So you want to eat out this Bank Holiday weekend but pub grub depresses you? Well, completely right too, I’d say. I don’t know what it is, but whenever I pass a pub that has the word ‘homemade’ blazoned across its blackboard outside, it always makes me shudder.

Quite why I feel this onslaught of panic whenever I spot this phrase is, I believe, because I was brought up Christian and therefore taught right from wrong.

And make no mistake, ‘homemade’ is wrong.

Not wrong I grant you in the great, cosmic patchwork, where terms like ‘pan fried’ are manifestly more offensive (after all, in what else would you try to fry a sea bass?), but wrong nonetheless.

You see, ‘homemade’ is not a term you mess with or take lightly. It evokes idyllic portraits of farmhouse kitchens, bathed in autumn evening light, where ruddy-cheeked women bake tray upon tray of cakes and loaves.

In fact, like gifts around the Christmas tree, it’s a wishful sentiment that binds us all.

But today, it seems to mean nothing more than some out-of-sight commercial kitchen.

It irritates the hell out of me that some two-bit cook-on-the-make can peddle ‘homemade’ values by simply using Olde English on a blackboard.

In fact, I’ve lost count of the number of pubs I’ve stopped at where ‘homemade’ translated into watercress and a plastic wicker basket.

Sadly, in the same way we’ve hung on to the fantasy of the Dickensian Christmas, we’ve equally refused to recognise that good, old fashioned ‘homemade’ fare is now little more than shorthand for ‘cooked-from-frozen’.

By contrast, McDonalds is squeaky clean...

You know that old desert island question: What one item would you most want if castaway on some remote pacific idyll?

Well, for me it wouldn’t be the Bible, or even a stash of morphine (for toothache, broken limbs, DIY surgery, etc). The answer is – and frankly always has been – very easy: Marks & Spencer.

Indeed, when I travel, I always wish that I had a pocked-sized M&S to take with me – you know, a kind of miniature, fold-away version that could be easily unpacked in any hotel room, with pants, socks, and some of those eat-in-for-under-a-tenner ready meals.

Now I know many people use religion as a crutch, like sport or sex, but they’re really not on the same par – nor even in the same universe – as food from M&S.

It should then come as no great surprise to learn that I am currently enjoying the festivities surrounding the store’s 125th birthday.

And at its premises in Queen Street, Oxford, this is being commemorated with some rather lacklustre bunting and a display of what looks suspiciously like biscuit, tea and coffee tins.

My point however is this – why couldn’t Twiggy or Myleene Klass have popped down instead? After all, didn’t we, the customer, help them out of that little ‘dip’ in profits a few years back?

Frankly I think we deserve more.

And finally, I went to the formal swearing-in of the new Lord Mayor, Mary Clarkson, last week. The ceremony was very nice, very quaint, but better still were the sandwiches served afterwards (the lemon drizzle cake wasn’t bad either).

No wonder people go into politics.