NEVER MIND Michelle’s dresses and what Barack said to Parliament. For me and thousands of other women, it was the glimpse we’ve been afforded of Samantha Cameron’s new kitchen that was one of the most fascinating things about this State visit.

I found myself staring past the Two First Ladies, wishing Michelle’s head was out of the way, so I could gaze at the gorgeous (possibly Britannia Sigma) stove, the practical walnut floor and the zingy yellow sofa.

Great use of texture and interesting choice of colours, with the white, yellow, and restful blue-grey of the unit doors. But velvet furnishing fabric? With three little children? In the place where they’ll be eating most of their food? Interesting… I know, I know. I can hardly believe I’m writing it, especially as I have only ever cooked two meals in my entire life.

And I AM interested in the international politics, really I am. But for women there is something about kitchens. As most men regard their cars as an extension of themselves – in some cases, bits of themselves – so most women regard their kitchen.

Our kitchen represents the heart of our home, the place where the food is cooked, the homework done (or nagged about being done), and where we display our children’s wonky art-work.

It’s where we chat to the old man over a Chardonnay at the end of the working day, where we drink tea and natter to our girlfriends.

Even if that girlfriend happens to be the wife of the US President.

If you can tell a bloke by his car – and remember, Porsche has actually designed kitchens for Poggenpohl – you can almost certainly judge a woman by her kitchen. By our kitchens, in fact, shall ye know us.

Think I’m mad? Well, SamCam’s kitchen is very like her; sleek, stylish with a strong practical bent but she’s unafraid to splash out on the bling accessory (that Fancy Nancy sofa and oven) when the need arises.

Contrast that with the poky wood-panelling-and-red-banquette horror that popped up in the film about the Number 11 life of Tony and Cherie Blair. “My heart sank at the sight of the kitchen. It might have been the state of the art in the Sixties, but that was then,” anguished Cherie in her memoirs.

Yes, the kitchen was horrible. Certainly it was too small. But did careful-with-the-money Cherie splash out on a decent new space for herself? Not that I’m aware of.

Jamie Oliver certainly wasn’t impressed when he visited Gordon Brown in 2009. “They’ve got the worst kitchens in England at Number 10 – terrible,” he said. “Wandsworth Prison has better gear than Downing Street.”

And gear is the operative word. Because another thing I bet a lot of us did with the SamCam kitchen was go through it, mentally spotting how many of the signatures it boasted – and seeing how many chime with one’s own innate good taste, naturally.

Cream Dualit toaster? Tick. Maldon salt? Tick. Her entire batterie on display for all to see? Tick and tick again.

If you’re not a kitchenista then this might seem like a parallel universe but stick with it because the cult of the kitchen is everywhere. I promise.

It’s only two weeks since New York’s fabled Museum of Modern Art packed up its exhibition of modern kitchen design, centrepiece of which was the iconic Frankfurt Kitchen, designed in 1926 by the architect Grete Schütte-Lihotzky.

As MoMA declares: “Kitchens have continued to articulate, and at times actively challenge, our relationship to the food we eat, popular attitudes toward the domestic role of women, family life, consumerism, and even political ideology in the case of the celebrated 1959 “Kitchen Debate” that took place between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow at the height of the Cold War.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back on the interweb to try to track down a supplier of old scaffolding boards, to create the right new worktops for my ever-evolving country kitchen.