On the cover of the Daily Mail the other day, there was an aerial photograph of the Thameside town of Shepperton, its achingly dull semis and prosaic garage forecourts submerged in the muddy brown effluvium. The editor of the New Statesman emailed me: “Your pal Jim wouldn’t have been surprised.” This reference to the late JG Ballard, for many years Shepperton’s most notorious resident, got me thinking about the strange conceptual flotsam that the current deluges are dumping on the floodplain of our collective psyche.

Ballard’s fiction brought into sharp relief many of the jagged realities submerged beneath our comforting sense of homeliness. His world was at once relentlessly anthropic – a sodium-lit landscape of motorway fly­overs and concretised modernism – and subject to largely inexplicable environmental disasters. In his novels and stories, he drowned the world, parched it, crystallised it and blew it to pieces with a wind from nowhere. Neither the riverside residents of Wraysbury nor the seafront ones of Aberystwyth would find his oeuvre remotely escapist at the moment.

Ballard said of these odd juxtapositions between the banal and the extreme that they, in part, reflected the impact of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, which he had witnessed as a child. Growing up in the comfortable European concession, the son of a wealthy manufacturer, Ballard learned from the war that, “Reality as we mostly perceive it is a social construct”; the skull always lies beneath the skin, whether it’s the human capacity for evil or the weather’s for wanton destruction. You would have to have a very stony heart not to sympathise with the victims of the current flooding: encouraged by successive governments and by uncritical neoliberalism to place their faith and their savings in bricks and mortar, they now have to face the truth that a property bubble won’t keep them afloat.

Ballard found in the landscape around Shepperton strange echoes of the Shanghai of his childhood. In place of the flooded paddy fields, there were the vast reservoirs that rear up out of Staines Moor to the west of Heathrow Airport. If you walk from Shepperton to Heathrow – which I have done, partly in homage to Ballard – you pick your way between the grassy flanks of these leviathans, oddly conscious that like a unitary tribe of Israel you are in a man-made defile created in an artificial sea held in suspension above your head. Then, when your flight takes off, you see these acres of drinking-water-in-waiting glistening beneath you, with the Thames worming alongside, a natural flourish signed beneath the marks of man.

Our geography, for all that we valorise “areas of outstanding natural beauty”, is overwhelmingly a human construct: we understand places in terms of the economic imperatives associated with them. We drive to work, or to buy stuff, or to paid-for leisure activities – even our relationships are mediated by mileage costs and time constraints. And Britain, being the first industrialised nation and a smallish land mass to boot, bears the impress of the human foot more heavily than almost anywhere else. Even in the middle of Rannoch Moor in the Scottish Highlands, you are surrounded by a wilderness that is the product of Iron Age clearance.

The British unconscious registers this, while our daily go-round is tightly circumscribed by concrete and clay brick; so is it any wonder that when Bide-a-Wee gets resolutely pissed on, its inhabitants look to Cameron, that anagrammatic Cnut, to stem the tide? The practice of psychogeography owes its origins to the French surrealists and after them it was crystallised by the situationists; both these quasi-Marxist groupuscules looked to the dérive – or aimless drift – through the city as a means of freeing the individual from the physical constraints imposed on her by the nexus of late capitalism. I should imagine the last thing the washed-out householders of Surrey, Berkshire, Somerset, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire et al want to do is drift anywhere but that shouldn’t stop the rest of us from going against the prevailing current. To undertake psychogeography is to experience place in a transcendent and unbounded way – to feel the reality of things peeling from the social construction of location, location, location.

In the months to come, I will be writing columns that recount my psychogeographic practice – which I took up in my forties when I began to find this anthropic home of ours almost suffocating in its claustrophobia. Put another way, I could no longer bear to look at the three plaster ducks flying on the wall – I wanted to experience animated ones, paddling in a real brook. But this is not about nature worship – it is about resiling from the dominant consumerist culture that makes a place just a fungible commodity to be traded in the global market: you’ve done Prague, why not have a bit of Bratislava?

No doubt in a few weeks Shepperton will be high and dry once more but perhaps its residents’ biblical experience will lead them to seek out the sort of gnosis the one-time inhabitant of 36 Old Charlton Road excelled in producing. The art of living to the full consists not in securing a place for your home in this ever-inconstant and turbulent world, but in being at home in it even when the apocalyptic horsemen are stabled next door.

