Five stars: Holiday in the sun Four stars: Bank holiday Three stars: Package holiday Two stars: Busman’s holiday One star: Holiday camp

There are £20 grouse at the butchers. Like cuckoos heralding spring, dead game in the window, with its hirsute legs wrapped round its vent, is a harbinger of autumn. The children can finally be prised out of their revolting Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirts, marinated in the effluvia of adolescence, and the suitcases can go back to the spare-bedroom cupboard.

Cases are the archeology of ordinary people. You find strange hotel keys in the pockets of rucksacks, little toddler’s collections of shells and seaworn glass, ticket stubs for seaside specials and Italian toothpaste that tastes of wormwood. There are forgotten Caribbean antibiotics for crusty ears and French homeopathic hangover pills, weird-pronged plug adaptors, holiday thongs curled up like dead woodlice and, in the farthest corner, a teaspoon of grit that is prosaically, but properly, the sands of time.

What shoes are to chick-lit heroines, suitcases are to me. They represent a deferred wanderlust, an out-of-here readiness. I’m particularly powerless against carry-on bags. The Blonde is losing patience with the colonies of leather and canvas that collect in the less-visited corners of the house like discarded swallows’ nests – I think she sees it as a passive threat of desertion. Actually, it’s quite the opposite: all their little labels point homeward.

It has not been the best summer. All the places you want to go have been peed on from a great height. The places that baked were generally ghastly, like Greece, which choked in a hot fog of bushfires that barely missed Athens. I nearly got a cheap flight just to go and blow. Thousands of us have returned home with a sour, sad taste in our mouths. The food wasn’t all we expected or remembered. Then we remembered that it never is. We came back to find Jamie and Rick discovering delicious pigs and figs on the telly: they live in another world of celebrity manna.

The best things I ate this summer were cooked in a truck-driver’s home in Tuscany. The first was a mushroom soup: glossy and thick as a mink muff, and darkly cunning with the mulchy, crepuscular flavours of the wood. Fungi have the most complex and dissembling tastes. Born of corruption, they are smooth and pale and pristine, but always a hair’s breadth away from gut-twisting murder. These ones were wild ceps, gathered from secret places and damp clefts.

And then there was penne, lacquered with tomatoes from a vine that grew like a hedge at the back door, with fruit the size of inflamed bull’s testicles: thick, corpulent flesh with barely a seed, and that miraculous gift of tomatoes – intense sweetness without sentimental sugariness. Pomodoro is a much more onomatopoeic word than tomato for the flavour of being in love in the sun.

I’ve just received the following letter, which perfectly conveys the aspiration and unintentional truth of the English eating abroad. It is the most superbly Pooterish piece of writing. I’ve changed the name to protect the guilty.

“Dear Mr Gill, I thought I should bring to your attention a real gem – nothing to do with me – that we visited on holiday. If any expats or sunseekers are in the mood for a treat, then they should know where to go, as should you, if you are ever passing.

“The restaurant is called La Fourchette Folle, in Roubia, which is in the Minervois region of France. Roubia has a population of 500 during the holiday season, falling to a population of two old ladies and a stray dog in the winter. If you drive through it, then don’t blink – you’ll miss it. Typical of a French village.

“La Fourchette has a scruffy bar on one street and a postage-stamp-sized deck for diners on another, as well as a tiny indoor eating area. The decor is plain and simple and comfortable. Lucy, one of the owners, by contrast, is neither plain nor simple, and instantly makes you feel comfortable with both her ample charm and her ample assets. She’s English, by the way, and after two weeks of trying to order in my pigeon [sic] French – and often ending up with a French pigeon – it was great to relax.

“Two adults and two teenagers ordered foie gras, a prawn cocktail and crab ravioli. The poor goose was served with a kiwi jelly (and quite pretentiously served on a plate of slate), but was to die for. My son demolished the two-inch prawns with relish, and Mrs and Miss Smith couldn’t get enough of the deep-fried ravioli parcels. This had been preceded by an amuse-bouche of a mussel served with chocolate, tequila and Mexican flavours.

“Three of us had duck for the main, and the girl opted for the seafood risotto, which was accompanied by asparagus and goat’s cheese foam. The duck was finer than any duck – or steak – I have previously had.

“For pudding, the girls had a strawberry pavlova item, which, in the words of the wife, had been injected with strawberry flavouring (a compliment), and the boy had a chocolate mousse, with me opting for a quartet of local cheeses. All was great, and at £20 a head, including drinks, very, very reasonable in a country that’s not known for its low-cost dining. I have never written to a food critic before, but if you are in the area, it would be a shame – for you and for them – if you were to miss it.

“Yours sincerely, G Smith.” Mr Smith, thank you. No, really, thank you. Back to London, and dinner at the Oxo Tower. (Can any other five words fill you with such low expectation? Such a grim name, Oxo – like calling pâté Swine-err or Duck-uh.) On the second floor is Bincho, a yakitori restaurant. If you get a window, it has a lovely view over the gold-lamé river to the ossified St Paul’s.

The waitress began by asking if we’d ever eaten here before, a phrase that actually trumps dinner at the Oxo Tower. Yakitori is essentially Japanese tapas – things to eat while getting drunk, so that salarymen can lurch into lap-dancing clubs with their fingers smelling of barbecue sauce. It doesn’t have the inscrutable cultural vanity of sushi. It’s pretty much the stuff that Uzbeks and Turks eat – grilled slivers with goo – and this place does it very well. You can have skewers of chicken skin or gizzard (“other duck parts are available on request”) and there’s a soup of pig’s tripe.

The problem is how much to order. The Blonde and I have a long-standing and intractable difference of opinion about communal ordering. She underorders; I overorder. She abhors waste; I have a perfectly reasonable fear that we might miss something brilliant. Anyway, we had a pathetically intense silent row made up of looks of withering blame and inhalations of hissing fury. As ever, we ate sufficiently, but not gluttonously.

As an act of vindictive one-upmanship, I slipped in a late order under the Blonde’s embargo. And, lo, we got the best dish of the day: a splendid ochazuke – rice with pickles and green tea. It’s much better than it sounds (which might be Japan’s national motto).

By the way, can anyone tell me why Japanese restaurants always look like Ikea works canteens lit by manic depressives?

Bincho Yakitori: Oxo Tower Wharf, Barge House Street, SE1; 020 7803 0858. Mon-Fri, noon-3pm, 5-11.30pm; Sat, 11am-11.30pm; Sun, 11am-10.30pm

Book a table at Bincho Yakitori

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