Tanya Gold eats suckling pig at Le Café Anglais

I write this column at the point of a pitchfork. A, normally so placid — ‘He’s so placid!’ people like to say as he wanders around placidly — has cracked. He is standing over me with what I can only describe as violent placidity, gesticulating at an email from Le Café Anglais, a very smart restaurant in Whiteleys, Bayswater, established in 2007; it is run by Rowley Leigh, who A says writes very witty recipes. ‘Suckling pig,’ it says, ‘Suckling pig. Suckling pig. Suckling pig. Suckling pig. Suckling pig.’ Of course it doesn’t actually say that; it is a notification that Le Café Anglais now does suckling pig every Tuesday. But that is all he can see: suckling pig, suckling pig, suckling pig. At times like this, I wonder at the internal furniture of his brain. His ancestors are calling — it is like The Vikings, but sitting down in a bonfire of pigs.

So on Tuesday evening, we drive to Bayswater, which I can never visit without thinking of Kind Hearts and Coronets: ‘It was typical of Lionel that he should live on the wrong side of the park.’ (I am certain that Louis Mazzini read The Spectator.) And here is Whiteleys, a dirty crown, preening over the dank streets of West Notting Hill, or North Kensington, or South Kensal Rise, or East Shepherd’s Bush, or whatever lie they are calling it in these days of self-hating postcodes. (I call it too near the Westway, the road of all despair.)

Whiteleys gleams with all the happy confidence of the shopping mall living in the right age; it does not know it is ugly or, if it does, it does not care. Some would call it horrible, I suppose, with its lines of escalators like metal tongues, and its flooring bleached the colour of George Osborne’s anxiety; but I like it.