L’Anima is a new and expensive Italian restaurant in the City of London, financial heart of Great Britain, where starters get up to within 50p of £15 and a turbot main sneaks in at just under thirty. Add a cheeky risotto or pasta in between, a spot of pudding and a modest bottle between two, and you are looking at a flat hundred a head before you’ve tipped or hailed a taxi. So I guess that means I’m going to have to write yet another intro about the recession.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarggh!

I just won’t do it. I won’t.

If I read another restaurant review containing the words “in these impecunious times” or “scoffers in straitened circumstances” or “relatively good value given the current climate” then, I swear, I am going to snap off the sharp, red end of the FTSE graph and, and, and, ram it up, you know, well it’s a bit horrid, but, you know, up the bottom of the person responsible.

We can’t keep doing this. We can’t keep apologising for the fact that restaurants are expensive, and presaging doom for all new projects, and recommending recession-busting bargains, and smugly predicting a separation of the gastronomic wheat from the chaff. It’s just too, too boring. For everybody.

So I am not going to make hay out of L’Anima’s location on the edge of the Square Mile (which is not square and is not a mile but is always referred to in this way by writers who think it makes a sentence more interesting than repeatedly using the word “City”, which it doesn’t – it is mere “elegant variation” and the very synonymitis that damn near killed Henry James).

Nor am I going to make jokes about watching out for falling stockbrokers, or question who on earth around here might dare to be seen bleeding money in such a place (for it was full, full, full when I went on a drizzly Tuesday night), or offer any handy tips for extracting value from the menu.

That said, I’ve no idea what I am going to do, since there’s bugger all point using all this space to describe a place which, in this fiscally problematic period, you will scarcely be able to… Nooooo! Stop it, stop it.

OK, deep breath. Just pretend there isn’t a recession. Try to remember what journalism was like until about three months ago, when journalists were perfectly well able to write 1,000 words about something without once mentioning economic principles they don’t even properly understand.

So. I went to L’Anima with my girlfriend, my boss, Tony (best to keep the old chap sweet at a time when unemployment is… aargh!), and a chap called John who is a big noise at Warner Music (a company which knows all about big noises), who had won me in a raffle. Or a tombola, or a lucky dip or something (damn chilly cowering in that bran tub for the whole of the church fête…).

Yes, I know. Very funny. And what was the second prize, two meals with me? Probably. Listen, they asked me. It’s not like I went to them and said, “I really, really want to be bid for in a charitable cause just so I can find out how little anybody cares if I live or die.”

In truth, I don’t think it was even John who won me. I believe it was his wife. I can just imagine the conversation in John’s home: “Guess what, darling, I’ve won dinner with Giles Coren.”

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