Right, I’m bored with tap water now. End of campaign. End of scoring restaurants on their preparedness to turn a tap. End of banging on about the vanity, pointlessness and waste of bottled water. Not because I think it is any less important than I did when I started all this, but because my work here is done.

I started imploring you to respond to “Still or sparkling?” with the cute little Anglo-Saxon “Tap!” back in January last year, when it just wasn’t seen as an issue. I thought the ball would take a little while to get rolling, but you wrote in your hundreds to offer support, grassing up places that wouldn’t serve you tap water without a fuss, hammering out the legal points, finessing the environmental issues. And then restaurateurs started contacting me to grumble about the effect my campaign was having on their profits, and I knew we were on the right track.

Then the other day there was a ministerial statement on the “moral un-acceptability” of bottled water, and I thought: “Aha, about time.” And then there was a Panorama programme about it, and I thought: “I’ve really started something here.” And then the Evening Standard, a paper that rarely shows interest in any matter of principle unconnected to roadworks, launched a huge, front-page anti-bottled water campaign. And I started to get that feeling a mother gets when its baby is ready to leave home, or like Joy Adamson when Elsa was ready to return to the wild: that mixture of sadness and pride that tells you it is time to back off and let your baby stand on its own two (or in Elsa’s case, four) feet.

And then, as an adjunct to her paper’s campaign, the Standard’s own restaurant critic, the great Fay Maschler, that daughter of Eve from whom we are all descended, was (I imagine) dragooned into including scores for the provision of tap water in her own ratings (in the form of five cute little droplets). I am not possessive about my ideas. I am flattered to be imitated. But we can’t both give weekly scores for tap water. It looks ludicrous. It offends the idea of customer choice. And I know my place, so I’ll leave it to Fay.

And if all that wasn’t enough to tell me that my point was now fully made, a backlash has begun – the only true confirmation that there was a lash in the first place. A backlash! Against asking for a glass of water in a restaurant! I just didn’t dream it was possible. But in one of his reviews in The Sunday Times recently, A.A. Gill, the grand boulevardier of our profession, that manicured eulogist of shimmering surfaces and brave debunker of simpering lefty cant, the gastro-dandy for whom all displays of sincerity, principle or tear-eyed social concern are as indigestible as a poorly rested joint, turned on me and my wide-eyed flock.

“Giles and all the other water divines don’t mind extolling wine that’s flown from Chile or Australia…” he wrote, gorgeously ignoring the point that wine, unlike water, is not piped to your kitchen free, and went on to declare, with ortolan-fancying foppishness: “Actually, Fiji water is exceptionally good: very soft, very round.”

Very soft! Very round! Water! I felt as Robespierre must have felt after Marie Antoinette started making silly remarks about cakes. The whole “them and us” matrix could not have been more fully expounded. The forces of reaction were at last doing my job for me.

And when Gill, now fully frothed, declared, “Water has become the toast of self-righteousness. This is stupid, lazy, T-shirt-slogan morality”, I think I felt as Trotsky must have the first time someone called him a Trot. In short, fully validated. So validated that I became mildly aroused. Perhaps not unlike a pin-striped bean-counter whose hired dominatrix has spanked him for being a naughty, naughty boy. And I saw that enough was enough.

And so I need another campaign to charge myself up. I’m very much the Alexander the Great of restaurant critics, you see: inclined to weep at the first sniff that there are no more lands to conquer.

And so I’m going to do smiling. Just smiling. Waiters, chefs, maîtres d’, coat girls, busboys and even the diners themselves, and drinkers, and dogs on strings. If it’s in a restaurant and it smiles, I’ll award a point. If it scoffs or sneers, frowns or looks me up and down to assess my dress, it’s going down. I’m fed up with long faces mulling over menus, lugubrious bozos with silver grapes on their lapels wringing their hands over arrogant wine lists. Gloom and introspection I can get at home, along with better food and cheaper grog. So when I go out, I want happiness. They say it can’t be measured. Well, I’m going to give it a damn good try.

And I’m going to give the Grill at Brown’s Hotel, newly under the direction of Mark Hix, a very respectable 7/10 for smiling. When it was taken over by Rocco Forte a few years ago, I called to book, was told I had to wear a jacket and cancelled on the spot (explaining politely: “A jacket, indeed. I’m a customer, not a bloody waiter!”). But there was no such request this time, and off I went, still doubting the oldest hotel in London would rate well for facial jollity.

But the top-hatted doorman smiled as he pointed to the dining room. The quite severe-looking, dark-haired receptionist smiled as she showed us to our table, and the head waiter smiled and joshed as he took our order, to such an extent that a slight backwardness in actual knowledge bothered me not a jot. (I assumed aloud that the “Gladys May duck egg with mayonnaise” would be hard-boiled, he said: “No, poached”, but it was, of course, hard-boiled, and delicious, with great mayo, celery salt and peppy watercress. And when I asked where the prawns on the set lunch came from, he said: “They are Dublin Bay prawns”, which they weren’t, not even close. “Dublin Bay prawn” is, as we all know, the English for langoustine, whereas these were tiger prawns, fresh enough, and well-dressed with wild garlic, bang on its tiny season.)

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