I once asked Martin Amis how an interview had gone with a particular journalist and he thought for a moment before shrug-sneering, “Well, y’know, he was a Tim.” When I was a kid we used to stop on the school run to pick up the son of the then MP for King’s Lynn, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler (not so much a wet as utterly saturated, he was the only Tory to defect to the SDP in 1981). Brocklebank-Fowler junior was called Tim, and my sadistic brother and I would tease him: “Timmy-Timmy-Timmy,” while he futilely protested that he was a Timothy.

It’s my contention that the likes of, say, Tim Henman, the tennis player, or Tim Parks, the writer, would have had enjoyed a great deal more success if they’d simply changed their names. There’s a prejudice against people called Tim; true, it’s not on a par with racism, sexism or homophobia but there’s little doubt that your life chances will be constrained should your otherwise risk-averse parents have had the temerity to Tim you. All of which is by way of introducing Tim Martin: the 6’6”, mullet-sporting originator of J D Wetherspoon, an invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-style pub chain that operates 833 outlets throughout the British Isles, together with 17 hotels.

Martin, who retains a 25 per cent share of the publicly listed company, rejoices in the sobriquet “the giant of the British pub industry”. But it doesn’t matter how much wonga the man trousers (pre-tax profits were £66m in the crash year of 2009), he can never escape the fact of his Timness, any more than he can elude its miserable correlate: his pubs are shit, brown dollops of establishments smeared incontinently across our cities. Actually, “shit” is a little strong for Wetherspoon’s – a bit too gamey; they’re more shit-lite.

The clever thing is that he doesn’t style most of them “Wetherspoon’s” but retains their original names – the Dog & Duck, the Duke of York, whatever – so that it isn’t until you’ve sidled up to the bar, clocked the plethora of guest beers – Diamond Geezer, Comfortably Numb etc – written up on blackboards in faux chalk-strokes, and registered the corporate vibe that you realise you are in fact in another soulless bloody Wetherspoon’s. As to why Martin should’ve dubbed his pub chain thus, the answer lies in his back story: a troubled youth who was an inmate of no fewer than 11 institutions (a sort of chain education, if you will), Martin did some school-time in New Zealand, where one ineffectual disciplinarian of a teacher was dumb enough to tell the young mulleteer that he would never succeed in business. What was this pitiful pedagogue’s name? Why, Wetherspoon of course.

I see a sort of nominative determinism at work here: Tim’s pubs are shit not only because he’s called Tim but also because they’re named after an object of resentment. And you know what they say about resentment: it’s like drinking a cup of poison and expecting the other person to die. Sadly, it isn’t Wetherspoon who’s dying (he probably expired years ago) – but us. It doesn’t matter that Martin was quick off the mark when it came to introducing no-smoking areas, nor that he’s been a staunch supporter of micro-breweries – nothing can counteract the excremental quality of these establishments.

The boy and I checked out the one nearest to us, which happens to be in Victoria Station. It also happens to rejoice in the actual Wetherspoon’s name, but while you might’ve expected it to live up to its flagship status, we found a poky joint crammed with tables. The standard chain-pub fare was on offer: burgers, sub-curries, toasties, pasta and pies. His bacon cheeseburger wasn’t tasty enough to be horse: the cheese hadn’t even melted and the bacon had been fried rather than grilled, so the whole comestible – when at last it arrived – was both frigid and congealed. My battered cod was at the nadir for this dish: the casing hard, the interior mush. At least it was hot – unlike the chips, which were like cardboard but not as tasty.

I suppose some might say: well, what do you expect? This is a busy location. To which I would rejoin: I don’t care, there’s a grim cynicism involved in flogging such drek; it demeans the customer and the worker. Looking around me at the other oblong platters on the tables, I saw that many of them had been barely touched. I did eat my food and so left with an unpleasant film inside my mouth. Still, tomorrow morning my palate will be cleansed – but he’ll always be a Tim.

At Paddington Station, where one occasionally finds a stray bear with a label around its neck reading: “Please introduce me to a life of prostitution and drug addiction,” the train departures board operates at a laggardly pace. By which I mean to say that the platform number for the train to West Drayton will mostly only be displayed five minutes before departure. As the platform is usually number 13 or 14, this necessitates a brisk walk of 500 yards in order to make the train. Even I, a sprightly pentagenarian, find it something of a push – but anyone less able, let alone disabled, would be scuppered.

