Saatchi Gallery, King’s Road, SW3; 020 7730 8135. 8am-11.30pm daily

Five stars Eton mess Four stars Another fine mess Three stars Kate Mess Two stars Sorry mess One star Mess murder

I was sitting on somebody’s Sunday lawn in a flotsam of newspapers, croquet sticks, cushions, infants’ plastic and a small allotment of BlackBerrys all set to vibrate, having that post-Sabbath-lunch conversation: the supine chat without eye contact that is phatic communion. Phatic communion: communication without specific meaning. Birdsong is phatic communion; elaborate trilling that says, I’m here, I’m here. Most of these columns are phatic communion.

This particular conversation was made up of the collation of lists. The companionable collective compiling of stuff is an important piece of social bonding. Aesthetic shopping lists, cultural death lists, intellectual snobbery. Your top 10 says so much about you. The plaiting of lists is flirting and bonding, and revealing of social aspiration. We were playing one of my favourites: comedy sell-by dates. Things and people that were once funny, but aren’t any more. My list is single-spaced double columns for three or four pages.

Obviously you start with John Cleese. Utterly unamusing now. And Steve Martin, the pink panter, as someone's child called him. Billy Connolly: not just not funny any more, but gone to an anti-funny alternative universe. The cartoons in The Spectator. The cartoons in The New Yorker. All cartoons. When do cartoons cease to amuse? Was it new Labour? Banksy, the minute he came in from the cold. Somebody added, “The Goons”. The Goons can’t go on the list: they were never funny. They just seemed funny because of rationing, and Prince Charles thinks they’re funny. In fact, Prince Charles can go on the list. Why did we stop laughing at him? Then there’s sex. That’s not funny any more. Sex used to be hilarious, but it stopped being funny when it became performance-related. The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov said it was a comedy. Not any more it ain’t.

I realised after a bit that this had stopped being a collegiate roundelay, and was just me ranting. “Is there anything you like?” said a voice from behind a hedge. Wagner, I said. “Wagner’s not funny, and never was.” That’s mostly why I like it. The Ring. Fifteen hours of high drama, and not a single giggle. Not a pun, double entendre, slapstick pratfall. No comic one-liners, nothing. Just a wall of impregnable Teutonic seriousness. No Englishman could have done that. After seven hours, they’d have given in and begged for a touch of farce, a naked Rhinemaiden in the closet, an Irish valkyrie. That’s why the Germans got Wagner and we got Gilbert and Sullivan.

I’ve just had a birthday. I’m 55, and now blissfully relieved of any sense of humour. It fades as you get older. You move from jokes to wit and, finally, a sort of Zimmer of irony. Now, thank God, it’s atrophied into an occasional mirthless smirk at children being knocked over by geese on You’ve Been Framed, and I quite like the old women falling over on the dancefloor, too. Being excused humour is a blessed release from the asinine obligation of laughter. In old age, we grow to be German. I’ve often thought that Europe is an allegory for the ages of man. You’re born Italian. They’re relentlessly infantile and mother-obsessed. In childhood, we’re English: chronically shy, tongue-tied, cliquey, and only happy kicking balls, pulling the legs off things, or sending someone to Coventry. Teenagers are French: pretentiously philosophical, embarrassingly vain, ridiculously romantic and insincere. Then, in middle age, we become either Swiss or Irish. Old age is German: ponderous, pompous and pedantic. Then finally we regress into being Belgian, with no idea who we are at all.

What we old Germans have instead of sex and laughter are word games and complaining about grammar. I’m dislectic, so I’m excused Scrabble and split infinitives, but I’ve come across a new one, which I nearly enjoyed. Take the word gay: it began by meaning light, carefree and happy; then it became homosexual; and now it’s being used by kids to mean sad, ugly and unfashionable. The game is simple. You have to think of a thing that fits all three meanings. So for instance, pugs: happy little chaps, screamingly camp, and hideous. Gladioli, Denise van Outen, the Maldives, Harley-Davidsons, mojitos, Peter Mandelson, Strictly Come Dancing, juice bars.

I just asked the Blonde to contribute something that’s whimsical, queer and bogus. Without a pause, without a scintilla of reflection, she said, “Look in the mirror.”

Mess is a hostage to fortune. Call a restaurant Mess and it is asking for trouble. Critics don’t look gift names in the mouth. In fact, we try to avoid looking anyone in the mouth. It’s been called Mess because it’s on the site of the old Duke of York’s barracks on Chelsea’s King’s Road. Very gay, the King’s Road. The barracks were turned into commercial property, so this is the offices’ mess. It could also have been called Mess because it’s attached to the Saatchi Gallery, which is exhibiting aesthetically challenging new American abstraction. I know Charles has been cogitating and cud-chewing over what to do with this awkward cafe space in a colonnade for some time. I suggested all sorts of things, from Nigella’s recipes to a restaurant based entirely on advertising slogans. Go to work on an egg. Breakfast of champions. Mmm Bisto. For mash get Smash. Where’s the beef? Finger-lickin’ good. And the Barbra Streisand of gay innuendo: Melts in your mouth, not in your hand. My two favourites are both American — one for chocolate: Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. And one for Utica Club beer: We drink all we can. The rest we sell.

Anyway, he took none of my advice and has handed the place over to Rhubarb, the caterers. I went with Flora, my daughter, who’s just left school and is demob stupid, blinking in the brightness of all that freedom. I felt like Virginia McKenna. Go, Elsa, go, run free. It was a nice day and we sat outside. I don’t think that sitting inside would be anything like as attractive. On the old parade ground, schoolchildren gambolled like corduroy goats. These are the Hill House lost boys and girls; they don’t seem to have any actual school, but spend their lives wandering around Chelsea in crocodiles, plaintively bleating, “Are we nearly there yet?” in 27 Middle Eastern languages.

The food is really not at all bad, bordering on really quite good. The menu does breakfast, and then there’s a sort of grab bag of constructed lunch. I had a vitello tonnato that was generous and nicely made, with those small intense capers, and not the ones that look like frogs’ testicles. Flora had pasta with a tomatoey crab sauce, which she said was really good, but then she’s a teenager and has been living on toast and Pringles for six months. For pudding, she had strawberries and cream, which, like all modern strawberries, tasted like transvestite brussels sprouts. I had a knickerbocker glory, which ought to be gay, but isn’t. Multi-storey ice creams are redneck kitsch, not camp kitsch. It’s an important distinction, and I’d hate you to get it wrong in life's lists.

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