LET me tell you about a special meal I have enjoyed since last week’s column — because I have eaten like a king.

When you get to my age, you are expected to say you enjoy “the finer things in life” (as I recently heard someone put it), but I’m not so sure.

Last Thursday I had had a busy day, the last two or three hours were thirsty work, and after that it would have been rude not to retire to the pub for a couple of pints.

But as I sat there, I knew I was faced with a dilemma.

To get home, I could phone my wife to pick me up in the car, and supper would be the nice salad I knew she was planning on making. We are trying to eat healthily at the moment, but that doesn’t mean we don’t loosen the reins and treat ourselves at times.

So my other option — and the one I chose — was to walk home, a journey that happens to take me past several chip shops.

Especially after an active day, the walk meant I had earned the right to stop off in one of the said chippies.

And so I did, choosing the one that is exactly the right distance from home to provide time to eat a small portion of chips and a large battered sausage before arriving.

With extra salt and vinegar, please.

I suppose when people say they have grown to enjoy the finer things in life, they mean they like an expensive bottle of wine and maybe some smoked salmon.

But not me.

I can’t think of any feast that I have eaten in my entire life that beats walking home on a warm September evening, eating chip shop chips out of the paper.

I concede there is something to be said, as you get older and you start to amass a huge bank of experiences, for finding pleasure in new things.

Indeed, one of the good things about being middle aged is you realise that life is still full of new wonders and pleasant surprises.

But there is also an argument for living life in the same manner as my wife shops for shoes.

She will visit every shoe shop in the town, looking for the right ones, but as all men who have been shoe shopping with their wives know, they nearly always go back to the shop they started in, and buy the first pair they tried on.

And so it was with me, eating my chips.

The smell and the taste instantly transports me right back to Friday evenings in the early 1970s at Polly’s, the chip shop in Upper Stratton, or walking along the prom at Great Yarmouth on holiday.

For the full effect, spend half a minute breathing in the heavenly aroma of the chips through the paper before opening the packet and eating them as you go along.

There is nothing to beat it.

But then, although I have tried all kinds of things and enjoyed some memorable meals, I can honestly say that I have never eaten one yet in which potatoes haven’t been the highlight.

They don’t have to be chipped. Every way man’s creativity has been applied to preparing the potato is, if you ask me, evidence of our genius.

So the older I get, the more I think the finer things in life were under our noses all the time.

And the moral of the story is you don’t have to eat what they dish up at Buckingham Palace to be able to say you have eaten like a king.