True, the West Drayton service is not the most popular of trains except during the evening rush hour. We midday voyagers to the outer ’burbs are pasty-munching, tea-sipping slowcoaches – spindrifts or even snags in the great current of urban life – and so we resent being so chivvied. But I’ve seen veritable stampedes when the platform is announced for a peak-time intercity express. If you happen to be standing in the wrong place at that moment, you might end up as a smear of jam in front of Delice de France.

As a thought experiment, it’s worth forming a mental picture of a British station at its busiest, then multiplying the human density by a factor of between 10 and 100. Such a scene – albeit more brightly coloured – would have met your eye had you been standing in Allahabad station on 11 February when a belated platform announcement (or possibly a collapsing handrail; accounts of the disaster understandably differ) triggered a stampede that led to 36 deaths and scores of injuries. That this took place during the climax of the Kumbh Mela, the largest human gathering on earth, makes it seem – how can I put this without being psychopathically insensitive? – relatively insignificant.

If 30 million people assemble on the sandy floodplain at the confluence of two rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, and a third, mythical one, the Saraswati, with the avowed intention of bathing in muddy waters into which the pitcher (or kumbh) of the Gods has dripped immortality-conferring nectar, a death toll in the hundreds would still seem a result. Deaths, lost children and parents are the inevitable sequelae attendant upon such a pathological party. Numerous Bollywood films have been made about these Kumbh Mela tragedies – the conjunction of so many people in one place presents unrivalled opportunities for plot-generating coincidences.

There is – as I’ve had cause to remark before – one type of human folly conspicuously absent from Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the 1841 book from which this column takes its name, and that is religion. Mackay doubtless itched to include the entire panoply of religiose nuttiness in his volume, from Catholic flagellation, to Muslim meteorite circumambulation, to Hindu widow-toasting, but lest the lens of comparative anthropology aim backwards into the equally wacky practices of Protestantism, he gave the entire field a swerve. The modern form of such an avoidance would be founded on a desire not to offend, which in turn would rest on a mushy pediment of cultural relativism: as all religions at all times have seemed valid to their adherents, who am I to judge between their forms of worship, no matter how excessive they may seem?

Stomping, snorting, naked and ash-smeared Naga “sky-born” sadhus charging in the dawn half-light across the riverbank to fling themselves into the chilly waters of the Ganges bear an obvious affinity to Justin Welby standing in a well-heated narthex objecting to gay marriage. True, they are physically many and he is just the one; but the Archbishop represents an entire crowd of benighted homophobes, while the Naga sadhus have dissolved their egos into the collective being of moksha, or enlightenment.

As you can see from the above, my cultural relativism takes a rather more robust form: Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that the miniature is the archetypal form of all artworks, for, when you considered the matter closely, all representation consists in a diminution. Even Michelangelo’s vast frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are miniatures, as their subject matter is the end of all cosmological time. By the same token, even the greatest of religious gatherings is a vicarage tea party when set beside the ubiquity of human belief in the immaterial. I’m not sure about train travel, either.

As I write, the traffic is still backed up from the Wandsworth Road – I can hear an occasional frustrated honk from a trapped van man, or the stifled yawp of an emergency services vehicle threading its way through the metallic mesh. I’ve only been out this morning to walk the dog: a turd-bagging totter around the block, but even here, several hundred yards away from the actual road closure, there are sheepishly bemused drivers diverted away from the flock.

Yesterday morning I was sitting on the top deck of the 88 bus: the traffic was slower than usual heading down the South Lambeth Road and as we reached Vauxhall Cross there began to be the unmistakable signs of an accident having just happened: fire engines shouldering cars over to the kerb and even firemen, on foot, running. By the time we were chugging over Vauxhall Bridge I’d overheard a man a few seats ahead of us say that a helicopter had crashed into the crane on top of the new cylindrical tower that, for the past few months, has been being extruded from the embankment – another architectural abomination to sully the London skyline.

