Archives for 2011

“I’m more loyal to Caffè Nero than I am to any other institution. I care more for the Sicilian lemon cheesecake it serves than I do for parliamentary democracy and, while I would sooner have my penis surgically removed and sold as a pestle in a branch of Recipease, Jamie Oliver’s delicatessen chain, than rise to toast the Queen, I stand up proudly by the counter in Caffè Nero, near-saluting when the time comes to pay for my triple-shot latte and the aforementioned cake. If you want the clincher: I possess a Caffè Nero loyalty card, a scrap of blue and black card that stands in the same relation to the contemporary left-liberal bourgeoisie as a party membership card did to earlier generations.

“However, in the past few months, a certain scepticism has crept in – this could be the post-Hungarian Revolution moment in my relationship with the chain. It’s become such a shibboleth among the caffeinated classes to babble that Caffè Nero is the only coffee shop worth its cinnamon sprinkles that I began to be suspicious of the orthodoxy.

“This seemed like a good week to put my loyalty to the ultimate test. There’s no doubt in my febrile mind that a coffee and a snack is what passes for a real meal in this day and age and, besides, I had a botched molar extraction last week and have developed something sinisterly dubbed a ‘dry socket’ (alveolar osteitis, if you want some real Latin), a hole through the necrotic gum to the exposed bone that feels to the pained and probing tongue bigger than my mouth – hell, bigger than all 400-plus branches of Caffè Nero put together. Eating, as you can appreciate, seems faintly preposterous under such circumstances.

“So, one grey morning on the clone high street, with the terrier snapping at his leash, I commit the ultimate act of disloyalty by buying a single espresso at Starbucks, then strolling three doors down to Caffè Nero, entering and buying a second espresso.

“For cover, I also select a honey bio-yoghurt, an orange juice, a blueberry muffin and something called a ‘brunch pot’, which sounds like a dubious sexual practice but is, in reality, ‘creamy, half-fat, Greek-style yoghurt with blueberry compote and crunchy muesli with dried cranberries’, or so the label assures me.

“‘Will you have this here?’ asks the charming Slovak girl by the register and I moan: ‘Sure, I think I’m going to stay for ever. I can’t go home.’ Which is all by way of further cover, because there I am, in the oxblood-painted interior of Caffè Nero, eyeballing a weird arrangement of woody stems, decorticated dried tangerine skins and artichokes (what’s that about?) while sipping a Starbucks coffee! Surely such a profanation is tantamount to pissing on the Kaaba or committing B&E at the Vatican, then eating a saintly relic, and yet … and yet … nothing happens. The Starbucks espresso is still hot and it has that distinctively watery, sourly flat taste I always associate with the chain. But what of the Caffè Nero espresso, coddled in its china egg cup? Yes, yes . . . It’s fuller and rounder and definitively better.

“What a relief! My breast swells once more with loyalty, but I rein in my impulse to down the whole shot – I’ve already had my customary four at home before the school run and if I carry on, my thoughts will spill from my buzzed-up bonce like polystyrene pellets from a slashed sag bag. Even so, as I plough through my yoghurts and pop Nurofen with slugs of OJ, I find myself salaciously eyeing the other customers who are, almost to a woman, what I understand – from surreptitious glances at the magazines my local newsagent Mohandra shelves above the NS – to be Milfs and cougars.

“Blimey! Who’d have imagined a mid-morning chain coffee shop to be such a sensual moshpit? Is it just me or is there an actual hormonal haze wreathing the counter? When one of them comes across to pat the terrier, who’s lying on my lap, I nearly leap out of my chair. I can barely read the screed on the board, which is just as well because, when I put on my glasses, the blur resolves into: ‘Super-thick and finished with whipped cream and Belgian chocolate’. As for the sign above the muffins – ‘Don’t squeeze me until I’m yours’ – there ought to be a law against it. Or perhaps a law in support of it, because, I now realise, having come into Caffè Nero to test my loyalty, I’ve instead assayed my fidelity. I should definitely get out less.”

The latest Madness of Crowds column looks at, er, the dynamics of crowd behaviour:

“It’s been a fantastic three months for those of us gripped by the dynamics of crowds. First, we had student demonstrations here in Britain spiralling out of control; then, we saw Tunisians link arms to push out their corrupt regime; finally, millions took to the streets of Egyptian cities, pitting their sheer weight of numbers against the sclerotic – but still vicious – government of Hosni Mubarak.

