If you push things far enough to the rear of the fridge, behind the half-empty jars of olives, the homemade chutney you bought at that long-forgotten Sunday market and the strawberry jam that has turned to sugar, they can fade from your consciousness. It was just such a strategy that had led to a shameful scene a few evenings before when I grabbed a hammer and hit the rabbit just behind the ear, shattering its head and splattering fragments around the kitchen. We'd resisted the temptation for weeks but suddenly, on this balmy eve, the choc-lust seized us and we would not be denied.

Thrusting my head into the far recesses of the fridge, my fiancée pounding on my spine in anticipation, I nosed aside a jar of ferocious vindaloo curry paste, pushed away the prunes which were turning a lovely pastel shade of lime green, and finally found the chocolate Easter rabbit. The ears, as any crazed chocolate muncher will tell you, are a rabbit's most vulnerable point, so I dragged it out by the feet and crunched down on the left lobe.

I'd forgotten, in my frenzy, that chocolate kept in the fridge can assume the consistency of tempered steel, and my teeth ricocheted off the ear with nary a sliver of chocolate dislodged. Kassya then tried gnawing at its edges like a starving beaver but it was hopeless. It was at this point that I was inspired to dive beneath the kitchen sink, re-emerging with my claw hammer.

It had got personal. I wasn't going to let any bunny make a bunny out of my future wife. "Let's see how you handle the old hammer-on-the-head trick," I snarled, positioning the chocolate rabbit over the cutting board and giving it a whack. It proved a remarkably successful plan although, a week later, we were still picking pieces of him out of the living room carpet, which is several metres from the kitchen.

We ate the entire rabbit and felt ill for several days, but were uplifted to hear a story from a friend who had relatives staying with her over Easter, one of whom was notorious for nocturnal refrigerator raids. Come the mornings and the contents of the fridge would be severely depleted, legs of ham ravaged as if by a biblical plague of locusts.

This Easter past, as Sunday dawned and our friend, family and guests gathered for breakfast, she noticed that during the night someone had performed surgery on her rabbit. That previous evening, the bunny had been a quadruped. It was ow lacking in the hindquarters department, someone having gnawed off a leg under cover of darkness. The culprit, known to all, never confessed. At least, I thought, my fiancée and I confine ourselves to eating our own rabbits and do not wander the suburbs chewing off the limbs of lagomorphs as the mood takes us.

Our rabbit was no more, but we still shared several choice eggs. The fridge-as-hiding-place having been busted, we turned to the pantry. If we hid them there, we reasoned, we might forget about them for a few more weeks and allow our stomachs and arteries time to recover.

It was then that we discovered the potato, the smell all but felling us as I lifted a plastic bag from the bottom of the pantry and beheld the dark, glutinous, white-fringed blob into which the spud had morphed.

With my fiancée holding a tea towel to her nose, I tossed it into the bin, noticing as I did that the bottom of the pantry had become the last resting place for several cockroaches - the pong of the putrefied potato had obviously overcome them.