Bottomless brunch: it sounds disreputable, to start with. There’s the suggestion of indecency; that lower garments are optional, perhaps on the part of the poor waiting staff, like those ‘Butlers in the Buff’. And ‘brunch’ is surely the louchest of meals, invented purely so that people could roll into a restaurant after a long lie-in and commence drinking before noon. There is none of the briskness of ‘lunch’ or the cosiness of ‘dinner’. No one’s going to go for a ‘constitutional’ after brunch. No, they’re going to have ‘just one more’…

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I’ve had some lovely brunches in my time. A glass of champagne, a brace of Bloody Marys (or, even better, Bloody Marias, with tequila) and all the newspapers an outside table on Brighton seafront can hold was for decades a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning. But even I, as a big fan of excess, remember thinking ‘that won’t end well!’ when I first heard of the bottomless brunch: basically, one meal per person and all the – selected – booze you can get down you in two hours, tops.

Hogarth himself could not have come up with a better illustration of........

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