I have an artist friend called Jonny who has been doing very nicely for some years as a portrait painter, but began to attract serious attention only when he started cutting up people’s genitals. The art world is capricious and fickle, and if you don’t want to stick the names of your ex-lovers to a tent or fill your studio with jungle poo, then taking a pair of scissors to the goolies of strangers is really the only way to go.

Genital mutilation is, of course, a tried and trusted route to fame. One thinks of Jack the Ripper, Josef Mengele, Lorena Bobbitt. But none of those managed to turn their fevered scissorings into cash money. Jonny, on the other hand, has.

Jonny and I were in the same house at school, and it was always assumed he would come to no good. So when he became one of Britain’s most celebrated portrait painters (painting Tony Blair, Rupert Murdoch, Prince Philip, Dennis Hopper, Nicole Kidman, Grayson Perry, David Walliams…), it felt very much like one in the eye to all those teachers who said he would end up cutting off people’s wobbly bits.

And then he did. He took delivery of several hundred porn mags (or delved into his personal collection, depending on whose story you choose to believe), cut them up according to certain subtleties of flesh tone, colour and texture, and then turned his finely nuanced pile of folds and flaps and veins and fecund tufts of pube into a mock-heroic portrait of George W. Bush called, obviously, Bush.

Jonny’s style is sometimes very deliberately chunky, composed of blocks of light and bold polygons of shadow, which always gave his early portraits a touch of the Mount Rushmores. Applied to George W., in a classical head pose, chin up, eyes locked on faraway dreams (presumably of pretzels and alcohol-free Budweiser), the effect is already deliciously ironic. That his face, when you look more closely, is made entirely of willies and fannies and bums, is, you suddenly realise, wholly fitting. It is not a complex political point, but it is a fair one.

Jonny then applied a similar principle to a portrait of Lucian Freud – this time as homage rather than lampoon – and to Paris Hilton (which was snapped up by Damien Hirst), some straight nudes and still lifes, and had a terrifically successful show in Soho last summer. It was jolly to see pukka old ladies and gents pottering round his show with a glass of Ruinart, remarking on the old-fashioned, traditional virtues of his work. The great thing about pukka old ladies and gents, you see, is that they don’t always have terribly good eyesight.

My sister bought me some deckchairs of Jonny’s from the Frieze Art Fair for Christmas that were upholstered in what appeared to be a fabric depicting falling leaves. I unwrapped them in front of my mum. “How lovely,” she said, presumably unaware of the time Jonny had put into finding pictures of porn stars with groin meat the exact colour of an English autumn.

It’s going so well that Jonny doesn’t have to do his own cutting out now, but has a team of assistants. You go around to his studio in Chelsea and there he is, sitting in a chair, surrounded by young girls holding up filth mags and saying, “Do you like this one, Jonny?” His smile as you walk in says, “It’s all I ever dreamt of.”

I was round there for a drink with a few people the other day, as it happens. I had wanted to see his Mary and Cliff – in which the porn principle is applied to a study of Cliff Richard and the late Mary Whitehouse. It’s what she would have wanted.

Afterwards, people needed to eat, and the weary suggestion of Eight Over Eight was made. “Well, hell,” I said, “if you want to eat half-arsed Jap fusion in a Kings Road bar with clumsy sushi, fried straggles of bottom-feeder, brightly coloured cocktails and a menu that makes no sense at all, then why don’t we go to Sushinho?”

I had never planned to review Sushinho. Its bringing together of Japanese and Brazilian food is everything I never wanted. A launch press release late last year was phrased in terms which to me were as stern a warning as yellow and black stripes on a dangerous animal: “An entirely new culinary experience inspired by two very unique cultures – Brazilian and Japanese. It will take the regular sushi restaurant offering and infuse it with that quintessential Brazilian-ness.”

Furthermore, it was in Chelsea. I’d walk round the corner to laugh at a Brazilian/Japanese concept space where raw fish meets transsexual samba and pre-teen death squads, but I wouldn’t get in the car for it.

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