If motorway service centres with their sweaty agglomerations of Burger King, KFC and Costa are the brothels of fast food, then garages are its knocking shops: the places where stressed-out people commit unspeakable and degrading acts with Peperami. No one in their right mind would ever visit a garage for the love of gastronomy, yet everybody who’s passing through seizes the opportunity to put something in their mouth. Why, when the combination of foods that are necessarily high in salt and preservatives with the tension of driving almost always results in flatulence, heartburn, or – a meal deal – both?

My theory is that garage food feeds that portion of our psyche that, through long association, has begun to mutate into a car’s on-board computer. Every habitual driver knows the strange melding that occurs between them and their wheels: feet rubberise, eyes acquire two semicircles of clarity and girth expands to fit the carriageway available. After hours in this altered state, when the fuel gauge indicates that you’re hungry, you pull on to the forecourt and ram the nozzle in, only to discover that nothing is glugging into your stomach.

The human-car chimera next enters the kiosk. Once upon a time, this was just that – a small booth in which a man in an oil-stained boiler suit counted out half-crowns while sucking Spangles – but now this has prolapsed into a supermarket-sized zone of commerce, offering everything from foldaway barbecues and lottery tickets to hormone supplements for pre-op transsexuals … and stupid amounts of food.

There’s a garage at the Woodstock Road roundabout on the outskirts of Oxford where I regularly stop. On heading in to swipe the plastic, I am freaked anew every time by finding myself inside a fully functioning M&S Simply Food outlet, complete with north-Oxford yummy mummies wandering around putting duck à l’orange in their baskets while little Tansy kicks off in her Maclaren buggy. The gathering pace with which supermarkets have gone into coalition with petrol stations suggests that complete mutation is not far off and that soon consumers will fill buckets with a mixture of Strongbow and V-Power unleaded, add Cadbury Mini Eggs and a tube of Zovirax, then knock the whole cocktail back. There’s still a Wild Bean Café tucked into the far corner of this giant garage but once you’ve ploughed your way along furrows full of porcini and cod in miso sauce, will you feel like putting a flaccid, microwaved sausage roll between your lips?

Yes, of course you will! You’ll also drink the piss-poor crappuccino and buy lots and lots and lots of crisps. After all, there are the kids to consider (even if you’ve never had any or they’re grown-up) and everyone likes different flavours, so you’d better get at least three bags of Walkers and one of those big, white ones of Kettle Chips seasoned with sea salt, because they’re sort of healthy, aren’t they? And they suggest to you – subliminally, at least – that modern Britain is a sophisticated sort of place where, for a modest outlay, you can stab your gums until they bleed with spears of deep-fried potato and at the same time rub salt in those wounds. Oh, and then there are Jelly Babies and Bisodol and two folding chairs for a tenner and a bottle of vintage Taittinger, which you buy simply because it’s so bizarre to see such a thing – and, what with the petrol, the cash register doesn’t stop sticking its paper tongue out at you for quite a long time.

I was in the local garage at lunchtime today and a man in pale jeans and trainers was holding a “light” chicken teriyaki sandwich and a package of two “individual” Melton Mowbray pork pies while he filled out his form on one of those National Lottery stands that looks like a giant, upended, blue turd. I considered the croissants and pastries that had been “baked in-store throughout the day” and meditated on the “savoury eggs”, neither of which seemed any more appetising than Go-Cat, which was also available in bulk. I’m not trying to pretend I’m some sort of hardened ascetic, I can assure you. I’d have been sucking on that ageing breakfast muffin full of warm bacteria like it was my mammy’s teat if it weren’t for one limiting constraint: I’d walked to the garage, rather than driven there. Try doing this and I guarantee you won’t buy any garage food at all – except for crisps.

