I was reading Jean Baudrillard’s meditation on Las Vegas – on an iPhone sitting in a sushi bar in the dead centre of the casino at the Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas. “It is in such a universe,” Baudrillard wrote of the modern mediatised world, “that what [Paul] Virilio calls the aesthetic of disappearance gathers strength, and that the following begin to appear: fractal objects, fractal forms, fault zones that follow saturation, and thus a process of massive rejection, of the abreaction or stupor of a society purely transparent to itself.

“Like the signs in advertising, one is geared down, one becomes transparent or uncountable, one becomes diaphanous or rhizomic to escape the point of inertia – one is placed in orbit, one is plugged in, one is satellised, one is archived – paths cross: there is the sound track, the image track, just as in life there is the work track, the leisure track, the transport track, etc, all enveloped in the advertising track.”

My friend and colleague David Flusfeder has written eloquently for the NS on gambling in Vegas but my journey to the dark heart of the American dream possessed not even the impetus of the adrenalised: I was there because it was the obvious stopover on a family trip back from the wilds of Zion in Utah to our jetting-home point: Los Angeles.

Flusfeder observes that Las Vegas presents the best exemplar of the great democratic denomination of American culture: the dollar. Anyone can lose their shirt in Vegas – so long as they have a shirt to lose. He also points out the strange Manichaeism that invests American debauchery: everyone is entitled to go to Vegas, get drunk and stoned, have commercial sex and gamble – so long as the shit they do stays steaming in the desert, while when they return home they continue to say grace before dinner.

However, in recent years this dichotomisation has been undermined by the drive of the big casino hotels to broaden their market base. Hit hard by the recession, no longer do gamblers flow through the flashing mandibles of the gaming rooms like so many krill being sifted by an avaricious leviathan; and so the monsters of the deep have gone looking for smaller fish to fry. Strolling through the vast halls and Babylonian corridors of the Mandalay Bay, what struck me was not cod-opulence but the complexion of the crowds thronging them.

Men-in-black and ladies-in-couture conventioneers were massing for the evening’s moral turpitude, crepuscular gamblers were a-creeping and demi-prostitutes a-sidling but just as thick on the polished ground were family groups returning from the artificial beach (the vast pool had been closed due to proximate lightning strikes, not even Moe Greene would relish his punters being stir-fried in chlorine). In the teeth of recession a plush room that more than comfortably houses a family of four was going for $200 a night, all in – about £35 a head – so it was cheaper to enjoy all this largesse than it would be to put up at your local bypass-bound Travelodge. On our first trip down from the 15th floor the lift was full of little girls in swimsuits sitting cross-legged in pools of water – clearly they’d been playing in there. Elsewhere stolid Midwestern families sauntered past the blackjack tables as they might stroll past the enclosures in a petting zoo.

What this infusion of genuine – rather than feigned – juvenescence does for Vegas I’m not altogether qualified to assess, but my hunch is that it spells out T-H-E  E-N-D, as clearly as the final credits of a major sword-and-sandals motion picture. It wasn’t the public exhibitions of hyenas being induced to rape female slaves that did for the Roman empire – it was the presence of Patrician kiddies in the stands of the Colosseum. There’s something about the mass acknowledgement of transgression as a trans-generational phenomenon that does for a culture. In Vegas I was witnessing Baudrillard’s society that is transparent to itself – and therefore invisible: the point about the children trotting through the casino was that they couldn’t really see it, while the gamblers couldn’t really see them. Both moieties were childlike in their belief that by covering their own eyes they could somehow not be perceived by others.

Baudrillard, who didn’t live to see the final familiarisation of the Vegas mirage, would undoubtedly have appreciated it as the complete confirmation of his view that under conditions of late capitalism the very notion of “the social” becomes a product to be marketed exclusive of any real relations. But then, speaking as rhizome, what would I know: I just eat raw fish and extend my filaments through neon loam.

