Martin Hesp on Saturday

Read Martin’s column every week in the Western Daily Press

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HERE are two Englands: one occupied by most of us and the other by a small percentage of the population.

That is what I was thinking recently when a friend told me about a restaurant bill he’d paid covering two dinners and a few glasses of wine. It came to 550 quid!

I don’t know about you, but I could not afford anything like that for an evening's repast - no matter how good the food or the fermented grape juice in the glass - but there are obviously others who can. It was a midweek night in October and apparently the West Country restaurant in question was full.

Which got me thinking, I wonder how many folk in South West England - which has a population of just under six million - would feel comfortable parting with such a large sum for their supper? Throw in a hotel stay for the night and you could easily be talking about £1,000 for a night out for two. That is a lot of dosh.

There are foodbanks in every town in Britain whose customers would be aghast by the thought of paying £100 for a single meal, let alone more than half a grand.

On the other hand, I was assured that the supper did represent value for money. The multi-course dinner was prepared by a large team of welltrained chefs and some of the ingredients would have cost a fortune. The best wagyu steak is bound to cost a great deal more than beef from a supermarket, A fresh, fat, juicy scallop caught by a diver rather than by a seabed-wrecking trawler is never going to be cheap.