An odd thing happened to me the other day. Two odd things, really. First, while playing pool I potted seven balls at my first visit to the table; a clear sign that something was afoot. Normally when I play pool, the words “odd” and “foot” spring to people’s minds for quite different reasons.

The main odd thing that happened, though, was when I entered the Compass pub on Chapel Market in Islington, recently reopened under new management. Hoving to at the bar, still flushed with my poolhall success, I glanced at the menu, and saw on offer a “pickled duck’s egg with star anise.” I pointed this out to my friend, more in a spirit of mockery than hunger. Duck eggs and star anise? Madness. Then (and this was the odd bit), a genial man to our right insisted that we try one. We demurred, being several pints to the good and feeling that culinary adventurism would be pushing our already pool-drained luck.

This answer did not suffice.

Bustling into action, our host (for he turned out to be the bar’s manager) fished out an egg and a knife, and thrust them under my nose (I’m not sure which was more threatening). It seemed only polite at this point to eat the thing, so I obliged, utterly failing to maintain a facial expression that conveyed both gratitude and epicurean bliss. I think I managed “politely horrified” at best.

It has to be said, though, that I don’t really like pickled eggs. I’m sure that as an example of the genre, this was a fine one. I wasn’t expecting runny yolk, either; I thought the things were routinely hard-boiled. As a result, I reacted to the sudden emergence of pale yellow goop as if an alien face-hugger had leapt from my snack. I prefer my amuse-bouches without the money shot.

Undeterred by this apparent rejection, the manager (whose name, I think, was Paul. Or Andrew. I was drunk, okay?) decided that the only way to proceed was to provide us with a smorgasbord of ridiculously nice things. Within minutes we were presented with a wooden block topped with black pudding sausage roll (which was exactly as brilliant as it sounds*), the best scotch egg in the world (their words, not mine, but entirely true), some welsh rarebit and some marinated anchovies on toast. We attempted to pay for this, but were rebuffed.

It takes a lot to distract me from anchovies, a fish I will happily eat to the brink of extinction, but the Best Scotch Egg In The World^TM did so in some style. I have literally no idea how they managed to combine perfectly cooked pork, crispy breadcrumbs, and an egg with a yolk so soft it ought to be used to stuff mattresses, but they have. I was advised to arrive at about 4pm to obtain the freshest specimens, and I pass this advice on to you.

To sum up: go to the Compass pub in Islington. You will find things there that you want to put in your face. The trick will be working out how to stop.

*If you don’t think this sounds brilliant, there’s something wrong with you.

So. Saw the new Bond movie. It’s pretty good. It leaves every male audience member subconsciously doing swishy things with their jacket, and trying to emulate that sort of flicky-footed stride that Brosnan did so well. So, if you think you’ll be amused by a corridor full of dewy-eyed malcoordinates looking like they’re trying to kick to death a horde of invisible chihuahuas, I strongly recommend hanging around outside showings of this movie. The alternative is developing some sort of chihuahua cloaking technology and loitering at clinics for goths with household pet phobias, and I know which I’d go for.

We all know what we expect from a Bond movie by now, and by and large, this movie doesn’t deliver. This is a good thing. Granted, there’s still a fair bit of quippery and dubious seductive dialogue, but it’s all done with a healthy amount of (whisper it) irony to go along with the cheese. Things almost veer too far in this direction, in fact; at some points the movie seems to come crashing to a halt in order to send up some bit of Bond lore, as if the writers felt the need to sledgehammer the audience with the message that THIS IS DIFFERENT. Coming shortly after Bond (with a complete lack of irony) explodes the bottom of a man who was trying to drive an airport truck into a prototype passenger jet, this gets a bit rich*.

But still: there’s no Q. No-one tells Bond to “pay attention”. No missiles are fired from the front of an implausible car. There aren’t any lasers, let alone sharks. The only car chase ends in about 8 seconds, without the two cars getting anywhere near each other, let alone using their ejector seats. While the airport duel is pretty classic Bond, it’s almost incidental in the bigger picture. This could be because the bigger picture is rather confusing, the screenwriting equivalent of a Picasso; noses everywhere, other limbs wherever they fit.

This didn’t really matter much, because the plot was just an excuse to get the characters in one room, in tuxedos. This movie involved poker. Quite a lot of poker. Even if you ignore the double-entendre potential of the word “poker”, as the script remarkably does, there was more than enough to go around. Luckily for those not well-versed in the ins and outs of high stakes Hold ‘Em, there was a bumbling french character on hand to explain what was going on to the Bond girl.

“Zey are all in; zat means ‘ooever wins zis ‘and is ze winner.”

Ze Bond girl in question was of course a highly experienced international banker sent to oversee the management of $15 million, but it was still nice of him to fill her in on this basic matter of betting protocol. Nonetheless, Eva Green survived this outrageous patronisation and gave every impression of being really rather clever, despite spending almost all of her screen time being overtly leered over by both Jim and the surrogate Clouseau.

The last line of the movie is The Line, studiously avoided for the preceding two and a half hours. After about 45 minutes of false endings, a ludicrously tacked-on romance, betrayal, counter-betrayal, revelation and catastrophic loss, Daniel Craig finally shoots someone right in the fucking ankle (grrr!). He stands over their cowering form and says:

“The name’s Bond. James Bond.”

And he is.

* For those curious as to how one might ironically explode a potential terrorist’s bottom, the trick is to find a terrorist hell-bent on blowing up a liposuction lab.