Most weekday mornings I get up and make pancakes for the two of my children who still live at home. I can cook a passable Irish stew or lasagne – I’ve been known to attempt a ribollita or caldo verde (the peasant soup is a particular love of mine, of which more later) – but most parties agree that I excel at pancakes. I’m not talking about the big thin pancakes the English sprinkle sugar on and douse with lemon juice – these, the floppy wafers of the Anglican Communion, are quite alien to me. No, the pancakes I make are American ones: about five inches in diameter, nicely browned, and almost fluffy in consistency. These are served with maple syrup or strawberry jam, and accompanied by grilled bacon.

When I was a child and friends came to our house and were served with pancakes by my American mother, they’d wrinkle up their little noses and say, “Ooh, drop scones” or, “Aren’t those Scots pancakes?” Either response infuriated me, and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” would swell in my inner ear as I rounded on them: “These are American pancakes!” Now, of course, such is the mid-Atlantic character of our cuisine that you can feast on a stack of the things in your local chain café, but it remains the case that if I make any oath of allegiance at all it’s to the American pancake, not the president. Shortly before my mother died, I got her to pass the recipe on, and while she never lived to see her grandchildren, I like to think of her as being constantly reincarnated for them in the form of these tasty discs.

The recipe is perfectly simple: self-raising flour, eggs, milk, water, sugar, salt, melted butter. I’ve no idea about precise quantities – having long since learned to mix the batter by eye – but my cooking really has nothing ad hoc about it. Each stage of the process is perfectly integrated with the morning routine: while the butter is melting in the frying pan I pour the flour into the mixing bowl; once the first batch is cooking I take the time before turning them to clear the plate dryer, or set the table; as I add to finished pancakes heating in the oven, so I perform other necessary tasks; and when the boys begin eating I start on the washing-up – my aim is to be seamless, so that the whole business is done with shortly after they finish eating.

I suspect my love of pancake breakfast has as much to do with this production line as it does with any desire to nurture my offspring, or culinary atavism: making pancakes in the morning makes me feel like part of the common weal, just another spatula-wielder trying to add to the great mound of steaming growth necessary to fuel our resurgent economy.

Indeed, such is my enthusiasm for this cod-utility that I usually make too many of the damn things. “You’ve beaten me,” one or other of the boys will often groan, looking despairingly at the pile still in front of him while clutching his bulging tummy. “Are you sure?” I’ll chivvy him, looking manically from pan to mouth and wondering whether I can shoot another batter-puck in there while he’s distracted.

My mother wasn’t exactly a versatile cook, but she tried hard. She also battled with her weight for the last 20-odd (very odd) years of her life. I remember her standing in front of the mirror in a slip when I was a small child and chanting in a despairing mantra: “Fat and old, fat and old . . .”; sometimes I wonder if that’s what I’m trying to do to her grandchildren: pump them so full of pancakes that they, too, will be fat and old. She also had a somewhat conflicted relationship with her ethnicity, believing – on no basis whatsoever as far as I could see – that no one really knew she was Jewish. Even if this were the case, she was forever blowing her cover by cooking up steamy heaps of faecal-
seeming chopped liver, or frying potato latkes, or boiling enormous vats of – yes, you guessed it – chicken soup.

Mother tended towards stereotypy in her belief that most of the world’s ills could be cured by a bowl or three of chicken soup. She made a great chicken soup: the broth clear but oily, while floating in this were bits of carrot, celery and fowl, as down below a shingle of pearl barley shifted. When she began dying I looked at her incredulously: surely anyone who’d supped such a catholicon for a lifetime couldn’t actually expire? But expire she did, and before I’d got her recipe off her. Really it would be a lot better if I could feed the whelps chicken soup – all of that flour is propelling them speedily on their way to fashionable wheat intolerance, and as for the sugar and salt, it’s shameful. But given that I have just the one hand-me-down recipe, I keep on following it, as if it were a culinary transcriptase that had to be written into the next generation.

Last Shrove Tuesday, the boys’ older sister asked me for the recipe and I relayed it over the phone to her while she mixed the batter in her student flat. I asked her later if the pancakes had gone down well and she said they had, but her friends said they weren’t proper pancakes – only drop scones.

I’m whisking in my grave – and I’m not even dead yet.

