Smug home-cooking won’t fill the hole if restaurants fold

Ihad a lovely lockdown – with a book to write and a view of the sea, I couldn’t have been better placed both mentally and physically. But as someone who identifies as a hyper-social lone wolf, I’m equally pleased to be frequenting restaurants again. A placement in the sun, the laughter of mates, the glugging of wine and me picking up the bill – as George Weidenfeld put it: “For me, conviviality is what for other people is sport and entertainment.”

My Facebook statuses paint a predictable story. All through the spring they deal soberly with corona-related issues, with a side order of agitating that I won’t get that lovely Brexit I was hoping for. Then from the start of July, my birthday month, it gets giddy: “Boy, did I ever Stimulate The Economy yesterday!”; “It’s the weekend, so let’s Stimulate The Economy!”; “Had lovely afternoon Stimulating The Economy yesterday!”; “Another pleasant day Stimulating The Economy – oh dear, that book will not write itself!” I may not be able to single-handedly save any of the thousands of jobs lost in catering and hospitality, but I’m certainly trying my best.

One thing I won’t be bothering with is taking the time to cook from

scratch as certain sad sacks have been boasting. Newsflash: it’s not big, it’s not clever and it’s not a guarantee of your family not falling apart, when the level of connubial lockdown loathing is revealed by the lawyers. (Divorce inquiries increased by more than 40 per cent between March and May, according to a report in this newspaper last month.) I’ve often thought that the idea of showing people love by feeding them is a somewhat convoluted concept anyway; can’t I just give them a big kiss or buy them a large drink instead?

Cooking is often about something else altogether – or the absence of it. I came from a home where love was everything and food was just fuel, and thus I have never felt the need to

I think the idea of showing people love by feeding them is a convoluted concept; can’t I just give them a kiss?

cook. I’ve seen so many middle-class dream homes where the kitchen is so obviously meant to be the heart of the house – and most of those marriages shattered like Murano glass spoons.

No doubt those who like to see women doing mind-numbing domestic tasks will see the decline of restaurants – Café Rouge and Bella Italia are among the mid-range family favourites struggling in the wake of the virus – as not entirely bad.

But be careful what you wish for, family fans; there’s every chance that eating at home may be less, not more, healthy and that far from labouring over sushi and steaks, we may well take refuge in exactly the kind of comfort food that might see our nearest and dearest in an early grave.

A new study from the Co-op shows that sales of packet trifle have risen a whopping 738 per cent this year, closely followed by custard powder, jelly, canned meats and tinned fruit in syrup – basically how the

Horn of Cornucopia would look if Homer Simpson was in charge. Don’t worry, though, because the Government is about to wage war on obesity, with a ban on fast-food adverts before the nine o’clock watershed expected this week. And that’s definitely going to work, because now more than ever we trust our policymakers not to have one rule for us and another for themselves.

Who can blame Tim Rycroft, chief operating officer of the Food and Drink Federation, for branding imminent state-sponsored measures against obesity as “a slap in the face” to the food industry, which has worked “heroically” to keep the nation fed during the pandemic?

In the past, I accepted the judgment that racketing around restaurants marked me out as a rather flighty individual, table-hopping and air-kissing my way through life.

But now I’m seeing myself as a new breed of self-sacrificing example to the nation. You’ll have all the time in the world to sit at home eating food that doesn’t need chewing when you’re old and toothless; get out there and stimulate the economy while you still can.