STOP TRYING TO MAKE BRUNCH HAPPEN

Saigon tapas in South Ken? Bottomless Bellinis in Borehamwood? Not on my menu, says Will Hersey

OK ,so brunch is an easy target with its annoying portmanteau name and heavily entrenched smugness, but you have to admire it for the chutzpah of attempting to add a fourth mealtime to the three that have served homo sapiens since the days of arable farming. Not to mention the fact that it also represents the acceptable face of morning drinking, am I right?

Except that while it used to be just your most annoying friend (the one who also uses the word supper with a frequency that makes you want to join the anarchist party) who would try to make brunch a “thing”, now even your dad’s throwing it about, while everyone in the food business seems to be pushing the idea of some buzzy hedonistic brunch scene as if this was New York in the Fifties.

Except this isn’t New York. And while the food scene here is arguably just as good, we’re still British. Which means we spend an above average quota of our days — indeed lives — hungover. Especially weekends. And buzzy means busy, and as everyone who was out the night before knows that’s pretty much the last environment on earth we want to be exposed to before midday on the weekend. We created the all-day breakfast for this very reason.

Brunch is basically an invention by needy people to fill every single hour of their weekends with activity, and by restaurants to exploit hungover people into paying way too much for some eggs at a time when they might otherwise be closed and we should otherwise still be in bed (or at least on the sofa).

Hangovers should be solitary affairs spent psyching ourselves up to put on a hoodie to go down the road for a can of Coke and some corner shop bacon, not guffawing over crab cakes with the kind of people who freely use the word brunch in the first place.

And anyway, what the fuck’s wrong with lunch?