Before we’d gained the north bank of the Thames, and despite the fog, my wife – who was sitting beside me – had visual confirmation: she could see the broken jib of the crane. It was about 8.15am and the crash had happened only a few minutes before. Back at home a couple of hours later, I had a phone call from the man who mends my typewriters – he lives in a suburb of north-west London and had seen the crash reported on the news. Was I, he wanted to know, all right? My wife was a little dismissive of his solicitude, seeing it as a slightly wacky example of ambulance-chasing by proxy, but with my fine attunement to – and sympathy with – the madness of crowds, I was rather touched by his concern.

True, this was the first time that anyone in London had ever been killed by a helicopter falling out of the sky on top of them, but the singularity of the event only made it more paradigmatic. In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year.

True, the mediatisation of certain kinds of spectacular events – the attack on the Twin Towers being the most obvious example – ensures they remain high in the anxiety hit parade, but I think there’s more to it than that. Human agency also makes us antsier: the idea that an individual or group of individuals is out there acting with malevolent intent is, we feel intuitively, a threat we should be able to assess and act upon – whereas there can be no anticipation of acts of God (or gods), unless, that is, we have a shamanic capacity for prognostication. It perhaps seems unfair but even human error of the kind that was probably involved in the helicopter crash, is, I would argue, grouped by our psyches under the heading of the potentially avoidable.

It may be crazy but in a deep recess of the group mind we imagine that we ought to reason along these lines: hmm, looks foggy out this morning, I think I’ll give Wandsworth Road a swerve – they’ll have switched off the warning lights on top of that crane and an unwitting helicopter pilot might crash into it . . . That this is a vanishingly small likelihood is neither here nor there, because the perceptual equipment required to swim safely through the urban mill race includes the expectation of other humans’ cock-ups as standard – along with airbags and safety belts.

All of this also helps explain why it is that public-safety campaigns need to be quite so relentless: they’re in competition. The wildcard helicopter crash gets free blanket coverage, but the 4,000 annual car fatalities have to pay for their bus-shelter space. And with spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality – threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we’ve begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena. The traffic – like a river – either flows, or it is damned; and when it’s damned, it backs up: a great logjam of frustration, anger and anxiety from out of which will come a host of misfortune. I’m not going to risk fording it – I think I’ll stop at home for the rest of the day.

‘‘Which,” I asked the nice young man in Le Pain Quotidien, “is the most daily of your breads – by which I mean the most popular?” To his credit he wasn’t fazed: “The baguette,” he replied, “absolutely – we sell many more of the baguette than any of the others.” This seemed a shame to me, because the other loaves had a pleasingly rustic air about them – great cartwheels of golden pain ancien, reposing on equally golden wooden shelves, the whole reminding me not so much of a boulangerie in La France profonde, as of a BBC television adaptation of a Marcel Pagnol novel.

Because that’s the shtick with LPQ: a cod-rustic vibe cultivated with cold-hearted commercialism. There are 175 of these fakeries in 17 countries – and 22 in London. If you’re reading this out in the sticks and thinking: Well, that’s just the sort of bollocks those dumb metropolitan pseuds fall for … then I concur. But should a branch of LPQ open up on your clone high street, it’s high time to slather a heel of stale Hovis with dripping and head up t’cobbled hill or down t’decommissioned pit.

I lacked such foresight and so found myself being ushered into the woody interior. I eschewed la table communale and sat next to a couple of ad-man types. Once the waiter had taken my order for a smoked chicken salad (which came, he assured me, with complimentary bread), and a fresh lime and mint drink – I had plenty of time to examine the decor. Walter Benjamin said of art nouveau that it “represented the last attempt at a sortie on the part of art imprisoned by technical advance within her ivory tower”. For the late, great Frankfurter, such a sortie “mobilised all the reserve forces of interiority”, forces that “found their expression in the mediumistic language of line, in the flower as the symbol of the naked, vegetable Nature that confronted the technologically armed environment”.

Frankly, if Benjamin could’ve seen the branch of LPQ I was sitting in, he would have found it more terrifying than the Gestapo: on the ceiling, duff track lighting was boxed in by rag-rolled boards, while above this frottage squatted metal ventilation ducts. Meanwhile, nailed to the lemonscumbled wall was a collection of Arts & Crafts windows – frames and all – their flowery stained-glass motifs winking complicity at the bourgeois diners.