It was difficult to contain one’s emotions: after 42 years’ service, the Clerk of the House of Commons, Sir Robert Rogers, has retired. A fluffy-wigged and bearded presence who sat below the Speaker dispensing advice on procedural matters, and who heretofore made little or no impression on the wider world, Sir Robert was given a lengthy round of applause by MPs following the reading of his resignation letter. I say it was difficult to contain one’s emotions – but I wasn’t even particularly near the chamber; I was lying in bed in my house about two miles away, listening to this effusion on Radio 4’s Today in Parliament. True, during particularly rambunctious Commons sessions (when, for example, Sally Bercow has forgotten to wipe the banana cream from her husband’s mouth), I can quite clearly hear the baying of our representatives: it rises even above the demented wail of police sirens, and the chunter of jets on the Heathrow flight path. It used to be that MPs were required to live within the sound of the division bell; nowadays a reasonable test of proximity would be whether they’re capable of hearing their colleagues’ barracking when abed.

Sir Robert’s letter praised our members of parliament; he said if only the country understood the absolutely terrific and selfless work they did, and how their great integrity was all that stood between us and an unfettered executive, we’d cease our bleating about their expenses-fiddling, influence-peddling and general loutishness. This wasn’t what he said verbatim, but it was the gist of it, and it went down extremely well with the flattered – they moaned their reverent acclamation: “Hear! Hear!” they cried, exhorting us via the state broadcaster to pay attention to how absolutely fabulous they were – and then they got on with the hard democratic graft of behaving like a bunch of minor public school boys huffing amyl nitrate. I believe it’s called Prime Minister’s Questions.

The House of Commons is the suited, booted and largely expensively educated crowd of louts that rampages at the heart of our body politic. You could have no clearer example of the crazed doublethink that typifies British public life than to look objectively upon the disjunction between the bewigged pomp of parliamentary protocol and the hair-tearing ruckus that MPs believe is integral to their “oversight”. It is nothing of the sort, naturally; rather, PMQs and other set-piece “debates” are merely a showcase for dumb macho posturing – the political equivalent of gorillas chest-beating. The vast bulk of Commons business takes place in a green leatherette desert, but once a week when the media chip up in earnest, so does the heavy mob.

A largely male, drunken and angry crowd is a scary thing, but at least it has a certain honesty about it. The affront the Commons presents to the electorate is that it’s such a half-arsed crowd. The noises they make! The collective sniggering and group moaning, the massed joshing and choruses of sneering! To heckle in a context where to do so is to break a profound social taboo – well, that has a certain brio and bravery; but to heckle en masse is simply to sound like a flock of silly geese. Parliamentarians themselves, and plenty of others in the Westminster village, say the fowl honking is the very tocsin of liberty. “What do you want?” they cry. “The dull and emasculated legislatures we see on the Continent?” But this is just another example of the binary thinking characteristic of English conservatism, whereby there is only ever one alternative to the status quo. Change the first-past-the-post voting system? You must be mad: we’ll end up like the Belgians, with no government at all, so protracted will the debates be between the fissiparous parties. Inaugurate a written constitution? Are you spark-a-loco? That way lies the revolutionary Terror! And so, wearily on.

What’s most galling about listening to the bovine lowing and swinish squealing of our £70K-per-annum senators is quite how blissfully unaware of their behaviour they seem to be. Rather like small children who believe they can’t be seen so long as they cover their eyes, MPs seem to think they are de-individuated by the crowd of suiting and skirting surrounding them, and so they gibber and they groan, they throw feeble taunts and make feebler still ripostes.

It’s often said of the British parliament that it is the most exclusive club in the country; and, like all clubs, it fosters its sense of exclusiveness by subjecting new members to humiliating rituals in combination with outrageous benefits. It is this classic double bind, whereby you are allowed to behave like a fractious child while being accorded honorifics, which ensures that our so-called democracy operates according to the dynamic of any other dysfunctional family.

It is perfectly true that there are other areas of Commons business that are conducted with something like decorum, probity and efficiency. But you have to be a wonk of the first order to listen to the deliberations of the public accounts committee under its redoubtable chair, Margaret Hodge. Ms Hodge may well call warped bankers to account for selling off the Royal Mail for a mess of pottage to speculator pals of the Chancellor, but as long as mob rule is all that checks our electoral tyranny (and that for only 30 minutes a week), we have no recourse from the madness of the pinstriped crowd.

Read Will Self’s latest On location column for the New Statesman here.

