5 William IV Street, WC2; 020 7036 0660. Mon-Sat, noon-11pm

Five stars Halle Berry Four stars BlackBerry Three stars Berry St Edmunds Two stars Strawberry One star Beriberry

I’ve just eaten the first summer pudding of the year. I love summer pudding. I love its season-specific sunny . It’s a harbinger, like gulls’ eggs and mince pies: a connection with the warp and weft of the life of our nation. A reminder that we are but shuttles in the loom of the ages, pulling the bright skein of our mortal thread through the tapestry of our island’s story, never actually knowing whether we’re a blue bit of sky, green landscape or a bit of pink milkmaid.

Scott’s has made its for two; in fact, it would feed five. I shared it with Amelia, a girlfriend from my distant, silken youth. We have occasional calf-eyed lunches. The pudding looked so good, a shining plum-puce breast of sticky sweet soft sodden bread and ripe fruit. What could be more redolent of England than summer pudding stains on linen? It is always a remembrance of things past, a reminder of lost heat, a trickle of sweat down the small of your back, the tickle of grass on your shoulder blades, sweet Pimm’s breath in your ear.

The first mouthful, as with all Proustian puddings, was a sharp and sour stab of self-pitying disappointment — tart, like unmade jam. It should have a tongue-saturated funniness, but nothing tastes as good as the memory of itself. There is a real problem with summer pudding: it doesn’t taste as good as it used to, because it’s not as good as it used to be. The fault’s not Scott’s, where it’s as good as you’ll find anywhere. The fault is the fruit. Although it is still early in the season and, as Amelia points out, I probably can’t actually taste anything anyway at all, as my tongue has been worn to a polished stump on an ingénu excess of whisky, figs, cruelty and cunnilingus. The pudding is made from white and redcurrants, which are both naturally tart, blackberries (the farm variety of which tend to be sour and faint), raspberries, which have lost their complex tartan flavour and half their fructose, and strawberries. It’s the strawberry that is the engine, the heart and soul, of a summer pudding. Strawberries give it the sweetness, its scent, its direction. The strawberry is summer pudding’s Ronaldo: it makes the bread red. But strawberries don’t taste of anything any more; or rather, they just don’t taste of strawberries any more. Our estimation of this fruit, the national talisman of summertime, is plummeting because we’ve been eating the memory of what it ought to taste like for so long. Now we’ve finally woken up to the truth: that strawberries are only edible if they’re covered in sugar, drowned in syrup and buried under a load of other fruit.

One of the first stories I covered for Style was the tradition of Wimbledon strawberries and cream. I went to a farm that supplied the lawn tennis club; they packed a type called Elsanta. It was grown for its long shelf life, robust flesh, uniform shape and size. It tasted of little; even the bugs didn’t bother it. It is now the most widely commercially grown strawberry in Europe, and it’s not worth eating. It’s not even worth making into doughnut jam. The supermarkets’ PRs are pleading for new and exotic ways to get us to go back to soft fruit, recipes for liver with strawberries, suggestions to drop them into cider, turn them into cellulite poultices. The truth is, if they’d sold one strawberry that actually tasted of strawberry, we’d fight each other to get to it.

Strawberries were always thought to be an aphrodisiac, a bit because they resemble hearts, more because they look like the business end of a penis. If you’re getting married this summer, you might consider serving the traditional wedding soup of strawberries, borage and sour cream. Strawberry leaves are the heraldic encarpa of a duke’s crown. Don’t ask why; don’t ever ask why about anything heraldic, because they’ll tell you and then you’ll have to kill yourself.

It isn’t only strawberries; we’re eating less unprocessed or melanged fruit altogether. Orange sales have plummeted. I expect plum sales are plummeting. We drink cartons of boiled fruit juice, but we can’t be bothered to peel one. When was the last time you ate a grape with a pip in it? We eat bits of fruit in salads and in yoghurt and shoved through juicers. The death of soft fruit has nothing to do with organics or green farming. It’s down to packaging and distribution. It’s not that the fruit’s grown badly, it’s just the wrong varieties grown for the wrong reasons.

One of my favourite things in the whole world is a ripe white peach, but I would never eat a peach in this country; the disappointment is too tragic. But every year I travel to the south of France, principally for a peach. There are worse lexicons to measure your life by than ripe white peaches. And I eat figs warm from under the tree, and golden table grapes that taste of flowers and honey. I go to Asia to eat mangoes and papayas, rambutans and mangosteens, and the brilliant, rare, snake fruit.

The answer to soft fruit is not to find ever more childish things to do with the cheap bouncy glut of it, but to eat less of better, to understand that a papaya is never going to be worth eating in Wigan, just as you won’t find clotted cream in Saigon. The answer to our own indigenous fruit is, I’m afraid, grow your own, or barter it for sex from an old man who has an allotment. I eat raspberries off the cane in Scotland, and make cranachan until my hands look like Lady McB’s. Here’s the thing with strawberries: at the start of every summer, there’s a couple of weeks when the Gariguette are in season. Perfumed and utterly delicious, they’re expensive, and they’re French. So there you have it: the Frogs do better strawberries than the English. Hang your head and live with it.

Terroirs is in William IV Street in Covent Garden. I covered the fascist, eugenic philosophy of terroir in a column a couple of weeks ago, so we needn’t go into all that again, except to point out that placing a French restaurant called Terroirs in the middle of London begs the question they might not have fully understood the concept implicit in their title. This is a dining room that doesn’t do what it says on the packet.

The Blonde and I took Kate Reardon, whose Top Tips website ought to be about sex but isn’t, and Willie van Straubenzee, the banker I take out occasionally, when I feel a bout of fiscal mockery coming on. The menu is written, strangely, in English and French, with the difficult bits in French, like cervelle de canut, which turned out not to be brains, but cheese that looked like brains. Perhaps it just looks like cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ brains. More confusing is the concept, which is Spanish. This is French tapas served sitting down at cramped, rustic tables that are too small to accommodate more than one plate per person. The ergonomics don’t work; the whole idea is annoying, and takes up too much time allocating dishes and talking about food when we’d rather be talking about Top Tips and how to drown unwanted bankers.

The shame is that the French food is really good. There was an excellent board of charcuterie with generous duck rillettes, salami and fatty ham; there was a nice smoked eel; there was bone marrow on summer truffle and toast; a whole crab was too stunted to be worth the fiddle, as was the quail. The place was crowded with local workers who’d come straight from the office. The service was hectic but obliging. It’s a decent, noisy, uncomfortable unwinding caff for about £40 a head with a bit to drink. The food is mostly well-sourced compilations, but it should trust itself to be a bistro, and drop the snack attack concept.

Times Recommends

• Jane MacQuitty’s party wine
• Oliver Peyton's Christmas pavlova
• Blood orange cosmopolitan