ARE WE really too idle to roast a chicken in this country? I must be blind as well as daft, because in all the years I’ve been trotting around Sainsbury’s, I’ve somehow failed to spot the enormous queues slugging it out to get to the front at the hot-food counter.

And yet, according to the Office of National Statistics, a rotisserie chicken is now the dinner of choice for the British. That’s why it has pride of place in the basket of goods it uses to calculate changes in the cost of living.

I don’t know. Maybe it works out cheaper to buy the thing ready-cooked than it does to take it home and stick it in the oven. But how do you get it home, red hot and dripping with grease? If you don’t end up with your car smothered in congealed chicken fat, there must be an environmental packaging issue or two for the green consumer to consider.

And you’re not telling me the supermarkets select their finest, hand-groomed, privately educated, died-of-natural-causes chickens to be cooked until shrivelled for Mr Lazy to take home and chomp like Hagar The Horrible while watching Match Of The Day.

Still, we probably don’t care. Britons are apparently too lazy even to crack an egg, according to some firm that’s just brought out half-litre cartons of liquid egg (ten ready-cracked eggs in every carton, in case you were wondering).

If that’s where we’ve got to, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall are rather wasting their breath trying to make us care about animal welfare.

Opening the oven door must in itself be quite an achievement for many of us. And as for basting – forget it.

Not that I can talk. The chicken I bought at the weekend stares back reproachfully at me every time I open the fridge door, and is a bit of an obstacle to my project of achieving a week without wasting any of the food I’ve bought in.

Tonight has got to be the night, even if it does take an hour-and-a-half to cook everything after I get back home from work.

It’s worth it because using a chicken properly is one of the most satisfying things I know how to do in the kitchen. After the roast dinner and the warm chicken salad, I have to ban the Other Half from getting too involved because he’s squeamish about me boiling up the bones – it’s a bit Sweeny Todd, apparently.

But he doesn’t complain about the resulting chicken soup, which to my mind is almost the best bit.

•OF COURSE, it may not be that we are too lazy to do much in the kitchen. If scientists from Edinburgh University are to be believed, it could be we’re spending most of our time hosing down Junior to protect him from disease.

Obsessive parental washing, say the scientists, is leading to a 40 per cent rise in the incidence of eczema and allergic rhinitis among the population.

It has the ring of truth about it. Look down any street and you will see the little emperors, mollycoddled to within an inch of their lives. They’re not let out of their parents’ sight and they’re certainly not allowed first-hand contact with anything as frightening as a peck of dirt.

Then again, it could be a result of that other modern obsession, the need to give everything a name. What you or I might call a runny nose sounds much more important if you call it allergic rhinitis.