I am dining with Jonathan Meades. The restaurant critic, presenter of Abroad in Britain, and now author of Pompey – the fattest and most scatological novel in recent memory – has a fearsome reputation. ‘He’s detached from the human race and would be just as happy to meet Dennis Nilsen at a dinner party as Mother Teresa,’ says a rival food critic. ‘He enjoys poking about in the nasty bits of pigs’ guts and people’s lives,’ comments another. ‘He borrows an intimidatory technique from Brando, of staring and pretending to be deaf.’

Meades, 46, is known for wearing black, a fedora hat and National Health tinted spectacles. But he arrives in purple tie and suede shoes with accommodating manner. He’s also renowned for his arcane vocabulary (it’s likely that the OED takes its lead from him) and uses words like eldritch, mansarded, naphthalic and salchows.

He’s currently making a film about vertigo for a new series, Further Abroad. ‘I suffered so badly from vertigo once that I had to crawl back along Clifton suspension bridge.’ And one about pigs. ‘The good thing about pigs is that they can be your best friend and you can eat them as well.’ His book, Pompey, is populated with people like a loopy paraplegic ex-comedian, a firework-maker and his four children by different mothers: one sees his father eaten by a crocodile in the Congo, one is a porn star, another brings an Aids-like disease to Europe as a result of eating a pygmy.

Does Meades aim to shock and repulse? ‘These things don’t seem that abnormal to me. I revel in them. Maybe it’s a question of the ancient truism that your subject chooses you . . .’ Does that make him a revolting person? ‘No. I’m absolutely charming, like a little old lady out of Muriel Spark.’ Not a psychopath? ‘I regard myself as an absolute paragon of normality. One does, doesn’t one?’

He’s renowned for his prodigious appetite. It is said that when he dines, the waiters queue up on the pavement to serve him. And he ‘probably’ drinks too much, becoming boorish. So will he eat black pudding or entrails en croute? He belies his offal reputation, choosing only a little goose liver and guinea fowl and mineral water. ‘I quite like dead guinea fowl.’ Would he eat people? The pianist tinkles in the background. ‘I don’t know. I wouldn’t eat dog. I loathe dogs. To eat something is a way of cherishing it. Of keeping it inside and paying it some sort of posthumous compliment.’ He laughs. ‘My idea of a good dog is one that’s just been run over.’

A lot of things prompt anger in Meades. ‘Traffic, Esther Rantzen, dog shit, Michael Parkinson. Normal things which any sentient civilised person would be provoked to anger by.’ He hates conformity, ditherers, pseuds, the stupid and drab. ‘I hate provincial GPs. I hate the provincial professional classes. I can’t say I hate the working classes in toto but . . .’ He toys with his puree of peas, goose liver, tagliatelle and truffles. ‘I enjoy hating. It gives me pleasure. It’s like a carousel of misanthropy which is fuelled by new hates all the time.’

Meades lives in Kilburn, where he reads eclectically. Twice married, he has four daughters, including 12-year-old twins. He doesn’t want any boys. ‘They’re extremely aggressive and very alarming. Backward compared to girls and very unsubtle.’

His first marriage lasted three years. ‘I don’t have any comments about relationships. They either come off or they don’t,’ he says camply. He remarks that his campness is a form of irony.

He was brought up in Wiltshire and went to Salisbury Cathedral School and various crammers. ‘I walked out of school at 16. It was too illiberal. I had to go to chapel all the time.’

An only child, his father was a Crawford biscuits salesman and his mother a teacher. ‘Most of my friends had parents who were much younger. I envied them quite a lot.’ His mother was 37 when he was born. ‘My childhood wasn’t particularly happy or unhappy. I was very much left to my own devices. I was at quite a loose end most of the time.’

He was trained at Rada in the Sixties. Naturally he landed a role as a deaf-mute child murderer in a film that never got made. He liked acting but despised the luvvies. ‘I dislike theatre because it’s so boring.’ What sort of actor would he have made? ‘I was good at simpletons and psychopaths. I dare say I could have broadened my range to include upper-class bastards.’ This, he says, has nothing to do with identification.

Meades doesn’t expect anything from life. ‘I’m completely nihilistic and don’t believe in anything. I don’t even expect a certain degree of material well-being.’ The death of his father and split with his long-standing girlfriend when he was 32 affected his attitudes profoundly. ‘You become brutally insensitive.’ He’s taken the line from Joe Orton and doesn’t really believe it of himself.

‘I think it’s mad to expect happiness,’ he continues, in lachrymose tone. ‘It’s nice when it happens, but counting on it is a ludicrous presumption. I remember when I was 17 and cycled from school with two litres of cider to Cothay, a medieval house in Somerset. I was happy that particular day. That’s 29 years ago,’ he says, deadpan. ‘One’s been happy since for brief moments.’

In his writing, he refuses to give moral assurances. ‘I don’t have any great hope for the future. I don’t think things get better.’ He puffs on his Marlboro. ‘I think we’re in a state of original sin. We’re born imperfect and remain that way.’ He doesn’t believe in redemption for anything except perhaps overeating.

He’s heavy-weight, very clever and with a timidity hidden beneath the act. Perhaps the Meades beneath the fedora and scatological misanthropy is just a nice middle-class boy?