It’s my birthday. Fifty-three. Well, 53rd year. Like the Chinese, I always count my age from the year I’m in. It seems more optimistic that way. But however you count it, I’m over the curve of life expectancy for most of the world.

That always seems to be the greatest iniquity: to be given another 20 or 30 years as a bonus simply by having been born in the right place at the right time. The most shocking statistic of our millennium is that a Japanese woman can expect to live twice as long as her sub-Saharan sister. That’s not just a few more years — that’s two lives for one. Live one, get one free. And why Japanese women? Is God moonlighting as a Prada salesman? How much nicer it would be to have majestic and erotic Dinka women swaying down Bond Street than a Gadarene crush of the daughters of Nippon? But it’s my birthday, so let’s draw a veil over everyone else and just concentrate on me.

As I was writing that, the doorbell went and there was a bloke who said: “Hello, I’m a Nottinghamshire miner, mate. Trying to get work. Can I interest you in a chamois leather, oven gloves, tea towels ... ” And he held up a plastic-coated identity card. The Nottinghamshire miners knock me up about once a month, and I now own an embarrassment of £20 oven gloves that can’t stand the heat. I keep meaning to actually read their warrant, their guarantee of troglodytic northernness. Is it signed by some alderman? Does it point out that the bearer is an original and genuine northern miner?

The funny thing was, this chap can’t have been older than 19. The pits were closed before he was born. But I don’t want to accuse him or any other minor miner of mendacity. I’d rather believe that miner has grown to be an hereditary honorific, like Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports; that the essential minerishness of being a miner has been disengaged from actually getting your hands dirty and that selling tea towels is, in fact, mining, provided it’s done by a born miner.

What struck me was that this lad has had the miners’ strike handed down to him, whereas to me it still seems like current affairs — which is why the hereditary Notts miners can continue their traditional trade of selling tea towels in Chelsea (as if any of us do any drying up). They couldn’t do it in Yorkshire or Wales. It’s the pitless, pitying south where they can mop up the guilt.

I’m going to have a laminated identity card made: “Guaranteed miner supporter. Keep well oiled. Will produce cash if right buttons are pushed.” I’m going to pass it on to my children. I told the born-again miner it was my birthday. I thought he might give me a peg for the washing lines we don’t have in Chelsea. “I can come back later,” he said. And, as I closed the door, I realised with a jolt that Billy Elliot would be coming up for retirement at the Royal Ballet about now.

The Blonde says I’m impossible to get gifts for. Not because I’m so epicureanly frugal or aesthetically uncomplicated, but because I’m so self-absorbed and auto-spoilt that I’ve already bought myself everything. But she always manages to get something inspired. This year, I unwrapped a coprolite and a pair of cashmere slippers. You don’t know what that is? Soft indoor shoes made from the winter coats of goats. The coprolite, of course, is a fossilised bowel movement — this one from a prehistoric turtle. Now how perfect a present is that for an over-the-hump food critic? Slippers and tough shit.

We went for lunch with my old friend Maurice at Papillon, on Draycott Avenue. It’s one of those sites that really ought to be a sure thing, but somehow has never managed to grab the area by either the gut or the wallet. The manager of a previous incarnation once accused me of arrant racism in my review. I think I’d called his establishment something like “a vile and disgusting Thai restaurant”, and he’d contrived to imagine that I’d meant it was staffed by vile and disgusting Thais. The Teflon vanity of restaurateurs never ceases to astonish.

Papillon comes on as hopeful as one of Turandot’s suitors. It’s done out in the French bistro style that’s the happy fashion of the moment. It’s sensibly setting its kepi at the clientele of Daphne’s, which is a couple of doors up. This stretch is an archeological dig of 30 years of sloaney dining. There’s the Poissonnerie, an ancient hooray spag house and Itsu, all catering for various ages of the internationally stateless and bored, who wander up and down Walton Street trying to work up an enthusiasm for monogrammed Babygros and polished U-boat periscopes.

It was a sunny day, and Papillon’s doors were thrown open. The room looked, if not exactly attractive, then decently tasteful and discreet. The menu, though, we thought was very good. There’s a set lunch for about £16, a market menu for £17, an à la carte at about £19 for a main course, and a menu of salads that is divided north, south, east and west into areas of France.

We started with tomato soup with a gazpacho garnish, which Maurice, who has eaten soup at least once a day for the past 40 years, said was merely adequate. On the advice of the waitress, I went for crab and celeriac rémoulade with a shellfish bavarois. The celeriac and crab bits were fine; I’d just forgotten how shiversomely ghastly an insipid, underpowered bavarois can be.

It was a quivering, pink, vaguely fishy gelatinous mush, the sort of thing that collects in dark corners and incubates unspeakable pustular contagions. A forkful was like being beak-fed by a penguin with emphysema. I should say that it was perfectly well made. That’s how it’s supposed to be. There’s a market in provincial France for penguin snot.

For main course, Maurice and I went for salad. He had the fish salad from the west, I had the niçoise from the south. The seafood was a poor mean little thing that elicited neither joy, good cheer nor comfort. It’s one thing making a menu for light, healthy lunches; it’s another serving dishes that discourage eating. The niçoise was correctly begun with tinned tuna, beans, black olives, boiled egg, tomato and too many leaves from the all-purpose bag of mixed lettuce. What it didn’t have was potato, the waxy pommes of southern France. We can argue about authenticity and licence, but a salade niçoise needs its potatoes for balance and ballast.

It was symptomatic of Papillon. This is a restaurant that is one potato short of a meal. The cooking simply isn’t as good as it should be. The service is polite, but unconscionably slow. It’s a lunch for people without a job or anywhere to be, with a lot of expensive time on their wrists. Overall, this is food prepared and served with manners, but without hunger, and it has found a niche of customers who live their lives in much the same way.

PAPILLON

96 Draycott Avenue, SW3; 020 7225 2555.

Lunch, Mon-Sat, noon-3pm; Sun, noon-4pm.
Dinner, Mon-Sat, 6pm-midnight; Sun, 7pm-10pm

5 stars Hooray! Henry
4 stars Chelsea flower
3 stars Attack of the sloanes
2 stars Chelsea Clinton
1 star I don't want to go to Chelsea

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