I hope some of you, after you finish reading this column, will go straight to urbaneat.co.uk, where you can find out all about such “real food” as the “hand-crafted” red Thai chicken wrap I saw advertised in my local Costa clone yesterday. (Costa clones are coffee shops so lacking in self-esteem that they’re “proud to serve Costa coffee”.) This particular wrap was pictured apparently lying in the roadway of Benefits Street – or at any rate, somewhere gritty and urban – with a disproportionately small sign by it that had been amended to read “a tasty DIVERSION”. The wrap got me to wondering: is it only me who’s noticed the way that wraps have stealthily and relentlessly infiltrated our fast-food culture? I asked my wife when she was first aware of wraps and she said, “Oh, the early 1990s, I suppose – I mean, they came in with Pret a Manger, didn’t they?”

I found her answer admirable, twining together as it did two equally hazy recent timelines into one uchronic vision of happy Labour party activists wolfing down wraps while they waved Union Jacks and watched Tony and Cherie skip up the steps of No 10. I don’t buy it: there may have been a few wraps around in the mid-Nineties but this was only a small and unleavened beachhead: the main invasion force came later.

It’s much the same sort of phenomenon as rap. There was some rap music and related phenomena (hip-hopping, crack-smoking, ho-bashing, bling-flashing) around as early as the beginning of the 1980s but it wasn’t until this millennium that rap was completely wefted through the wider cultural warp.

The more I thought about this, the more it seemed to me that the coincidence between wraps and rap was nothing of the sort; both are, after all, syncretic phenomena. In rap’s case, this is a fusion of African-American soul and funk with the turntable-created percussive breaks and other sound effects pioneered by Jamaican dub musicians such as Lee “Scratch” Perry. The wrap, on the other hand, comes from the Mexican burrito, by way of other flatbread snacks long present in the Turkish, Kurdish and Iranian cuisines, to name but three.

And while rap music is made by black working-class men and largely listened to by white middle-class boys, wraps are mostly made by economic migrants on zero-hours contracts and eaten by middle-class office workers on the hoof. You can see what I’m driving at here: it was only a matter of time before the red Thai chicken wrap came into being; even if no one had ever made one, such is its culturally overdetermined character that it would have had to self-assemble. That it should also be “halal approved” goes without saying – but should instead be shouted, like the muezzin’s call, from the rooftops of mud-brick houses.

The wrap is still more fundamental to western Judaeo-Christian and Islamic culture than we perhaps care to acknowledge: beside its great antiquity, the sandwich is a mere parvenu, the hamburger a mayfly that’s soon to … die. In Exodus, the Lord pelts the Israelites first with quail (yum!) and then with flatbread (or “manna”, as they perversely name it). It’s not recorded whether any Bronze Age Heston Blumenthal had the smart idea of boning the quail and wrapping it in the manna together with a few herby sprigs but how else can we explain the sacerdotal role that manna henceforth had? No one’s going to place a few manky bits of bread in the Ark of the Covenant alongside the Mosaic tablets – but a quail wrap makes perfect sense.

This also explains why the latter-day wraps have had such an easy time converting our dyspeptically secular society: they slot right into the atavistic hunger that torments us when, like the Israelites, we find ourselves wandering for 40 minutes in some desert part of town devoid of fast-food outlets. We see, perhaps, the oasis of a petrol station and, stumbling in, heave a sigh of relief, for the Lord in his infinite wisdom has seen fit to stock the shelves with wraps – wraps such as the chicken Caesar, another of Urban Eat’s “real foods”; hand-crafted with xanthan gum, sorbic acid, diphosphates, acidity regulator, modified maize starch, sodium carbonates, malic acid, mono and diglycerides of fatty acids and – in case your appetite isn’t fully whetted – that ingredient beloved of the people of the book, locust bean gum. Thanks be to God.

It must have been in the late spring of 1982. I went down to London from Oxford, where I was at university, to buy a bag of marijuana from a friend of a friend who had a room in a squat immediately behind Brixton police station. “It’s a great gaff to deal out of,” the bespectacled little fellow said. “I mean, this is the last place they’d come looking – right by their back door.” Maybe he was right; after all, it was only a year since Brixton had been up in flames, the railway bridge was still black with soot and the premises to either side of the squat were boarded up. It seemed reasonable to think that the police might have had more serious things on their mind.

We took our bag – it was a big green dustbin one and contained about half a pound of weed – and sauntered off into the city. Even with this plastic-wrapped potential jail sentence dangling from my hand, I didn’t feel particularly paranoid – but then some things don’t change and, statistically speaking, we were the wrong colour to get stopped and searched by the Met.

