I’ve written before about those hideous, collective earworms – the nonce-phrases that clutter up our mouths then fall unbidden from our lips – and I make no apology for writing about them again; if you like – and if it makes it any more tolerable – think of this as a sort of nonce column, quite inadvertently repeated, with no more awareness being exhibited on my part as I type, than you have when you utter the words “to be honest”.

Yes, “to be honest”, it is without doubt the meme de nos jours – and as such, must represent a cul-de-sac in cultural evolution on a par with loon trousers or fondue parties. And everyone is saying it – oh, yes they are; you cannot turn on a radio or a television, get on a bus or a train, roll over into the sweet morning afflatus of your beloved, or walk your dog in the local park without hearing it. “To be honest” squawks forth from politicians and broadcasters, mutters sullenly from the woman and the man in the street, murmurs enticingly in your frowsty ear, calls to you across the muddy pockmarks and smudged white lines of the football pitch: to be honest, to be honest, to be honest, to be honest!

And what does it mean? Clearly, it has nothing to do with the truth; indeed, it is almost always appended to statements of either incontrovertible fact, or opinions of such an anodyne form that only Descartes’ malicious demon would dream of fabricating them. In our fair land, on any given day, you can hear your fellow citizens say things of the form: “To be honest, I had a pork pie for lunch,” or, “To be honest, I think Michael Heseltine’s a little pompous,” or, “To be honest, I never really liked Take That’s music.” (I introduced these statements as hypotheticals, but, to be honest, they’re all ones I’ve heard in the past 24 hours.)

Back in the days when the prime minister wore loons and his chin was permanently glazed with melted emmental, the reflex of fidelity was far simpler. “I think Ted Heath’s dishy,” people would say, and then after a suitable pause, “honest”. Or, to ring the changes on this, they might prefix their remark with the adverbial form: “Honestly, I don’t know what he’s doing sailing his yacht while the country’s going to the dogs.” The single word forms were both less jarring – and the opinions they bracketed were often a little more contentious. But nowadays, there seems to be nothing at all that cannot be dulled down by the addition of the hateful tic.

In the past I’ve advanced the view that these banalerisms seep up from the water table of the collective unconscious as telling evidence of the true state of things – in this respect they are, formally at least, entirely honest. In a society riven by bad faith – corrupt politicians, bent coppers, finagling hacks, kiddie-fiddling philanthropists, peccancy, in short, of every conceivable form – the quite blameless ordinary citizen nonetheless feels an inner compulsion continuously to profess her super-glued adhesion to the truth. But if things go on in this way I predict that you’ll find yourself in automated checkout queues grown exponentially longer due to the swearing-in ceremonies shoppers feel they must undergo; Bible raised in one hand they will intone, “I swear by Almighty God to remove all unexpected items from the bagging area.”

We erroneously believe we can save ourselves from being crushed by our own lack of faith in the most ordinary speech acts, and that there’s a personal nonce-phrase saviour – I refer, of course, to “I’m good”. In the past when you asked people how they were they might reply, “I’m quite well, thank you,” or even give you a thumbnail sketch of their health. But now there’s only the wet-blanket coverall: “I’m good.” Why does everyone say they’re “good”? It is because really we feel ourselves to be bad; bad because we lie about our pork-pie consumption and Michael Heseltine’s character; bad because we secretly sleep with a Gary Barlow blow-up doll; bad because we can no longer trust the evidence of our senses.

“I’m good” is a useless prophylactic, yet we must not flag – we must fight the “to be honests” on the beaches and in the bar rooms, in the classrooms and on the shop floor. I call upon you all to resist “to be honest” with all your might and main. How? It’s simple really: every time I hear someone say “To be honest, it’s been a rainy day,” I snap back: “No! Don’t be honest, lie about it – say it’s been a sunny day, spice things up a little!” To begin with they look at me suspiciously, but then a comprehension dawns on them and, to be honest, it’s a lovely sight.

Numbers of giraffes (Girrafa camelopardalis) in the African wild have more or less halved over the past decade, while the numbers of Giraffes (Restaurant pseudoglobalis) in the urban areas of Britain have more than doubled. I wonder if there may be some axiom at work here and that the inverse correlation is a fixed law. It would follow that anyone could start any old chain of crap restaurants, calling them – for example – Platypus; and so long as the namesake species was rapidly exterminated, success would be guaranteed. I realise this is a troubling business plan – but we live in troubling times.

I first became aware of Giraffe, the restaurant, in the early 2000s. But I don’t recall chowing down in one until 2008, when, tucked up in some lofty nook of the newly opened Heathrow Terminal 5, we indulged our hideous picky-eater children in buttock-soft burgers and stiff little fries, knowing full well that they’d refuse the free airline food waiting for them beyond the departure gate. It could’ve been the pre-flight tension or it could’ve been the terminal itself, but the only memory I have of that meal are the giraffe-shaped swizzle sticks the youngest insisted on clutching in his sweaty palms all the way to New York.

