Maybe there was a time when this enquiry referred to how you liked your boiled egg - but these days there’s no getting away from the Brexit interpretation of the question.

And I guess, with farming being the industry which probably has the most to lose when the top’s cut off the egg, we’ve all been desperate to pick up any hints on the deal the country hopes to secure on leaving the EU.

But we certainly don’t seem to be alone in trying to read between the lines.

And last Sunday's media interpretation - which verged on a parlour tea-leaf reading - of a TV interview given by Prime Minister, Theresa May, declared the country firmly bound for a hard Brexit, with no chance of remaining part of the single market.

Even fairly strong denials of the press’s soothsaying antics by May the following day failed to buoy up the pound as it plummeted at the beginning of the week.

But it just goes to show that where a policy vacuum exists, it won’t be long until something spicy is concocted to fill the void and I’ve no doubt there’s likely to be several other 'informed' prognostications on the Government’s intentions on the Brexit front before the week is out.

In a similar vein, I would suggest that it won’t be long until some entirely erroneous – and quite possibly bonkers – plan for the future of the farming sector begins to gain sufficient traction to put the wind up everyone as well.

Not, of course, that the current lack of information isn’t damaging enough in itself.

Hopes were pretty high that we might get some sort of clue as to what the future might hold from that bastion of establishment thinking, the Oxford Farming Conference, which took place just over a week ago.

However, despite both Defra secretary Andrea Leadsom and UK farm minister, George Eustice – surely key players in securing the hand which farming will be dealt in the negotiations – addressing the meeting, neither of them was either keen or able to give anything away.

But while the long awaited country-wide consultation on future farming policy is to be launched, we were told, 'in the near future', there’s no getting away from the fact that what we’ll need to stay afloat will depend entirely on the type of deal which the UK manages to glean from the exit negotiations.

And even if our views on what sort of trading arrangements we want to see are to be part of this review, then they’re going to be pretty watered down by the time it reaches any sort of crunch decision.

For, regardless of what farming as an industry would like to get out of the negotiations, there’s also what other industry and lobbying organisations will want to be thrown into the mix – as well as what the Scottish Government wants and what the UK Government wants – and then of course there’s the small matter of what the rest of the EU is likely to let us get.

So I have a fear that the consultation – and the resulting green paper – will be little more than an exercise in preparing us for the inevitable support cuts and market disruption which will lie in the years ahead.

Mind you if there was little information coming forward on the negotiating stance at the conference, there were several fairly heavy hints on what might lie ahead for farm support measures, even before the consultation has begun.

So, in what is quite probably a brazen case of falling foul of the reading-between-the-lines sin of which I was accusing others earlier, here’s what I took out of it.

George Eustice was adamant that we would have an overarching and 'coherent' UK-wide farm policy, effectively replacing the CAP with the British Agricultural Policy (BAP).

He said that while there would be room for some discretion for the devolved administrations to tailor schemes to their own situation to some extent, he also made it plain that measures would be put in place to ensure that nothing was introduced which might distort markets between different parts of the UK.

And, as we have viewed agriculture as a devolved issue under the CAP – with the Scottish Government having had a fair deal of leeway to have a different system to that south of the Border – I would guess that many in the country will see this UK approach as a backwards step.

Eustice was also determined to see direct area payments – as we currently have under Pillar 1 measures – stopped.

He proposed, instead, that support for 'innovation' together with payments for ecosystem services would be the best way to target funds to active farmers rather than what he called 'area payments with environmental conditions tacked on'.

So it would appear that these two routes – along with risk management tools and crop insurance measures to help farmers 'when things went badly wrong' – are likely to form the basis of his BAP.

Asked if he was willing to guarantee that the farming sector would have its current budget ring-fenced, he argued that the policy should be decided first and then the Government would see how much money was required to finance this.

And I don’t think you need to be a genius at reading between the lines to work out what that means…