If, as Nietzsche assures us, wit is the epitaph of an emotion, what then is the crisp if not the apotheosis of hunger? The crisp promises so much – yet delivers nothing at all. Vladimir Putin disdains the alcohol that transmogrifies his countrymen and women into slobbering, soulful wretches but I’d wager he forgoes crisps as well. When I consider the amount of time I’ve wasted eating crisps – let alone the money I’ve spent on these fried and friable folderols – it occurs to me that, sans crunch, I might easily have gained control of the Russian Federation and turned it into my own personal fiefdom.

With almost any snack food, no matter how grimly artificial, there is still meaningful discrimination to be made. You can look back to a better sausage roll – conceivably even a finer cheese football or Twiglet – but when it comes to the crisp, “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” is not a question worth posing. The paradox is this: each and every crisp leaves bag or bowl with a sort of nimbus of individuality surrounding it. “I,” it rustles to you, “am the one and only crisp, the crisp you’ve waited for all your life. Only I can satisfy you and I can do it because of my unique characteristics: I am the most flavoursome! I am the very epitome of crispiness itself!” And despite having been taken in a hundred thousand times or more by such salty nothings, we still bite down expecting things to be different, only for our true love, within a couple of spasms, to become subsumed to the goo constituting its predecessors.

Yes, yes, I know. You protest that you remember the bags of Smith’s or Golden Wonder that, as a child, you were handed through the back door of the pub with great affection. But that’s just it: note the plural. These werebags that you enjoyed, probably bags and bags and bags; for, even more than chewing gum, the crisp is the food that brings us closest to the ruminants and you wouldn’t expect a cow to discourse too meaningfully on the greatest mouthful of grass she ever chewed. I, too, enjoyed those bags of crisps but I recognise now that these were only the flimsy gateways I shouldered my way through into a lifetime of addiction.

Yes, addiction. I don’t use the word lightly in its traditional sense – we’re not addicted to crisps in the way a minor cleric in the Church of England might be addicted to reading the novels of Anthony Trollope. I’m talking about full-blown, vein-clogging, pavement-scouring, down-and-outing pathological addiction – the kind usually associated with crack cocaine or the novels of George R R Martin. The only reason we don’t acknowledge our addiction to crisps to be such is that we have ordered things so our supply can never be interrupted and warped our social conventions so their use (note I don’t say “consumption”) is almost always acceptable. Even in circumstances where to munch would be completely beyond the pale – for example, listening to András Schiff play the Goldberg Variations at Wigmore Hall – you’re still allowed (nay, encouraged) to rush out in the interval and crunch up a storm.

And bite down on this: crisps are incredibly unhealthy. Full of salt and sugar and seemingly designed to inflict dental caries, since the spatula-like forms they assume during their pitifully short half-lives thrust all that salt and sugar up between root and gum. Don’t take my word for it. Ask any cardiologist or dentist: crisps are the enemy. But if everything I’ve said so far isn’t enough to convince you, then here’s the clencher: the artisan crisp. Just as evil drug barons employ chemists to synthesise new and more addictive narcotics to enslave our vulnerable youth, so small potato growers in Shropshire band together, sousing crisps in cider vinegar and sprinkling them with rosemary in order to do the same to our feckless bourgeoisie.

Is there anything – and I mean anything – more useless and destructive than an artisan crisp? At least your common-or-garden crisp is, no matter how pernicious, an established feature in our culinary landscape. But the artisan variety? Cardamom and fenugreek, garlic and chilli, black pepper and sea salt: these are just some of thegrotesque additives these “artisans” coat their death discs with! It almost makes me yearn for the landlocked prawn cocktail flavourings of yore.

Then there are crinkle-cut and skin-on crisps, thick-cut and Kettle – all of which exhibit the same homicidal inclinations, stabbing at cheek and tongue with their tooth-tooled daggers. Last summer, my son and I walked almost the length of England and nearly every pub we came to was serving up some new take on this beastliness. After about a week of it, his poor little mouth almost cut to ribbons by these “snacks”, he was begging me for relief. “No more artisan crisps, Dad,” he moaned. “Please.”

But, poor child, he was ignorant of the psychological horror of crisp addiction, of how it takes only a few minutes for the memory of both crisp hit and devilish crisp comedown to be washed away by God-given saliva. Come the next pub, he would be clamouring for more of the wretched things. I identify: I mean, I am writing an entire column on the subject but once I’ve finished I’m heading straight to the corner shop. I’m feeling a little peckish and there’s a bag of crisps there with my name written on it.