Four years on, and with 43 Giraffes now wavering across our stony-hearted Serengeti, all the way from Aberdeen to Portsmouth, the time seemed right to give it another go. All critics should beware of prejudice: the irritating fungal complaint that makes the most painterly surface appear . . . flaky. This being noted, surely a man can be forgiven for approaching a chain restaurant in a crappy mood – especially one that announces on its website that “It’s about exploring the wonderful foods from around the globe and opening our ears to music from around the world. Giraffes are so tall they see a different view of the world.” Curiously, the two locations the Giraffe people pick as their diners’ imaginative loci are: “anywhere from Sydney to Israel – somewhere sunny and full of smiles”.

Hmm – when I was last there, Sydney was a pretty tough town, and as for Israel, don’t get me started. Still, I wasn’t eating the Giraffe website. I and my now 11-year-old were being shown to a grim little circular table hard beside a big concrete pillar, while all around us roiled an international migrant workforce serving food to tourists. I could see there were lots of better tables that were vacant, so I snagged a servitor and complained. She plonked us back down on vinyl poufs in the reception area, cleared one of these better tables and then reseated us.

Was I mollified? Was I fuck. I scanned the menu: chicken potstickers, oregano halloumi skewers, falafel “deluxe” burger – blah, blah, blah . . . world, world, world. The waitress reappeared and took our drinks order. When she came back with apple juice for the young master and the ten-millionth sparkling mineral water of my effervescent life, she took our food order. Mine was simple: grilled salmon, mashed potato, a green salad. I couldn’t have the cherry tomato, fire-roasted corn and jalapeño salsa for reasons of gastric rather than psychic intolerance. As for the boy, he gave his burger order complete with a series of negative stipulations: no tomato, no mayonnaise and no lettuce – just bun, cheese, meat. I’m used to this bollocks, so paid it no mind until the patty appeared and he lifted its top lid and began to moan plaintively because there was something healthy in there.

Next, I did the bad thing. Was it because of the swizzle sticks – or because I am congenitally ill-humoured, or perhaps I simply wanted to challenge the fundamental taboos that surround eating in our benighted culture? I don’t know – and I don’t care. I picked up the offending burger and squeezed it in my fist until the hated mayonnaise squirted from between my clenched knuckles and spattered across the tabletop; then I dropped the macerated lump back on his plate, rose and went to the bathroom to wash. When I came back, expecting uproar, I found nothing but smiley calm: the waitress had cleared everything up and told me she was bringing a new burger without the offending gloop. Chastened, I ate my salmon, mash and salad – hardly world food but exactly the sort of thing I eat at home, and just as tasty.

Worse was to come, because they didn’t even charge me for my intemperance – and how goddam smiley is that? By the time we left I was beginning to think that this really was a family oriented establishment, so perfectly did they cater to adult children.

The mot juste is oophagy, meaning that strange form of in utero nourishment whereby embryos feed on eggs produced by the ovary while still in the mother’s uterus. There is speculation among ichthyologists – and sociologists – that oophagy may be preparatory for a predatory lifestyle, but in organisations such as the BBC it seems to serve no useful or adaptive function at all.

Ever since the Jimmy Savile paedophile story broke, we’ve witnessed one act of oophagy after another, as, within the capacious womb of New Broadcasting House, director general eats director of news, and director of news eats Newsnight editor. The only developed embryos to get out of there alive have been the original reporter on the Newsnight story, Liz MacKean, and her equally upstanding producer, Meirion Jones. For the BBC listeners and viewers, the oophagy has been more or less 24/7, as each bulletin begins: “This is the BBC news at X, the director general of the BBC, George Entwistle, has said . . .” I only hope that by the time you read this, it will have all died down a bit.

But what all that threshing about at the BBC has been obscuring from view is the more disturbing gyre of the societal whirlpool surrounding Savile’s abuse. Possibly there was conspiracy at the BBC to cover up Savile’s activities; it is not inconceivable that other media organisations passively or actively colluded with this, although, as regular readers will know – and please forgive the grotesque punning – I always favour cock-up as a heuristic over conspiracy. It seems to me that the question of how it is that the serial abuser Savile was able to hide in the over-lit view of the television studio for over four decades cannot be answered within any such binary formulations. As a species we’re addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that some phenomenon is either “this” or “that” – how much more uncomfortable that it may well be “the other”.

