I woke up three times this morning before I finally got out from under the pyjama-striped covers. The sun was out so I read with the window open and my feet on the windowsill. Somewhere down Church Street someone was driving with his windows down so Sunday morning sounded like the Everly Brothers thinking that they’re gonna cry-y.

Last night we broke into the honeymoon fund to honeymoon at Locanda Locatelli. We eat at Locanda Locatelli but we are still one who is unemployed and one who earns minimum wage, so we took the 73 bus all the bitter way to the ass end of Oxford Street. (Is there an ass end of Oxford Street? Is not all of it quite bottomish? I suppose the spot in front of the Selfridges window is not so bad.) There was a girl sitting in front of us who had a bad connection on her mobile so she had to say, again and again, “Wo’?” “You know,” I wanted to say to her, I wanted to tap her on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear. You know,” I wanted to say, “there is a ‘t’ in there somewhere.”

Tucked away two quiet streets behind the ass end of Oxford Street, we had a corner table and a bread bowl and a glass vase of breadsticks –

I wound my hair round to hold it between my nose and upper lip, I wiggled my new pointy-ended moustache, and I puffed on the breadstick as if it were a cigarette on the finest of silver cigarette holders. You put me in a black dress and gold shoes, you put me in antique Peranakan jewellery, and this is what I do

– we had the corner table and the sommelier was a precise man with sculptural spectacles and a smile for punctuation. “Would you like some wine?” he said, his accent drawing out his i’s, and the smile, a small one but a warm one, was both question and answer.

We had prosecco, of course, and then too much bread – the olive bread, the grilled-onion bread, the garlic? bread, the crisp-topped cheesey bread, and a magic wand of a parmesan breadstick – and then, and we hadn’t even begun, really, Olive said, “J’ai plus faim.” We’d known this was going to happen, we’d known we’d run into trouble with the bountiful bread selection, even if we didn’t follow Laureen’s recommendation. “Go for two bread baskets!!!” she’d e-mailed, as if exclamation marks had been on special that day. “TWO!!!” she’d reiterated. “They are free!”

In between courses I stretched out my arms and rested them on the top of the banquette as if I were Giorgio Locatelli surveying my kingdom. In Giorgio Locatelli’s kingdom, the clouds are handmade gnocchi, delicate and melty. The hills in the distance are chocolate-banana doughnuts dusted in sugar, and passionfruit jellies hang from the trees. I stretched out my arms and rested them casually on the banquette as if to say, “I am pleased,” but really I was making room, rearranging my insides, for more.