“Perhaps the most celebrated analyst of the crowd was the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, whose 1960 magnum opus, Crowds and Power, aimed to do for modern mass movements what Frazer’s Golden Bough did for “primitive” ritual. To Canetti, both socialism and capitalism were political systems defined by “the modern frenzy of increase”, in which production led to ever bigger crowds of goods and consumers.

“This sense of industrialised society as a crowd, at root, directs Canetti to his definition of power as the coincidence of the desires of the ruler(s) and the ruled.

“By this view, it’s easy to understand the presence of crowds of people on the streets as symptomatic of a disjunction between the two: only when the crowd has been reabsorbed into the social fabric has synchronous equilibrium been achieved. In Canetti’s jargon, the crowd in Tahrir Square was ‘stagnating’, whereas the crowds of the quiescent Cairene unemployed before the revolt could be characterised as ‘rhythmic’.

“Canetti showed a nice understanding of how masses of people make their own political weather when he caustically observed that ‘fire unites a theatre more than a play can’ – but his vision was underscored by the apocalyptic mood music of mutually assured destruction. ‘Rulers tremble today,’ he wrote, not ‘because they are rulers but as the equals of everyone else . . . Either everyone will survive or no one.’

“Fifty years on, and with examples of people power toppling regimes from Iran to Russia and Ukraine and – almost – back again, we’ve come to believe that there is an inherent ‘goodness’ to the crowd. At least, this is what we believe in the west, where, apart from kettled teens jiggling to dubstep and lobbing firecrackers, the mob has become a purely recreational event. Our crowds hold up lighters and sway in stadiums; their mobs do away with tyrants, replacing rulers we were happy to do business with, one hopes, others we’re even happier to do business with.

“One man who experienced an epiphany while holding up a lighter at a stadium-rock gig was the inappropriately named Professor Keith Still. This mathematician was moved to invent the science – if it is one – of ‘crowd dynamics’, a discipline he teaches at Bucks New University and on a course at the UK Cabinet Office Emergency Planning College.

“A few weeks ago, I heard Still speaking on the radio about his work for the Saudi Arabian government, ensuring that the millions of pilgrims descending on Mecca for the Haj don’t crush each other to death. I was struck by the technicality of Still’s exposition and so, when crowds took to the streets across the Middle East, it seemed to me that he was the person to consult, rather than some woolly-minded foreign-policy expert.

“I sent Professor Still a suitably humble email: ‘I appreciate that your methodology is not able to tell us whether or not crowd power will oust Mubarak but, nonetheless, it does occur to me that there is some kind of metric at work in the interaction between largely unarmed demonstrators, passive troops and active police – I wondered if you had any comment?’ As quickly as a stampeding mob came back the prof’s reply: ‘We have a range of models for assessing risk to the crowd and this is the sort of application we use for training purposes. I’m not sure I could comment further, other than that the type of work I do is related to understanding crowd behaviour and anticipating action/ reaction in this kind of situation.’ He then referred me to his website.

“Rather than being chagrined, I was gratified. There’s a fabulous section on Still’s site that details incidents of ‘crowd crazing’, when businesses hype up crowds for sales and openings. One fatal ‘crazing’ happened in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2004, when 20,000 people turned up for the opening of a new Ikea. I dare say Still’s crowd dynamics might have prevented this – but only Canetti could have explained it.”

“I feel it in my fingers/I feel it in my toes/Love is all around me/And so the feeling grows . . .” So have crooned a succession of pop stars, from the Troggs, who first coined the expression, to Bill Nighy and Wet Wet Wet. But from where I’m sitting a more plausible candidate for omni­presence would be cancer. Let’s make the substitution and see how it sounds: “I feel it in my fingers/I feel it in my toes/Cancer is all around me/And so the feeling grows . . .” Ye-es, much better, I’m sure you’ll agree.

“Both of my parents died of cancer; my wife is receiving radiotherapy for breast cancer; the sister of one of my closest friends is in a hospice dying of lung cancer; I was on the phone recently to another friend whose breast cancer – treated a decade ago with a mastectomy and chemotherapy – has recurred and metastasised into her bones; another good friend is suffering from throat cancer; indeed, cancer is so much all around me that two people I know well are being treated for leukaemia in the same ward of the same hospital.”

Read the rest of Self’s New Statesman piece here.