Lutyens, 85 Fleet Street, EC4; 020 7583 8385

Mon-Fri: breakfast, 7.30am-10.30am; lunch, noon-3pm; dinner, 5.30pm-10pm

Five stars Just the job Four stars Hand job Three stars On the job Two stars Jobseeker One star Jobsworth

It said on the news that scientists have made sperm in a laboratory. Come again? I once made sperm in a sock, before I’d even taken biology O-level (failed). Any number of men have made sperm in the back of a Ford Escort. Portnoy made it in liver; Bill Clinton in a Gap shift dress. Onan made sperm on stony ground, and God killed him for it, which seems a little extreme. Everyone else just went blind. (Weirdly, Onan is one of only a couple of characters in the Bible God took the time to kill himself. Usually they were smitten by some intermediary: an out-of-town plague, a freelance lightning bolt, a gang of boils. But God was angry enough with Onan to off the dirty knuckle-shuffler personally, for taking Captain Picard to warp speed.)

The thing that bothers me about scientists making sperm in a laboratory — actually, stop right there. Many, many things bother me about scientists frothing up in laboratories, but the politest thing is, are they planning on copyrighting it? Because every time scientists make something, they make it illegal for anyone else to have one, and this is going to cause adolescent consternation. If you have to pay every time you have one off the wrist, student loans are going to look like nothing compared to the fees for sperm usage. But presumably, being kids, they’ll just do it illegally. Sort of pirate sperm. But I expect massage parlours and Stringfellows will have to have those public-service commercials: “Masturbation is theft. If you’re caught downloading illegally, you could face a fine and a criminal record. Or God might come and smite you.”

You and I might think there’s no particular need for any more sperm. We might imagine there’s already potentially more than enough — way more than enough of the stuff in the world. Just as a back-of-the-tissue calculation, each pair of adult male bollocks produces one quadrillion sperms in a lifetime. And if there are roughly, give or take a eunuch, three billion men in the world — well, you do the maths. Because the noughts are swimming before my eyes. Add to that a daily tablespoon of seminal fluid, and that’s a glut, a gulp and a gag that’s pretty hard to swallow.

So, who’s in the market for laboratory stuff? “Can I interest you in some sperm I made earlier?” I think not. These scientists are from Newcastle. You try going around those pubs on a Friday, flogging fatherless spunk. “It’s all bloody fatherless around here, son.” “I tell you what, try some for free, and come back if you like it.” “All your sperm needs, delivered to the back door.” “Artificial sperm: can you tell the difference?” “Hassle-free sperm: neat, easy and you don’t need to get it a taxi afterwards.” “Indulge yourself. Organic Geordie sperm. No additives, no E numbers, no drunk chat.”

If you ask me, or indeed anyone who has ever had a sex life, which I’m assuming these particular white-coated jizz wonks haven’t, if you’re going to start tinkering with the man fat, “more” is not where you start. You begin with presentation. “Hey, I’ve got chocolate-flavoured sperm” may well be the best pick-up line ever. Why can’t they cross sperm with jellyfish and make it glow in the dark? What about effervescent sperm? Or, come up with a secondary use? Pritt Stick. For recycling brown envelopes. Cavity-wall insulation. Toothpaste. I’m sorry: semen toothpaste is genius. The minty-white grin that says, “I scored last night.” The religious fundamentalists and the born-agains — born again without sperm — complain that this laboratory stuff is immoral, ungodly and will mean women won’t need blokes any more. We are staring down the urethra of male extinction. I think they’ve got it all wrong. Research and development is the way to go. Adaptation is, after all, the key to survival. I reckon that sparkling, mojito-flavoured, Day-Glo spunk, with added Nurofen, that comes with a wolf whistle at the point of delivery, would guarantee men breakfast and morning-after.

Edwin Landseer Lutyens was an architect who is most famous for the vainglorious, ponderous pomp of the viceroy’s palace in New Delhi. It has the most impressive drive. The building seems to rise out of the shimmering earth, a magic, magisterial, final pink flowering of an already exhausted and waning empire. It’s a potpourri of mogul and imperial styles that sit uncomfortably with each other. He also designed the speechlessly dignified Cenotaph in Whitehall, but what he was best at was English vernacular architecture, the stockbroker smugness of Surrey and Sussex villas, with their Gertrude Jekyll gardens, that use local materials and were built to merge in with the rural landscape long before these things were fashionable. The houses were so popular that they became a landscape all of their own: the suburbs and ribbon developments of the 1930s and 1940s. You can now see Lutyens variations all over the world. He is responsible for the most popular houses ever built, so familiar and ordinary, you wouldn’t think of them as having an architect at all.

The Reuters offices in Fleet Street are Lutyens, embodying Edwardian corporate probity with a stiff confidence. He was a masterful manipulator of planes: rational, tight-lipped, unemotional. Lutyens built the way Elgar sounds. Now the building has been taken over by Conran, and made into that fashionable compendium, the club/restaurant/bar/hotel/business space and so on. I took Jeremy King, the restaurateur who, with Chris Corbin, runs the Wolseley and St Alban and co-hosts the Monkey Bar in New York. Lutyens and Conran have a lot in common. Sir Terence will have already thought of that. They were both defining designers of their time, and, though they aspired to patrician grandeur, were best when they were being popular and simple. Conran completely changed the way we eat in public, the way restaurants look, their furniture, the tableware, the menus, the kitchens. He should be one of the most respected and feted Englishmen, but he has a manner that discourages warmth. If ever you open your mouth to offer him a compliment, he’ll interrupt you and say it first. However highly you think of Sir Terence, and I think so highly of him I need crampons and oxygen, I’m still not in the foothills of his own self-regard.

I almost didn’t get in at all. I cycled, and had my trousers rolled, a Bagaboo on my back and three pints of perspiration on my face. A man with a military bearing stood in the door and asked if he could help me. I said I was meeting Keira Knightley for lunch. The room inside is cool and functional, with the comfortable aesthetic austerity that comes from a thousand details over which there was no compromise. Rather like the man himself, you admire the Conran interiors without necessarily cosying up to them. The menu is good, if a little conservative, but it’s probably right for the clientele. I started with vichyssoise, a soup that must make a virtue out of its blandness by being silky and presumptuous. It was slightly too watery, the potato a touch grainy, though perfectly nice. Jeremy had the feuilleté of quails’ eggs with hollandaise, the old Langan’s dish. It fulfilled everything it promised on the menu, but no more, and as he pointed out, the pastry had been stuck to the plate with a dab of mashed potato. We both disliked this chef’s professional trick: edible fix-its show an element of control that is not altogether hospitable. A plate of smoked salmon was, though, unimpeachably excellent and well sourced. I had lamb cutlets with a herb crust, the businessman’s favourite — meat that comes with a handle, well cooked, and the best time of year for lamb.

The chef is Irish, so there was excellent champ, and crubeens breaded and fried, pigs’ trotters, which tasted good, but were a bit dry, their accompanying condiment too claggy. Peach melba was properly made, but with the addition of something biscuity in the bottom. With coffee and two glasses of wine, delivered by a sommelier who offered his advice in the manner of a private obstetrician attending a Saudi princess, the bill was £135. This is a classic Conran restaurant. The other diners were all City businessmen, enjoying a classic Conran experience. They’re the sort of men who like their sentences and explanations, indeed their lives, barded with the word “classic”. This is a very good restaurant, though I’m still, as ever, left with the nagging conundrum of why a man who so plainly thinks the world is a misshapen fool devoted so much of his life to making beautiful spaces to feed it in.

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