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Which side of the road did the Romans drive on? I agree that this question isn’t important or relevant, and you probably don’t think it’s that interesting. But it’s the sort of question that keeps me awake in the daytime – and seeing as you’re a passenger in this column, you’re just going to have to put up with it. Take your feet off the dashboard, close the window and don’t eat crisps.

There’s a quarry outside Swindon that was used by the Romans, possibly to build Swindon. The road leading to the quarry has two sets of cart tracks, one deep, the other shallow. The wagons went to the quarry empty and came out laden, proving that Romans round Swindon drove on the left. Seeing as all roads lead to Rome, we can also safely say that the entire empire was British. So, remember your safety code: vide dexter, sinister, then dexter again.

Travelling on the left seems to be the natural way of getting around. Most people are right-handed, and meeting the oncoming traffic with your sword hand would once have made a lot of sense. There is also a predominance of people who are right-eyed, and countries that drive on the left have measurably better road safety than those that drive on the right. About a third of the world drives on the left. It used to be much more. We have the Americans and the Nazis to blame for the swing to the right. Sweden and Finland, Hungary and Poland all once drove on the left. Now, only four European countries do. Answers on a postcard to Stephen Fry, please. Clue: they’re all islands.

The only place to buck the trend and change from right to left is Okinawa. Occupied by Americans who forced them to drive on the right, they went back to the left when they went home to Japan. Borders where you have to change mid-road include Afghanistan-Pakistan (though, in truth, most people drive down the middle as fast as possible, praying at the top of their voice) and Sudan-Uganda (much the same). Canada used to drive on both the right and the left, depending on which province you were in – possibly the most exciting and edgy thing that has ever happened in Canada. They’ve stopped it now, though, so that Americans don’t come over all dead on the border.

Now I notice you’re nodding off, so we’ll have to save the interesting facts about the invention of road markings for another time. Let’s move on to something just as interesting: the carpet in the Royal Festival Hall. The famous net-and-ball pattern was designed in 1951 by Peter Moro, who did the net, and Leslie Martin, who added the ball, just to be annoying. It’s a beautiful piece of corporate shagpile, a design that is as timelessly fresh as supermarket strawberries, and still absolutely of the moment.

The RFH has had armfuls of millions spent on its refurbishment. And, you know – nothing has changed. It looks exactly as it used to, only slightly more so. Architectural and design commentators are pointing out that this is the most perfectly sensitive restoration. Personally, I suspect they got a Filipino couple with a bucket and Mr Muscle, and trousered the change. But I don’t care, because any excuse to go and look at the RFH as a building, not just a room full of German musicians, is welcome.

This is all that’s left of the Festival of Britain, that exhausted act of bright optimism made by a nation that, five years after the war, still didn’t have enough bricks to rebuild houses or enough sugar to make a birthday cake. After the great war, the country made memorials in every village. After the second, we had a festival and left the RFH. In place of a remembrance of the dead, it was a promise to those yet to be born. Me. Most of us.

The RFH is beautiful and calm and elegant and functional. It combines excellence with popularism. You can see in it the embodiment of the welfare state, health service, useful and universal education, collective responsibility, freedom and order, with a touch of culture. All that, and a particularly undemonstrative, English idea of fun. If you want to stand at ground zero, at the meridian of the modern age, then step onto the net-and-ball carpet of the Royal Festival Hall.

The restaurant upstairs used to be called the People’s Palace. It wasn’t. It has been reborn as Skylon, which sounds like fabric softener or a button on your remote control. In fact, it was the rocket-like sculpture that was the centrepiece of the festival. The dining room is now run by Conran, except that Conran is now no longer Conran. The eclectic collection of restaurants built up by Sir Terence has been bought by a consortium. Conran has always been vain about his name, and now a committee is taking his name in vain.

He is still credited as a design consultant, but this room is a pastiche of Conran – Terry’s Allsorts. There’s the old-hat central oval bar (it actually does look like an old hat), the waiter stations, the heavily underlined touches of look-at-me designerishness – lamps, knives, proctological bar stools – and too many prematurely balding young men in skinny suits with Antony Gormley brooches (cultural kitsch). And while the hall, 56 years on, looks fit and up for it, Skylon – open a couple of weeks – looks tired, trying too hard, a collection of has-been trends. If it were a person, it would be Calum Best chatting up Lindsay Lohan. As, indeed, would most of the waiters and customers.

The menu is short and comes with a mission statement. Miss Puolakka, the chef, says: “My philosophy of food is . . .” Stop right there. Anyone who has a philosophy of food plainly also has a dangerously feeble grasp on the priorities of life – or is a labrador.

I started with a Dorset lobster salad made with grapefruit. The lobster was so puny, it would have lost a fight with a couple of buttered shrimps. It was certainly knocked out by the grapefruit. My guest, Donaldson the photographer, had scallops, which were carpaccioed with chorizo, capers and almonds. They arrived in a lather of spume. “Yuck,” he said, professionally. “This looks like a plate of nameless bodily fluid.” Except he didn’t say “nameless”.

Bland is too exclamatory a word for what it actually tasted like. Testicular froth is the leitmotiv of the kitchen. Everything has been whipped into ecstatic spurts of warm lather. An annoying taster of soup had an ejaculatory blob of truffle oil. My chicken was palmed off with a froth of foie gras: warm, runny liver is a very nasty idea. Donaldson’s calf’s liver, on the other hand, had been sliced by a man wearing boxing gloves and dressed up with more frotted juice.

The service was overattentive, intrusive and repetitive. Three courses are £34.50. I wouldn’t normally dare to talk on Sir Terence’s behalf, but I bet he wouldn’t put up with this chichi, timid, provincial compilation of guide-kissing, aspirational combinations from 10 years ago.

The Festival Hall really deserves a whole lot better than this. And if you want a philosophy to take to dinner, look around you.

SKYLON

Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, SE1; 020 7654 7800 Lunch, 12pm-2.30pm; Dinner, 5.30pm-10.45pm

Book a table at Skylon

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