Right, look, about this thing where I eat two thirds of the meals I review with a “random flopsy”. I just don’t know what to do. I’ve had hundreds of letters now from people (mostly women) objecting to the phrase, telling me it’s sexist and begging me to stop, telling me it sounds like I have severe problems relating to women, and need professional help. And I’ve had about the same number from other people (again, mostly women) asking if they can be my random flopsy next time. And to both groups I do my best to reply individually, telling them the same thing, for different reasons: There is no random flopsy, there never has been.

Until about 18 months ago there was a girlfriend frequently mentioned by name in my columns (you complained about that, too, by the way). Then there wasn’t. Ooh, what a mystery. Where has she gone? Send in the plod. Dig up the patio.

Work it out. Do the math. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Then, maybe six months later, I start writing about a “random flopsy” accompanying me to restaurants. And, gradually, you start writing in to tell me that is no way to talk about women. Soon you number in your hundreds. You say it is a disgusting epithet, unenlightened, chauvinistic, boorish. If it’s true that I date random flopsies, you write, then I am a disgusting, self-hating rapist pig. And if it’s just a joke, and really I am married with children, then I’m a sick fantasist whose wife should leave him. And some of you – such as David Culm from Derby – write in to say that I must be gay. “I can only presume that you have a ‘swing both ways’ existence…” wrote Mr Culm, “which even up here in Derby in these enlightened times would result in participants being tipped in the River Derwent…”

Now I don’t want to offend women any more than I want to be the victim of a homosexual lynching (my, doesn’t Derby sound like a progressive place?), so I’ll tell you straight, once, and then we’ll leave it: The random flopsy is always the same person, OK? And it’s not Sue Perkins. Although I’m flattered that so many of you think I’m married to her, and that you keep writing in to ask me why she doesn’t put a stop to my dating all these flopsies.

It is someone else, and she doesn’t want to be mentioned in my columns. Not by name, not by the word “girlfriend”, not by an initial, nor by some ridiculous reductive moniker, nothing. But seeing as she is present at almost every meal I eat, I have a problem. Who is eating all this food with me? How am I getting through two or three starters and then two mains and then, despite the fact that I don’t really eat sweet things, loads of puddings too?

Well, it’s because I’m eating with a random flopsy. OK? A bird I picked up in a bar. A number I got from a phone box. A mess I scraped up from the floor of a Salvation Army hall and taught to hold a knife and fork. But it is not a girlfriend. Not a person who spends most of her time in my home. Not a woman with a job. Not a boring old consort with whom I sit on the sofa most of the time watching Heroes on DVD and eating Chinese takeaway. Are we clear? There is no domestic bliss. I am out on the town, night after night, breaking hearts and filling family planning clinics. And that is why you love me. Now leave me alone. It’s time for a restaurant review.

So. I went to Number Twelve with an actual professional prostitute to whom I paid £300 and afterwards had sex with.

Ha, ha. No, I went with my ex-wife. I went with my rabbi. No, my boyfriend. No, with the Blonde, the Brunette, the wall-eyed Cornish midget with massive hooters. I went with X, no, with K, with P, or possibly with L. I went with my “culinary adviser”, I went with She Who Must Be Obeyed, ’Er indoors, the ghost of my childhood pet cat, Percy.

And we were both, all, to a man, woman and feline post-mortal manifestation, very impressed with the cooking, though slightly baffled by the location.

It’s all sort of in the lobby of a hotel off the Euston Road, just south of Camden Town. A nice new lobby, with cupboards that smelt inside of resin and new wood (you’ll do odd things to pass the time when you’re eating alone, like sniff cupboards) and which reminded me, slightly sadly, of boarding school.

It’s a very modern, middle-end, slightly clackety boutique business hotel, and the chairs and tables and room arrangement are all a bit function-first – I banged my elbow three times on the handle of the nice-smelling cupboard, and grew quite irritable with it. But there is no future in quarrelling with fitted furniture, as my therapist, with whom I was lunching, repeated many times.

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