I have just eaten a Fendi handbag. I followed it with an Oscar de la Renta off-the-shoulder dress in a darling shade of yellow (so this season), and managed to fit in one half of a pair of Gina shoes in pink polka dots.
This is the Prêt-à-Portea at the Berkeley Hotel in London's Knightsbridge, billed as 'a fashionista's afternoon tea'. For a lavish £26 per person, it includes a 'delicate collection of cakes and fancies, in the colours of the fashion season'. Right now, that's lilac butterfly cakes à la Marc Jacobs and a delightful little eclair in Missoni's pale-green stripes. I scoffed the lot, and left that salubrious establishment with the kind of sugar rush usually reserved for toddlers on their birthdays.
The Berkeley tea is an ode to feminine eating. It's a bit naughty, a lot nice, and everything is served (on Paul Smith crockery) in fiddly, doll's-house portions. The problem for me, though, is that I eat like a man. I don't mean that I belch or pick my teeth after a meal, nor do I get leftovers trapped in my moustache. But I do have seconds. I do nip into the kitchen after a roast lunch and forage among the meat litter for tasty, crispy bits (I learnt this trick from my father, and can honestly say that there are no finer pickings, even if you're full beyond the point of discomfort).
I have, however, been known to eat to the point of discomfort, in the same way as many women now drink till they hurl (I never, never do this. My shoes are too precious). But I do flip the menu over to look at the puddings before ordering, allowing myself to 'leave room' for the profiteroles ...
On second thoughts, the concept of 'leaving room' is an exclusively female trait. In my experience, men tend to eat till they're full, working in a methodical, bovine fashion; women eat until they've covered all the bases. It's all about strategy. If we haven't had bread, we'll allow ourselves pudding. If we don't fancy the puds (having checked in advance), we'll order a side of buttered mash.
The Prêt-à-Portea is designed for the kind of women who nudge lettuce across lunch plates but who deeply, desperately want to lick whipped cream from the inside of a choux bun. Don't we all? Deep-down, if appearance didn't matter, if fat really was fab, wouldn't we all wallow around in a glorious ocean of crisps and cakes and fry-ups and fancies?
But we don't. Because there is a very thin line between, say, Nigella Lawson (who looks gorgeous - as if she is constantly having to lick Nutella off her chin) and Kirstie Allsopp. Who looks like a three-seater sofa. With this basic rule in mind, most women I know despise food. We despise it because it is the enemy - the enemy of youth, bikinis and size-eight jeans. I remember one particularly extravagant party in Paris thrown by Donatella Versace, where the Gorgeous People (Naomi and the rest) sat for hours amid a mountain of exquisite food and never touched so much as a strawberry. That's why tea at the Berkeley is so clever; it is a glorious lesson in stealth feeding. It looks as though you're eating diddly-squat, but you end up carbo-loading like a triathlete before the race.
Taking a leaf from the Berkeley book, I have been honing my stealth skills in an attempt to feminise my eating habits. So now I only order pudding if another person at the table orders it first. Or I'll ask for 'just a decaff and an extra spoon, please' and then embark on a surreptitious quest to get as much of someone else's tarte tartin into my trap before anyone notices.
The bottom line, quite literally, is that everything a woman consumes is laced with the arsenic of guilt. It's a gender-specific condiment. Like jalapeno sauce. While men are busy out-bidding each other in vindaloo-battles at curry houses up and down the land, women are either lying, cheating or performing mental gymnastics to ascertain the exact calorie content of a chocolate eclair. The fact is that whatever its calorie content whether enrobed in Missoni colours, or in a pack of four from Sainsbury's - it will always be too high.
And men? Men wouldn't know a calorie content if it asked them out to tea at the Berkeley. They just don't have the tools. While they're generally whizzes at figuring out the number of four-by-twos it takes to build a lean-to, they're hopeless at the far- more-crucial calculation that arises when faced with a choice between the profiteroles and the exotic fruit salad on the menu at a wedding reception. Just recently, I asked my husband how many calories there were in a Mars Bar, and he said 'What Mars Bar? You didn't tell me you had a Mars Bar. Have you eaten it all?'
The answer, alas, was yes.