Restaurants | 18 March 2006

The restaurateur Oliver Peyton’s latest project is the National Dining Rooms at the National Gallery. It is situated in the Sainsbury Wing, although as Tesco has more or less blasted Sainsbury’s out of the water in every way you can think of in recent years, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Tesco takes it over, moves it out of town until everything in town goes bust, and then moves it back as the Tesco Metro Wing. Supermarkets. Aren’t they just so evil? Last week my car was broken into, window smashed and everything, and while I’m not one of those people who likes to blame supermarkets for all that is wrong in all the world, I do think it was Asda’s fault all the same.

Anyway, I’m meeting my mother, to take her out to lunch for her birthday. My mother is 78 and still plays tennis nearly every day. I always introduce her with: ‘This is my mother, who is 78 and still plays tennis nearly every day’, rather as Maggie Smith in A Private Function always introduced her mother with: ‘She’s 74, you know.’ I don’t know if this upsets my mother, but I do know that birthday lunches don’t. The other thing my mother is very good at, aside from being 78 and playing tennis nearly every day, is racking up birthday lunches, managing to get at least 17 out of every birthday. ‘I’ve already taken her to the Wolseley,’ says my father, ‘but she found her way out again.’ My father is with us. He can be a very hard man to shake off. For every 17 lunches my mother racks up for her birthday, I think it is probably fair to say my father is at them all. There may even be others he doesn’t tell her about.