By the time you read this, no doubt you will be sinking your teeth into a slice of hot buttered toast or smooching with a yearned-for smoked salmon bagel.

As you idly chase a stray crumb around your plate, perhaps you’ll look back on this year’s Pesach and its yield of memories, savouring the idiosyncrasies of your own family’s Seder (eg, as the youngest child in the family is now 19, is it still necessary to enact the exchanges between Moses and Pharaoh with glove puppets?).

So spare a thought for me, your hungry correspondent, reporting from the front line of dietary restrictions.

A recent consultation with the doctor has led to my being consigned to a “Low-FODMAP” diet for at least a month.

If I tell you that the F stands for Fermentable and the O for Oligosaccharides, you will be grateful that I’m not going to haul you through the rest of it.

Suffice it to say that my fridge is now wallpapered with nine sheets of instructions, with tables of permissible foods and foods to shun in every category. There are oddities I can’t fathom: why are white and red cabbage OK, but green cabbage an absolute no? I can eat ordinary white potatoes but not sweet potatoes? Mozzarella but not milk or yoghurt?

Chief among the restrictions is the absolute prohibition on all forms of bread, pasta, biscuits and cake unless gluten-free.

Oren Challah 320

Claire's bread must be gluten-free (Issy Croker)

I get the diet sheets shortly before the start of Pesach and realise it’s the perfect time to begin because the house will be free from bread, pasta, etc, anyway, so I won’t have to cast longing glances at The Husband when he is eating a toasted bagel (it’s all right — he knows it’s the bagel I’m lusting after). I make a batch of almond macaroons because if I don’t have ready access to something sweet, I may kill someone.

Unfortunately, I can’t have matzah either. Usually, I’m thoroughly sick of the bread of affliction by the time we reach the end of Passover, but now that I’m not allowed it, I feel as if a big bully has just snatched away my last cuddly toy.

At the supermarket, I check out a box of something labelled “matzah-style squares”. Reading the ingredients list, I realise they are only matzah-style in the way that ceiling tiles are matzah-style — square and brittle but otherwise with little in common.

I remind The Husband that if we were Sephardi, we would still eat rice and corn over Pesach so I could have rice cakes instead of matzah (though they are even more like ceiling tiles), and he reminds me in turn that yes, that’s true, but we’re Ashkenazi so… he shrugs. Tradition — what can you do?

I threaten to jump ship and play for the other team because, let’s face it, they have the better food. The Husband, inexplicably a lifelong devotee of the fishball and the haimishe cucumber, does not agree.

I’m regretting buying so many boxes of matzah (I did it out of habit). Usually, The Teen lays waste to them, but he is currently on gap-year travels in south-east Asia; he sends us pictures, mostly of food: “They have shakshuka! Falafel! Who knew?”

Normally, I’m lusting after baguettes barely halfway through Pesach, but now I find I’m delirious with desire for bread before it’s even started.

As I’m a keen baker, I Google gluten-free recipes so that at least I can console myself by reading them and make some as soon as the chametz-free edict is lifted.

But the recipes sound disgusting and the helpful tips make me want to rush screaming down the street. I need psyllium husk powder (no idea).

Xanthan gum (sounds like a character from a bad science fantasy adventure: “Xanthan Gum strode across the planet’s rocky surface and took out his ray-gun…”) It says I need apple cider vinegar. In bread?

How will that be good? I should combine rice flour, potato flour and tapioca. It’s not promising.

At least I can have eggs for breakfast. But no toast to provide the essential crunchy platform beneath them. For at least another three weeks after Pesach, when everyone else is watching their perfect yolk burst onto a slice of toasted sourdough, my eggs will be served on a rice cake. Can the decline of western civilisation be far behind?

My lovingly prepared meals in the freezer are all now out of bounds: Bolognese sauce (can’t have onion or garlic) and I can’t have spaghetti anyway.

Chilli con carne (no red kidney beans). Beef stew (no mushrooms, no leeks). Even a lazy lunch of beans on toast now enters the realms of fantasy: no toast and indeed, no beans.

“It’s not fair,” I moan to the Husband yet again as he butters another matzah. “Well,” he says, edging back to another postcode to keep out of harm’s way. “Looking on the bright side, at least you might lose weight.”