77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1; 020 7522 7896. Tue–Fri, 11.30am–3pm, 5.30pm–11pm; Sat, 11.30am–11pm; Sun, 11.30am–5.30pm

Five stars By jove Four stars Holy mackerel Three stars Fancy that Two stars Yoikes One star Fiddlesticks

The Blonde said she could smell smoke. Smelling smoke at 30,000ft is one of those unnerving harbingers of modern life. Like having your Harley Street heart specialist insist on cash. Hearing someone muttering in Somali while rifling through the knife drawer in the kitchen at five in the morning. Or finding half a mouse in a pasty and wondering where the other half went. I said, “Don’t worry.” Men do that. We say “Don’t worry” to take away the worry, as if the phrase itself was a prophylactic to worrying. But in all the years we’ve been saying don’t worry, no woman has ever turned to us and replied: “Thank you for saying that, I won’t worry now.” I think we assume that panic is gender-specific, like pain, flu, football and crying in films. (All male.)

So, we both sat there, calm on the outside, screaming with blind terror on the inside, until some other chap bagged a hostess and said, “I can smell smoke,” and the hostess did the strangest thing. Instead of telling him to put his seat belt on and return his seat to the upright position, she smirked, and said: “You can smell it? It’s the captain.” Oh my God, the captain has combusted! No, apparently the captain was just having a fag. Well, that’s all right then. On the way back from Morocco, the captain didn’t turn up at all. After six hours, they found someone else who could fly a plane. “I hope he’s not had a night on the piss,” another passenger said. She gave the same smirk, and said: “You can hope.”

Anyway, before the flight back, I sat in the lounge staring out of the window while they fed the pilot black coffee. I was trying to think of things that made sitting in the lounge staring out of the window seem less onerous and, naturally, my thoughts turned to Silvio Berlusconi, and what it must be like having the absurd little Eyetie maître d’ bounce up behind you with amorous intent. The most riveting international news of the past month has been that Noemi Letizia, his chubby, barely legal inamorata, was known by her ex-boyfriend as his “little anchovy”. Which is, without labouring specifics, unarguably the most unpleasant, unflattering and unromantic pet name ever given as an inducement for frolicks and congress. So I whiled away the time concocting gastronomic nicknames for the dirty duce himself. She could call him “my truffle”: an expensive, smelly fungus. Or “Fanta”: saccharine, effervescent and an improbable orange colour. Or the “pepper grinder”: comes with a flick of the wrist, and mostly over the linen. She says she calls him “Papi”, which is too spookily Humbert Humbert for words, but being a bimba, I’m sure that she usually reverts to calling him “Apollo donkey c**k”. Bra-burning came to Italy only because you didn’t need them with plastic tits.

Mind you, I had discovered feminists are still squinting through the nylon letter box back in Morocco. I particularly liked the chemists in the souk: Boots for witch doctors, stacked with stuffed chameleons, bottles of dead beetles, noxious pastes and stinking amulets; dark, animistic stalls festooned with desiccated and decaying wildlife, strings of hoopoes flown south from Europe on one-way tickets, the pelts of rare Atlas wolves, horns, skulls and toe bones, dusty piles of fur, feathers and feet, cages of live kestrels and owls. I asked what everything cures, in a sort of autistic, repetitive way. Apparently, Moroccans are in rude health, except for two conditions: impotence and the inability to produce boy babies. Hanging from the roof, however, there was a defunct and dusty griffon vulture. What’s that for? Indigestion? “That is for woman who wants man who doesn’t look at her. Man she wants to mount.” Is it expensive? “Not considering its power. Maybe it get ugly woman rich husband.” Yes, I can see that would do it. Just think of the Moroccan munter wearing a provocative vulture, winking over the beak. (The Moroccan bird, not the vulture.) It would be irresistible: so, Abdul, why did you marry the fat hyena? “It was so fast. I got a glimpse of her bald raptor and next thing we’re in Vegas getting hitched by Elvis.”

Sex: the promise and absence of it vibrate and ululate in Marrakesh. This has always been the city that Europeans come to for experimental fornication. It’s particularly hedonistic and unjudgmental. This is where you discover what is in the corner of your own personal envelope, and it is still full of humid and spicy hippies, up for a hammam and humping weekend. But for young Moroccans, there is very little sex outside an arranged marriage, and this makes for a certain tension.

In the main square, a world heritage site that has the best collection of alfresco eating anywhere, while we waited in the throng for seats at the sheep heads stall, the Blonde turned to me with a look of gasped astonishment. “Yoikes,” she said and then burst out laughing. I’ve never heard her say yoikes before. “I’m being frotted,” she said. And, sure enough, behind her was a rather impressive trouser tent attached to a skinny and furtive young man who blinked and was led off by his minaret of desire in search of new infidel buttocks. It turned out that almost every woman in our hotel, and one large South African man, had had a similar experience, or rather, been the giver of a similar experience.

Now I know that you’re supposed to feel irate about this, the conventional wisdom being that one thing can lead to another — give them an inch, etc — and I know that the feminist thing is to turn round and bellow: “Stop doing that, you disgusting male person. What would your mother say?” But I can’t help thinking that we’ve been using this rather conservative and buttoned-up country as an exotic, hot knocking shop with added shopping for a long time, the least we can do is lend them a hand. Allow the kid to cop a frot.

There are more hijabs and burkas in Whitechapel than there are in Marrakesh. I lived in Aldgate as a student. The docks were still working then, there were bomb sites and a last remnant of the Jewish community. The street signs weren’t yet written in Bengali. It was blasted and miserably grim, tearful and vicious, with a gritted history of Ripper and Blitz, Kray and Cable Street. It’s much nicer now, full of art and curry shops as cheap as poppadoms. But such is the contrariness of nostalgia that I miss the bad temper and decay, the busted knuckles, mezuzahs and toothless, mumbling meth addicts. And I miss the rudest waiters in the world at Blooms, killed by its own orthodoxy when the rabbis found a single nonkosher sandwich in the fridge and shut down the last Jewish restaurant in the East End, drawing the blinds on 200 years of history and culture.

The Whitechapel Gallery is still here, thriving, and they’ve opened a new restaurant. It is small and neat and nicely turned out. The customers are those easterly arrivistes who talk about their ’erbs and competing zeitgeists and seem to have lost a fight with five dressing-up boxes. The menu is that ubiquitous modern English that has colonised every dining room east of Tottenham Court Road: short and well made, and austere with treats, but without surprises. There is the de rigueur mission statement of organic righteousness and gastro-correctness — “ingredients locally sourced” — although where they find scallops on Leman Street I can’t imagine, and really and truly, I’ve had enough of pork belly now — it’s become a tiresome mockney cliché — but I ate a good rump steak with artichokes. We were happy with the food.

If you’re visiting the gallery, or having an affair with someone in the East End, do go — you won’t be recognised, and it’s better than most of the culturally semidetached museum cafes. But this revision of old England seems oddly like foreign food here: they might have indulged the schmaltz and resurrected a Jewish restaurant, though I quite understand that resurrection is not exactly kosher.

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