I was hungover and jittery in St Louis, and there was a blizzard raging across the Midwest. As I looked at the departures board in the airport it riffled into DELAYED, DELAYED, DELAYED . . . the only exception being the New York flight: my own. Cursing this glitch that was sending me to my doom, I tramped down the companionway, reflecting ruefully on how my last moments on earth were to be spent noting, yet again, the bizarre habit air transport infrastructure designers have of fitting odd vertical surfaces with carpet.

On board the plane, things got worse: it was virtually empty, confirming my worst suspicion – to fly in this maelstrom was suicide and the other passengers had all checked in to the airport Sofitel to watch reruns of Friends. I have heard it said often enough that you should be worried on a plane only when the flight crew start to look anxious – but I couldn’t even see any stewards to assess, and we were still on the tarmac.

I plonked myself down beside the only other passenger. It’s a tactic I had used in the past to ameliorate my fear: because I’m at least demi-English, not keeping a moderately rigid upper lip can strike me as a greater solecism than dying quite pointlessly. “Nervous?” my neighbour enquired. He was youngish, casually dressed, and the picture of sang-froid. I explained that I felt I’d every right to be, given this was the only flight taking off into the kind of weather that did for Captain Oates. “You shouldn’t be,” he said. “These planes are flown on a wire – that’s the expression we use – and it’s effectively impossible for weather to bring them down.” Realising that my companion had a professional interest in such things, I began pumping him. It transpired he was a cockpit fascia designer heading home from the Boeing plant in Seattle.

Over the next hour or so he patiently explained to me a great deal about how commercial airliners are designed and built. I remember that at one point – in response to my pathetic whine, “But they’re so heavy. How can they stay in the air?” – he said: “On the contrary, given the laws of physics it’s impossible for them not to stay in the air – and you believe in the laws of physics, don’t you?”

Whether I believed in the laws of physics, I believed in him, and had been pretty much oblivious to the humping, bumping and shuddering as we surfed the jet stream. As we made our approach in to Newark, I thanked my airborne life coach and firmly resolved never to succumb to such irrational idiocy ever again.

That was almost 20 years ago, and by and large I’ve managed it; from time to time I’ll have a little babbling relapse, but mostly I behave myself, sitting there motionless in deep-vein-thrombosis-inducing thought as the big titanium tube thunders through the sky. In the days when I was seriously scared of flying, I’d look around at my fellow passengers and marvel at their detachment. How could they go on reading Jeffrey Archer or scanning spreadsheets while we were hurtling towards our destruction? But after the St Louis blues I began to understand: flying itself may require no magic, but fearless flying relies on a collective delusion of occult proportions. For to sit calmly with only a bit of carpet and some tinplate underlay between you and the void, you must not only be a believer in the laws of physics, but a believer in progress, a believer in growth, a believer in connectivity, a believer in tourism, a believer – in the final analysis – in the whole crazy carnival of so-called globalisation.

That is my fundamental problem. Not having a proper job of my own, I labour under a different delusion – that I’m free; and when I find myself strapped into a chair and being sold plastic sandwiches at €7 a pop, the delusion is punctured and I start brooding on the utter weirdness of my predicament. After all, mass jet travel is only a very recent phenomenon and people have been plummeting out of the sky since Icarus Airlines operated the low-cost route from Minos.

Only contact with people whose work consists of flying can act as a prophylactic against this inability of mine to suspend disbelief in the raw mechanics of late capitalism. The only flights on which I’ve ever felt at complete ease are the ones where I’ve been in the cockpit with the pilot; and since the 9/11 attacks that’s difficult to organise on commercial flights.

A fortnight ago when the Malaysian Airlines flight went missing over the South China Sea all my feelings about the madness of international air travellers came screaming back to me. Consider this: had the plane crashed in a comprehensible way – due to mechanical or human error, or even terrorism – people might have been upset for a few seconds or hours, but soon enough they’d have got on with it (whatever “it” is). However, the mystery of the plane’s disappearance sent a shiver through the collective psyche, because, I’d argue, it darkly shaded the enigma of all our lives: why, in the final analysis, do we get out of bed in the morning at all, let alone get on a plane?

