I USED to wake the middle of the night, planning our next rendezvous. Often on dark winter evenings we’d meet on seedy back streets. Sometimes in the early hours of the morning we’d have chance encounters in motorway service stations. It would happen quickly, while the rest of the working world snored. Some mornings I would slip in as early as 10.30am.

Yes, I admit it. For much of my adult life I was engaged in an illicit affair –with Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Once upon a time I couldn’t wait to get my hands on those wings. These days we’re barely talking.

How did we end up like this? How could it be that a man could hold such unhinged, romantic yearning for fried chicken? The answer is simply that, like its cousin the humble cheeseburger, it comes from America.

If you grew up in the 1980s practically anything that came from America was excellent. This is food I once associated with all the romance the USA threw at me as a child – from Star Wars to Gridiron to NASA to the Fonz.

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I carried on flirting for a while. I imagined I was rubbing shoulders with James Dean in neon-lit diners on Sunset Strip. Any moment now I must have thought, Marilyn Monroe might stroll in off Cornmarket Street, push her way past those prams, and sit opposite me. My reasoning was that if it’s good enough for Elvis it’s good enough for me.

The trouble of course is that the cheeseburgers Elvis enjoyed are not the same as the stuff you buy for 89p. The food that left the kitchens at Graceland was not the same as the garbage that pours out of the identikit shacks they’ve erected outside our villages, spewing litter into the hedgerows and fields, smashing the livelihood from the hands of our local shopkeepers and defacing our English countryside with cheap, overwhelming ugliness.

Now I’ve concluded there’s nothing American or glamorous about these modern day hamburger joints my problem is how to replace this junk food I’ve cherished for so long. My only answer is to invent the English equivalent.

For simplicity’s sake I’ll call it the Winston Churchill burger.

Served on porcelain plates, each burger will feature scenes from VE day. The only possible litter will be the large patriotic flag I will have shoved into every handmade bun.

Inside will be the sort of beef that will never surrender. The cheese will come from an actual cow who I’ll keep in my backyard. As I milk her I’ll address her as “Your Majesty”. It will all be washed down with gallons of Port, served in an actual glass. Visitors to my imaginary restaurant will not be allowed to leave until they’ve developed gout. This is the only sort of cheeseburger I can pay allegiance to these days. If only I could sell them for 89p.