My salad had some leaves, a few tomatoes, quite a lot of pinkish strips of what appeared to be meat and some croutons. Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that what’s roused me is an overpowering urge to visit violence on its originator. I often buy ready-made Caesar salads from supermarkets, because they come with the croutons in a separate little bag and I can then experience the delight of throwing them straight in the bin. What was worse was that these LPQ croutons were extra-large – an ordinary sized crouton is merely a crunchy impediment, but a big crouton is a piece of stale fucking bread. If I wanted bread I had plenty to hand – and it was complimentary! I turned my attention to the smoked chicken: it had the plastic texture and slightly tangy, chemical sweetness of smoked ham bought in an all-night petrol station.

I was so appalled that I turned to the ad man on my right and asked him to try a piece. He obliged and I tried not to prejudice my tiny focus group by grimacing as he chewed. “It’s not very nice,” he said, after a short length, “it rather reminds me of the sort of ham you get in petrol stations.” I almost kissed him. The waiter reappeared: “Is your food all right?” he asked. “Um, well,” I chose my words judiciously, “no – it’s not really, I mean this food is quite … unpleasant.” The waiter was suitably nonplussed, so I expanded: “This chicken is … grim – where do you get your chickens from? I mean, is this organic? Free range?” The ad man chipped in: “It doesn’t taste organic.”

Perhaps fearing that the Bastille was about to be stormed, the waiter hurriedly offered to replace the dish or refund me – but I wasn’t having any of it: I didn’t want the social conditions obtaining in Le Pain Quotidien to be smoothed over, I lusted for the antagonism that leads to revolution! £15.81 was way too much of my daily bread to pay for this daily bread – there will be blood!

These are the coldest collations of the year: shards of glass tossed on the kerbstone, dressed with vomit. Nearby stands a seven-eighths empty bottle of supermarket champagne; while if you follow the straggle of pink streamers you can see beer cans lurking by the wheelie bin, tinnily jostling. The party has well and truly pooped out.

Last year there was comparatively little hoo-ha: the failure of the Mayan prophecies to come up to scratch left the credulous with sod all in the way of an apocalypse – while as for the more civic-minded, there was a mass sense of the anticlimactic: the Eve marked the end of the spectacular year of the Jubilympics, a twelvemonth of unsurpassed gloriousness and achievement, the like of which we’ll never see again in our lives, nor our children and grandchildren in theirs.

Some consolation was to be found in the ennoblements of those who had reeled, writhed, and – in the case of Sir Bradley Wiggins – fainted in coils; but for the most part, as the damp, drear 31 December merged seamlessly into the damp, drear 1 January, there was no sense that the populace were shouting and staggering from any great sense of joy, only going through the motions.

Lying in bed, in the small hours, listening to the occasional yelps of grimly enforced gaiety, I thought back to the New Year’s Eves of the more distant past. You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers – some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party, but it wasn’t always so, believe me. I remember New Year’s Eves before the munificent Mayoralty forced London’s transport workers to stay up all night – in those days, if you chose to revel on the far side of town, you might find yourself with a very long trek before your belated bed.

One year, sometime in the early 1980s, I ended up at a party in Rotherhithe – at that time still a wasteland of redundant docks and warehouses, its “renaissance” but a twinkle in Terry Conran’s hooded eye. And although people gyred and gibbered, there was still – come about 2am – the sense that the world spirit of dissolution had moved on. Together with a couple of mates, I left and took the long bend of the Thames for home. Crossing London Bridge, we passed by Fishmongers Hall and were just tending towards King William Street and the Bank of England, when we heard the massed slapping of marching feet.

Yes, “slapping”, because as the sound drew closer it became conjoined with this vision: around the bend of Gracechurch Street came a formation of Roman legionaries. In the lead was a standard-bearer: above his helmeted head flew the letters SPQR grasped in the talons of a rampant eagle; beside him strode the decanus, his short sword drawn, while behind them came perhaps 20 more men, all with long pila at slope-arms, burnished helmets, tunics, cloaks and dangling, jangling baldricks. We stood, slack-jawed, as the le gionaries slapped downhill on to the Bridge and headed south into the sodium-tinged darkness.

