1521 Ganton Street, W1; 020 7297 9800 Mon-Thu, noon-11pm; Fri-Sat noon-11.30pm; Sun, noon-10pm

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I did take a solemn oath to you all that I would never write syrupy, boiled-suet peregrinations about the twins. But anybody who’s read any 10th-century Icelandic saga, and I assume that’s most of us, knows that oaths are there to be deoathed, or unoathed, or reconfigured, in a manner that is both committed to maintaining the original integrity of purpose and, at the same time, takes into consideration current practices and the changing social environment. Actually, if you deoathed in Dark Ages Iceland, someone called Yossa Acknipple would come and cut off your legs at the knees and kick your stumps till you bled to death while reciting 17 generations of his forefathers.

I was reminded of the oath when I had tea with a friend, who I hadn’t seen for a bit. Before we sat down, he said: “Have you got any baby pictures?” No, I replied. “Okay, I’m going to have to stop and search you. Any infant paraphernalia, or evidence of the use of infants, will be held against you and laughed at. And not in a nice way.” Don’t you think you’re taking this young-stud, fancy-free, no-commitments, “life is just a big bouncy giggling slalom of inconsequential, zipless jig-a-jig” a little fundamentally? “I am a paedophobic,” he replied. “I suffer an unnatural loathing of the grisly, vicious little fun-murderers. I am starting a support group and a paedophobic website.” Of course, you could call it Herod’s.com, and download pictures of abortion clinics and boarding schools.

“That would be tasteless,” he said. “I was thinking more of a paedophobes’ register. We would post it in police stations, primary schools and youth centres. Names of people who really don’t want to be visited on Hallowe’en, won’t be volunteering as lollipop people, don’t think Christmas is a time for families, aren’t going to give to Save the Children and aren’t available as godparents, baby-sitters or mentors, whatever that might be. We’re going to have badges made: Paedophobe, R. Adults Only.” Just as a point of interest, I asked, is your favourite book still The Wind in the Willows, and do you still have that blind, bald velveteen rabbit? “Huggy Bunny? Yes.” Well, I suspect it’s not children you can’t bear, it’s the competition.

The government, or someone close to the government, has announced it is going to make paedophile artwork illegal, with a possible three-year prison sentence, so if you do a drawing that a social worker, copper or one of the few consultant paediatricians who haven’t been struck off thinks is a bit underage, then they can bang you up and ruin your life. I imagine that, as we speak, the crack kiddie-fiddle squad is visiting the Chapman brothers, putting a coat over their heads for their conception of life-sized, genitalia-faced prepubescents in sneakers.

The law against paedophile photographs is there to protect the children who are being abused in them. It is not some sort of moral censorship of images. This is ridiculous, craven, bread-and-circuses, lowest-impulse, least-effort, crowd-pleasing legislation. Why stop at pictures? Why not the words that make pictures? Arrest anybody reading Nabokov. Raid the RSC for performing Romeo and Juliet in front of schoolchildren: she’s only 13. And, by the way, Madame Butterfly is 15. This is a law that does nothing to protect children, just demeans and infantilises a society that ought to behave like sophisticated and moral grown-ups. If you’re going to start eradicating stuff, wouldn’t a really civilised society begin with any paeodophobic images, the real, careless, out-in-the-open cruelty to children? Get rid of photos of starving African bairns, the street kids of South America and our own neglected and terrified youths in bus shelters? Difficult to know where to start with paedophobia.

Well, I never meant that to get quite so serious. I was going to syncopate into my boy Beetle’s feeding himself. Getting to feed yourself is a red-letter moment on the Darwinian escalator. Obviously, he doesn’t actually make the porridge himself - he just sits and spoons it in or close to his mouth. But then, I don’t go and dry-roll the oats. You have to draw the line somewhere. I watch him eat every morning; he gets to the last mouthful, looks at the spoon and deep into the bowl, and he cries. He weeps, with an intense sadness, at the death of porridge. The infinite emptiness at the end of oats. I wish I could still feel this deeply about food: I, too, love porridge, but I don’t howl and snot and beat my head with the spoon when it’s gone. I console myself with the knowledge that there will be porridge again tomorrow. That thought is of no solace to Beetle. There is no balm in the consideration of porridge futures. No healing in the wheel of breakfast, as yet unsimmered. Only the fathomless grief of the finite bowl. The tragedy of expectation, appetite, pleasure, comfort, consumption, loss and emptiness is the human truth revealed in the naked spoon, and only a banana will make it better.

It would have taken more than a banana to make Cha Cha Moon better. I was annoyed even before I sat down. It annoyed me twice. Once, by being called Cha Cha Moon, which sounds like someone from Star Wars or a James Bond shag. And then by making me queue. Queues are kryptonite to hospitality; syrup of figs to standing still. Queues may well be a sign of egalitarian, meritocratic, democratic, ethical self-righting society, but they’re deeply aggravating when you’re hungry.

Cha Cha Moon is a no-no-book, communal-tables Chinese noodle shop in the mood of Wagamama and the Great Depression. It’s cheap. All dishes are £3.50. You could eat replete for £7, which, in London’s West End, in the warm and dry, only the Salvation Army can match, and the customers here are prettier, nearly all of them young, and hungry for more than food, with better things to do with cash and their mouths than eat. Cha Cha would be marvellously welcome if it were not just cheap, but good value. It isn’t. It isn’t if you have a functioning palette. At best, the combinations of ingredients are odd. Mostly, they’re psychopathic. I offer you Cha Cha muli: turnip cake, dried shrimp, spring onion, egg. Or Chinese salami, fishcake, Chinese chives, beansprouts and egg ho fun. I ordered a salted lemon Sprite. What came was a preserved lemon in a glass with a bottle of Sprite. Together, I must admit, they were rather clever, spookily recreating the flavour of half a pint of fizzy Lemsip. It was the medicinal taste of aspirin that was unmistakable.

This is technically what’s known as the Ramsay Dichotomy: smart but stupid. Dishes, we were told, were not meant to be shared, which is understandable, because, give or take, they all tasted the same, using a generic broth. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what this was trying to be, but it wasn’t broth. A cloudy, sickly gruel that was more seepage than soup. There was something of bin juice about it: a grim distillation of waste and parsimony; the textures of the stuff that lurked in it stretched from slimy to slither to slop, sludge, slobber, sputum splat and the shimmeringly shuddery. The stuff that Orientals find so evocatively gorgeous, and we tend to only manage to swallow with our eyes closed and a hand on the back of our heads.

It’s a shame this isn’t all better made and more attractively flavoured, because it is inventive and unusual, the concept brave and necessary in a city that’s way too expensive for its most ecstatic denizens. But brave often ends up dead. Inventive and unusual can also mean unnecessary and unpleasant. The service was grudging or forensic, with nothing like enough ho fun all round.

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