Shepherd’s Bush, W12; 020 3371 2300. Shopping centre open Mon-Fri, 9am-10pm, Sat, 9am-8pm, Sun, midday-6pm

5 stars Mall conquering; 4 stars You shall go to the mall; 3 stars Mall mercies; 2 stars Backs to the mall;
1 star Malled to death

This is the season of fruitful fatness. You sniff the frost and order a glossy, dripping, goose-fat-fried breakfast. There is pink-cheeked, plume-breathed permission to have both the custardy pudding and the varicose cheese. This is the very best time to eat in Britain: pastry and pâté, pies and russets, and the wonderful varieties of round-mouthed, clubbable brassicas and loamily suggestive roots. And there’s game, feathered, furred and finned.

I’ve been shooting quite a bit recently. Ever since the invention of smokeless powder and the four-wheel drive, hunting has been a sedentary sport. We tubby Nimrods probably burn fewer calories than bowls players. But there is still the assumption that we traverse vast distances with muscles like coiled springs and lungs like Hades’ bellows. In truth, the world over, hunters are the wobbliest, wheeziest men. Softer than crazy golfers, we eat vast breakfasts, absurd elevenses, indulgent lunches, monumental teas, and then get dressed up for Edwardian dinners like extras from a Sunday adaptation. We don’t even have to bend over to retrieve the corpses. They are picked up by care-in-the-community labradors.

So, I’ve been thinking, since I’ve been outside in the fresh air such a lot recently, I really ought to get back indoors to the gym. I haven’t been for months. Gyms fall into two types: sergeant majors or aromatherapists. Mine has more scented candles than broken noses. It’s mostly used by resting Ukrainian mistresses, strung-out middle-aged women looking for a new life that will be achieved through a toned cocktail of summer anorexia, Botox and rhythmic sphincter clenching, and men who worked in the financial-services sector and used to come in and prop the FT’s How to Spend It up on their cycles while gently pedalling the distance from Le Caprice to Harrods. So I assumed the place would be empty now. The bankers would be back living with their mums and the strung-out women would be doing their own housework and cooking for their paying guests.

Quelle surprise. On a Tuesday afternoon, it was a-hotching and a-humping and a-grunting, a marathon of stringy women still sprinting for serenity and happiness, dozens of men assuming the absurd and humiliating poses of extreme stress. Who were these people? In the changing room, all was revealed. They’re still bankers, just thinner. They’re unemployed bankers, here because they have nowhere else to go. Their perk gym memberships still have a few months to run. Everyone is pumped in the chest-and-biceps manner of men who work out to work out inferiority issues. The mood in the changing rooms used to be podgy banter about jet lag and the best hotels in KL. Now it’s silent and introverted and furrowed and henched. Exercise gives you a feeling of wellbeing. It releases happy head drugs. For these lost and unwanted future-mongers without futures, junked junk bonders with nobody to bond with, they are the demastered masters of the universe, here to get the rush into their prematurely unhurried lives.

The saddest thing, the real tearjerker, was the bollock nudity. This gym never went in for Adonis racks. There was a general air of portly modesty. But this Tuesday, it was like August on a German beach. It was a prehistoric show of masculinity from the commercially castrated, the accountants whose balls no longer counted, negotiators with negative-equity nuts. And hard as I tried, even in the gym, it was physically impossible to jerk the merest ounce of sympathy for any of them, even though their divorce rate is soaring. Those mercenary, gusset-lipped, smooth-browed harridans on the treadmills are all filing while there’s still some redundancy and bonus to grab before the house has to go. I’m told that a divorce lawyer from Farrers is harder to get these days than a table at The Ivy. “Hello, Farrers Divorce, sorry to keep you waiting, a lawyer will be with you as soon as possible. Hello, I’m sorry we’ve got nothing for Thursday. We can’t do you anything till after Christmas. I could fit you in for a two-hour separation Wednesday lunchtime, but we’d need the brief back by 2 o’clock. If we get a reconciliation, I’ll call you back.”

Another place you might imagine would now be in mourning is Britain’s biggest and newest shopping centre, Westfield. But on Monday evening it had the buzz of lots of nearly happy people. It used to be fashionable to say that malls were in fact churches, temples for the communion of commerce. This was supposed to be ironic, but here it may actually be true. A surprising number of people smiled in an intensely messianic mien and asked how much did I love Westfield. Because Westfield loved me.

The Blonde and I managed to pass the chapels of merchandise to get to the food court, a compendium of 49 restaurants and coffee shops and creperies, from The Real Greek and the snappy version of Club Gascon to a salad bar called Tossed, which so screams for a single entendre joke that I give it to you for a Christmas present. I must say, it’s dauntingly impressive, Hollywood-designed, all shiny and new and alluring. We started to queue for Pho, a Vietnamese restaurant that sells the eponymous breakfast soup. We waited for half an hour while eight people ahead of us gave tortuous orders to a woman who was apparently taking them down in cuneiform on damp clay tablets — plenty of time to watch an overindulgence of staff turn in slow circles like toys with defunct batteries. The Blonde almost vaulted the counter to sort them out.

Finally, my brisket pho arrived. But I was in a fury. In fairness, it was fine. Not as good as Saigon, but authentic and surprising for Shepherd’s Bush. An orchestral broth with bright, clean additions of herb, lime and chilli. You can, if you wish, get Nam’s famous weasel-regurgitated coffee here. It’s not regurgitated, and it’s not a weasel. In truth, it should be called civet-crapped coffee and it would make a nice Bushtucker Trial. Could they drink coffee made from beans that had passed through Robert Kilroy-Silk?

Next we had aloo chat from Tiffinbites, a very Bombay dish of unctuous textures and screaming, pickled sweetness. A delicious mess for £4.50. Moving along, we shared a duck burger from Croque Gascon, a splendid thing of minced Aylesbury on a pain de miel bun with cheese and poitrine bacon. And duck-fat chips. There is a foie gras option, which is almost worth coming for all on its own. Then, a banoffee crepe, which looked like sodden chamois leather and tasted like the rest of the civet’s dinner. A young couple next to us said that they often came here for dinner after work. They had the smug and exhausted look of the still employed. It was, they added, a nice place to graze around the world, each eating from companionable but separate continents.

There seemed to be quite a lot of couples who had the same idea. It saves the argument about where to go, whether you want fish or meat, Chinese or Indian. You can go everywhere all at once. And it’s all relatively cheap. Yet I still feel a resistance to the whole idea of a food court. It seems slightly spooky. A bit Stepford Chefs. There is a privet hedge that runs around everything and I can imagine looking over it and finding Tom Cruise handing out communion ketchup.

If I’m honest and examine my reservations, however, they appear to be made of nothing more than old age, habit and snobbery. I just don’t want to like shopping-mall food. I need some sort of aesthetic, liberal-intellectual permission to think this is a good place. Perhaps if White Cube opened a Damien Oeuf en Gelée bar, or if they had a couture Oxfam shop and a multiplex theatre. Anyway, I know my kids are going to want to live here. And if you do come, please be nice to the waiters, the valet parkers and the men slowly pushing brooms. They were probably the people who financed this cathedral of munchies and Mammon in the first place.

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