The other evening at a very good restaurant in the north of England – I won’t be more specific, the better to protect the identities of all involved – a woman at a table near ours, having finished her main course, decided to make a complaint. Her waitress asked her if everything had been all right, and she took this, perfectly properly, as her cue. Off she went.

Her complaints were various, each one quite distinct from the other. They were also groundless (she was sitting behind me, out of sight, but I was fully tuned in, having carefully deployed my bat-like hearing at the first sign of trouble). For one thing – I twisted round to take a quick look – she’d made a good job of eating almost everything on her plate. It was like that Woody Allen joke from Annie Hall in which two elderly women at a Catskill resort discuss the food (when one says how awful it is, the other replies: “Yeah, I know – and such small portions”). For another, it’s idiotic to complain about the “cheap, fatty cut of meat” you’ve been forced to eat, when said cut of meat was “belly pork”. Restaurant goers! If it’s filet mignon you’re after, my strong advice is to order it.

Then there were the roast potatoes. “They were not my idea of roast potatoes,” she said, in a mimsy voice that was straight out of Alan Bennett. The waitress replied that one reason they might not have seemed like roast potatoes was that they were, in fact, as she’d explained, pumpkin gnocchi. We were gripped. How would the woman whip this curve ball back over the net? But… Oh, madame, what a shot. “Well, I didn’t hear you,” she said. “I thought you said roast potatoes.” Roast potatoes/pumpkin gnocchi: personally, I could not discern the aural similarity here – and nor, I think, could the waitress. The woman, however, was undaunted. “It was all so dry,” she said. “That was why we needed extra gravy.” She didn’t feel that the dish’s component parts went together – meat and vegetables, eh? Some places are just so pretentious – and she’d been given too much kale. It was all over the place, like seaweed on a beach. Her tone now was resigned, more in sadness than in anger. I began to wonder if she wasn’t a retired teacher.

The waitress apologised. She was young, a tyro, and sincere. “I’ll pass your comments on,” she said. The woman considered her, head cocked. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “But you did ask me what I thought of the food.” At this, I leaned over to my husband and, more loudly than I’d intended, muttered: “OOH, PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE.” He took a deep, soothing swig of red as, behind us, the drama continued. Did the woman want to see the pudding menu? “No,” she said, indignantly. “I never eat sweet things.” A phoney laugh. “Actually, you’ve done me a favour. I shouldn’t eat at all, should I? Look at me!” The room grew – was I imagining it? – a little quieter. What was this? A dare? The woman was no sylph. Everyone could see it. I began to wonder if we were secretly being filmed. Perhaps Michel Roux Jr was about to burst in, and tell the waitress she’d won dinner for two at Le Gavroche. Perhaps this woman was an actor. Come to think of it, she did look a bit like Patricia Routledge. Or perhaps it was her who would win dinner for two at Le Gavroche: a kale-free supper at which the potatoes would not only be roast, but truffled and garnished with caviar and served from a golden dish with crystal spoons by Nigella Lawson. I decided then and there that I would refuse point blank to sign the release form that would enable someone to broadcast my campy whisper.

Look, I won’t say our evening at one of my favourite restaurants was ruined by this woman, whose antics continued until she finally eased herself out of her seat – though perhaps I did later spend more time than I should have doing impersonations of her for my husband. (“This bread isn’t my idea of bread at all … It tastes more like custard tart to me.”) But I will say this. It used to be that in Britain we never complained; we ate everything up and were grateful, even when what we were given was horrid. Now, though, things have swung too far the other way. Minor dissatisfactions shade swiftly into full-blown grievances, and then into a weird performance art: a peacock display of repulsive 21st-century entitlement that does no one any good at all, save perhaps for the manufacturers of Gaviscon. And it’s grotesque, and I wish it would stop.