27 Kingsbury Hill, Marlborough, Wiltshire; 01672 515004
Mon-Sat, lunch noon-2pm, dinner 6.40pm-10pm

5 stars: Old King Cole; 4 stars: Cole of the month; 3 stars: Coles to Newcastle; 2 stars: Own Cole; 1 star: Dragged over hot Coles

I was in Pizza Express in Marlborough one lunchtime recently when the whole place suddenly filled with neatly attired, cheerfully mewing schoolchildren. They were from the local toff school, of course, for which this rather thin-lipped and clenched-buttocked market town is famous. I found it vaguely shocking, all these little monkeys having upmarket pizza for lunch, sitting in a restaurant at the age of 14 with inherited ease and side salads. The waiters – local, nontoff kids, not long out of school themselves – traipsed around with expressions of wearied hatred. I quietly asked one of them if this was a regular occurrence. “Every day, without fail,” he whispered. “I feel like a f***ing dinner lady. And the thing that gets me is that they always order sides.”

We shook our heads in a shared moment of opprobrium. Between the ages of 0 and 16, I ate out in restaurants perhaps four or five times in total, always with my parents (who deeply resented these occasions, usually thrust upon them by malign circumstance). The notion that I could have entered a restaurant on my own and paid for a meal was so alien as to be beyond comprehension. The closest me and my friends ever got was to poke our heads around the door of the local Chinese takeaway in Guisborough and bark out some hilarious racist epithet. Flied lice. Waiter, this chicken is rubbery. (“Oh, than’ you, sir!”) And so on.

A friendly chippy might give you a free bag of scraps – tiny, glistening nuggets of myocardial infarction left over from the fish frying – and, if you were lucky, you might be bought a burger by your dad at a football match, but that was about it.

We had school dinners (unless we’d flogged our tickets to buy cigarettes, which, back then, were sold to kids individually in little paper bags by conscientious shopkeepers). Battered Spam fritters, rabbit stew, great hunks of liver, presumably hacked out of Lord George-Brown’s body, the colour of mud and the texture of plywood. “Keesh” Lorraine the consistency of grouting, accompanied by chips and beans; chunks of pollack or dogfish coated in liquid asbestos and deep-fried, accompanied by chips and beans. Huge peas, utterly impervious to even the most committed mastication; boiled cabbage like shreds of Scotties tissues overused by someone with a bad cold. All of which was character-forming and, er, made me the man I am today (overweight, wheezing and embittered, in other words). But please – a 14-year-old ordering a bloody side salad? What is the world coming to, etc.

I assume that by the time these kids are 16 or 17, they will have left Pizza Express behind and begun to patronise the more upmarket restaurants in the town, of which Coles is, by common assent, the most grand and highly regarded. Well, good luck to them, I say. There comes a moment in mid- to late adolescence when the first intimations of mortality occur, when youthful promise begins to be tainted by the terrors of the dark, by the notion that the world might not, after all, be a huge playground in which everything is possible but might instead have, here and there, vast lagoons of nastiness and disappointment. Welcome, boys and girls, to Coles.

Is this unfair of me? I feel bad about dissing a small local business in a way that would not bother me at all if it were a small local business in, say, London – which strikes me now as quite illogical. I would be a lot kinder to Coles were it not so extortionately expensive for what it is – the result, I assume, of too little competition. The day after dining at Coles, my boss took me to a Gordon Ramsay place somewhere east of Eden – the Isle of Dogs or Stepney or Canary Wharf. The food was fine, if not spectacular, but the price – I sneaked a look at his bill, wondering if he spent more on me than, say, Clarkson or Gill – was exactly half of what I had spent the previous evening in Coles for roughly the same amount of food and alcohol. And, equally roughly, the food was about twice as good in the Ramsay place.

Until you factor in the bill, Coles is by no means appalling; just nowhere near good enough for the idea it has of itself. Let me give you the positive stuff. It feels like a nice place to eat, a big long dining room of agreeably haphazard furnishing, pale polished wood, space and light. One item on the menu had buried within it greatness – a coconut meringue with passion-fruit purée, these two concoctions quite superb. But they arrived buried beneath enough cloying whipped cream to have kept John Prescott in the toilet with his fingers down his throat for months on end. And – shoved into the cream, with the same sense of purpose with which an imbecile might adorn the Mona Lisa by drawing an aeroplane flying over her head – large chunks of banana. There was something delicious in this melange trying to get out, but they were determined not to let it do so. The ham hock and foie gras terrine that I had to begin my meal was okay, although it felt as if it had been assembled by a one-armed Romanian bricklayer. And it came with a mountain of rocket soused in balsamic vinegar, so it looked a mess and made me feel daunted and inadequate. The servings here are unfashionably large, which is in many ways a good thing, unless the food itself is poor, in which case you wish for less of it.

My main course was pork with leek crumble and bacon mash. The pork was overcooked and dry; the bacon mash was vast, with huge candy-pink chunks of bacon staring out, so it felt like you were eating someone’s sliced-up gums. The “crumble” didn’t: it slouched and dozed. My girlfriend had a piece of halibut, which was also overcooked; I watched her gnaw her way through mounds of fish flakes from which every scintilla of moisture had been carefully expunged. She had a look on her face of stoic endurance, very similar to the one she wore when I took her to watch Millwall draw 0-0 with Cardiff two or three years ago.

She had begun her meal with tea-smoked chicken and chorizo salad; the spicy sausage was either uncooked or cooked for less time than it takes to decide not to vote for Ken Livingstone, and so kept its lovely flavour to itself. My dessert was a rhubarb trifle that may well have been prepared at about the time Rhodesia declared UDI. Hideously dry, lumpen and flavourless, it was one of the worst creations I have tasted in many a year. How can a trifle not be moist? What do you have to do to a trifle to make it so unpalatable? It had, sticking out of the top of it, a one-fingered salute – a sponge finger of the kind you buy in Aldi to shove at the bottom of the trifle to soak up the juices. “You think you’ll like this?” it seemed to be saying. “Well, f*** you.”

Anyway, here’s how you can annoy the locals at Christmas time in Marlborough. Walk down the high street, tap a local on the shoulder and, pointing to the Christmas decorations slung across the road, say: “Excuse me, but are those Marlboro Lights?” Never fails to amuse.

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