Savile was such a phenomenon: the seventh child of a Leeds bookmaker’s clerk, he was conscripted into the mines during the Second World War as a Bevin Boy. Making his career in entertainment, as a dance hall manager and wrestler, then as a disc jockey and television presenter, Savile occupied a pivotal position within the British class dynamic: as a deracinated petitbourgeois, his obvious affinities were with Tory leaders such as Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher (seemingly a friend) and John Major. Like these politicians, Savile’s shtick was to personify a transitional state: between poverty and wealth, between stasis and change, between tradition and innovation. As such, his existence typified a socio-economic order – and related culture – that tends towards punctuated equilibrium. In his cut-out-and-keep Jackie magazine togs, he had the air of having been designed by committee, which in a way he was: a mass committee, the members of which numbered in the millions, and included both complacent leaders and the complaisantly led.

Key to Savile’s role was charity. “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.” (1 Corinthians 13:13.) I don’t know if Savile was much of a Bible-reader, but he had Paul’s first epistle down pat and was able to violate the faith and hope of scores of young people through his philanthropic endeavours. Now, you may say that simply because a psychopath (and clearly, Savile was one) cynically deploys charitable activity to cover up his crimes, it doesn’t invalidate the principle of charity itself – but I say: it does.

Savile’s cynicism differed in degree from most people’s charitable motivation, but not in kind. Charity has come to play the same role at the mass level that Savile did at an individual one: it acts as a safety valve to shame the less well-off and otherwise deprived into muting protest. Violated by the social order, the poor cannot rise up and revolt, because having allowed Jim – or Oxfam/Shelter/the NSPCC – to fix it for them, their distress no longer has credibility.

The rich, as we know, love charity. They’re always having a ball – most often a charitable one. By institutionalising charity, state-funded bodies such as the BBC collude in socio-economic inequality – and by hearkening to their fundraising calls, we, the crowd, are equally collusive. Will anything change as a result of Savile’s unmasking? I doubt it – after all, the thousands of newly self-identifying victims of abuse that are now coming forward are having to be counselled and supported by . . . charities. But the BBC, once it’s dealt with the red face accompanying that oophagy, should seriously think about removing its red nose as well.

In John Steinbeck’s Depression-era novel, The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family, forced off their farm by the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, head west to the promised land of California. Impoverished and immiserated, three generations of them pile on top of a chimerical vehicle they’ve welded together out of a wrecked truck bed and a jalopy. Unsurprisingly, in a novel that concerns itself with the material realities of life, Steinbeck places appropriate emphasis on the cooking and sharing of food – his account begins with an al-fresco meal: a jack rabbit served up to Tom Joad, the eldest son, shortly after he arrives back at the farmstead having been in jail, to discover the land desiccated and the family gone.

Throughout The Grapes of Wrath there are precise descriptions of meagre meals: gravy and hard biscuits, bread baked with scratchings of cornflour and a long riff centring on the behaviour and attitudes of a couple working at a roadside lunch counter, who all day long deal with the endless caravan of penniless refugees. Steinbeck interspersed his tale with these interludes, which examine the consciousness of people variously located in the economic order: car salesmen, bankers, cops and other officials. He does this unashamedly and didactically, as a way of educating his readers regarding the human consequences of a downswing in the cycle of laissez-faire capitalism. The book was a cause célèbre when it was published in 1939, and Steinbeck was accused of being every shade of a red, from puce liberal to incarnadined commie.

Eighty years after the events the novel depicts, we found ourselves driving through the American south-west: a couple of well-padded leftists ensconced in their hired Hyundai, together with a brace of want-for-nothing kids; and, by way of echoing Steinbeck’s didacticism – albeit in a minor key – we downloaded the Grapes audio book so we could play it as we bucketed along through California, across Nevada and a corner of Utah, before looping back towards Los Angeles across the Mojave desert.

Then a strange thing happened: in the continuously present fictional inscape of Steinbeck’s novel, the Joads were trundling across the California state line and along Highway 40. Meanwhile, the Selfs were headed out of Las Vegas south-west along Highway 15; all things being supernaturally equal, the two families would coincide at Barstow. To give this weirdness a swerve, I took a left on to the Kelbaker Road and headed across the undulating plain studded with Dr Seuss Joshua trees towards Kelso.

In his paean to the south-west, Scenes in America Deserta, the architectural critic Reyner Banham wrote: “In 1980 no historical or other explanation can make the station at Kelso look any less improbable than it does at first sighting – the grove, the lawns, the brick paving, the Hispanic building bearing, in fine ‘Railway Ionic’ lettering, the blunt name of a rainswept township in the Scottish border country”. It was 32 years later and 108C in the shade when we pulled into the parking lot at Kelso and switched off the Joads, and yes the immaculate station building with its arched colonnade looked just as improbable. There were still freight cars halted on the tracks, still the green shock of palm fronds and the viridian of well-watered lawns, but once inside it became clear that the station was no longer the same at all.

“The lunchroom and any other facilities,” Banham had written, “exist only to serve the Union Pacific. It’s an oasis of civilisation and style in the middle of nothing, but it’s someone else’s private oasis – not ours.” Banham had felt the presence of Taco Bell wrappers in the Kelso Station rubbish bins surpassing strange. But that was then; now, we wouldn’t be surprised if a Mars probe beamed back images of Taco Bell wrappers crumpled on its canal sides.