My friend, who is now a thoroughly respectable provincial solicitor, suggested that we go up to Clapham Common and have a snooze with our grass on the grass, which we did. We then sauntered back down Clapham High Street, took the Tube to Victoria and got the coach back up to Oxford. The reason I vividly recall that day has nothing to do with the marijuana at all – obviously – and everything to do with Clapham High Street, because I remember thinking, as we trolled down it in the late afternoon sunlight, what a benighted and miserable stretch of road it was. It had none of the vigour and buzz of Brixton Road and on the way from the common to Clapham North Tube – where the commercial zone ends and the residential one begins – there can’t have been more than one or two restaurants and cafés and perhaps a boozer or two. As in Brixton, quite a few premises were boarded up, or their windows were fly-posted, and overall there was such an atmosphere of psychic despair that the rubbish drifting across the roadway reminded me of tumbleweed blowing through a western ghost town.

Fast-forward 32 years and here I am on Clapham High Street again. It’s not terribly surprising – I live down the road in Stockwell – and at least once a week I find myself metonymically riding the 88 bus and having all sorts of rather conventional opinions. On this occasion, it was the night bus, because we’d been to a late screening at the Picturehouse, and the opinion was . . . well, it wasn’t so much an opinion as an experience of profound shock: who the hell were all these people?! And what the devil were they doing – many of them half-naked – on Clapham High Street at 12.30am on a Sunday morning in January?!

I’m not so blinkered that I haven’t noticed the rising commercial tempo of Clapham – where there used to be a brace of hostelries, there are now scores of them. Indeed, along the stretch where once I toted my bag, it’s pretty much a continuous strip of tapas bars, pizza parlours, Belgian mussel shacks and Brazilian steakhouses; there are assorted themed bars and several clubs, including Infernos, which – rather suitably – suffered a fire a few years ago. I knew all that but what I couldn’t quite credit was that come Saturday night all these joints really would be jumping – but they were and there was no room on the pavements, either, so that the crowds spilled out into the road.

London barely went into recession after the 2007-2008 crash; last year, house prices in the capital rose by an average of £50,000, so that people who own property are, once again, earning more off it than they are from their employment. The visible evidence of this bunce is the crowds whooping it up in Clapham – Clapham!

While they swill their property bubbles and dance the night away, there are many other Londoners living in a permanent hangover. I’m not in the business of inciting revolution but a society that can become so crazed and decadent that it seriously considers Clapham a fit destination for a wild night out is clearly in need of a savage reality check. What next, the Balham carnival? Mardi Gras in Mitcham? As I sat on the top deck of the bus, it occurred to me that I’d become a one-man constabulary – after all, while I knew there was criminality like this going on, it had never occurred to me to look for it by my own back door.

No, I only put on my judgemental hat for a crowd of one nutter: Prince Harry. He set off for the South Pole in early December, accompanied by the obligatory entourage of limbless ex-servicemen (and women), the aim being to show that limbless ex-servicemen (and women), and lame unemployed princes, are all capable of inspirational levels of achievement. It’s difficult to know where to begin when it comes to unpicking this giant bezoar – or should I say pseudo-bezoar – that’s stuck in the British gastrointestinal tract.

In a country in which ex-servicemen (and women) – whether limbless or not – have disproportionately high levels of all the following: unemployment, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and familial breakdown, how on earth is the realisation that Prince Hal and pals have made it to the pole going to help one jot?

What these folk need are decent job prospects, homes at genuinely affordable rents and consistent welfare. What they get is the capricious compassion of charity and the example of “achievements” confabulated for them out of the most threadbare tropes of imperialist delusion. For the British loyalist the South Pole will always remain a proving ground: we was robbed – they still madly and impotently believe – by a gang of horn-heads who had the temerity to go properly equipped, using effective techniques (most of them learned, mark you, from the lowly Eskimos) that included that ultimate atrocity: feeding their sledge dogs to . . . their other sledge dogs. Damn it all, you cannot possibly consider a man who’ll watch such dog-on-dog action any kind of adventurer – let alone a victorious gentleman.