When, back in the mid-1990s, I was asked to write restaurant reviews for the Observer, I told my then editor that I wanted to broaden out the chomping field and give due weight to the sort of places where people actually ate. This premature stab at the idea of Real Meals was greeted with some scepticism – Britain was about to be submerged beneath a cresting wave of extra-virgin olive oil and the consensus on the edible was that thi-ings can only get bett-er! But before the axe fell on the pancetta and I was compelled to spend evening after evening having jus drizzled over me, I managed to fire off a couple of despatches from the front line of chain restaurants.

One of these was about Garfunkel’s, which was – and thankfully still is – the sort of joint where a callow teenage boy might take his first date. With its brassy, banquette-laden interior, photos of generic celebrities and all-you-can-graze salad bar, Garfunkel’s speaks to the condition of the tourist family, weighed down with fractious children. The first Garfunkel’s opened in 1979; by the time I reviewed the chain in 1995 there were a few branches in London and southern England and, 20 years later, there are only a few more – with an outlier in Edinburgh.

Still, in the glorious year of our twin saviours, Elizabeth and Olympia, it seemed worthwhile to go back. After all, the majority of visitors to our shores are unlikely to give a flying fuck about the Fat Duck: Garfunkel’s and its ilk are where the forking action is. So I dragged the 14-year-old from what he terms his “man cave” and hauled him into town. In the 1990s, I’d had a vision of Garfunkel the man as a wannabe southern Californian dude with a Magnum PI ’tache in a cheesecloth shirt and bell bottoms, frolicking by a poolside with a bevy of pneumatic lovelies, but my teenager went one up. “Garfunkel,” he said, scanning the menu, “sounds either like a grinning, gap-toothed child molester or a performing monkey.”

Then – with some trepidation – he kicked off the meal by ordering a Coke float, while riffing about a mate of his who will “eat anything: like, he’s eaten almost all animals there are, except for reptiles. In Thailand, he ate some, like, scorpions – but he said they put him off bugs for ever.” Sadly, there are no bugs of any sort on the Garfunkel’s menu, which is weighted towards old-fashioned Brit and chips, with lots of meaty feasts. A charming young man from Szczecin took our order. My son went for the London Tower Burger, a £13.95 masonry pile comprising two beefburgers, dill pickle, Monterey Jack cheese, crispy bacon and onion rings. He seemed to feel this was the epitome of gastronomic adventure: “I didn’t use to like onion rings,” he said, “but now I love them.”

Still, I couldn’t talk: after receiving assurance that Garfunkel’s chicken was free-range (presumably it hangs out at the poolside with Mr G), I selected a quarter of fowl from the rotisserie, which came – bizarrely – with a Caesar salad and pasta. Because of my fashionable wheat intolerance (a legacy of all that focaccia during the Blair regime), I swapped the pasta for chips. All around us sat balding, middle-aged men in shorts accompanied by harassed wives and children tethered to helium balloons. I was pleased to see that the Garfunkel’s salad bar was still at the epicentre of the establishment, although its echt 1990s matte-black livery had been changed for what looked like a variation on the theme of giant Aga stove. Weird.

Weirder still was the decorative scheme, which consists of pen-and-ink-style drawings of jumbled London landmarks, juxtaposed with ludicrously inappropriate flower-power slogans: “Tune in, turn on, drop out”, “Make love, not war” – you get the miserable picture. The Tower Burger, another landmark, loomed into sight and the Boy Wonder mused as to how he was going to fit it into his mouth. This I found a bit rich, because in the family he is known preeminently for having a huge (albeit fetching) gob. When he was about two, his mother and I caught him standing sucking on a doorknob. The entire knob was inside his mouth.

True to type, he demolished the Tower; and I made quick work of my chicken, which must have been very free-ranging indeed, because it was a skinny little thing. Not content with his Tower, my companion then had a great mound of pancakes with maple syrup and ice cream – while I had ice cream and an espresso. The bill, I thought, was, especially for a vaguely 1960s themed restaurant, pretty uncool: £56, including tip. Still, if you’re a tourist, you pays your money and takes your lack of choice.

