In warm, unhurried southern Europe (all misconceived pretence at Teutonic industry notwithstanding), lunchtime is a time for sleep. In the Cold War, it was the time to wrap yourself in the beige macintosh of treason and stroll calmly to the nearest dead drop to betray your country. In Sydney, it is a time for manic jogging round the harbour. On Wall Street, so Gordon Gekko assured us, lunch was for wimps.

In leafy Cheshire, bastion of bourgeois privilege but also of Premiership-funded exuberance, lunchtime is for anything with anyone, including “quickie” breast enlargement surgery so fast that the new poitrine can be at work, having had a life-changing experience by teatime.

Wince not. The £4,500 local anaesthetic “lunch” is here. The professionals involved hasten to note that most patients stay for at least a night, and others caution that going home too soon can increase the risk of bleeding. No supplicant at the altar of the cosmetic scalpel should ignore such warnings. Equally, no student of human progress should be blind to the extraordinary convergence of science and time management that allows a woman to alter her physiognomy for good in the time that it might otherwise take her to alter it, with too much stuffed woodcock and Sachertorte, for ill.

Nor should cynics assume that insufficient thought goes into something just because it takes less time than an episode of Lost. The great hinges of history pass in the same seconds and minutes by which we count our children’s sleep. A lunch hour is long enough to declare war, sign a dozen treaties, end an affair or convert to Zoroastrianism. And then nip out for a sandwich.