So it is that even after half a century of painstaking revisionism by the likes of Roland Huntford, the Scott debacle remains embedded in the national gut as a splendid example of pluck, fortitude and self-sacrifice, instead of a criminal one of officer-class arrogance, cravenness and homicidal ineptitude. But the really important thing to remember about this ill-fated expedition is that it prefigured, in miniature, the grotesque “sacrifice” of British lives that came two years later in the killing fields of Flanders, where the manufacture of limbless  ex-servicemen was conducted as if on an assembly line. Perhaps the most pitiful addendum to the whole sorry business of British polar exploration was the fate of Shackleton’s men, who, having survived the loss of their ship in the Weddell Sea in August 1914, made it across the pack ice to Elephant Island, from the isolate wastes of which they were finally saved, only for many of them to return to Europe just in time to get killed in the First World War.

This year will be wall-to-wall remembrance, and the British state, which excels in co-opting dissident voices to its oxymoronic ideology of post-imperial imperialism, will have a field day propagating the bizarre double bind that while the First War was a dreadful business, it nevertheless produced some excellent poetry, and of course it remains the case that Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Seen from this angle, His Dumbness was simply the vanguard of a great horde of bonkers militarists. We’re at a curious juncture in our island story: despite being defeated in almost all the theatres it has engaged in over the past decade, the British army has never been held in higher popular esteem. This isn’t down to state, it’s a function of a populace who subconsciously view our troops not as puissant warriors fighting for a noble cause but charity cases in the making, just like themselves.

On the dockside in Boston I spotted Fia’s Seafood – they were offering “twin lobsters” for $28.95; I ventured in and asked if the lobsters were identical or non-identical twins. “Why d’you wanna know?” the maître d’ snarled. “Because,” I replied, “I can only perform unnatural psychological experiments on them if they’re zygotic.”

The president was in town for a speech and the area around the State House was fraught with security: state cops on cliché Harleys, FBI agents in cliché letter jackets, and, most intimidating of all, those excessively polite men in pale yellow raincoats with pig’s tail antennae dangling from their ears. I gave them all a swerve and took the Red Line into Cambridge.

Sometimes it seems to me that the relationship between American society and its fast food is as close as that of … well, identical twins. Foreigners writing on US gustatory habits have always understood the cafeteria and the lunch counter as the extension of the production line into the stomach. If you haven’t already, take a look at Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s ecstatically enraged depiction of American fast food in his 1933 novel, Journey to the End of the Night.

Emerging into the darkness of Harvard Square, I also gave the raggedy man standing by the subway exit a swerve. (His sign read “Looking for a Little Human Kindness” – how corny can you get?) The street folk were thronging about Starbucks, homing in like zombies on its smell-a-round of deceit – the odours of bread, pastry and roasted coffee that as one enters are dissipated by the cold winds of commercial calculation. In the lift down to the basement I sighed as I tapped my receipt code into the console. “They gotta do it,” an academic-looking type said, “else the homeless people trash the restrooms – they smear shit on the walls – I guess they’re really aggrieved.” I gave him an admiring glance and said, “Nice use of ‘aggrieved’.”

Back on the surface I passed by the Bridge Over Troubled Water trailer – “Reaching Out a Helping Hand to 16-24-Year-Olds” – before coming upon Mr Bartley’s Gourmet Burgers, a Boston landmark – or so its sign asserted – since 1960. Inside, the tables were covered with wood-grain laminate and the chairs were of the green plastic, lawn variety. A waiter with a T-shirt that read – wholly in innocence – “We Beat the Meat” showed me to a table. Looking around me, I saw that this was an establishment dominated by what Walter Benjamin characterised as the “vertical type” of modern consumerism: hokey old advertisements for Chesterfield cigarettes; triangular road signs that showed stick figures crawling on their knees towards beer glasses, and that were captioned “STUDENTS CROSSING”; over several tables there were small signs that said “Johnny Cash Ate Here”, or “Robert Plant Ate Here” – claims I didn’t doubt for the thousandths of a second necessary for a computerised trading system to make a ruinous interest-swap.