Anyone seeing such a visitation would’ve been shocked and questioning of their sanity. But what saved us from hysterics were the following facts: all of us had seen the same thing – so we knew we weren’t hallucinating (or, at least, if we were hallucinating, it was only part of that collective hallucination ordinarily termed “reality”); and then there were the legionaries themselves, who, far from having the swarthy and squat aspect expected of first-century Roman invaders, were distinctly pale and paunchy. Put simply: it was obvious that these were men dressed up as legionaries, rather than a couple of real contubernia that had somehow managed to march through a tear in the space-time continuum.

Why a group of Roman army fanatics had decided to suit up then tramp through the City was a question that could never be answered – they may have been of our era but their expressions were Caesar-stern, forestalling any inclination we might’ve had to hale them. And why do I offer up this anecdote now? Because once you’ve been part of a triumvirate who have witnessed a troop of legionaries marching through a silent London in the small, cold hours of New Year’s Day, all subsequent celebrations are bound to seem utterly infra dig.

I thought it might be a good idea to depart this year with an explosive fart rather than a whimpering burp, so I arranged to meet a young radical friend of mine at the Spaghetti House in Knightsbridge. The Spaghetti House chain seems on the surface to be an inconsequential thing: there are 12 coiling across London, dishing up pasta, pizza and the trimmings in an ambience of dark wood and off-white Artex – so far, so dull.

Indeed, after recent outings to Prezzo and Zizzi – both larger operations playing variations on the same wheat’n’sauce theme – even bothering with the Spag’ Gaff at all would seem de trop, were it not for the siege. (Apropos of Zizzi, which I wrote about a fortnight ago, the name kept bothering me – I was certain it meant something but could find no reference. Then a friend explained that “zizzi” is French slang for “little penis” and is employed in those parts as an anti-Semitic taunt. Makes perfect sense of all that chilli oil drizzling, no?)

The Spaghetti House siege began on the evening of 28 September 1975 when a Nigerian-born gunman, Franklin Davies, together with two accomplices, attempted to rob the restaurant. At that time there were only three or four Spaghetti Houses, and their managers had assembled at the Knightsbridge branch to pay in their week’s takings, which were in the region of £13,000 – pretty good dobs, really. The job went tits-up from the get-go: one of the waiters escaped and raised the alarm, while the robbers, together with nine staffers, ended up in the basement, where they remained for the next six days, under siege by the Met’s finest.

At the time, the Spaghetti House siege was huge: prime location, exotic cast and a pleasing high-tech element to the operation as fibre-optic surveillance equipment was used for the first time. Davies claimed to be a member of the Black Liberation Army – a splinter group of the Black Panthers – and tried gussying up the blag as a political act. Needless to say, neither the plods nor Roy Jenkins – the then home secretary – were having any of it, and the siege ended not with Davies and his crew boarding the plane to Jamaica they’d demanded, but instead being hustled into a Black Maria.

Fast forward 37 years and the world seems a safer place. Yes, you heard me: every era privileges itself with the cachet of being edgier than the ones before; yet standing in the Spaghetti House vestibule on a cold December evening and reading the front pages of newspapers reporting the siege that had been framed and hung there, what struck me was how much violence there’d been then –nine deaths in Northern Ireland the previous day and the IRA recently peppering the porticos of St James’s gentlemen’s clubs with machine-gun rounds. There were considerably fewer chain Italian restaurants, however, let alone ones that made a selling point out of their staff once being held hostage. I asked the smiley chap who showed me to my table what he made of the siege-as-marketing but he just laughed: it was such a long time ago!

My friend was equally unfazed – he wanted to talk about Slavoj Žižek and the Occupy movement, and savour the piquant zeitgeist rather than munch on the stale bread sticks of yore. It was understandable that the waiters weren’t keen to consider the fate of their forerunners – one grim aspect of the siege had been that Davies refused to feed his captives. This seemed harsh; if you’re taken hostage in a bank raid, it’s reasonable to expect you won’t get much in the way of eats beyond the limp biscuits left behind in a cashier’s drawer. But a restaurant? Surely it wouldn’t have mattered to the gang if the staff had whipped up a pollo e funghi risotto? 

