In Days of Being Wild, the protagonist Yuddy runs away from home in search of his real mother and dies in the process. The ill-starred lovers in Happy Together go on holiday and things begin to fall apart. In Ashes of Time, the narrator Ou-yang Feng is forced to flee from his ancestral home by scandal and has to eke out a living by arranging low life “hits” in the desert. Along the same lines, the neighbours in In the Mood for Love are driven out of their homes by their adulterous spouses and you just know there can be no happy ending to this story.

That said, home is not necessary a happy place for some of these characters. Yuddy has to deal with his adopted mother’s infidelities and inconsistencies, Ou-yang Feng leaves his hut in the desert amidst a standstorm and a deep sense of foreboding – all these make you wonder they had a “real” home to begin with.

Then there are the bit part players – the hotel keeper’s daughter in 2046 who spends her days on the roof of the hotel and the good time girl Lulu (she appears in a number of his films) who seems to have no fixed abode and only very loose attachments. Their lack of a conventional home is matched by their increasingly tenous grip on reality as things develop. 

It’s been said that Wong makes movies about misfits but I’m not sure if that’s always the case – there are some very odd characters like the Canned Pineapple Man who appears both in Chungking Express and Fallen Angels – it might be more accurate to say the common thread that runs through these characters is not homelessness but a thwarted yearning to belong. If that can be also expressed as a search for a home then maybe that’s a little closer to the truth.

So why do they leave? In the words of Policeman 6117 in Days of Being Wild – “if you are bored and a little frustrated, it’s good to get away for a little while” … but you can never go home again.

We had the five course menu and different things for each course so we could sample ten dishes rather than having the same eight course tasting menu. In terms of courses, two which stood out for me were the Pig’s Trotters and Sweetbreads Salad and the Braised Lamb Neck but if I had to pick single thing I enjoyed the most, it had to be the aubergine souffle which came with the Roasted Wildebeest.

Cooking aside, the dining room was a touch too noisy (sound bounces off a hard floor) and lighting could be better – as in brighter, I always like to be able to see my food. The service was a little hesitant and while the wine list was absolutely enlightened by Franschoek standards, I suspect the sommelier would have struggled to find two wines to go with every course. That said, this was possibly the best meal we had this year.

For the most part, I agree with what Richard Vines has to say but you’d also have to admit Asian restaurants are great for food and flavour but not so hot on presentation and ambience. The best Chinese meal I’ve had in the last few months was at Made in China in Beijing but by the end of the meal, the table looked like a war zone complete with body parts strewn on the lazy susan. The other problem with Asian restaurants is the quality of the serving staff – too often you get moonlighting students or illegal immigrants who have no idea what you are eating or even if you are getting the correct order. Which is why, for Porco, the most impressive thing about Iggy’s is the service - unobtrusive, understated and unbelieveably professional.

Turning to the list, a couple of things don’t make sense. The two Robuchon L’Ateliers which top and tail the best 20 are, for me, very much the same if not identical. The differences could only be down to one of them having a bad day when the judges visited. For my money, I would put Robuchon a Galera in Macau in first place – classic plates, full-sized and incredible value. Plus a wine list that would put most telephone directories to shame. I would also argue if you walked into Yung Kee, you would be hard pressed to justify its lofty status on the list. You’d get a better meal at T’ang Court at the Langham.

I am a huge fan of Zanotti in Bangkok and think it deserves a place at least six rungs higher. Then there are the omissions. I think Nicolas Joanny and his eponymous establishment deserves a mention as does the black pepper crab at Eng Seng. Time to make more than tweaks at Miele where the worthies have fallen in that age old trap of thinking tradition, astronomical prices as well as white table cloths equals quality, innovation and good eating. In case you’re wondering … miele means honey in Italian.

That said, there’s the other stuff – the philosophical bits. Did you really think it was just about two wheels on a frame, a bit of chain and some aluminium things?

First, if you are pedalling along and minding your own business, there is no guarantee a taxi won’t come from behind and knock you over. Shit happens – that’s life. Next, a bicycle is an inherently unstable thing – deal with the instability. Cycling is about balancing. It helps if you pedal faster but you can’t do that forever, sometimes you have to get off the bike. Finally, know that you will fall over sometime. If your cleats are still attached to your pedals, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Just hope a taxi doesn’t come by when that happens.

Sunday was a totally different matter. There was a time trial on the coastal road so I decided to go through the park not realising there were two different runs taking place along different stretches of the park. Moving onto the road was initally much better until I got to a stretch of one way traffic and a speeding van weaving its way past parked cars and bikes on both sides.  It was looking too close for comfort so I tried to get on the grass verge – managed to get my left foot off before the bike went from under me. Amazingly, the right foot freed itself and I managed to stay on my feet as well as leaping over a small drain in the process. Total damage done was a slightly twisted handlebar and a ripped velcro strip on one shoe.

Things could have been better but then they could also have been much worse.

That said, I am not sure if I want my daily lunch to be my last supper. Porco has been reading a book about 50 chefs and what they want for their last meal. Foie gras figures a lot but then so does context. Where you eat, who you eat with and even the background music. Perhaps in this case, it’s a question of what you want being a function of who you are – so chefs have to eat what they have to cook so they end up liking what they have to cook. So much for work-life balance. I once met a chef who was appalled that I’d never had caviar and Krug – he felt I hadn’t lived and he had to remedy that immediately – never mind that I was 20 years old at the time. Context? You want context? You can’t handle context!

At some level, food is about being fed and probably the best meals you’ve ever had are the ones when you’ve needed or wanted food most. So for his last meal, Porco wants what he had after every swimming lesson when he was young (and cold, tired and very hungry) – pork porridge with a raw egg, some spring onions and coriander, a bit of pepper and soy sauce.

And another thing – the stuff looks treatable and apart from cases in Mexico, not many people are dying. I know there were a couple of deaths in the US but those looked like they were not getting treatment until it was too late. Is it something about the state of healthcare in Mexico? Or is it a question of – death, where is thy sting?

Porco’s brother – who has an advanced degree in epidemiology – thinks it is more about life and less about death. He thinks it’s about the way the animals we farm for food lives – pack them in and pump them full of antibiotics. Most of the time everything goes as planned and nothing happens. Once in a while, the drugs don’t work and the sickness gets to people. Like a bad case of agricultural terrorism, people need to be vigilant all the time but the pigs (or more specifically, the viruses) need only be lucky once in a while.

As the words of the Maori haka go – Ka Mate! Ka Ora!