Food: Blood and guts

Rules is the restaurant where Edward VII ate himself to death and, in a way, it looks like him. It is spacious and regal and covered in velvet. His personal dining room upstairs is a cocktail bar now, with a lump of Stilton as focal point and memorial. Downstairs there are stags’ heads and a painting of Margaret Thatcher as Britannia, with pointy breasts. From a distance, it looks as if she is topless.

The customers are the sort of people who like to watch powerful women topless. That is, they are powerful men, in groups or, quite often, alone. Rules has single booths for these lonely creatures — well, they can accommodate two small people, or one very fat man, and it is always one very fat man who is there, wiping the blood from his mouth with a blinding white napkin. They all have grey hair and grey suits and grey newspapers.