Katy Guest: Pancakes worth waiting for

I'm just not the kind of girl who gets taken to the Fat Duck in Bray

For some reason, no matter how hard I've tried, I have to accept that I'm just not the kind of girl who gets taken to the Fat Duck in Bray. Luckily, I am the kind of girl who gets taken to the Little Chef in Popham in Hampshire, so I am enormously grateful to the chef Heston Blumenthal for expanding his empire to include us low-maintenance types.

Blumenthal opened the new-look Little Chef in a service station off the A303 in November, but for reasons to do with having a job and not really knowing where Hampshire is I didn't go until the weekend. Unfortunately, this was the weekend after 4.8 million people watched the transformation on Channel 4's Big Chef Takes On Little Chef, and all 4.8 million were there on Sunday afternoon.

With a 1 hour 45 minute wait for a table, it was an excellent opportunity to find out ways to kill time in Winchester on a rainy Sunday while starving, but apparently there aren't any. This was good, because the best way to experience a Little Chef is after a long day's driving in the dark while extremely fractious.

I don't know what kind of atomised essence of Soma Blumenthal has got the staff on, but they are coping with astonishing humour. One had had three hours' sleep. Another said blearily: "The best time to come for breakfast is between 7am and 7:05... It's great to be involved!" And they were still prepared to do fat pancakes with maple syrup, old-style, for my friend the closet Little Chef fanatic.

If only he could be persuaded to tart up a grotty kebab shop in south London next, then I might be taken to a Heston Blumenthal restaurant more often.

It's looking grim up north...

A study from the Centre for Cities think-tank shows that London, Reading and Oxford will successfully weather the recession, while northern cities face a harder time. This is terrible news for anyone already in the South. London is full up; it is time for a programme of voluntary repatriation to the North.

The kids are a bit of all right

The new series of Skins has just started on E4, featuring a mythical school full of unfeasibly beautiful teenagers with expensive hair being drop-dead witty without even trying. The new series of Beverly Hills 90210 has a similar theme. A musical of the book and TV series Sweet Valley High is scheduled for this autumn. Grange Hill finished last year. Where are all the role models for ugly kids?