Food and booze are fun, and it is good to be exacting but it is bad to be pompous

Well, I had my cake and I ate it. And not just my cake, reader, but the bits before the cake, too. The lunches and dinners and the multi-course breakfasts, and the absurd afternoon teas, and those new cocktails with beef dripping, and just about every other highly calorific confection those frenzied minds that spend their time in subterranean kitchens dreamt up; up to and including a portion of un-fried ants eaten in the Claridge's ballroom. “They are very acidic,” said Noma's René Redzepi, my host. “Have them with a little lettuce.”

By my own reckoning, I have consumed about 208,000 superfluous calories and added a stone to my body weight. I have also learnt a treasure-trove of things about life and people, not least that suffering does not ennoble when in the dining room.