Then the station was theirs – now it was ours, and by ours I mean us tourists who descend on a landscape once fertile with possible meanings and reduce it to a fine dust of digitised certainties. The cream-painted and darkwood-floored rooms that once housed a telegraph office, luggage depot and dormitories now housed replicas of these. It was all beautifully done. A plump, pink couple with two plump, pink children came in and sat at the counter at right angles to us. We ordered hotdogs, garden salads, coffees and Cokes – so did they, employing the same resolutely English accents. Steinbeck, I felt certain, would’ve had something to say about this: we hadn’t avoided the Joads at all – they were out there in the noonday swelter, skulking from window to window, pressing their emaciated faces to the panes and looking in on this unreality.

It must have been a hippy-dippy-happy-hoppy fortnight round the David Icke household, what with Jimmy Savile being exposed as a paedophile. The Savile business has all the hallmarks of one of those “Who knew?!” moments (this to be exclaimed mockingly in the manner of Jeff Greene, Larry David’s roly-poly agent in Curb Your Enthusiasm). I mean to say: children’s TV presenter and confirmed bachelor who reveres his mummy and feels most comfy in loose-fitting sportive nylon turns out to be a kiddy-fiddler . . . Who’d’ve guessed it?!

Well, Icke for one, whose world view, aptly summarised as “New Age Conspiracism”, includes the tasty insight that many public figures are satanic paedophiles. Icke, a former TV presenter (although let’s not read anything into that), is rather better known for his contention that the human race is the result of a millennia-long breeding programme run by the Annunaki, a race of reptilian super-beings from the Draco constellation.

What the precise relation is between child sex-abusers sporting devil horns and extraterrestrial lizards I’m not in a position to divulge, not having waded through the reams of apodictic text that Icke has generated since his revelations of the early 1990s set him on the course from Grandstand presenter to godhead, via a stint as one of the Green Party’s speakers. (At one time he was touted as “the Greens’ Tony Blair”.)

Still, I’m not dredging up any of this Ickiness with a view to mocking the man or his beliefs – such dismissals, to my way of thinking, are mostly complacent, often revealing an equally credulous belief, on the part of those making  them, in their superior rationalism, seldom confirmed by anything they say, do, or think. No, what got me going on the Ickenield way was an encounter I had with Raj (not his real name, or implied ethnicity), who I often run into in the park where we’re to be found being exercised by our dogs. (I could, in an Ickeian fashion, enlarge on this: might it not be the case that human civilisation is a 200,000-year-old conspiratorial breeding programme organised by canine super-beings to create conditions in which intelligent apes with opposable thumbs will open tins of food for them and pick up their excreta?)

Raj is in his early 40s and a decade or so of hard-drug and alcohol abuse have knocked him about a bit – there are teeth missing and deep lines on his face where only a Beckettian septuagenarian should have them. Still, Raj has been clean and sober for years now – and by my standards highly selfless; because while he has fuck all himself, he works part-time as a carer for dementia sufferers. I know – just know – from the way he talks about his work that Raj is almost desperately caring. When I saw him the other morning he was upset because he’d had to take the day off due to a bad dental abscess; he was worried that whoever filled in for him might not be as . . . well, caring. All this, and because he’s waged he’s not eligible for free dental care, meaning that unless he lies on the form, the cost of the treatment will just about pauperise him.

Anyway, he was saying this and I was thinking: what a miserable world it is in which decent folk have to skulk about the system – I wish the entire coalition front bench could be struck down by a plague of gum boils, when Raj slipped in that he’d just dobbed up for a ticket to see David Icke’s gig at Wembley Arena. This, the culmination of a two-year promotional tour for his latest work: Human Race Get off Your Knees: the Lion Sleeps No More, during which Icke has been addressing enthusiastic crowds the world over and indulging them with his trademark Gladstonian rhetoric, speaking sometimes for eight hours non-stop.

As I examined Raj – with, dare I say it, the reptilian scales falling from my eyes – he went on to explain that he had all of Icke’s books at home and that the Leicester-born prophet of universal consciousness “spoke a great deal of sense”. And there you have it: I don’t believe in Icke for a second – but I do believe in Raj, fervently. And if great crowds of Raj-a-likes believe Icke speaks sense then it’s a mistake to dismiss their belief as mere ignorance and credulousness.

Even on the most cursory examination of Icke’s ideas I can see he’s doing something that the left in this country has abandoned: speaking truth unto power. There may be no conspiracy of satanic paedophiles bred by alien lizards but the way corporate entities and their capital flows undermine any possibility of real democracy in Britain, while all main political parties ignore it, has the lineaments of a conspiracy. Remember: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you, Jimmy.