‘“All right, big man,” said the pirate DVD seller outside Sainsbury’s Nine Elms, “I got ’em all.” He fanned out his merchandise in one hand – lurid movie posters, shrunken and photocopied – while casting furtive glances around the crowded car park. As a rule I take a hard line on any copyright infringements whatsoever; after all, my livelihood depends on its enforcement just as much as – and probably more than – those of News Corp’s shareholders, whose subsidiary, 20th Century Fox, made Prometheus, the film I ended up buying for three quid.

‘It was the “big man” that did it, really. I liked the transposition it seemed to suggest of the old cockney honorific “guv’nor” into a multicultural context; after all, was it an African “big man”, or a Scots one? And I also appreciated that the DVD scalper was himself a big man, who, like so many other thousands of immigrants to London, was trying to wrest the spark of a living from those stony gods, Gog and Magog. So I bought Ridley Scott’s sci-fi epic, whose tagline is “The search for our beginning could lead to our end”, and my ten-year-old son and I strolled on. I was thinking about my own beginnings in the old Charing Cross Hospital – the Decimus Burton-designed building that is now the police station on the Strand – and I was thinking about this essay, the aim of which was somehow to encompass my feelings about my native city in this year of its very public orgy of attempted self-celebration.

‘I had almost managed to give the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee a complete swerve; but sitting, at the beginning of June, exhausted by the journey, in a beautiful and remote house on the Hebridean island of Mull, I was appalled when one of the friends I was holidaying with turned on the television and settled down to watch the festivities. In his defence, his attraction was to camp rather than pomp, but I’d come a long way to avoid the flotilla on the drear Thames, with its freight of civil-list supernumeraries and drizzled-upon luminaries.

‘To the workaday Londoner, preoccupied by getting from A to B through tangled and metalenmeshed streets, the monarchical sideshow – which goes on in one form or another all year round – is just another practical annoyance. My heart never stirs when I’m pulled up by the Met so that tourists can gawp at busby-topped Guardsmen on the Mall; I usually just get off my bike and push it through St James’s Park.

‘As for the international festival of running and jumping shortly to take place on Stratford Marsh, I have argued vociferously against this monstrous corporate boondoggle and cynical exercise in political boosterism across a plethora of media in the past couple of years, and I shan’t waste precious space on reprising those arguments here. Suffice to say, the British – and particularly the London – taxpayers will see no return on their money; the so-called legacy of the Games will be merely the new ruins of overpriced stadiums, together with a steroidinduced collective hangover. While it gives me no pleasure at all to say this – although Schadenfreude is a very cockney indulgence – the Olympics fiasco does at least provide us with a real-time demonstration of all that is wrong with London’s governance.’

To read the rest of Will Self’s piece on his love-hate relationship with London, visit the New Statesman website here.

She’s lying over there in the corner of the room, innocently asleep; her dark face impassive, her scarlet dress neat. You wouldn’t think to look at her now what a tantalising jezebel she can be – how she can lure a man on, make him forget all else in his hunger to touch her, and stroke her, and touch her again; press her face to his, or else hold it at arm’s length and fixate upon its radiant beauty to the exclusion of all else.

And he, he’s lying over here, awake; tormented by his abandonment, although it’s difficult to say, such is the forthrightness – no, the stoicism – of his pale face, with its bold and simple features. He’s lying beside me, scuffed, chipped, painfully aged by a decade of rough manipulation – and now so callously dumped. How could I do it? I was warned and yet here I am not simply succumbing to the madness of the crowd, but almost revelling in the Dionysian digitations that have gripped me, the obsession, the compelling need for her . . .

Yes, it’s time to talk about mobile phones again – and I make no apology for it. For those of us anywhere much over 40, the blanket coverage of British mental space by mobile communications has to be the biggest psycho-physical alteration to the environment that we have witnessed in our adult lives: we are all, willy-nilly, caught squirming in its net of bandwidth. I’ve written before about my revulsion at the attrition of the divide between public and private, between intimacy and sociability, between rapt attention and attention deficit disorder implicit in the promiscuous use of these devices; what I haven’t bruited about is the nature of my own twisted relationship with . . . Phony.

