Of course the big news round here is the opening of Ikea. My friend Ben rang me up the day before the opening. He lives in Kemp Town which is miles away from Churchill Square but he’s very fit.

“I’ve got a proposal for you. You’re not going to like it at first, but there is a reward.” At this stage I do not have the faintest idea what he is talking about.

“Really?”

“A potential reward.”

“They’re opening a new Ikea. And they’re giving out vouchers to the first hundred people who show up on the day.”

“And?”

“Well, most of them will be for £1. But there will be one for £10,000, and one for £1,000. So if we turn up together we have double the chance of winning a ticket.”

“I presume there’s a catch.”

“Well, they’re vouchers you can only spend in Ikea. And you have to go on their website and register as a friend of Ikea. Or family or something. But you have to register, cos if you don’t, you won’t get the money, and if you cock that up, I will never forgive you. Ever.”

He suggests that I get there at 6.30am, 7 at the latest. I try to explain that I am more likely to go to bed at 6.30am than get up at 6.30am, and he tries to explain to me that one in a hundred odds of getting £10,000 aren’t only not bad, but they become better if they are reduced by half. It might mean only £5,000 each, but that’s still not to be sneezed at, especially considering the initial outlay.

But the outlay for me is too much. That is, the early start. I sleep in, and put my phone on Do Not Disturb just in case he tries to ring me.

Later in the day I get in touch. Did he go there in the morning? He did.

“It was incredible. The whole of Churchill Square was packed. There would have been no chance we’d have got even one of the £1 vouchers. You know, even if they’d brought the Turin Shroud over to Churchill Square, with the Pope making a personal appearance, they wouldn’t have got more people there.”

So my decision to have a lie-in was vindicated. A few days later, I popped down to Churchill Square to see how it was all going. I also fancied a bedside reading lamp. The queue, on a Thursday, at noon, or noon-ish, was not the longest I’d ever seen; but it looked like a good twenty minutes, at the very least; and I’ve never been that much of an Ikea fan anyway. But at least, in Brighton, they’re making good use of vacant premises (the old Debenhams, where I would buy shoes and bedding and curtains); unlike – and allow me to bring it back to this – those bastards at the Co-op, and their plans for expansion at Seven Dials.

I have written about the Regency, my favourite Brighton restaurant, before: every so often, when I am in funds, or someone else is paying, I stroll down the hill to this venerable seafront establishment in order to gorge myself on oysters or, if there is no R in the month, whitebait. Sometimes both. Portions of the latter are large enough that even as a starter there are plenty.

Now, everyone knows what an oyster is like, so I won’t describe them. If you’re serving fresh oysters, you can’t really muck them up. Whitebait, on the other hand …

The whitebait I had become accustomed to at the Regency were crunchy fish from heaven, coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried, but never greasy. They were like fun-sized fish fingers, only… fish. There is something appealing about eating an entire animal in one mouthful, if you like that kind of thing. (Cf. oysters.) If you don’t then my apologies, and I hope I haven’t offended. But Brighton is very much a live and let live kind of place.

Or is it?

A few weeks ago some money miraculously found its way into my bank account and down the hill I went to the Regency. All the way down I was thinking about whitebait; so I ordered a plate. I did not think to ask how they were prepared, for I had been going there for years and knew what to expect; or I thought I did. For when the plate arrived, it wasn’t a plate of breadcrumbed paradise, but a plate of nude fish, with a dusting of paprika on top. I forked a few mouthfuls and then gave up. Imagine how disappointed you’d be if you’d gone to a fish and chip shop and found that your cod or whatever had been served without batter,

I tried to have a word with the waitress but she was new and hadn’t quite mastered the English language yet – when it comes to their waiting staff, the Regency’s policy seems to be to hire on the basis of beauty and a general keenness, not fluency in the language. And quite right too, I think. After about ten strained minutes of communication in pidgin and hand gestures, I was given to understand that this was the new whitebait situation, and that if I didn’t like it, then that was too bad.

Well, we are not put into this world for pleasure alone, and one must be philosophical. But when I went there a couple of days ago, with the very editor of this magazine, as it happens, I asked again about the whitebait, and it was confirmed that they were still the unbreaded kind. I gave a little pout and said that I had really liked the old-style way of cooking them.

“People didn’t like them,” said the waiter.

I find this hard to believe. The only explanation I can think of is that everyone has become coeliac and can no longer eat even breadcrumbs. But that can’t be right, can it?