I enjoyed mine, as the callow revolutionist opposite me tucked into a dish of pasta. I don’t know whether it was his onslaught on my middle-aged and middle-class complacency, or the surprisingly tasty nosh, but I found myself warming to the Spaghetti House and in particular to its staff – all of whom, unusually for a Italian restaurant in Britain seemed to be . . . Italian. Anyway, either they were an exceptionally chatty and attentive lot or I was suffering from the rapid onset of Stockholm syndrome. Even when I descended to the gents, the fateful basement looked pretty damn cosy.

We finished our political wrangling with an affogato apiece: a scoop of vanilla ice cream affogato – “drowned” – with a shot of espresso. I like to think Franklin Davies would’ve approved of this culinary miscegenation – although I have no reason for believing so.

Real meals have a way of provoking surreal thoughts in me – but then you knew that, didn’t you?

Oh, I do so hope, dear readers, that you don’t feel I’ve been neglecting you? I do try so very hard to give the impression that I’m a grounded sort of a fellow, with a proper appreciation of the follies of our age – but it’s difficult you see, when I’m in such a whirl. I’m just back today from São Paulo, where the deliciously modest and unassuming Tracey Emin had a little vernissage at White Cube. I’d gone there from Hong Kong where I attended the opening last Thursday evening of Takashi Murakami’s new show at the Gagosian Gallery – lovely bright paintings of flowers and skulls that would make good wallpaper.

Before that, I was at another Gagosian on Madison Avenue in Manhattan for the launch of 30 new works by Bob Dylan, no less. It was a bit awkward, because I’d just been in Honkers for the Elad Lassry opening at White Cube, but obviously I couldn’t just sit there and wait. Oh, and before that I was in Rome, again at a Gagosian opening – this one for Rachel Feinstein’s neorealist architectural photographs. Such beauty! Such fun!

I’d popped there from Berlin, where’d I’d touched down for the Jannis Kounellis launch at BlainSouthern (awfully droll), and prior to that I’d also been in New York – yet again at the Gagosian – this time for an Ed Ruscha show wittily entitled “Stock Market Technique Number One”. I’d been hanging out in New York for a while, having pitched up at Antony Gormley’s opening at the Sean Kelly Gallery – well, one has to fly the flag, no? The day before that was one of Richard Prince’s “Four Saturdays”, also at Gagosian. While we’re on Gagosian, I must tell you how adorable their bijoux art showroom on the rue de Ponthieu is. I’d flown into Paris for Rudolf Stingel’s reception and stuck around for Anselm Keifer’s out on the Avenue de l’Europe. And don’t you just adore William Eggleston’s Ektachrome photographs of otiose Americana? I know I do – which is why I was in Los Angeles for the opening reception . . .

Not that I want to give you the impression that all I’ve been doing these past couple of months is gadding about the world attending exhibition openings. Oh no, I’ve also been doing some pretty serious attending here in England: trolling up and down Cork Street, making forays to Oxford and even benighted Liverpool in order to enjoy a glass of shampoo, a daub and some chitchat . . . At least this is what someone might conclude were I to expire at this moment, and they were to go through the six-inch-high stack of pasteboard on my desk.

The truth is I can’t remember the last time I went to an art opening – but that doesn’t stop these Frisbee-sized come-ons zinging through my letterbox. And not just invitations but also large and glossy catalogues, the unit price for which is probably well into double figures. Who, I often ponder as I scoop another highend print-job off the mat, seriously imagines that I will attend a Tracey Emin opening in São Paulo, let alone buy one of her hyperbolically overpriced bits of self-indulgent appliqué?

The answer, of course, is nobody at all: I’ve simply chipped up a bit over the years, written a few pieces about art for the newspapers, and so this great slew of stuff continues to slide into my numb fingers.

From time to time I think of calling up all these galleries and getting my name removed from their mailing list but, surprise, surprise, I never quite get it together. If only it were as simple as putting a sign saying “No junk art mail” on my front door.