Phony 1 I got hold of during the 1997 general election, when I was commissioned by the late John F Kennedy Jr to chase Tony Blair about on the campaign trail and write about it for his short-lived political magazine, George. I remember holding Phony 1 while Alastair Campbell, his spittle flecking my face, shouted at me for dogging his master. In those days mobile phones were still a comparative rarity and while I liked toying with Phony, I wasn’t so enraptured that I didn’t after a few months leave him on the roof of the car before driving off at speed. Bye-bye Phony 1. I didn’t get Phony 2 (hereafter simply “Phony”), for four years, when my wife was expecting our second son.

Faithful soul that I was, I stuck with Phony until a few days ago. Flickering through the zoetrope of the years, I see how the phones of friends and family mutated, while Phony remained securely himself. When he was five years old he became remarkable enough to be commented on as something quaint; when he reached the venerable age of eight, children began to laugh at him in the street. Now he’s nearly 12, connoisseurs lavish praise on him and suggest that he has become collectible, while admiring his phenomenal battery strength and the purity of his functionality.

In part, Phony’s long life is attributable to this: unlike my human playthings, I’ve never used him much; for most of the time he’s been switched off – when I want to make a call, or receive and send text messages, I turn him on. It drives the garrulous circle of my acquaintance mad in turn, when I observe that mobile phones were invented for my convenience, not theirs. The sleeping beauty of Phony has been of a piece with the slumberous state of my other gadgets – my camera, my voice recorder, my laptop, my iPod (a vintage 2006 Nano): none of them leap into life and start demanding my attention; they are servants, not masters.

I have indulged in what seem like aeons of mockery, observing the useless fixation of all those around me upon 5-by-3-inch screens and yet . . . and yet . . . now I, too, have succumbed. What the hell got into me? I can only describe it as half an hour of madness, during which I sat with Phony pressed against my faithless cheek while the service provider went through the credit checks. Now I am owned by the svelte tormentor who lies asleep on the other side of the room – an iPhone 4S, I believe they call her but I think of her only as . . . the Bitch: a Venus in plastic, who whips me into obliviousness.

During the past 48 hours I must have spent 40 of them fiddling with her – sending useless emails, downloading dumb apps, listening to music I don’t particularly want to hear, and – worst of all – leaving her switched on the whole time. What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!

Happy birthday to the hegemon! I’m sitting with Tony Lacey, my long-time publisher at Penguin – who was responsible for ushering a collection of these columns into electronic print – in Mishkin’s on the east side of . . . Covent Garden. It’s the Fourth of July and it was Tony’s idea that we celebrate my American heritage. Mishkin’s advertises itself as “a kind of Jewish deli with cocktails”, so presumably it isn’t named after the Christlike protagonist of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The plate-glass window at the front is stencilled with “gin” and “meatloaf”, which is about as implausible a culinary coupling as it’s possible to imagine.

The rest of the room is bare brickwork with old boards nailed up against it; some large booth seats surrounded by vinyl-covered banquettes and some smaller wooden ones. A zinc-topped bar is overseen by anglepoise lamps. Tony is drinking what looks like real lemonade out of a jam jar. “Whassat?” I ask him and he laughs, “It’s called a Will Skidelsky but why they’d want to name a lemonade drink after the books editor of the Observer is beyond me . . .” Darrell the waiter supplies the answer, but first, scanning the menu – salt beef, schmaltz herring, chicken liver, all that sorta mishegas – I ask him: “This is like a Jewish American deli experience, yeah?” He concedes that it is; “So,” I press on, “you’re telling me that my food is going to be touched and handled by actual Jews?”