Harvey Woolfe, a regular consumer of Real Meals, writes to suggest that I tackle the vexed question of cinema food. He observes that whereas there are tintinnabulating warnings in advance of every screening that patrons should put their mobile phones on silent, there is nothing done about the clash of their jaws, the gargling of their gullets, or – my favourite, this – that peculiarly gravelly noise the last few centilitres of a fizzy beverage makes as it is sucked up a straw from a waxed paper cup. Indeed, the policy of film-house management is positively to encourage comestibles (the noisier the better) by flogging them in the foyer. Harvey speculates that it’s all about profit, Statesmanlike socialist that he presumably is, but the horror show that is screen snacking is actually rather zeitgeisty. I heard a DJ on the radio the other day saying that he’s set up a pressure group to campaign for better viewing behaviour, following an incident in which his subtitled enjoyment was compromised by other patrons munching and chewing the fat on their dog-and-bones.

Well, good luck to them all but I’m afraid I can’t lend my shoulder to this particular wheel of processed cheese. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as incensed by inconsiderate eating as the next intolerant middle-aged cinemagoer; in fact, probably a great deal more so. I’ve been known to offer to meet these swine in the lobby and serve them a knuckle sandwich if they don’t desist, but on balance I accept it as part of the rough and tumble of popular entertainment. The thing is that films and food are a gestalt that’s been fully formed since the Keystone Kops were slinging custard pies; to go to the cinema and not shell out £3.50 for a bag of chocolate-coated peanuts that you could – with even infinitesimal foresight – have got around the corner at a fraction of the price would be a paradoxically impoverishing experience.

The same goes for those evilly glowing hot dogs that birl on their metal rollers; and for great, glistening heaps of buttery popcorn; and not to top off such a rotten repast with a demijohn of carbonated corn syrup would be a solecism on a par with loudly demanding ketchup at a state banquet. Besides, the artier cinemas usually offer quieter food – flapjacks, ham croissants, chai lattes – and the artier films attract thinner spectators. You’re unlikely to find yourself at a late-night screening of, say, Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal with someone behind you lustily squelching wine gums. True, there is the occasional nightmarish crossover situation when what should be a famished cinematic road gets hopelessly jammed. My own enjoyment (if that is the appropriate term) of 12 Years a Slave was rather undercut by being surrounded by wage slaves who happily troughed their way through every excoriation.

Still, it made me see the film in a different light – by the end I was interrogating Chiwetel Ejiofor with my eyes, and thinking: “Hmm, you’re looking a little porky for a man in bondage . . .”

Ignoble thoughts, certainly, but it makes me suspect that instead of a blanket ban on cinema eating, we require appropriate dishes. After all, what was it that the Italian futurist Marinetti demanded for his fascist banquet: raw meat torn by trumpet blasts. So, for 12 Years, punters should be offered hominy grits, rice and beans; for Shame, Steve McQueen’s superb anatomising of sex addiction, they should be given flavoured condoms to lick, Viagra to snack on and pubic hairs to thread between their teeth; and for his debut feature as a director, Hunger, there should indeed be not so much as a melt-melded bag of Revels on sale.

All of which reminds me of a photograph I was emailed a few years ago that showed the seat occupied by a Very Big Movie Producer during a screening of an epic tale of starving polar explorers. This producer is both fiscally big and morbidly obese, and he had munched his way through the film in the most egregious fashion. There, forming a sort of blast pattern on the carpet, was the evidence of his insane appetite: half-chewed candy bars and hot dogs had been cast aside, litres of soda spurted skyward, and the finger-fumbled popcorn lay as thick and white as pack ice.

This is the dietary nightmare that underpins the whipped cream of the dream factory, and it is – as the mogul would no doubt concur – non-negotiable: snacking belongs to passive forms of entertainment as Pearl does to Dean.

I went to the theatre this week to see Francesca Annis in Peter Gill’s new play, Versailles. It’s an oxymoronically modern period piece, set in a late-Edwardian country house during the Paris peace conference of 1919, that gratifies playgoers with the unearned but amusing right of hindsight. At one point a character says of the lower middle class: “They have a capacity for single-mindedness that could lead them anywhere,” at which everyone laughed knowingly. In the interval I chatted amiably with Melvyn Bragg, another reader of this column. We both had ice creams – mine was Belgian chocolate, his stem ginger flavour. Both cost a reassuring £4.50.

I say to Harvey Woolfe, what’s good enough for His Lordship is good enough for everyone; surely that’s what men died for at Ypres and Passchendaele?