The last thing you want to hear about is my bowels – I know that. In William Burroughs’s emetic classic, Naked Lunch, he has a riff wherein rampant bores escape from an asylum equipped with blowpipes and curare-tipped darts; these excolonial British civil servants paralyse their victims before subjecting them to tedious disquisitions on their own constipation – monologues that, Burroughs tells us, are “as intractable as the processes they describe”. So, none of that.

In fairness to me, having been diagnosed in May with that malingering bore’s catch-all “Irritable Bowel Syndrome” and placed on the highly restrictive low-FODMAP diet (see Real Meals passim), I think I’ve been comparatively restrained, managing to carry on writing about food pretty much as if I still ate normally – whatever that means. But now I feel I must share with you – dear dyspeptic readers – an exciting new culinary discovery: the WAGfree café, bakery and deli in Brixton Village.

Started up a couple of years ago by a newly diagnosed coeliac, David Scrace (crazy name – logical guy), this charming establishment caters to the colonically challenged with an extensive range of cakes, quiches, breads, tarts, buns, pies, pasta and even sausages – all free from so much as a micron of wheat and gluten.

We live in a provender-saturated culture – that’s the wholewheat truth. Brixton Village, one of the series of old shopping arcades that radiate out from Electric Avenue – used to be a curious mixture of the vibrant and the desultory. The pale-yellow-painted, three-storey-high passageways, concrete-arched and opaquely skylightened, are designated avenues – first through to sixth – and in times past they housed the odd greengrocer’s stall piled high with phallic yams and anfractuous okra. There were also butchers fortified by glistening ramparts of pigs’ trotters and cows’ feet; the chopped lilt of reggae, accompanied by a rhythm section of cleavers rising and falling, filled the saffron-scented air; while here and there were small shops flogging tea cosy hats and Bob Marley memorabilia.

These concerns are still there – but in the past decade there’s been an astonishing foodie infill. I wonder what Walter Benjamin – whose Arcades Project, the ur-text of modern psychogeography, took its inspiration from Parisian shopping arcades of the same era – would make of it all. Outside, buddleia still thrusts from the brickwork of the railway viaduct, while old Afro-Caribbean women trundle pantechnicon-sized shopping trolleys past clamorous nail bars. But inside the Village, beneath the hanging banners of national flags throng Lab G (Laboratorio Artigianale del Buon Gelato), Etta’s Seafood Kitchen, MTK African Restaurant, Honest Burgers, and French & Grace (home of the Über Wrap) – to name only those within a waddle of each other.

It would be fair enough to dismiss the WAGfree café as just another cavity in the bourgeois psyche impacted with eatables but for those of us who – should we eat wheat or gluten – bloat up Montgolfier stylee, then hover about the house propelled by our own flatus, Scrace’s place is a veritable oasis. His marketing mantra is: “It’s gluten-free but it doesn’t taste gluten-free. We bake things that are great to eat, not poor imitations of things you can’t eat.” This begs all sorts of philosophical questions – for does not everyone eat poor imitations of things they cannot eat: the shadows of the pure nutritious forms being carried past the cave mouth?

But let us nibble – not quibble: David told me proudly that the wheat- and gluten-intolerant flock from miles around to sample his sweetmeats – and having over the subsequent week polished off a trio of his mini quiches, a strawberry tart, the aforementioned sausage and quite a lot of bread, I can only say that they’ve got the right idea. I make no absolute promises on this matter but I hope that having boomed the WAGfree café in this column two things will happen: even those who can revel in wheat and make free with gluten will give it a try; and having disburdened myself I won’t feel the need for at least another five months to bore you with my intolerances. Frankly, I’m intolerant of my own intolerances (which also make me distinctly intolerant), so what they do to you out there in normal land I shudder to think.

Finally: as an added bonus, the clientele of the WAGfree café – so far as I can tell – does not include any wives or girlfriends of Premier League footballers . . . yet. Result, as fried potato supremo Gary Lineker probably wouldn’t say.

You don’t need to know this – but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio. On a good night I’ll push the frail barque of my psyche off into the waters of Lethe accompanied by the midnight newsreader – on a bad one it’s the shipping forecast. Somewhere in between the two lies Book of the Week, which goes out at 12.30am on Radio 4. I try to give this programme a swerve – my main occupation is writing books, and listening to other people’s isn’t that relaxing; it’s a bit like a performing seal trying to catch 40 winks while watching another seal . . . perform.

Schadenfreude lies at the root of this; I am, shameful to relate, lulled by news of riotous disturbances in distant lands. A baying mob attacking the US embassy in Cairo? Yawn. Crazed Chinese patriots torching Japanese car showrooms in Beijing? My eyelids droop. Machete-wielding provocateurs rampaging through Kenyan villages? Zzzzz. But a few weeks ago, when I found myself inadvertently listening to the adaptation of Paul Auster’s Winter Journal, I came viciously into wakefulness. Auster’s memoir employs the second-person singular, so that the saccharine and self-indulgent observations about his own life are addressed to . . . you. You went to Paris, you slept with a prostitute, you sat up all night drinking whisky.