To give Darrell credit, he doesn’t bat an eyelid, despite being only around five: “Um, no,” he says, “in fact I don’t think there’s a single Jewish person in the kitchen.” As for the lemonade drink, it turns out – natch – that bookman Skidelsky is a mucker of Mishkin’s owner, one Russell Norman, who also helms a number of other trendy eateries in central London, all of which – in their several ways – are deliciously, pungently, piquantly fake. Obviously I knew Mishkin’s was a put-up job the second I saw “gin” – my mother always used to maintain that there was no such thing as a Jewish alcoholic but while that may be an overstatement, the only liquor I can remember in Jewish restaurants was grotesquely sweet Israeli wine.

There was this and there was the odour when I walked in the door – insufficiently schmaltzy and old-mannish – and the decor, which was way too studied in its dishabille. Musso & Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard in LA – which has to be, by reason of longevity alone, the quintessential example of the type Mishkin’s is aiming at – is a synthetic symphony of muted and smooth surfaces. Boho it is not. Then there’s the clientele, which should include a couple of tables surrounded by Walter Matthau/George Burns, Sunshine Boys types, a-kvetching and a-picking of their teeth.

While Darrell goes off to fetch me a Skidelsky, Tony and I recount our ailments. I have exciting news: the stomach ache I chronicled in Real Meals got worse until I ended up howling in bed with my colon in spasm. The croaker prescribed anti-spasmodic medication but after a long dark night of the soul on the web, I had to concede that I had a malaise with the disgusting appellation “irritable bowel syndrome”. I’d always assumed IBS was one of those catch-alls that malingerers battened on to as an excuse for their laziness and neurasthenia but now I had the damn thing myself, I was utterly convinced of its veracity.

So convinced, that that very morning I’d had an appointment with a dapper Scots dietician who instructed me in the virtuous properties of a low-Fodmap diet, which aims to reduce the intake of short-chain carbohydrates that irritate the bowel. It was love at first sight – as Joseph Heller would say – the first time I saw the low-Fodmap diet, I fell in love with it. It was so random: onions are out, vinegar is in; honey is bad, refined sugar is good – that I could see it would provide me with inexhaustible opportunities for being a fussy eater and so return me to the psychic arms of my long-dead but formerly doting Jewish mother.

So it turns out Mishkin’s is the perfect place for a Dependence Day lunch, and Darrell doesn’t mind as it takes me half an hour to order, flicking between the menu and my diet book. What a mensch (not, thankfully, of the Louise variety). As for the food, it’s fine but then that doesn’t matter much, it’s the authenticity of the experience that I crave.

Sitting in the chair at Smile, the fashionable Kings Road salon where I have had my hair sculpted by Keith Wainwright for the last six or seven years, I looked for too long into the abyss of the mirror in front of me, which – given that it was positioned in front of the mirror on the opposite side of the room – afforded me an unpleasant vision of infinite Wills, both rear and full-face. I looked at the scrawny neck, the Gautama ears and the praying mantis posture – but these I could cope with, I knew they were present, if unacknowledged aspects of my physicality. I even stared upon the juxtaposition between me and Keith with a certain equanimity: he is on the small side, I am freakishly large; so to look at him skipping about my semi-recumbent bulk, snipping away a hair here and a hair there, was akin to observing those birds that pick at the teeth of crocodiles.

Keith is a celebrated hairdresser – in a career stretching back to the 1960s he’s sheared ‘em all, including David Bowie at the spiky peak of his success. I delivered myself into his expert hands because I had at last, with almost preternatural stoicism, faced up to the fact that my hair was thinning at the temples. My old number four down the barber’s wasn’t hiding this enough – but Keith’s genius allowed him to seamlessly elide “balding” with “short hair”. He also said reassuring things to me (or at least I thought he did), of the form: “There’s no need to worry, you may recede at the sides, but you’ll be dead before it goes on top . . .”

