Very few things make me feel calmer, more centred, more at peace, than really good Italian food. On the other hand, nothing in the world makes me more irritable, more roaringly, ragingly, inconsolably furious and contemplative of murder than bad Italian food. Specifically, bad Italian food screeching up and down my road every ten or 12 minutes in a box on the back of a 50cc moped, squealing like an angle-grinder going through marble mantelpieces, the little spotty bastard at the handlebars relentlessly revving, up and down, up and down, waaaa, waaaa, waaaa, in an attempt to find some miracle space between the gears which will enable his poisonous little machine to make some new and yet more suicide-inducing noise.

Why do those piddling little engines make so much noise? I don’t know much about physics but, surely, if less of the precious petrol in the tank were converted into sound, then they would go a bit faster.

And they must want to go faster. It’s why they guarantee delivery within half an hour, because they’re worried that if it takes a minute more than that then the fat, indolent, pea-brained loser who ordered it might change his mind, cancel his order, make himself a salad, go for a run, give up the weed, get a job, lose his virginity, and cease to be a customer.

Or perhaps they work on the principle of the ice-cream van. Do feckless, pork-necked, jobless wasters hear the whine of the bike going past and begin to drool and slobber and say to themselves, “Yum yum, is that the dulcet tone of the all-healing pizza man I hear? Ooh, ooh, I haven’t had a hubcap-sized slab of refined flour covered with tomato jam and reformed ham chunks smelling strongly of old socks in weeks, I’ll dial up right now”? Perhaps they do.

My particular afflicters are a pair of competing pizza joints at the top of my road. Because if anybody west of there finds himself in urgent need of a giant wheel of stodge covered in processed fat, mechanically reclaimed mammal flesh, raw onion, pineapple and sweetcorn, then the quickest way to get there is down my road: waaaa, waaaa, and then over the speed bumps: waaaa, clunk! waaaaa, clunk! waaaa, clunk! waaa… the 2 kilogram discus of crud banging up and down in its metal cage, yodling for egress.

To be fair, I hate all motorbike and moped riders: why must one man getting from A to B disturb so many hundreds of humans per mile travelled? So many thousands forced to look up from their work, reading, piano practice, quiet love-making, hushed lepidoptery, by the finger-on-blackboard screech of a teenage delinquent doing wheelies on his stolen Vespa or the sick-making basso profundo of the 57-year-old wife-beater on his Harley-Davidson.

I would wish them all dead, but it’s an ungentlemanly thought, and anyway the reaper comes to them, on average, a little earlier than to the rest of us, in his democratic way. So I wish death only on those disturbers of my days who are themselves deliverers of death.

For the junk the pizza-boys deliver, empty of real nutritional value, responding to sudden impulse with a hot injection of starch, fat, sugar and salt, is mere obesity in a noisy box. And with it, whining its way to you on the back of the bike, comes misery, ugliness, poverty, depression, impotence, arthritis, back pain, joint pain, breathing difficulties, deprioritisation (quite rightly) on certain NHS waiting lists, skin complaints, organ failure, heart disease, and even (recent research suggests) cancer.

And the great thing about our free society is that you can phone up and have these things delivered to your home for less than a tenner – and when they come, within half an hour or your money back, they don’t even feel that they have to come quietly.

And now, Semplice. Ahhhh. Step through those doors and feel the calm. The cool. The quiet. See the smooth, wavy gold patterns on the walls, the burnished wood, the soft white napery, the thin people eating small portions of “simple” (semplice) things.

Look, here’s Giovanni, who used to manage Locanda Locatelli. He doesn’t give you a free barrel of Sprite when you order a portion bigger than you can feasibly eat. Nor do his staff scream like strimmers when they bring your food (though it would be rather fun if they did, particularly the girls).

Obviously, it is quite expensive. “Simple” is. I am not saying, “Cheap is bad, expensive is good”. Or that a classy, laid-back, top-end Mayfair Eyetie is in some way for “us” and pig vomit on a bike is for “them”. I’m just saying… oh, you know perfectly well what I’m saying.

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