What on earth could have persuaded Auster to so dramatise his relationship with his younger selves if not a spurious belief that we, his auditors, would share in his doubly reflexive self-self-indulgence? Still, I didn’t let it trouble me too much – or, rather, for the next few nights my timing was better and I returned to the more soporific go-round of destruction, hysteria and rapine. Then: another Book of the Week wheedled into my cochlea, Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton; another series of highly subjective recollections, this time treating of their author in the third person. Thus: he had a miserable time at public school, he underwent the miserable confinements of the safe houses following the fatwa and latterly he canoodled with Madonna at the Vanity Fair party.

Two grandish old literary men does not a crowd make – and yet there did seem something telling about this unwillingness on the part of Auster and Rushdie to own up to their own singularity. I don’t doubt that Rushdie’s explanation for fashioning a third person out of himself relates to the extreme psychological effects of living under an alias for a decade, but as Pankaj Mishra pointed out in his review of Joseph Anton for the Guardian, Rushdie’s inclination to elide the personal with the geopolitical results in a curiously binary view of the world-historical events he has been caught up in. While on the one side there’s the good crowd: Anton/Rushdie, Madonna, Tony Blair et al – all those individuals who unequivocally support the right to unfettered speech and publication; on the other is the great mass of Islamofascistic loonies, who, when not burning copies of The Satanic Verses or cutting off their womenfolk’s clitorises, are plotting the terrorist acts against the west that he so presciently foresaw.

Mishra is at pains to point out that not for a second does he endorse in any way, shape or form the fatwa against Rushdie, or any of the other manifestations of extremist political Islam that have blighted the past quarter century – and I concur wholeheartedly with this. However, what I think concerns us both is that a Manichean approach to these events results in the lumping together of many different crowds into a singular mass.

To take the violent demonstrations over the past few weeks; the attacks on embassies and other concerns in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere may have been remotely triggered by the bowdlerised anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims, but their proximate causes are to be found in very different local cocktails of corruption, sectarianism and deprivation. These are people for whom freedom of speech is besides the point – for such is their benighted condition, they have not even the ability to speak but can only scream with frustration.

Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals – as Marx averred – is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he. I prefer to adapt Stephen Dedalus’s maxim, and rather than seeing history as a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake, I choose to regard it as a sedative susurration.

It’s worth recalling the infamous “black dinner” from J-K Huysmanns’s Á Rebours, the so-called immoral book that the prosecution counsel insisted on reading lengthy passages from during Oscar Wilde’s trial for gross indecency. Ostensibly the cataloguing of the decadent aristo Des Esseintes’s weltschmerz, far from being particularly shocking what will probably strike the modern reader most is how funny the book is – that and how extensively Wilde stole from it for his The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Anyway, here’s the dinner thrown to celebrate “the most unmentionable of minor personal calamities”: the host’s impotence:

The dining-room was hung with black and looked out on a strangely metamorphosed garden, the walks being strewn with charcoal, the little basin in the middle of the lawn bordered with a rim of black basalt and filled with ink; and the ordinary shrubs superseded by cypresses and pines. The dinner itself was served on a black cloth, decorated with baskets of violets and scabiosae and illuminated by candelabra in which tall tapers flared.

While a concealed orchestra played funeral marches, the guests were waited on by naked negresses wearing shoes and stockings of cloth of silver besprinkled with tears.

The viands were served on black-bordered plates, – turtle soup, Russian black bread, ripe olives from Turkey, caviar, mule steaks, Frankfurt smoked sausages, game dished up in sauces coloured to resemble liquorice water and boot-blacking, truffles in jelly, chocolate-tinted creams, puddings, nectarines, fruit preserves, mulberries and cherries. The wines were drunk from darktinted glasses, – wines of the Limagne and Roussillon vintages, wines of Tenedos, the Val de Penas and Oporto. After the coffee and walnuts came other unusual beverages, kwas, porter and stout.

Personally, I had no idea a mule steak was – or is – black, but then what do I know? Standing on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica and looking at the crowns of the palms tossing against the inky dusk mounting over the Pacific, I said to Mac Guffin (aka the Happy Detective), “I’ve acquired all sorts of savage food intolerances – basically all I can eat is a bit of meat or fish, some salad leaves and potatoes for carb.” Mac chewed on his organic moustache – a genial soul from the backwoods of Minnesota, he was a staffer on the LA Times before Sam Zell took the title and ploughed it into the ground; now he works as a consulting shamus known the length of LA for his upbeat attitude to homicide. The fact that whenever he turns up people get dead never seems to faze him: “I guess it was their karma,” he’ll say, poking at a corpse with the toe of his Belvius Vintage canvas lace-ups.

