When Marie Antoinette famously said, ‘Qu’ils mangent de la brioche’, or ‘let them eat cake’, she was unlikely to have been having percipient thoughts about Test Match Special. Nonetheless cakes were to become an integral part of the programme.

It all began in 1974 when a lady who had heard Brian Johnston talk of his passion for chocolate cake sent him a large and particularly good-looking one on the first day of the Lord’s Test. A precedent had been created.

As soon as Johnners had died our listeners mysteriously and inexplicably, I thought, began to send us an abundance of fruit cakes. In 2001, Steve Waugh’s Australians came to England and, as usual, played the second Test match at Lord’s. Buckingham Palace announced that the Queen was going to come to the match.

To celebrate, the PR machine at the Palace had decreed that the chefs there should make a suitably regal fruit cake, which Her Majesty would bring with her and present to us during the tea interval.

I think the cake actually went on ahead of her with a motorcycle escort rather than being tucked away in the boot of the Rolls. It must have been miffed at missing out on the Rolls, but then not every fruit cake gets a motorcycle escort.