From Rayner's PFD biography:

"Jay Rayner is an award-winning journalist, writer and broadcaster. He joined the Observer newspaper straight out of Leeds University in 1988 as a columnist, after a year editing the student newspaper. He has since gone on to write for almost all the broadsheet nationals as well as a wide variety of magazines from GQ and Esquire, through Cosmopolitan (for whom he was a contributing editor) to the New Statesman and Granta;... He is a very mediocre jazz pianist."

Which means he's never had a proper job, and writes about so many subjects that that he can safely be said to know next to nothing about any of them. GQ, Esquire and Cosmopolitan? Another fucking lifestyle journalist with no real life of his own. Needs to get out more.

Anyway, what on earth are you doing reading restaurant reviews?

Raynor is a tedious tosser, who should be ignored and left to his "Essex girl of desserts". I'm currently in email discussion with Chris Wood about this 'incest and Morris dancing' stuff, and I think he makes too much of it.

Anyone truly offended by such tosh is clearly of the mistaken belief that the Weltanschauung of the Guardian has an influence that extends beyond the coffee houses of Hampstead and Islington (another, only partly justifiable, stereotype). Well, it doesn't, and you know how positive real people can be when they see Morris dancers performing in their sarf London manor.

Do you have a link to the Morris dance discussion?

Call a tosser a tosser (as I shall do shortly over at the Trots), and be done with it. Righteous indignation is misplaced when it concerns metrosexual pondlife such as Rayner.

Here and here.