I’ll never eat lunch in this town again

The trouble with lunch, writes Rachel Johnson, is that it takes all day, serves no purpose and makes you feel bloated. Tea is so much better. Ladies who don’t lunch, unite!

As far as I’m concerned, the most chilling words in the English language, apart of course from the bloodcurdling cry of ‘Mummeeee! Can we do fingerpainting?’, are ‘Let’s have lunch!’ Especially if the often phony exclamation is followed up by live action, and a real date goes in the diary, and a smart restaurant is booked.

At each successive stage in the countdown to luncheon (none of which can proceed without important people’s ‘offices’ checking that both parties are ‘still on for the Ivy’), instead of feeling greedily expectant of the forthcoming treat, my heart sinks.

Now, I would like to say one thing to all those I have lunched before.

This is not about you. I loved our lunches. I love my tuck, and am not one for sharing my desk with my eating disorder. Past lunch dates will vouch that Madame likes a glass of champagne comme aperitif, that, yes, Madame will be drinking wine, and she can eat the whole bread basket unaided.

So my loathing is not for food nor for people, but for the institution of lunch as a means of doing business or pleasure. Here — and I talk, of course, as a homeworking mother, not a captain of industry — are my main reasons.

First and most important, lunch is never just lunch. Lunch takes up the whole day.

If, like me, you like to spend the working day slobbing about in pyjamas with Struwwelpeter hair, the rendezvous will require hours of prior grooming. I need a blow-dry (one hour, £25) and at least half an hour to make myself presentable — i.e., pop round to corner shop for tights, iron skirt, apply mascara — to the outside world. Then it takes another hour to reach the restaurant by public transport (we freelances never have expense accounts and travel by Tube, while our dates often have cars and drivers to swish them to and from the West End). So that’s two and a half hours of prep time before the lunch even starts at 1 p.m., which is — if you consider that children have to be taken to school at 9 a.m., a dog walked until 10 a.m. — the whole morning gone.

Secondly, no productive activity can ever take place after lunch either.

I’ve tried not drinking, or only having a spritzer, and refusing pudding, but still: if you finish lunch at 3 p.m. and have children coming home by 4 p.m., that’s it. Your entire working day has been sacrificed to the consumption of one meal that you don’t actually need to eat. On top of that, you feel postprandial for hours after: if you aren’t a serial luncher, but maybe have a ‘hot meal’ in the middle of the day only once in a while, it knocks the digestion for six, and you — well, I — stagger home feeling fuzzy, stupid and bloated.

Thirdly, lunch is not only costly in terms of time, but money. We women are conditioned to multitask. When we are diverted off-course by a lunch engagement in St James’s or Soho or Knightsbridge, parts of town we do not usually reach, we feel we must pop into Fenwick, Harrods, etc. and see if they have anything we ‘need’. As a result of yielding to this natural and normal feminine urge, we are then late for our next appointment, which means we have to come home — of course we do — in a taxi.

If you think I am alone in my dislike for lunch, you’re wrong.

‘I never have long lunches,’ says Nell Butler, a TV executive. ‘I never usually have proper lunch during the week — a piece of toast if I’m at home or a chocolate mousse from Pret if I’m at work. In fact, the worst bit about our sabbatical was that — [the author has deleted the name of Nell’s husband] expected a proper lunch every day. At about 11 a.m. he’d start wondering out loud about lunch, and we either had to go out to a restaurant or he’d cook something, which involved hours of washing up for me.’ Victoria Hislop, the mega-selling author of The Island, agrees that lunch is a terrible distraction from the daily round of spilling crumbs on the keyboard and the school run. ‘It’s a massive disruption in the middle of the day to have to find the eyeliner. And as I never drink at lunchtime, business lunches are not really much fun.’ Anna Lloyd, a BBC producer, reveals that she hasn’t actually ‘done’ lunch in the business sense since 1979. ‘It’s what made me give up working in advertising,’ she reveals. ‘I couldn’t stomach being trapped for three courses and then cigars listening to brand managers boring on about Barclaycard or Birds Eye boil-in-the-bag cod in cheese sauce.’ And when I asked Amanda Craig, the novelist, whether she relished long business lunches, she replied, ‘Would rather scoop eyes out with spoons.’ Now, I do have mates who say they enjoy them, and who gush about gastropubs and fizzy water. One Hampstead friend puts herself ‘definitely in the relish camp, but it has all to do with an opportunity to get out of my Uggs and amortise my large collection of rather pointless daytime business clothes.’ But, basically, few of us are shedding many tears over the fact that the average lunch hour has shrunk to 38 minutes in the Anglophone world, and that even the French are bidding adieu to the custom of a twohour l’heure du repas — during which time banks, government departments, shops, etc. all close — in favour of calling in McDo.

For two wonderful things have come along to replace the function of ‘the lunch’. According to Emma Tucker, the weekend editor of the FT, ‘Savvy PRs are taking their female clients to spa days. Or they invite you to a manicure and a pedicure.’ Yes please!

The other nice thing is the renaissance of tea. Tables for afternoon tea at the Ritz where they have three sittings and use Limoges porcelain — are so popular with the ladies who don’t lunch that they have to be booked three months in advance.

Which is cheering, as Mrs Hislop notes: ‘Nearly a whole day’s work, and then a scone as a reward.’ On that note, I must stop — it’s 3.30 p.m. I’ve been working without interruption since 10 a.m., as my day started with the most heart-lifting words in the English language, which are, of course, ‘Your lunch has been cancelled.’ And at 4 p.m. I have a table at the Lanesborough, where my daughter and I will sip Darjeeling ‘first flush’ tea poured by London’s only tea sommelier, Karl Kessab, from a silver samovar, and eat our way through a three-tiered cake-stand of fancy, unashamedly girly pastries, sandwiches and scones, all baked ‘à la minute’ for our pleasure.

I may never — after this piece — be invited to eat lunch in this town again. But who needs lunch? To hell with lunch. There’ll always be an England. And we’ll always have power tea.