Mr Bartley’s menu was equally diverting; the standard seven-ounce burger came in a plethora of guises. The Obamacare was glossed thus: “Nobody knows what’s in it … ask the liberal sitting next to you”, and costed at: “$ Trillions”; while the Fiscal Cliff – “it’s here!” – was rather more optimistically priced at $13.85, for which you got crumbled bacon, blue cheese, red onion, balsamic vinegar and additional onion rings. I wish I could tell you I ordered a Mark Zuckerberg (“America’s richest geek, Boursin cheese and bacon with sweet potato fries”), which was a snip at 13 bucks – but, strange to relate, my sense of humour seemed to have deserted me. While I sipped my Coke and chewed on my standard Mr Bartley’s cheeseburger (the only novelty being that I opted for provelone) I stared about me at my fellow preppies, who, to a man and a woman seemed to be channelling Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw in those early scenes of Love Story – before the crab bites.

Lucky us. Out there in the streets the chill winds blew along Massachusetts Avenue and our brothers and sisters were dunking in the trash cans for discarded donuts. As I say, I often feel that American society and American fast food are twins separated at birth; and while one has been fed on 100 per cent ground beef and French fries cooked to a golden perfection, the other has been starved, beaten and otherwise degraded. It’s an unnatural psychological experiment – nonetheless I’m sure you’ll agree that it has to be done.

Jamie Oliver – like the poor he so adores – seems always to be with us; to be with us and to have been with us always as well, although it’s only 14 years since he first thrust his meat and two veg at us in the television series The Naked Chef. Since then, not a year has passed without some new Oliver production: cookery books, more TV, many Sainsbury’s advertising campaigns, restaurants, delicatessens, food product ranges and latterly a number of campaigns aimed at improving the eating habits of the nation, specifically its children.

Not content simply to gnaw the mound of bread he’s accumulated by giving supermarket endorsements, Oliver has committed himself to spreading the wholesome word: his Fifteen chain of restaurants aims to give a break to young folk who’re broken, by delinquency, addiction and poverty, by inserting them into the food industry as sous-chefs and so vastly improving their life chances.

It’s this combination of shameless avariciousness and a belief in the drizzle-down of oily emolument from the top to the bottom that makes Oliver the personification of modern Britain. If Terence Conran plummily taught the middle classes how to be a proper European bourgeoisie in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Oliver is his worthy estuarine successor, taking the permanent foodie revolution on to that portion of the former working class who bought up the public-housing stock. Now they can borrow against their equity to buy bruschetta, while the poor saps who didn’t get their plutocratic act together poke Turkey Twizzlers through the school gates to feed their morbidly obese cuckoo kids.

Needless to say, Oliver sticks in my craw and I’d walk a cunty mile to avoid him and all his works. What this society needs is a culture that values its eternal soul above its lemon sole and a form of social justice that doesn’t depend on the tit-beating self-righteousness of charity – with all the patronising bullshit that goes along with this. Still, I don’t expect Oliver to have a Damascene conversion on these matters, not while he’s doing such a lovely jubbly.

Between the liverish columns of the brutalist former bank building at the end of Shaftesbury Avenue in London, a new outpost of Oliver’s army has been established: Jamie Oliver’s Diner. Unlike his delis and his Italian (sic) restaurants, the “pop-up” diner does indeed have a surrealistic, thrown together feel, like the chance meeting between a hand-held card reader and a PR wonk on a conference-room table.

“I know,” some bright spark must’ve said, “let’s make it a themed western dinosaur burger joint!” And verily, it was so, complete with a triceratops meat chart on the wall and weird glyphs on the ceilings that show cowboys and dinosaurs peacefully cohabiting in the sagebrush. There are hortatory slogans painted along the architrave: “Gorgeous food cooked with love and care”; “No porkies, just free-range meat”; and – most heartening, this – “If it’s not eaten, it’s composted.”

My two velociraptors had standard seven ounce burgers with various bits and pieces, Mrs Tyrannosaurus (who doesn’t usually attend these reviewing meals) went for a chicken burger and I had the Caesar salad. The food was nothing special: Mrs T said her burger tasted bitter; the bit of grilled chicken on my salad was just that – a bit about two by three inches and as wafer-thin as Mr Creosote’s mints. The boys were pissed off by the cardboard straws in their Cokes, which were weirdly absorptive. The fries, naturally, came in those dumb little zinc buckets. With “home-made” lemonade for me, a Bacardi and Coke for Mrs T and a tenner tip, the whole schmozzle cost 20 quid more than the weekly Jobseeker’s Allowance.

