Grace Dent

No one should suffer my pastry.

I eat food from all over the world for my job as a restaurant critic, so I often find myself craving a plain Barnsley lamb chop or fish and chips, as I'm so sick of sashimi.

My plan, for several years, has been to simply let one year merge into the other, without fanfare, so that the Grim Reaper won't notice me and move me closer to my exit interview.

If I desire something badly enough, I'll buy it for myself; and this thing will never be a Yankee Candle gift set or a book bought beside a shop till that delivers 'The Tao Of Pooh.'

I don't like birthdays. Never have done. Not when I was little and it involved the wild decadence of a Wimpy Brown Derby doughnut with chocolate drizzle, and even less so as I grew older.

I would give my back tooth - the one with the silver filling - to eat afternoon tea with my mother.

Before Covid-19, my job was to put on shoes and pants and leave the sofa so you didn't have to.

If God wanted me to be a size eight, would he have made Birds Eye Potato Waffles so waffly versatile? Or toastable in the toaster?

I gave up eating outdoors in London in the 1990s, when it became impossible to eat at an outside table without a small gang of buskers turning up to play a rousing chorus of 'La Bamba' on their accordions while you waved off hornets with the menu.

By the 90s, we'd got sniffy about sending infants over two lanes of moving traffic to fetch sliced Hovis. It has, I think, something to do with health and safety. Such errands wound up back in the hands of the adults.

Some people are cruel and thoughtless, some people are definitely phobic, others are just stymied by the march of time, left behind by words and ways of thinking.

I am abundant in crap, yet weirdly amazing, let's-all-make-the-best-of-this half-term memories. Looking back, those family holidays were really just a chance to take the mick out of each other, pointing out each other's shortcomings, in the same old manner, in a fresh and uncharted setting.

I love the Tower of London, but it is not a feel-good day out - unlike time spent eating beef biang biang or slurping a bean thread noodle and seaweed soup.

I loved the secret language of stupid fancy restaurants: I knew the question 'How do you want that cooked?' is actually rhetorical and you should let the chef please himself.

Eating plant-based makes really no impact on my career as a restaurant critic. I see this as my special skill as a critic, not a hindrance.

When I was a little girl I always enjoyed the roast potatoes and the vegetables at Sunday dinner more than the meat.

What we eat at home, behind closed doors, is personal. Our secret snacky peccadilloes do not bear scrutiny.

I love being shown evidence of a rule-flouter, because it makes me feel ever so righteous and holy.

Eighties vegetarians were a lonely, much maligned breed, exposed to frozen pub-lunch veggie lasagnes, prototype soy milk that floated on tea like a tanker spillage, and the pain of buying almost all edible items via postal order from Holland & Barrett.

Pret was a thing I did almost subliminally, often mainly for a few minutes of downtime, sat quietly alone in the middle of dozens of strangers, sharing tiny tables, breathing each others' recycled air and scrolling mindlessly through our phones.