I don't do kitchens. I do restaurants

Last Monday the waiter came back after five minutes.

I don’t like menus — too much choice. So I always say: ‘Surprise me’

"How do you like your steak, sir?"

"I asked you to surprise me!"

"Just in case," he said.

Guess what I got? A fillet steak.

I always carry with me my telescopic steel fork. If I like the look of the desert on the next table, with a flick of the wrist it instantly becomes 3ft long and reaching over I can help myself to a slice of crème brulée or cheese cake.

Everybody finds this funny. OK - almost everybody.

At the beginning of April, I was in Montreal at a place called Milos,when a man with his wife at the next table got upset when my fully extended fork got stuck in his wife's low-cut top and some baklava unfortunately went astray.

What happened next took me back to when I went to Disneyland in Paris with Lily aged four. I got into a fight with Goofy. He started it!

"You queue jumped," he said in a Parisian accent.

"Moi!?"

He poked me in the chest with his paw. I fell down, pulling Goofy down on top of me.

Lily was screaming: "Daddy, don't hurt Goofy!"

I would definitely have won if Mickey and Donald hadn't joined in.

One evening during the FVC (first volcanic cloud) three weeks ago, I was sitting outside my favourite restaurant, the Hellenic in Thayer Street, when a man walked up and looked at the menu in the window.

"It's had the same three waiters for 30 years, and they're all crazy, I told him. It's like being in a scene from a Marx Brothers movie."

"Very interesting," he said and sat down.

And that's how professor of mathematics Zvi Artstein of the Weizmann Institute became my new best friend.

Over a glass of Othello he explained to me his eponymous theorem which states that a dynamical system has a differentiable control-Lyapunov function if, and only if, there exists a regular stabilising feedback.

"Right… thanks for explaining that, professor." I said through a mouthful of klefteko.

Having a professor of mathematics as a best friend is very useful. Only last week I emailed him: "Prof, I have to vote in the election here tomorrow. Do you happen to have a theorem that will tell me who the winner will be?" I asked.

He answered immediately: "Of course I have such a theorem, hence I know who the winner will be. I am busy now so will tell you that next week."

Last year a friend with ambitions to be an interior designer stayed with me for six months. One night I got out of bed to get a glass of water. Where I was pretty sure the kitchen should have been, there was now only a pipe sticking out of the wall.

"What happened to the kitchen?" I asked her the next morning.

"You told me I could design you a new one. It's going to be delivered in December."

"It's September - it might have been a good idea to wait until the new kitchen arrived before ripping out the old one."

"It's been gone for three months." she said." You never complained until now."

"That's because I never noticed I hadn't got a kitchen until now!" I said.

You never know what you had until it's gone.