At last, printed menus and a chance to wear smoky eyeshadow again | Grace Dent on restaurants

Restaurants are back, back, back, so I booked breakfast to see off the misery of the past year'

In the happy run-up to last Monday's grand reopening of restaurants and pubs, a fleck of disquiet seeped into the shallower end of my brain. I have craved many things over these recent months of confinement - printed menus, petits fours, the chance to wear smoky eye kohl - but one thing I'd not missed was Fomo (that's fear of missing out", should you not be up on modern acronyms). Fomo is the pernicious, all-consuming suspicion that other people elsewhere are having fun or, in my case as a restaurant critic, eating at better, more exclusive restaurants on nicer tables, which they booked ages ago. If I were to put a face on this hypothetical person, he would be a tall man with shaggy brown hair who plays jazz piano. Let's call him Jay Rayner. OK, it is Jay Rayner, but, sometimes, it is other people.

Fomo is pathetic, but also sinister, because it sabotages your ability just quietly to be". Thankfully, it's at its most acute in teenagers, which is why merely asking one of them to look directly at you for upwards of half a minute, rather than at a phone displaying constantly revolving reels of other people having fun", is deemed an act of war. Fomo is more complex still by your late 20s, when it comes with a second layer of the lesser-known Jomo (joy of missing out). This is when anxiety about Friday night Fomo is followed by waking brightly at 7am on a Saturday without a hangover, and with the freedom to make wholesome plans: hot yoga, bottomless brunch and, inevitably, a saunter to a farmers' market to spend 35 on four heritage parsnips.

Pre-pandemic, and now in my 40s, I experienced both Fomo and Jomo, as well as that sharpest, diary-related thrill of all: High as a kite on cancelled plans." This is when the date you made six weeks ago to catch up" at 8pm this coming Friday with an old colleague for a bite" is cancelled by the other party at 5.20pm, leaving me to haul my grumbling knee home, unhook my bra as I walk up the corridor and drape it over the bannister before eating leftover pasta out of Tupperware in front of The One Show. Actual ecstasy. Then came Covid, and all these things were taken away.

But now they're back, back, back. At the start of April, as whispers began to reach me of other people's holiday cottages in the Ribble Valley and someone who'd booked the private room at a fun Soho restaurant for every weekend in May, an inner voice told me that I was already way behind. There was a level of emotional calm back in those days when nobody seemed to be having fun, except the Kardashians and the Beckhams, both of whom learned by the 10th internet pile-on to be discreet.