My great friend Razors, with whom I used to share the original Hovel, is back in town, having flown over from Los Angeles.
“Why’s he over here?” asks a friend.
“To buy me lunch,” I say. There may be other items on his agenda, but this is the main event. The last time he was over here he’d booked a table at Rules, but the night before I ate a kebab from a place I had hitherto considered trustworthy – honestly, their kebabs were so good you could eat them sober – and it gave me absolutely horrendous food poisoning, and I had to cancel.
So I ate nothing but tinned food the night before and showed up at the venerable restaurant with my hair in a braid. The reservation said we were to be there from 12.30pm to 2.30pm, which bothered me, because two hours is barely enough for a decent lunch. “It was a privilege,” my friend D— once said after seeing me being bought dinner at Noble Rot, “to see the master at his lathe,” for I know my way around a menu and a wine list, especially if someone else is paying; but one needs a good three hours to spread oneself.
So, to start, a dry Martini: gin, with a twist. Utterly divine: like drinking an alcoholic cloud. Then, for me, the rabbit rillettes (“What are they?” asks Razors. “Rillettes,” I reply, “made from rabbit.”) We wash our food down with a big, chewy South African Merlot. We share the roast rib of beef for two; I go for the sticky toffee pudding, and brandy and coffee to close.
Our conversation, as always, is delicate and civilised. We discuss the latest developments in the arts, the subtle differences between American and English culture, that kind of thing. We speak in a low, hushed murmur, as always.
“Don’t look round,” he says at one point, “but the woman at the table behind you has been giving us the evils for the last hour.” I turn round: a middle-aged woman, with her daughter (presumably). Quite clearly a tourist, almost certainly American. She calls the maître d’ over, they have a word, and he takes them to a table further away. Razor then calls the maître d’ over and asks why they moved.
“I think it was your conversation,” he says tactfully. “Particularly what you were saying about masturbation.”
This is not my first rodeo. Once, the incredibly talented screenwriter Ian Martin – Veep, The Thick of It, The Death of Stalin – took me to lunch here, and then the maître d’ had to ask me to moderate my language. My language, not the language of the man who came up with the phrases “marzipan dildo” and “fuckity-bye”.
If the staff consider us horrible vulgarians, they have a funny way of showing it. Whenever we deal with the waitress, she has a big smirk on her face, as if trying to suppress laughter; at one point Razors makes me laugh so much a piece of beef goes down the wrong way and I have a coughing fit. The waitress comes over to give me some thumps on the back. “Harder! Harder!” I say. For some reason, when the bill comes they hand it to me. I look at it and my face goes white. I hand it over to Razors.
“Hmm,” he says, “that’s not so bad.”
“Not so bad?” I scream. “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” (We are talking a figure in the mid-hundreds.)
After lunch we go to the Groucho Club, of which Razors is still a member, and we have a couple of refreshing G&Ts. Then it’s off to the French House; by now it’s about five o’clock so the place is filling up, although I confess I am beginning to lose track of time at this point. Razors has a Kir with me – darling, one must drink nothing else at the French – and then disappears, probably to go back to his family. I fall into conversation with a couple of young Geordies who have come to work in London at LBC. I tell them of my love of the north-east, and the affair I had with S—, the flame-haired temptress who enticed me up to Durham because it was Covid and she was bored. She lived west of the city in DH7 and she got us T-shirts with that postcode on them, so enamoured were we of the place.
I must have been saying all the right things, because the Geordies kept buying me drink after drink even though I had pointed out that I had absolutely no money. Seriously: I had to borrow £50 off Razors just so I could afford the train fare.
There’s then a bit of a blip in the memory circuits and the next thing I know I am waking up with a start as the train comes into Brighton. It is about a quarter to ten in the evening – just time to nip into Waitrose to buy a bottle of Scotch. Johnnie Walker Black Label at £22 a bottle? It would be insane not to.
So that’s that, really. I now have no money but some very nice memories. My apologies to the women who had to move tables, and my love to the fantastic staff of Rules, and the lovely Geordies whose names I have forgotten for some reason, and, of course, to Razors.
[Further reading: Your guide to cocktail party diplomacy]
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This article appears in the 29 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new terror
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentFunny how irritating, boorish, and loutish behaviour which would embarrass even a Bullingdon nob is expected to be tolerated when one is from the left.