I feel like an absolute heel for saying this but something is not right in Oxford’s Camelot for food.

It isn’t the service – that’s still as great as ever; and it’s not the prices – they’re still just as reassuringly expensive. No, it’s the re-design.

There was a time, not so many Christmases ago, when a trip into the hallowed lobby of the Marks & Spencer food hall was one of the yuletide season’s greatest treats.

There before you, chilled and ready-to-cook, was always an Aladdin’s Cave of festive treats – everything from the mundane but essential turkey roast dinners for one to the select but vital seafood platters so revered by the party set.

I can fondly remember wandering in there only last year, my senses alive to the sights and smells of this culinary orgy, my head swimming with the gastronomic possibilities and my wallet itching to splash out.

Oh boy, what a difference a year can make… I sincerely pray it isn’t just me, but if it is then I alone, as a point of principle, will poke my head above the gutter and nail my flag to the mast. For as Edmund Burke once said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.

Yes I too hear the sharp intake of breath but the simple question is how could M&S have allowed this monstrosity to have occurred?

Where once there was peace and harmony, there is now but friction and discord.

Where once there was amity and understanding, there is now only trolley rage and aisle resentment.

Where once there were willing staff and good-humoured queues, there are now only self-service checkouts and customers bruised black-and-blue from shoppers unable to get at their lunchtime sandwiches.

In short, the newly designed food hall at M&S in Queen Street is a blight on the city and I for one have taken it hard.

Trust, after all, is everything – without it the very fabric of existence becomes fleeting and pointless, yet here I sit, head in hands, lost and betrayed by the sheer scale of this travesty.

Like many I’m sure, I just took it as a given that M&S would care for me at Christmas.

They’ve nurtured me these last 51 years and I don’t think they’ve done a bad job. But this re-design of their food hall has changed the goal posts in a way I prayed I would never see.

Their staff are still 200 per cent; their hummus still the best in Oxford, and their smoothies sublime, but in recent days I’ve taken to straying elsewhere.

It hurts – of course it does – but I just want to enjoy shopping for my pigs-in-blankets and bread sauce without fearing the on-set of claustrophobia and anxiety-related queuing disorders.

It’s almost Christmas. With that in mind, can’t M&S grant the ultimate shopper’s wish and return things to as they were. Or forever curse me to live my Christmases in the past…