On the back of the paper menu, together with recipes for cocktails called Cucumber Number and Dark’n’Stormy, there’s a chirpy little missive from Jamie himself, wherein he witters on about “great food values and ethics” and “sustainable and local ingredients”, all of which leads inexorably to “yummy healthy dishes”.

There’s also a sidebar entitled “A word about nutrition”, in which the usual guff about calories and saturated fats takes on the air of a pious homily. Jamie says: “The beauty of being a pop-up is it gives us loads of flexibility to listen to what you guys want, so please let us know.” To which I can only respond: do please pukka off with your millions to Necker Island with Branson and leave us in peace, matey.

“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles,” or so the opening line of Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero would have it. For myself, I’ve never seen the least evidence for this, any more than I have that happy families are all alike. Everywhere I’ve ever driven in LA, its inhabitants have cheerfully braided me into their steely weave until I too have merged with their all-consuming automotive abandon.

This time, arriving from Dallas, I was offered for $40 extra per day a retro-styled Dodge Challenger in DayGlo orange with a black stripe running from hood to trunk. This is a reincarnation of the humpbacked shark of a car synonymous with those Seventies belted-cardie-wearers (and sometime crime-fighters), Starsky and Hutch. Without any ado I heaved my plastic, roared off the lot on to Airport Boulevard and passed the Airport Endoscopy Centre – a timely reminder of what a pain in the ass 21st-century air travel can be.

In all civilised cultures there are patterns of social conformity that act to align the wayward individual with her conformist fellows as invisibly but irresistibly as magnetic waves arrange iron filings around a lodestone. In Los Angeles, not to drive is an aberration on a par with being … well, homeless. Heading north on La Cienega I passed CAR CASH: Borrow Against Your Car, and pondered the ghastly predicament of those who had sub-prime car loans; at best, driving a car in a big city is a ceaseless calibration of time, speed, distance and money, by which the human psyche is transmogrified into a hideous chimera, part satnav, part spreadsheet. But to have the added anxiety that the rubber matting might be pulled from beneath your feet … well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

Coming down off Baldwin Hills, with their dipping-prehistoric-bird oil pumps, I passed under the Metro Expo Line and fell to considering the bizarre history of LA transportation. Even now, in 2013, the light railway line from downtown to Santa Monica, some 20 miles distant, is only just about to reach the coast, joining together by public transport two urban centres that became incorporated into greater LA decades ago. True, there was once an extensive streetcar network that covered the entire LA basin, but by the early Twenties – around the same time car ownership reached one per head of the population – the steel tracks began to be pulled up to make way for more tyre ones.

This Eleatic paradox lies at the very core of LA’s polymorphously perverse being: the light railway line halving the distance to Santa Monica and then halving it again and so never arriving, while the Streamline Moderne skyscrapers, chelonian under their copper shells, win the race in a few short years. Looking at photographs of LA in the Twenties, I’m always struck by this technological discontinuity: the buildings so sleekly speedy, while the cars retain the flimsily foursquare aspect of horseless buggies. Narrowly avoided by the snout of my Challenger, a cyclist huffing along beside the six lanes of spluttering traffic is just such an anachronism. Reyner Banham, in The Architecture of Four Ecologies, his Starsky and Hutch-era survey of Los Angeles, coined the term “autopia” to describe the city’s vast concrete graticule of freeways and boulevards.

In European cities, despite the botched bits of Le Corbusier that have been bunged down on them, car transport remains quite at variance with the built environment: the Arc de Triomphe is inexorably eroded by the circulation of Citroëns, but in LA the car is the built environment; traffic reports have the epochal character of earthquake warnings and by night the city’s very fabric ripples in the convection of its own exhaust fumes, so that merging with the freeway one is flipped end over end, a satellite orbiting the daemonic earth.

I concede, when it came to it I probably wouldn’t last five minutes but I still have a childlike passion for Los Angeles, and in particular for its car culture. To be in a place where people say porte cochère with no hint of affectation (indeed, “porte cochère” is about the only thing they say unaffectedly) is some kind of strange liberation for me. Everywhere else I drive, the traffic jam presents itself as a vicious instantiation of the human predicament under late capitalism, but in LA it’s just the stuff of a very ordinary workaday madness.