Although you wouldn’t know it from reading this column the last few weeks, I spent February on the other side of the world. This astonishing illusion was achieved by my visiting six restaurants in the week before I left and programming my computer to drip-feed reviews to The Times in my absence like an automatic cat-feeder.

I do it to confuse the burglars. During my childhood - when we were burgled on average twice a year - it was common knowledge that men in stripy sweaters with masks and caps and bags marked “swag” would sit in the back bar at The Crown on Cricklewood Broadway checking The Times for tips on the racing, the weather and the whereabouts of local columnists. Even as I staggered around a Portuguese beach with my old man, trying to get a rally of more than three hits going with two giant wooden bats and a tiny blue ball that sank when it landed in the sea, certain individuals back in NW2 were folding their copies of the Thunderer six ways to fit them on the windowsill so they could do the crossword and keep an eye out for the plod at the same time, and saying:

“’Ere, Lefty, it says ’ere Alan Coren’s on holiday.”

“Again? All right for some. Who is it filling in this week?”

“Some geezer called Bernard Levin.”

“Never ’eard of ’im. I don’t fink ’e’s local.”

“You going to turn the Coren place over this time or am I?”

“Isn’t it Sid’s turn?”

“No, he cleaned out Libby Purves last Thursday while she was in the Canaries…”

I am not about to fall into the same trap. By allowing my column to continue appearing in the paper when I am away and then taking weeks off when I am actually at home, I will be in a position to fool the
bastards into attacking when I am in residence, lurking in the shadows nodding fitfully in a rocking chair with a blanket over my knees and a shotgun across my lap, so that the moment the door opens… blam! Imagine the look on the blackguard’s face when he points at Joe Joseph’s fill-in review in his copy of the magazine and says: “But, but, but…”, just before I send him to meet the fairies.

I was in Australia and Hong Kong, if you want to know, and in one of those two places ate the best Peking duck I have ever eaten, and in the other no Peking duck at all. Do you want to guess which way round it happened? You’re right. It was at the Flower Drum in Melbourne that I ate duck of the rarest breeding, rich and pigeonny but fat like babies, roasted slow in steaming drums and draught-dried to give three spell-binding products: skin as golden and crispy as George Hamilton’s neck, limpid subcutaneous blubber of cetaceous richness and lastly and leastly the glorious meat. This then whipped with whirring chopsticks into seasoned pancakes and supplied à volonté. A glory. A marvel.
In Hong Kong I aimed to go one better and eat the famed roast goose at Yung Kee where Kam Shui Fi, now 85, still presides over the roastery he opened in 1949. I sat, I salivated, I ordered my goose, with a side of duck, and the waiter shook his head and pointed at a sombre sign on the table. It was in Cantonese. I looked baffled. He reached down and turned it round. Now it said: “We apologise to our valued customers. Due to avian flu there will be no goose or duck until further notice.”

I ate some so-so tripe with noodles and left to trawl the neon-dogged streets of this great food capital for somewhere doing under-the-counter roast duck. I looked in the windows of hundreds of restaurants. But how to choose one? In London it is a weary truism that you can tell a good Chinese restaurant by how many Chinese people there are in it. But how do you tell one in China? (And do Chinese people peer through the window of, say, the Wanchai McDonald’s and say to each other: “Oh look, lots of whey-faced fatties in leisurewear, this place must be terrific”?)

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