Because that’s all this stuff is: junk mail sent out as a marketing exercise by purveyors of investment opportunities to the tasteless rich. The reason it’s scattered so widely is that it helps to conjure up “an art crowd”, and it’s within this seemingly freewheeling and bohemian milieu that the serious dealers cruise about, their expensively tailored dorsal fins cleaving the choppy waters of sociability as they zero-in for the killer sale.

Your average thick, tasteless Richie feels pretty exposed in the minimalist fish tank of an upscale gallery – but fill it with full-time wankers, poseurs and MAAWs (model, actress, artists – whatever), and they start to relax; after all, they’re not simply in it to stock up their portfolios – oh no. They want to be acknowledged as collectors, people with discrimination surfing on the zeitgeist. And so on they go, torching the planet and punching holes in the ozone layer as they jet off to the next biennale or bean feast: the art crowd, surely one of the maddest, and the most swinishly Gaderene that there is.

The “spatialisation of culture under the pressure of organised capitalism” is how the veteran critical theorist Fredric Jameson described the Westin Bonaventure hotel in downtown Los Angeles. This behemoth of a hostelry comprises a curious agglomeration of four giant squeezy bottles coated with mirrored glass grouped around a six-storey high atrium, up the sides of which shoot glass lifts. The Westin – which has a stand-still part in the epochal video-game series Grand Theft Auto – was, with its colour-coded zones and its restaurant-cluttered levels, an early spatialiser of late capitalism but, three decades on from Jameson’s appraisal of it, Zizzi, a chain of some 120-plus, vaguely Italian restaurants, is surfing the zeitgeist when it comes to such figurations.

This is what I thought as I clop-slopped in from the rain to an empty shopping mall. Up above, a thousand little dag-tails of fairy lights dangled from a bridge of white-painted girders, atop which hunkered an office block, lit up and void – a ghost ship sailing through the urban night. It was a scene that demanded zombies; instead I found Zizzi. In turn, dramatic logic dictated that Zizzi should be deserted: a pure cultural space through which the crumpled menu cards blew like tumbleweeds, but instead the glassy hull projecting into the mall’s atrium was loaded with folk eating, drinking and talking 9.857857 recurring to the dozen.

The waiter – who resembled a stevedore – dumped me at a table by the glassy bulwark. At the next table, three flushed men in their thirties were getting performative over their second bottle of wine as they ate crispy bread strips served in a furl of greased-paper pseudo-newsprint stuffed inside a miniature bucket. I could’ve sworn one of them said – loosening the knot of his puce tie – “Yeah, I’m poisoning him with Tipp-Ex!”

I cast about me at the pillars papered with a pattern of leafless silver birches, at the dangling 1960s-style lampshades that hung in bollock couplets, at the zinc-topped counter piled with wooden platters. I took it all in and sighed: I was home, where I belonged, with my Volk: the great, lumpy British bourgeoisie, who spend all day industriously servicing one another and all evening being serviced in turn.

As to food, let one menu description act as a synecdoche: “Agro dolce – one half mushrooms, thyme, mascarpone and mozzarella all drizzled with truffle oil. The other half speck ham, pumpkin and mascarpone with a sprinkling of crumbled amaretti biscuit. It really shouldn’t work but it does.” Basically, Zizzi is a high-end pizza joint with spicy pretensions. I ordered a risotto and a green salad, which were brought by the stevedore at a decent clip and were fine. I was fine, too, if that’s taken to be an acronym for Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional. The men at the next table were talking about moving offices; the Tipp-Ex poisoning victim would have to be run through the shredder before they finally departed.

The Zizzi chain proclaims the usual charitable inclinations on its menu – in this case, it’s something to do with the Prince’s Trust. It had never occurred to me before why Charlie Windsor should’ve chosen this name for his institutionalised noblesse oblige but, when you think about it, by ceaselessly bringing before his putative subjects the words “prince” and “trust”, the subliminal message “Trust the Prince” is being implanted in all of us. Zizzi’s involvement with the trust seemed to have some bearing on its work with young graduate artists, whose work is displayed in the restaurants. In the case of this particular outlet, the work was by one Amy Murray, who’d done a series of illustrations that were riveted up in the corridor that led to the toilets. This sequence “attempts to capture elements of the Orient Express’s history while also creating intimate snapshots of its passengers at the peak of its popularity during the 1920s and 1930s”. The elements in question are, of course, “exoticism, intrigue and romance”.

