Last weekend, as I spiralled round an endless succession of identical ring roads in the Midlands, looking for somewhere to have lunch, I realised with a heavy heart that the global food shortage had reached Britain. Quite simply, there was nowhere serving anything that a human being might reasonably want to put into its mouth.

I had in my mind a white-painted pub, perhaps by a restored lock. I imagined pretty gardens, some brightly painted canal boats, a pint of frothing ale and a hearty ploughman’s with lashings of Branston and some crunchy pickled onions.

There were many brown signs with knives and forks on them, pointing down sun-drenched country lanes. Each one, though, led to a conference hotel that was invariably teeming with men in idiotic Oakley sunglasses, looking at flip charts. Or theme pubs with gardens full of purple dinosaurs with steps up the back.

My satellite navigation system was no help either. I asked it to list all the restaurants within 10 miles of the M6 and, after a silicon shrug, it came up with a cafe called something like the Wife Beater. And that was about it.

Most of the restaurants we happened upon were garish, neon-buffed, American add-ons to retail parks. Why? Who wants to make a day out of shopping? “We’ll buy a terrible sofa in the sales, and then before we go to get something that makes an unnecessary noise when we’re gardening (which these days is pretty much everything), we’ll have a slap-up lunch at the Harvester.”

Here’s something you might like to chew on. They always ask in these places if you’ve ever eaten at a Harvester before. And I bet no one has ever said yes.

I have, which is why I found it so easy to drive right on by in search of my increasingly elusive canal-side pub. Eventually, though, the tummy-rumbling became too much, and so in Coventry - which bills itself as a city of peace and reconciliation but is in fact a city ruined by the bloody Germans - we ended up in something called TGI Friday’s.

A pretty girl, who was about eight, asked us to have a seat in an anteroom while our table was prepared; and here I noticed something odd. Why, in places where the menu features pictures of the food they’re serving, are all the seats in the waiting area slashed?

Do people who buy noisy fence-paint sprayers have an inability to sit down for more than 30 seconds without thinking: “I know. I’ll take out my Stanley knife now and cut this chair into ribbons”? Perhaps this is why DFS does so well. Its customers cannot watch Traffic Cops Action Kill on Sky 457+1 without tearing their settees into small pieces with knives.

I have similar thoughts whenever I visit the lavatories at large public events. How do they all miss the bowl by such an enormous margin? Are they doing it deliberately or is it a congenital fault with their bomb-aiming equipment? In which case, what on earth must their bathrooms look like at home?

After a short wait, during which time I never felt inclined to throw any of the chairs through a window, we were shown to our table - where I remembered Clarkson’s first law of eating in the provinces: “The chef is from Coventry. He was not trained in Paris.” This means I always select something that can’t be mucked up. Celery, usually.

On this occasion, however, I went for a burger, which, according to the manager, could not be served “rare” because meat, unless cooked properly, would kill us all. Of course, this isn’t true if you buy decent meat from a decent butcher or if you are a dog, but no matter.

My nuked beef arrived between two pieces of what, I suppose, you could describe as bread. But only if you were mad. Let me put it this way: if I threw it at you in a food fight, I feel fairly sure that it would take your head clean off.

Plainly, then, this is a place you go to not because you are hungry or because you want to treat your family to a tasty meal. No. You go there to get heavier. As lunches go, it was right up there with an experience I had at a restaurant in Saigon. The menu said, “Rather burnt rice land slug” and I ordered it because it sounded intriguing, but sadly it wasn’t. It turned out to be as described - a rather burnt slug.

I can understand why the Vietnamese serve burnt slugs. I can understand why a chicken I was once given in Mali was skin and bone separated by nothing but warmed air. And I know why in Havana I was once given a spaghetti bolognese that came whole. Like a Frisbee.

Here in Britain there is no excuse for eating rubbish. We are bombarded with cookery programmes - and every Christmas the shelves in WH Smith groan under the weight of all the recipe books. Most people could name half a dozen footballers and maybe a handful of royals, but if you asked someone to list all the famous chefs in Britain we’d be here till Doomsday. They’re all so famous that we know them now by their Christian names: Gordon, Delia, Jamie, Marco, Heston, Gary, One Fat, the Hairy and so on and so on.

So why is it impossible to eat properly in Britain unless either you are in the middle of London or you are prepared to book six months in advance for a plate of vertical leaves drizzled with something odd? Why can’t someone open a restaurant in the provinces that serves bread, cheese, Branston pickle and some onions? Good, honest food for people who know how to use a lavatory and won’t slash all the seats.

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