This is probably going to mean something to only half of you. But you know how, in gents’ toilets, there’s a line of urinals at an average man-aim height, and then, at the end, there’s a couple set lower down? Well, the oddest thing happened to me the other day. I was standing at No 3. I always stand at No 3, because that means if someone else comes in, they can stand at No 1 or No 5 and you’ve always got a cordon sanitaire. You never stand at 1 or 6, because then you’re hemmed in against the wall by the fat truck driver who thinks that reaching a urinal is an opportunity to download every noxious humour in his body — farting, burping, spitting — while muttering contented expletives.

So, I’m standing at No 3, and there’s another bloke at No 5. And then this little boy rushes in, pees into one of the lower urinals, zips up and rushes out again. And I can’t help noticing that the bloke at No 5 is transfixed. Knees flexed, mouth agape. “Oh my God,” he says. “Oh my God. They’re for kids!” He looks to me for corroboration. “They’re for kids!”

I smile wanly. “The little loos,” he says. “They’re put down there so that kids can go. Did you know that?” I shrug noncommittally. “Well I never!” he adds for emphasis. “All my life, I’ve assumed they were for big men. You know — big?” And he laughed. “Isn’t that odd? If you think about it, the provision for large and little is the same. There’s something deeply Buddhist about that. You think things are half empty, but really they’re half full.” You’re dribbling on your foot, I said.

If you want to know the most fundamental difference between men and women, look in a lavatory. Here’s the lowdown. Women can talk and micturate at the same time. Men can’t. Women actually go into the loo to talk to one another. If anyone talks to you in a gents, it’s heresy. At a football match, it can be a billion bellowed decibels on the terraces, but in the bogs, it’s as silent as the reading room in the British Library.

The other difference between men and women is squeamishness. Ask a woman to place the following in order of horror. 1) The melting of both ice caps simultaneously; 2) endemic bird flu in the nation’s infant schools; and 3) a nameless, authorless droplet on a loo seat. It’s no contest. You could eat prunes and custard off the seats in women’s loos. They’re pristine — because no woman has ever sat on them. Two things girls learn as they get out of nappies: how to make a towel into a turban and never, ever, to sit on the loo. Men always wash their hands because they don’t want other men to see them not washing their hands. Women never wash their hands, because they know the sink-soap-dryer combo is septically poisonous.

And they’re probably right. I once interviewed a molecular biologist who told me that swabs taken from the commonly touched parts of public conveniences grew more noxious microbes than an Algerian plague pit. “It’s all virulent,” he said. “Dryers blow bacillus up your nose, there are 40 forms of salmonella in the soap and the door handle of a public lavatory is statistically more dangerous than standing in downtown Baghdad wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, shouting, ‘Come on, if you’re man enough, towelhead.’ ” What should we do? I asked. “Well, personally,” he replied, “if I really have to use a public convenience, I always make sure I urinate all over my hands. Urine is sterile and inert, the safest disinfectant you’ve got.” I pass that on simply as information. Make of it what you will.

I get as many letters about the state of lavatories in restaurants as I do about the food, with complaints about cleanliness, darkness (what were you looking for?), cubicles blocked by fornicating couples, and, most recently, unisex loos, which women seem to mind a great deal. Perhaps I should start hanging around toilets on your behalf.

In case you’re wondering, I didn’t actually go to the loo at Awana, a Malaysian restaurant on Sloane Avenue. Malay food is the least travelled of the holiday-destination Far Eastern cuisines, and one of the most interesting — certainly more varied, accomplished and sophisticated than the ubiquitous Thai.

The room is a generic vernacular of international orientalism. There is a bank of silent TV screens showing Malay tourist videos. The bill has “Visit Malaysia 2007” printed on it, which gives the place a corporately hospitable feel. The staff wear little westernised bits of national costume. The whole place feels like an airline’s first-class lounge. The Blonde and I were the only customers who had a permanent address in London. That’s not a complaint. A happy group of Irish middle managers out on a get-to-know-you conference jolly is preferable to a strop of Sloane Street shoppers.

The waitress ordered for us. We opened with chicken and lamb satay. Satay must be one of the best starters ever invented. These were hot, tender and dewy. What more could you ask of meat on a stick? There were also some very good folded roti with a bit of a dip. Malay food is all sticky, dippy stuff: sweet, sour, savoury, hot, coconut. Next, we had an excellent beef rendang, which always has that furry texture, as if the beef has been prepared with a currycomb. A chicken sambal stir fry was okay, but too polite. My only real cavil with this kitchen is that it’s a bit refined, a bit “Malay for beginners”.

Best was last. Puddings were a roti tissue — sweet, thin fried bread — with a chocolate dip and durian ice cream. Durian is one of my touchstone ingredients. I know that when I can eat one with unconditional pleasure, I’ll have a truly international palate. The durian spreads its large seeds by fooling carrion-eaters that, despite appearances, it is, in fact, dead meat. It has been described (by me, I think) as like fruit-bat pee with the texture of dead babies. The smell is more gaggingly putrified than the flavour. You’re not allowed to transport durians on aeroplanes, because they have to throw the plane away afterwards.

In the Far East, they simply adore them; make cakes, biscuits, puddings and ice cream from them. But I doubt there are half a dozen places in Europe offering durian ice cream. It’s worth going to Awana just to see if you can face it. The flavour is astonishingly complex and contradictory, both fugitive and pungent, with a hint of fried garlic wrapped in ripe camembert and green wine gum, and an insistent undertone of rotting liver. It is repellent and moreish, an incantation of sweaty bed and cheap scent, all folded in the pristine, white cool of fatty ice cream.

When you’re a decadent epicurean, durian ice cream is what you dream of in your ennui. The savour of it stays. It wafts in a miasma from your gut as if some small nocturnal frugivore rodent has decomposed in the humid burrow of your gullet. Yum!

Awana

Rated 3/5

85 Sloane Avenue, SW3; 020 7584 8880

Lunch, noon-3pm. Dinner, Mon-Wed, 6-11pm; Thu-Sat, 6-11.30pm; Sun, 6-10.30pm

5/5 Royal Flush; 4/5 Straight Flush; 3/5 Flush Gordon; 2/5 Flush Harry; 1/5 Flushed Away

Times Recommends

• Thomasina Miers’s cabbage and bitter leaves on garlic toast
• Food that's good for body and soul
• Carrot, date and goat's cheese salad