‘The lobster is the martyr of our ethical primitivism,’ he tells me as he carefully scrubs mushrooms for his famous Quiche Borraine, ‘both our inability to empathise with other life forms and our stubborn tendency towards infidelity.’ I’m not sure if he knows that he’s really talking about my stubborn tendency towards infidelity (which, technically speaking, isn’t infidelity: we have clear agreements on the subject).