I don’t know if your girlfriend was ever head girl of her school. The odds are she wasn’t. But if she was, then I wonder if, perhaps, she expects even now to get her way a little more often than just half of the time.

Perhaps she doesn’t. Perhaps it’s wrong to assume that all former head girls carry into adult life the qualities that brought them so gleamingly to the attention of their teachers – qualities of probity, honesty, a ruthless commitment to the upholding of authority and a voice which, when raised, can make lions and tigers retreat whimpering into a corner.

Perhaps it is only girls who were “Captain of the School” in a predominantly boys’ establishment. Who arrived in the sixth form, at a place where they were outnumbered ten to one, and within a year were running the joint.

Because that is what Rachel was. Worse still, the school of which she was captain was my school. The same establishment that would not let me go for a wee without an armed escort chose to give Rachel local powers of almost medieval absoluteness, and created in her an expectation of respect for her authority which persists to this day.

Nor does it seem to make a jot of difference to our power relations that she arrived at the place 12 years after I left – was not even born when I first miserably hoiked my tuck box up the stairs, took off my cap, and squeaked, “Coren, sir, Coren G, reporting for loneliness, beatings and sodomy.”

Take restaurants (since that is what we are here for): if it’s a work night (for her) then we don’t drink and are out by 9.30 no matter what. If my food arrives looking nicer than hers, we swap. If she thinks the waiter has given her a funny look, we leave, no matter what stage of the meal we have reached. And if it’s Monday evening, we swim 60 lengths at the County Hall gym and then go to Wagamama on the South Bank.

Wagamama is all right. In winter, I rather look forward to my large bowl of noodles in soup served by multiply-perforated staff who scribble in Biro on the place mats. But every Monday for nearly two years? You’d think one could occasionally try somewhere else, wouldn’t you? Well, you tell her.

Occasionally somewhere new opens local to the pool (including three restaurants that have opened recently in County Hall itself) and I suggest we go there so I can review it.

“What, instead of Wagamama?” says Rachel, giving me a stare so hard it would melt Paddington’s little glass eyes off.

It’s extraordinary. Whatever dazzling new place opens, whatever Gordon Ramsay gastrodome or Hakkasan II, or new scoff palace from the Ivy group I try to take her to, she always says, “I’d rather go to Wagamama.”

And, because Rach was head girl, we go to Wagamama. Indeed, for every glamorous meal you read about here, I have had to eat at least three Wagamamas. So, for example, when Skylon opened the other day in the newly redone Festival Hall (which Rachel will tell you is easy to find, as it is behind Wagamama) and I suggested we go after swimming, she said, “What, instead of Wagamama?” and I said, yes, instead of Wagamama. Just this once.

She protested that it looked expensive, as she does any restaurant that is not Wagamama, regardless of the fact that The Times would pay if we went to Skylon, so it would be free, as opposed to £9 each. But Rachel’s point is moral, not financial. She hates to eat in an expensive place if she knows there is a Wagamama within an hour’s walk, regardless of who’s paying.

So we didn’t go to Skylon, we went to Wagamama. And very nice it was, too.

Noodles in soup, I believe I had. But then, on Thursday, we went swimming again. Not our usual day. The week nearing its end, my copy due, and Skylon waving its hand in the air nearby, saying, “Me, sir, please, sir, me, sir!”

So I thought I would try again.

“Do you think,” I asked Rachel, as we surfaced between lengths 48 and 49, “as it’s a Thursday,” and we both went into the inverted side-stroke formation that we use when serious matters have to be discussed while swimming, “We could not go to Wagamama, and go instead to –”

But Rachel had dived. Went down like a dolphin after a herring. Snapped the periscope shut and shouted, “Dive! Dive! Dive!” She didn’t want to hear.

But in the end she did let us go to Skylon, as long as we were quick. And we were. So quick, in fact, that I forgot to have a look at the newly redone Festival Hall. Not that I would have had much to say about it, never having been inside the old Festival Hall.

But Rachel says that Skylon is much better looking than the restaurant that was here before (The People’s Palace, she says it was called), where she ate many times because her family, unlike mine, are into classical music. That’s the sort of thing the families of head girls are into. Her parents took her to church and the ballet and extracurricular military training for small girls; mine took me with them to work and left me to read newspapers in the smoking room, and also to football matches and the odd Dalek hunt.

Skylon is owned by D&D, which is what used to be Conran restaurants, and there is a nice symmetry, I gather, in Sir Terence having begun life as a barrow boy selling knock-off lamps or something at the Festival of Britain in 1951, in the very shadow of the original Skylon (a 300ft temporary installation), after which this joint is named.

It would thus be wrong to describe the space as “Conranny”. We must now, rather, call it “D&Dy”. And it is fair to say that Skylon looks rather classier than – but not generically very different from – the kind of swanky brasseries one gets in these sorts of places nowadays.

Being in a hurry, we ate in the grill, which occupies one end of the hangar-sized space. Skylon’s “fine-dining” room being at the other, with a bar in between, and the great brown river magnificently present on the other side of the biggest window I have ever seen.

I dare say that the posh restaurant benefits more from the expertise of executive chef Helena Puolakka, who arrives with a decent track record (Sonny’s, La Tante Claire, Harvey Nichols’ Fifth Floor), but I can never get all that excited about “executive” chefs, and bedtime was roaring towards us relentlessly.

From a menu of upscale brasserie standards Rach had an excellent, summery pea soup and I had “Empress eggs”, which were duck-egg mayonnaise with a blob of pressed caviar. Then a very good crab risotto made not with rice but with spelt from Sharpham Park – offering a nuttier flavour than rice, and a much lower glycaemic load. But I think £15.50 is pushing it a bit for a risotto, as was £18.50 for a nice piece of roast halibut, especially seeing as minuscule sides of broccoli and green beans were a quite crazy £3.50 each.

There was home-cured organic salmon, asparagus from Secretts Farm with poached egg and hollandaise, roast organic poussin and a lovely freshly made orange and raspberry juice. They use great ingredients here, and you have to pay for that, but the prices for these well-made brasserie standards are still pretty startling.

Skylon may well end up a destination joint for out-of-towners (Londoners will find better value nearer home and already know what the Thames looks like), and it is certainly useful if you’re going for the music. Which I won’t be, of course. Unless the head girl tells me to.

Skylon

Royal Festival Hall, SE1

(020-7654 7800)

Meat/fish: 8

Cooking: 6

Value: 4

Water: 10

Score: 7

Price: we paid £70.65 for two, with no alcohol, coffee or pudding

Reeves Restaurant

20-22 High Street, Dunster, Somerset (01643 821414)

Mike Bowden writes: “Justin and Claire Reeves have opened a splendid restaurant in this medieval village near the north coast of Somerset.

Olives, canapés, delicious bread and a carafe of iced water all appear on the table without charge. My lady comes from Hamburg and she found her fillet of brill with Exmouth mussels, simmered in a creamy leek and saffron sauce and finished with a dash of Pernod, as good as she could have found anywhere in that city-state of seafood-lovers."

Meat/fish: 10

Cooking: 10

Service: 10

Score: 10

Water: 10

E-mail feedme2@thetimes.co.uk if you know somewhere good, and maybe we’ll go there together

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