In London on Tuesday for the Michelin guide lunch, I could not resist a further invitation, though this meant rising earlier than 6am. Breakfast at the Royal Academy was in a new restaurant run by Oliver Peyton’s Peyton and Byrne. Usually it’s open between 10am and 6pm, with dinner served on Fridays and Saturdays until 10pm. Head chef Andrea Zuccolo offers an enticing menu, with pumpkin and stilton soufflé and Andalusian fish soup among the starters, mains like mixed venison grill and cod confit with red cabbage dumplings, and puds ranging from Black Forest crumble to pineapple carpaccio.

Designer Tom Dixon has come up with a sympathetic, art-themed decor for the 150-cover restaurant. In a brief speech of welcome, he mentioned that the bar and serving area used hand-made bricks from Oxfordshire. Curious about this, I followed him upstairs into the newly-opened Modern British Sculpture exhibition to ask about the bricks. Alas he eluded me, though I did come across bricks in the form of Carl Andre’s once hugely controversial Equivalent VII, which I last encountered at Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art (as it was then called).

I also saw and admired Alfred Gilbert’s 1887 Jubilee Memorial to Queen Victoria, which gazes majestically on all around, including Jacob Epstein’s magnificent Adam. I saw and shuddered at Damien Hirst’s 1990/91 work Let’s Eat Outdoors.

In this, a Perspex box (see above) divided down the middle, features, on one side, a barbecue laden with half a dozen or more pork steaks and on the other the relics of a picnic meal, a table covered with empty bottles, a chicken carcass, plates and condiments. Beneath the table, with purple blood pouring from it, is what I took to be a large dead bird but which an accompanying label told me was a cow’s head.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the entire exhibit was covered with hundreds, possibly thousands, of buzzing bluebottles.

Just what I wanted to see before lunch.