How to survive posh restaurants with your uncivilised children and your pervy spouse

A recent poll of 1500 British adults on the nation’s rudest restaurant habits included clicking your fingers to get the waiter’s attention, getting out the calculator to work out your share of the bill and blowing your nose into a napkin.

Unlike our elegant French or Italian friends, us Brits have never seemed to get it right when it comes to restaurant etiquette. So for all those with a restaurant booking this weekend – be it at a Toby Carvery or somewhere not quite as swish – I’d like to have your attention please.

Children who are not French or refined

There is no point in taking children to a restaurant before the age of three. They will turn into Linda Blair as soon as you place them hopefully into their highchair.

They will projectile vomit their chicken nuggets and spew profanities at the assembled diners. They will loudly demand milk from your boob even though you stopped breastfeeding a year ago. You will not eat your meal. Or you will panic-binge on the breadbasket and hate yourself more than you do already.

You will end up shouting at your husband, which will be the first step in a slippery slope to him embarking on an affair with a childless 24-year-old. You will stop loving your child and have to pay for years of therapy for them when they’re 18. The couple at the next table will complain that they are unable to enjoy their Black Forest gateau while you are changing your child’s nappy on the table.

You are not French. Your children will not sit quietly in Breton stripes and colour in a Monet watercolour with their Caran D’ache. They will not agreeably eat smaller versions of adult food and quietly read Le Petit Prince.

Your children will draw penises on the tablecloth and demand multicoloured milkshakes.

Parents, please, there is no shame in admitting defeat. Grab yourselves a drive-thru Happy Meal and eat it in the car with the windows up so no one can hear the screams.

Husbands who want to talk to you

My husband always expects me to talk to him, should we find ourselves in a restaurant without our children. And he wants to talk about proper subjects, not just Love Island or whether the couple at the next table are secretly shagging.

He sees a restaurant meal as an opportunity to find out my opinions on things – North Korea, black holes, Nick Cave’s last album. It’s exhausting. I try to engineer it so that if we do find ourselves alone in an eatery, it’s on a Sunday – so I have an excuse to bring along the Sunday papers (but even then he asks questions on the stories I’m reading instead of reading his own – v annoying).

He also tries to “go on” after the meal. “Shall we go for a cocktail now?” Is he crazy? We are child-free! I want to go home, put on my onesie and watch Millionaire Matchmaker. Sex is obviously off the cards as I’ve eaten the whole breadbasket and am already bloating from the gluten.

Boyfriends who want to chat up the waitress

An ex-boyfriend of mine would always undress the waitress with his eyes and address her as “babe” when we went out to a restaurant. Always. Even if she looked like the back-end of a bus. It annoyed me so much I would encourage him to order super-fattening food so I could secretly smirk at his weight gain.

So, men: flirting with the waitress will not make you more attractive to us – in fact, the way the waitress recoils from your oily administrations is a positive turn-off.

The ideal man will be blind to anyone but us, put his iPhone away in his snugly ripped jeans, tell us we need to eat dessert because we’re looking so thin and stroke our thighs in such a way that we don’t even consider the breadbasket.

Electronics at the table

If with children, bring ‘em on. iPads, 30-inch flatscreens, their own sealed off cinema – whatever it takes.

Ask the restaurant owner if he’d mind you installing the Wii in the corner of the room. If with your husband, bring an iPad and suggest a double-headphone splitter – so you can watch Love Island on catch up instead of discussing Kim Jong-un.

Electronics at the table does not include pleasuring devices. Your moans may distract the couple at the next table during a nappy change.

Bingers and bulimics

Those prone to a binge: there’s no point in ordering the funless bunless burger or the joyless chicken breast if when you go home, you power-eat Pringles and Ben and Jerry’s. Tuck in now and lock your fridge later. Or even better – cut out the middleman and just bring the Pringles and B+J to the restaurant and neck ‘em in the loo.

Those who use controversial tactics to lose weight: same rule applies as to the under-threes – keep away from restaurants until you can keep solids down.

Work parties

Stop pretending you’re having a good time. We know you all hate each other. Just eat your chicken in a basket and leave quietly please.

There is light at the end of the tunnel for all the poor sods reading this and wringing their hands. Luckily, we now have Uber Eats and Deliveroo. Which means that the family can bring the restaurant experience to your living room while you lock yourself in the loo with a bottle of voddy and wonder what happened to your life.