135 Stephendale Road, SW6; 020 7731 7823

Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-3pm; Sat, 10.30am-4pm. Dinner, Mon-Sat, 6-10pm. Sun, 10.30am-9pm

5 stars: Hot dog; 4 stars: Puppy love; 3 stars: Paws for thought; 2 stars: A real howler; 1 star: Smack my bitch up

I was asked to judge a dog show on behalf of Macmillan nurses. Actually, I misheard and thought I was going to judge a nurses show on behalf of Battersea dogs' home. It's quite simple, they said: the contestants trot around in a circle, and you see which one you fancy the most. You're looking for keenness, alertness, discipline and a general air of up-for-anything health. “Oh, I say.” That's me. “It's informal.” That's them. You just give them a bit of a stroke, rub their chests and some of them will roll over and do tricks for biscuits. Right. Good. We are talking nurses here? “Yes. Marvellous people. They do wonderful work, home visits to desperate folk, and they really need the money.” Well, I can imagine. And the biscuits.

When I got there, of course, I realised my mistake. I'm not stupid, you know. I can tell the difference between a terminal carcinoma palliative-care outreach professional and a French bulldog. I was expected to judge the dogs' and owners' fancy-dress competition. It was spectacular. You have no idea the length children will go to to humiliate a labrador, or indeed the abject discomfort and species-ist ridicule a labrador will put up with for a chewy whatsit and a sniff at your crotch. I was particularly taken by the two grown-ups who dressed their three chihuahuas as an Arab, a Hasidic Jew and a Catholic bishop, in an allegory of world peace and harmony. I also liked the pair of vizslas that were kitted out as 118 and 118; 118 shat in its pants. I loved the little girl who dressed herself as Dennis the Menace and did nothing to her dog, because he was the spitting lookalike of Gnasher.

In the end, the mutt that won was not the most elaborate, cleverest, funniest or gaudiest, it was simply a black pug wearing feathered wings. There was something about it. It wasn't just wearing a costume, it had become a part. It was a Stanislavski method pug being the evil monkey from the Wizard of Oz. It even accepted its rosette in character.

It was surprisingly emotional, and it made me think a couple of things. First, that the only honest response to other species is naked gay anthropomorphism, and second, that the Olympics should have a dog show. If we can have horses and Germans, why can't we race national dog breeds? We'd walk. Think how big our squad would be: Dogs R Us, from jack russells to greyhounds. Mexico would turn up with just a chihuahua, the Chinese with pekingese, the Koreans with lunch. The Olympics are missing an element of frivolity. It's all too much sport and not enough games. They should bring back extinct events. Cricket, for instance. This was first contested olympically in Paris in 1900. The French team included TH Jordan, R Horne, H Terry, W Anderson, D Robinson, WT Attrill, W Browning, A McAvoy, P Tomalin and J Braid. The more astute of you will have noticed that these names are not typically French. The entire Frog team was made up of Englishmen. What greater evidence of the spirit of the ancient Olympiad, and our own innate fair play, than to actually field a team for the opposition because they're useless. The final was between Britain and France, and for the first and possibly last time in all the Olympic games, all 24 players (yes, it was a 12-a-side game) came from the same country. Britain won by 262 runs to 104.

Then there was the tug-of-war, which, in 1900, was won by the combined Swedish-Danish team. Edgar Aabye was a journalist covering the Olympics, but, at the last minute, he was asked to help out his Danish countrymen. He ended up with a gold medal. In 1908, the tug was won by the City of London police, who represented Britain. They were accused of cheating by the American team, who thought their vast, hobnailed police boots were an artificial aid. I like to imagine the coppers all grunting, “Come quietly, come quietly” as they reeled in the Yanks. When the Americans held their first Olympics in 1904, in Missouri, they had anthropological days, when a variety of “savages” were encouraged to compete. So pygmies, Patagonians (whoever they were, Amerindians or perhaps Welsh settlers), Filipinos and American Indians all took part in, and I'm not making this up, contests of mud-slinging and greasy-pole climbing. I think we need more of that sort of good, clean fascist fun.

I know that in the spirit of everything, I really ought to be doing a Chinese this week, but I didn't think about it until now. The connection between Sands End and the Olympics is that it's never been held there, and that nobody from there has ever won anything, except a suspended sentence. This is a very weird little corner of west London; a muddle of artisans' semidetached cottages, of meagre and pursed aspect, behind Wandsworth Bridge Road. A place that must have been the first step out of the working classes into the fear and loathing of the lower middle. It still has a sense of first-generation blazers and rectitude. You can look down the lines of bow windows and glimpse who's on their way up to Shepherd's Bush and who's slipping back down to Wandsworth and Streatham.

The Sands End pub is the sort of little residential boozer that's dying on its knees all over the country. The options are to become more executive flats or do food. Pub food is generally too much pub and not enough grub. The menu is still seen as an encouragement to sell more beer, and the ethos and expectation don't really work. Publicans are not the same people as restaurateurs. But the Sands End appears to be an example of how you can do both: make a proper local restaurant and still keep a community bar. Inside, it's not decorated in any sense that a decorator would understand, more cleaned up. The dining room is a retirement home for lost chairs. The Blonde had to put her napkin under her bottom because the horsehair cushion had burst. It was, she said, like sitting on David Blunkett's face.

It all started very well. The menu is brisk and bright and edibly within the capacity of a pub kitchen. I was told by a number of rather slurry customers, who had all apparently modelled themselves on Jameses Hewitt and Hunt, that the bar snacks were things of wonder: scotch eggs made from real Scotchmen, and pork scratchings that might have come from a pig. We started with English snails that tasted very much like French snails, and not at all like the slugs in hard hats I was expecting. Scallops were puckish and perky; scampi was sweet hard work.

At the end of the first course, I thought this was all shaping up to be a really good room. And then things began to go a bit Leona Lewis-shaped. There was a considerable wait; long enough for me to mention it here. Long enough for me to mention it twice. Then, when my meat and cheese pie came, it was burnt. So well done the pastry had charred and the fat curdled, and inside had turned into a muddy sludge that tasted mostly of grease and heat. The pork steak was fine, but the bavette steak, not my favourite cut, was underhung and so chewy that it made you work like a happy spaniel. After another age, the Eton mess arrived with bananas, which, frankly, can only have got to Eton on some cultural exchange. A raspberry tart was raspberries in a pastry case.

My guess is that something collapsed, exploded, ripped its clothes off, caught fire, drank the cooking sherry or ran off screaming into the night from the kitchen. The menu, the starters and the word of mouth led me to believe that they could probably do better than the meal we had. But the meal we got is the meal we had. This is, though, a worthwhile local restaurant. If it were at the bottom of my street, I'd be jolly pleased, though if it were at the bottom of my street, I wouldn't be at all pleased, because I don't want to live in a candle-dipper's cottage between the gasworks and Dixons, next to a howling sloane who wants to import Balinese rickshaws. Someone parked a bright red Ferrari outside the pub. How much more visibly arriviste can you get? We had to snigger.

Times Recommends

• How to season a wok
• Chicago Rib Shack hits back at its critics
• Gordon Ramsay: Indian barbecue