Don’t meal-shame me: a table for one at a restaurant I love is the ultimate indulgence | Megan Nolan

One London restaurant has a minimum spend for solo diners. Doesn't it understand the pleasure of taking yourself to dinner?

In March this year my appetite left me for the first time in my life. My characteristic failing has always been a helpless, freewheeling, incontinent appetite for more or less everything: - food, men, booze - whatever is to hand, really. The problem has been moderating or neutralising it.

The idea of appetite disappearing was unthinkable, a fantasy to envision when I had overconsumed. Imagine not wanting anything; imagine food losing its complex, charged appeal without any effort or restraint. It's the dream of women with eating issues, the ones who have squandered years anxiously scrutinising calorie charts and glycaemic indexes and BMI scales. Which is to say, many of us.

Megan Nolan is an Irish writer based in London