I was a bit confused by all this: was it Murray’s illustrations alone that were meant to evoke the Orient Express or were the toilet stalls and the corridor intentional components of this fantastical mise en scène? I’ve never travelled on the Orient Express but I wager that even among all that exoticism, intrigue and romance, there’s still the occasional, pee-soaked bit of toilet paper flotched on the floor.

Anyway, there I was, urinating inside an evocation of a historic trans-European train, inside an Italian-themed restaurant, inside a British shopping mall … Fredric Jameson would, I felt certain, heartily approve.

The opening night of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May 1913 has gone down in the aesthetic annals as one of the most exciting art riots of all time: the premier example of an aesthetically challenged mob baying for the blood of the innovators. As Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes dancers circled the stage in wild khorovods, to the accompaniment of the atonal “The Augurs of Spring”, they trembled, shook, shivered and stamped.

According to Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise, his history of 20th-century music: “Howls of discontent went up from the boxes, where the wealthiest onlookers sat. Immediately, the aesthetes in the balconies and the standing room howled back. There were overtones of class warfare in the proceedings. The combative composer Florent Schmitt was heard to yell either ‘Shut up, bitches of the seizieme!’ or ‘Down with the whores of the seizieme!’ – a provocation of the grandes dames of the 16th arrondissement.”

All well and good but it hardly compares with serious civil disturbance, not when you learn that, by the end of the first week, The Rite of Spring’s entire run was booked solid. Stravinsky’s and Diaghilev’s shock opera had transmogrified into the contemporary version of Les Misérables. Rather more impressive were ructions outside La Scala a couple of years ago when the Italian government announced a 37% cut in cultural funding – these featured smoke bombs, riot police and Daniel Barenboim. What’s not to like? The opening of the La Scala season has often been the focus for a bit of agg’ – however, it’s seldom got anything to do with what’s going on inside but rather represents a sort of distinctively Italian gestural elaboration on the idea of opera.

The Astor Place riot of 1849 took place outside the now demolished Astor Opera House in New York and certainly qualifies as an example of a crowd losing its head: at the end of the night of 10 May, 25 had been killed and hundreds injured. The proximate cause was the rivalry between two celebrated Shakespearean actors – Edwin Forrest and William Macready – but its real genesis was that whereas Forrest was a proud “nativist” American, Macready was a ghastly Englishman. Those who consider matters of cultural dispute to be the preserve of limp-wristed time wasters should study the Forrest-Macready bout, which has more in common with the battle between Bill “The Butcher” Cutting and Amsterdam Vallon in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York than, say, a tussle between Daniel Day Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio over who should have the fanciest trailer.

Belgian independence arguably owes its very fact to an opera – or to a single aria, “Amour sacré de la patrie”, sung at a performance of La Muette de Portici in honour of the Belgians’ Dutch overlord, William I. Ah, the 1830s! When even Belgium was an exciting place and a fine tenor voice could provoke a revolution. Now, the screaming death chants of the most frenzied shock rockers provoke entire stadia of narcotised face-metal-wearers to . . . buy merchandise.

But opera riots provoked by nationalism scarcely count – nothing could be more infra dig than the 1919 Times Square demonstrations- turned-nasty against a production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, which was staged despite the mayoral ban on German opera productions then in place. Servicemen and civilians battled the NYPD’s finest and the whole fracas was reported in the Los Angeles Times under the teasing headline “Crossfire of bricks”.

After all, if you want to riot against a Wagner opera, at least go for Parsifal or The Ring Cycle. I go to the opera quite a lot, almost always equipped with the makings of a Molotov cocktail in the hope that Bryn Terfel will spark it off and the scores of suits slumbering on corporate freebies will get torched but somehow it’s always a bit of a damp squib.

The one recent production that looked promising – from the riot point of view – was The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams, performed for the first time in the UK at the English National Opera in February. Adams’s opera, which deals with the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, was accused of antisemitism after its first performances in 1991 and sidelined from the repertoire of the major companies. There was a lone protester outside the Coliseum but, inside, the audience sat silently through the show before applauding like the crowd of dutiful conformists that we were – how mad is that?