"Eating out Giles Coren"?

Loyal VE readers will recall my habit of buying the Times on a Saturday solely for the pleasure of reading Giles Coren's alleged restaurant column. Not, you understand, because I have any particular interest in restaurants - given that much of the pleasure of the column comes from his regular reluctance to mention having visited one - but simply because (with the possible exception of Larushka Ivan-Zadeh's film column) it is probably the best and most amusing thing written in English every week.

Recently it got something of a revamp (again, loyal readers will recall that I do not read anything else at all in the Saturday Times so cannot enlighten you how much further, if at all, this revamp extends - a quick skim reveals mainly that a column on the back page called Beta Male is written by a man called Robert Crampton who is the spitting image of my mate Silk) and is now rather oddly entitled "Eating out Giles Coren". Sure, the "Eating out" is in bold pink and the author's byline is italicised in a completely different font and colour but mere typography is hardly enough to disguise the fact that in the absence of any punctuation the column's title is now unambiguously "Eating out Giles Coren". If the thing was penned by Nigella Lawson I would have considered this outcome inevitable - as it is not, this new double entendre merely bewilders. 

Comments

[Adrian Monck]

Useless "small world" info: I used to share a house with Robert.

[Rick]

Robert Crampton's had the last page for years now. His columns are quite drab in a sort of "hanging out in the pub with Robert Crampton on a day in which not much has happened to Robert Crampton" sort of way.

I could swear - but can find no evidence - that Tesco used to have a range of ready meals sold with the slogan "It's as good as eating out!"