43 Parkway, NW1; 020 7267 9700.
Mon-Sat, lunch, noon-2.30pm, dinner, 6pm-10.30pm; Sun, lunch, 1pm-4pm

5 stars: Base jumper; 4 stars: Skipping along; 3 stars: On the hop; 2 stars: Jogger’s nipple; 1 star: The runs

I try to cover the waterfront, the bases, the borders, the wrinkly creased bits, and talk about complete eating, ultimate dinner, the alpha and omega of face gratification, gastronomy sans frontières. But how often do we bother to venture below the overhang of the paunch? How often do our inquiries journey lower than the love-handle muffin tops? Most rude writers rarely go toilet, in the discursive sense, but where lunch goes, there must go I, and, like a labrador puppy, pull you along behind me. Come with me, it’s time to go through the motions.

I have a penchant for talking dirty, and the Blonde’s pretty potty-mouthed, too. We can while away long journeys never rising above the scatological, like two interior-decorator queens arguing over swatches. We’re just back from Bombay, and nowhere plays fast and loose with the bowels like India. You’re never further than a couple of yards from a turd. Shit happens in India, and then they grow vegetables in it. It’s a neat Hindu wheel of virtue, but the food is so fabulously good, it’s worth the midnight runs. Bombay, in particular, is all about street food. Tourists tend to be particularly squeamish about eating from the gutter, but the street is no more poisonous than the big hotels: it is the most exciting place to graze, and the salutary truth for sensitive western guts is that the majority of food poisoning you give to yourself. The most common culprit is your own fingers. Living in a rigorously antiseptic society, we’ve stopped washing before eating. The Indians are scrupulous about it. I shared a sink in a restaurant with a man cleaning his teeth, both upper and lower sets, under the tap, with soap.

Somehow, I picked something up. I’d had enough pebble-dashing amoeba and slurry with the fringe on top to insist on drugs, so I took it straight round to my doctor. “I’ll need a specimen,” he said, without any discernible note of excited inquiry. The thing with specimens is, well, everything. And they never find anything in them. I mean, would you? How hard are you going to look? Can I suggest you give me the most powerful antibiotics known to botty world, and let God pick through the corpses? He handed me a plastic container the size of a film canister, with a little spatula attached. Look here, considering you’ve all spent so long studying physiology, and you can do microsurgery on hearts and laser surgery on eyes, and grow triplets in saucers, how the hell do you imagine a man with a hair-trigger gunk butt is going to neatly truffle into a lipstick tube? Not even Yoda could manage that. “Ah, there’s a technique,” said the doctor enigmatically.

I’m passing this on, in every sense, as a public service. I know a lot of you are planning exotic holidays, and you may want to bear what follows through in mind. The rest of you might like to look away now, and skip to the final sentence, which is this week’s restaurant review.

First, lock yourself in the lavatory at home. Don’t attempt this in public or with acquaintances. You have brought in with you the specimen jar, a roll of clingfilm, a knife and a “must-go” feeling. Take the hand towel and drape it over the mirror. Lift the loo seat and cover the bowl in clingfilm. The knife is to cut the clingfilm, because the little serrated strip on the box serves only to corrugate the stuff into unbreakable plastic rope. The cover should not be taut. This is important, as you will discover later. It’s important you don’t discover this later. When you’re satisfied with the engineering, go number twos. Or, as the doctors have it, vacate the bowel – remembering to lower trousers and underpants first. Pray that this isn’t a colonic tsunami. Hastily poke a hole in the clingfilm, because there is a simultaneous plumbing problem. (How girls manage this, I’ve no idea. Of course, they just call an ambulance.)

Gingerly stand up, thankful. Thankful you’ve put a towel over the mirror. Spoon interesting and memorable portions into specimen tube. Screw on lid so tight only a prop forward will get it undone. “Here’s the clever part,” said the doctor. “You just unpeel the clingfilm, drop it in the pan, and there you have it.” Well, you’ll probably want to take a moment for a spot of personal maintenance here, and then, with a sense of a tricky big job handled with élan and aplomb, you can give Mr Crapper’s ballcock a jolly tug and wave your problems goodbye.

Not so fast. It’s at this point, when you imagine you’re home and dry, that you see with eye-bulging, breath-purloining, heart-thundering horror that clingfilm doesn’t go quietly. It transforms into a limp cack-balloon that thinks it’s a brown ballet dancer, and pirouettes above the U-bend. You are now in a whole new world of shit. And the rest I’ll leave to your fetid, heaving imaginations. It was ugly. And if it had been someone else, unbearably funny.

All of which brings us, naturally, to Camden, a little stretch of London’s lower colon that has aspirations of being north Notting Hill, but is really south St Albans. Someone tried to set it on fire a month ago. Fire engines and news crews turned up to watch, but unfortunately, the rain put it out. Market is a small shop-front restaurant on Parkway that has been getting very good notices from my betters. It’s the sort of simple English restaurant that needs to break out and colonise every high street and residential parade, replacing those hideous Cypriot caffs and sordid chicken-beaters, if English food is to become more than a style fad.

The walls are brick, the tables zinc and the room full of locals talking and eating. Suggs from Madness lurched back and forth to the street for fags. Inside, the menu is short and replete with those dishes that have become young England classics, or clichés, depending on how your digestion’s feeling. I started with mushroom soup, which was a thick, grey custard of underseasoned field mushrooms and not much else. It was, blamelessly, what it promised to be: a liquid made out of fungus. Salad of duck liver and green beans with un oeuf mou was very nice, as was a red mullet with brandade. The main course of mutton chops was off, so the Blonde had another starter: pig’s cheeks, which are the prawn cocktail of Brit grub. Ignore the name, this is a small, cheap cut that needs careful and tender cooking. It hadn’t got it. It was stringy and thin-tasting, and again, underseasoned.

My chicken and ham pie was a disaster. I use the word in the gastronomic sense. It wasn’t a disaster like an earthquake in Pakistan or the Black Death, but in its own dinner time, it was up there with the Thirty Years War. A sarcophagus of bone-dry, boiled and shredded ham, with hen tits. Once the pastry was on, they’d forgotten to make it taste of anything, or give it any liquidity. “Sorry, mate, we’ve paved it over now. Can’t dig it up again.”

Pudding was a sponge that was not as good as one from M&S, and rhubarb that tasted weirdly fishy. New English has got to be on top of puddings: puddings are what we do. Sweet is who we are. The bill was £70-odd for the two of us, with a glass of wine. That’s very good. The service was slow, and the kitchen needs a lot of attention. It’s difficult, after the opening buzz and the rave reviews, to keep up the standards of a packed restaurant – the pressure is to cut corners, let it slip a little, concentrate on the till. But it can unpack quite as fast as it filled up. Market needs to get a grip if it’s in it for the long run.

Talking of which, the bowel has pulled itself together, you’ll be pleased to know, which is a relief, as the other inevitable symptom of a trip to India, with its myriad pulses, is a massive increase in the wind section. Farting is a small, solitary and admittedly masculine pleasure. But at night, in the dark, I lie awake and listen to the Blonde’s bottom and mine mutter medieval German to each other. It’s oddly comforting.

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