Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Gorge on syrup pud and be glad

It carries on serving golden syrup pudding as though nothing has happened, and makes everything OK

Rules looks as if it voted for Brexit, and now finds itself inside an eternal Christmas Eve, where it is always Christmas, and always Brexit. And what a gay Brexit, with swags and flounces and light bouncing through the windows on to Maiden Lane, like a child’s vision of hope. Or is it illusion? Does a chimney contain Arron Banks as Father Christmas with gifts in his sack marked ‘depression’, ‘delusion’ and ‘starvation’? Will he get stuck and go shouty-crackers on Twitter? Is Nigel Farage sipping a pint of lager, pretending to be a good elf? The sort of elf that politically alienated elves can identify with and follow, until they learn the depths of his betrayal and drink only tears, because the lager has gone and is not coming back, and neither, I must tell you, is the empire?

No matter, for we are in Rules, and nothing hurts in this tall Victorian house with its wonky rooms and faded staircases to unknowable attics. Or rather, the worst has already happened, and Rules still stands and serves golden syrup pudding, which no one else does, because it kills with angina, and its companion psychological disorder, which is hubris.

Rules (est. 1798) is older than the Great Reform Act and universal suffrage and two world wars. Charles Dickens used the loo. It will outlive us with its slightly Hobbesian name, and this is comforting. If you dine in a restaurant that feels eternal, you are a speck of dust on the prong of a fork. That is only a metaphor. Rules is shabby but very clean. It has seen heart attacks, which will not shock anyone who has read the menu and knows that Rules has regulars who freebase claret in one-person booths; and the ceiling has fallen in, with no interruption to service.

For the compulsive eater, therefore, Rules is not a restaurant; it is too profound for that.

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