To me he said, “I know just the right joint for us – it’s right up the street.” I hadn’t doubted he would. Santa Monica is the kind of place where you can throw a Vintage Belvius canvas lace-up and hit a wholesome restaurant: Planet Raw, the Kreation Kafe – they’re all here. We strolled to Tender Greens, which was just that: a long glassy frontage revealed a submissive decor of teal tables, olive chairs and hessian walls. The beige-clad clientele sat around under lamps with ecru shades and the most aggressive coloration was the turquoise light over the counter where young people, wrapped in eau-de-Nil linen dished up unbelievably healthy food.

“What do you think these guys earn?” I asked Mac as we picked up salt-and-pepper grilled chicken, Yukon Gold mashed potatoes and “a small simple salad”. “Oh, they’re on minimum wage, I guess,” he replied. So, I thought to myself, even at $8 an hour it’d still take you an hour and a half to get dinner. Still, this was blackhearted quibbling: the truth of the matter is that Tender Greens dishes up ethically sourced food relatively cheaply at eight outlets in LA and southern California. The basic format – fish, red meat, chicken, rice, bread and salad stuff – so exactly conforms to the profile of my modish intolerances that the establishment could’ve been conceived by some anti-Huysmanns in order to cater to my dicky tummy.

Mac and I fatalistically forked our herbage – all around was the muted burble of environmentally friendly conversation: people drumming up support for tree-hugging jaunts, mass vasectomies, or cetacean de-strandings. It felt as if we were sitting in a biome that had been doctored to resemble a standard retail outlet. Mac dabbed his moustache with his hempen napkin while I told him about the Des Esseintes dinner. “Oh man,” he sighed, “that’s, like, unreal.” But later, strolling back to the Shangri-La Hotel where I was staying I wondered, was it actually any less veridical than Tender Greens?

Sometimes the crowd is the madness – at others it’s the absence of the crowd that is. Standing with the father of my youngest son’s schoolfriend we survey the prospect: a large triangle of close-cropped grass is bald-faced-on-to on two sides by semis of 1960s vintage – the contracting metal of cooling engine blocks ticks in the cool summer evening. There is a sense of spaciousness – exposure, even – at odds with the conurbation that we both know surrounds us.

“We’ve been here for over ten years,” the father figure says, adopting a hands-in-pockets stance, “and y’know what.”

“What.” I counter his rhetorical question with one of my own.

“During that entire time we’ve never so much as locked the front door once – not once. Hell, I even leave the key in the ignition of my car. And y’know what.”

“What.” If it weren’t that he was making an apposite observation this reflexivity would be intolerable.

“None of the neighbours has ever had a break-in either – and y’know why.”

“Why.” In point of fact, I know why.

“’Cause of the nick, of course,” he gestures to the hypotenuse of the triangle, which is formed by a 25-foot-high wall of ageing London stock brick; beyond this can be seen the peaked roofs, the mucal rendering, the barred lancet windows of HMP Wandsworth. We are both silent for a while – I’ve no idea what the paterfamilias is thinking about but I’m meditating on the crowd of felons in the nick: each one probably at this time banged up for the night in his cell. A particulate crowd – a crowd of isolates, each of one is not regarded and therefore becomes undifferentiated, faceless and to be ignored.

One might’ve thought that even to the averagely sussed, cracked-up, aggravated burglar, the juju that surrounds the prison – where, no doubt, he has spent time himself – would be countered by the following reasoning: “No one probably dares go near the gaffs in back of the nick – those straight-goers probably leave their doors unlocked. All I’ll have to do is stroll round and carry off some rich fucking pickings.” But as friend’s father’s testimony confirmed, if there’s one thing the crowd abhors, it’s reason.

Cut to Bodie, a ghost town in the middle east of California, on the Nevada border. Bodie once had upwards of 40,000 inhabitants, daily newspapers, taverns, hotels, schools and so forth. At the height of the Gold Rush it was the second biggest city in California after San Francisco. When the seams became unprofitable, the crowd ebbed away until at the time of the vast fire in the early 1930s that destroyed 90 per cent of the buildings there were only a handful of people left. Now the only residents are temporary ones; tourists who drive the ten miles of winding – and latterly dirt – road from Highway 395, pay their $20 and then mosey about the revenant of the town’s grid pattern, stopping to admire the echt weathering of the church, the general store and some barns, houses and assorted lean-tos. Up on the hillside is the flaking bulk of the Standard Stamp Mill, where the ore was crushed and refined – but this is, quite reasonably, classed as a dangerous structure and can only be visited in an organised crowd (called “a tour group”).

Standing in the cinematic rain, the sky umber overhead, I find myself curiously heartened by the way the State of California has resisted the impulse to gussy Bodie up. True, there has been some artful rearrangement, some gathering together of curios into implausibly exact arrays but on the whole Bodie has been left alone. The crowd respond to this arty desuetude by moving about the ruined buildings gently and quietly – or is it perhaps that only those who already feel themselves on the way to being revenants choose to visit ghost towns? Although there was some enthusiasm in the family for visiting Alcatraz, this proved impossible because the tour groups had to be booked long in advance, such is its popularity.

In Bodie, where absences touched one another lightly on the edge of the great expanse of America Deserta, I wondered at the strangeness of it all: to superstitiously avoid one jail but wildly flock to another is surely definitive proof – if any were needed – that there’s nowt so queer as folk. One of the reasons they need to corral visitors to Alcatraz is that the temptation to pilfer the few remaining relics is so great. I wish I’d had my son’s friend’s father along with me, so I could ask him what he thought of this paradox – but only rhetorically, of course.

As we drove down the broad stretch of Highway 9, which, under its guise as State Street, forms the main thoroughfare of Hurricane, Utah, my 14-year-old confided that he found the girl on the illuminated Wendy’s sign “disturbing”. I can see his point: with her ketchup-red hair and pigtails akimbo; with the upstanding and presumably savagely starched piecrust collar of her shirtwaist; with her stylised freckles and unbelievably joyful smile, the Wendy’s girl (who, one can only assume, is the eponymous “Wendy”) has the same sinister aura of other humans-gone-logo. Still, she’d probably give that creepy Colonel Sanders a thrashing while beating up on that Chucky-doll-lookalike, Ronald McDonald, with a handy rolling pin.

The fast-food logo that’s stayed with me most powerfully from the time I spent living in the States as a child is Orange Julius. Originally a fruit-juice stand flogging sugary OJ – hence the moniker – the chain had branched out into burgers and hotdogs under the winking sign of a little pitchfork-wielding demon by the time we were cruising the streets of Ithaca, NY, in the mid-1960s. You might’ve imagined that the marketing of fast food under such a diabolic presence had eventually fallen foul of the religious lobby, but what put paid to it (or him) was a suit by the alumni of Arizona State University, from whose own logo Orange Julius had been freely adapted; thus proving yet again that branding (and associated litigation) is far more fundamental to the American psyche than even the Bible.

Anyway, I never remember being scared of the Orange Julius devil – yet even now, sitting many thousands of miles away, the very thought of Wendy baring her teeth in the desert sunset is enough to bring me out in a cold sweat. Mind you, this could be a somatic memory, because the air-conditioning in the joint was savage. “Quality Is Our Recipe”, that’s the Wendy’s shtick, a perfect little piece of nonsense in its own right. But then once you’re out in the American boondocks, you begin to suspend disbelief in these sorts of things – just as it seems entirely acceptable to bumble along the interstates in an SUV the size of a semi-detached house. Our hire car seemed grotesquely huge to me, until I pulled in to Wendy’s and parked it beside one whose wheel arches arced above it like the flying buttresses of Chartres Cathedral. Inside there was the full-strength mortuary light, tiled dissection areas and melamine gurneys; the troughs full of real plants genetically engineered to resemble plastic ones. In the queue, pimply teens fresh from football practice sported those flesh-coloured and obscenely padded calf-length pants, while jiggling with the effects of a lifelong corn syrup comedown.

My teenager suppressed his fear long enough to order a “Baconator” (“Two ¼lb patties topped with fresh-cooked Applewood Smoked Bacon in between a premium buttered, toast-ed bun. Topped off with mayo, ketchup, and American cheese. Now that’s not just a sandwich, but a tasty treat”). I perused the info boards above the servery. There were scary salads and berry tea infusions – if I didn’t know better I might’ve thought I’d stumbled into a health-food joint.

But then this has been the way of it with the big fast-food chains: their response to accusations of super-sizing their customers while etiolating their workers has been not either/or but both/and. Wendy’s is no exception, with plenty of signage about corporate responsibility and donation boxes for worthy causes.

I had the spicy chicken Caesar salad, my wife a cheeseburger. For some dumb reason I also got us two cryogenic storage dewars full of tea the temperature of liquid nitrogen – and when I closed in on the table they top-heavily toppled out of the slots in the cardboard carrier and inundated my wife’s vintage Prada handbag. I’d already scored a perfect zero two days before when I put the open sunblock bottle in a shoulder bag with her vintage Prada bag. Now the handbag was definitively fucked – only Laura Ingalls Wilder’s blind elder sister Mary would still have deemed it stylish.

Inevitably the rest of the meal passed off with a certain froideur. I tried making a few jolly remarks about the square-cut beef patties Wendy’s use in their hamburgers (“We don’t cut corners!”), but these fell as flat as . . . well, as a square-cut patty. The food was the usual dreck but the staff were sweetness itself when it came to mopping up this perfect tea storm in the desert town of Hurricane.