And yet there it was, in the mirror, and all the infinity of other mirrors, right on the very apex of my skull, like some sinister new fontanelle, opening to herald my birth-into-death, a patch of bare scalp at least two inches across! I spluttered – Keith left off his deftness: “What is it?” he asked. I pointed to the mirror, “Look,” I said, “look at that, I’m losing it – and you said I wouldn’t!” Not so much a note as a full orchestra of infantile petulance had infiltrated my tone, and Keith, responding to this, grasped me by the shoulder and looked me full in the face: “I never said that,” he said forcefully, “I simply said that it would be a long while – if ever – before the sides and top met up. And anyway . . .” I may’ve been mistaken, but I think his grip on my shoulder tightened as his eyes narrowed and tone hardened, “ . . . what did you expect?”

I’ve treasured that remark ever since. What did I expect? I was 50 – my father’s pate was naked by my age, both my brothers had lost the bulk of their covering by their 30s, who was I to hang on, idiosyncratically, to some Rapunzel-like escape ladder of hair? But Keith’s “What did you expect?” has continued to shake the wobbly edifice of my denial ever since. George Orwell said, “By the age of 50 every man has the face they deserve”; and recently Martin Amis has pointed out that the mirror always lies, because once you hit 50 you deduct ten years from yourself and superimpose the younger you. Putting Orwell and Amis together seemed to indicate that everyone believes they deserve to be ten years younger.

Certainly, walking the streets of any British city you could be forgiven for thinking this. On our way to school the other morning my youngest said conversationally, “There’s a lot of mutton about nowadays,” and when, thinking he was referring to young sheep, I began to explain the expression “mutton dressed as lamb”, he said that this was exactly the sense in which he meant it. Ten is a little young to be making these distinctions, but the more curious phenomenon is how, throughout life, we move from an exaggerated perception of our own bodily quirks, to an occluded one; from maximising to minimising. In adolescence, pimples are a yard wide and gushing pus, chubby thighs are elephantine and hair is either too curly or too straight. But in our middling years we tip the other way on the fulcrum of delusion, and start believing that tight underwear makes us thin, or a well-knotted tie obviates a turkey-skin neck, or even that a few carefully arranged strands will hide a head like a billiard ball. Body dysmorphic disorder is a well-recognised mental illness but less acknowledged is the far more widespread phenomenon of clothes/hairdressing/make-up dysmorphic disorder (CHMDD). It took Dr Keith, with his devastating “What did you expect?” to tear the hairy veil from my eyes. Of course, it helps that this therapist is as bald as his patient soon will be.

I haven’t eaten a real meal in the past 10 days – if by “real” is implied a repast the consumption of which lies on the scale between “automatic” and “hearty”. Instead, each masticatory act has been chewed over in turn. Why? Because since that Saturday evening when I returned from Scotland on a Virgin train, I’ve had a grinding, stabbing, rumbling, bloating stomach ache. I’m not about to libel Richard Branson by suggesting that his on-board snacks are to blame – even though I doubt more overpriced or nauseating fare is served in the ninth circle of Hell – and as yet, I have no idea what’s wrong with me. I did go to the doctor last Friday but I was feeling a little better and he was demob happy – off to a holiday in Croatia – so after a cursory laying of hands on tender abdomen, he said that it wasn’t likely to be an ulcer as the pain associated with this malady was usually higher up.

Needless to say, within 24 hours, the pain had returned and, as if to avenge the NHS, it had relocated to my breastbone. It hasn’t let up since, so as things stand I’m not in a position to write about eating with any dispassion at all. But is this so unreal? I’ve had cause to note in this column before the situational woes of the restaurant critic – last year, I had something called a “dry socket” after a tooth extraction that put me right off my fodder for a month. I think it’s a truth that should be shoved down people’s throats more often that hunger is the best seasoning – most reviewers, by definition, are spoilt for choice and expense-account-funded; their general unwillingness to be pleased by anything that isn’t either novel or top notch is reflected in the pickiness of their plump readers. But deprive the lot of ’em of eats for 24 hours and they’d fall on half a KFC corncob from a bin in Salford Quays and devour it with … gusto.

By the same token, you never read a column by Fay Maschler, Adrian Gill or John Lanchester in which they contextualise the restaurant experience within their own internal biotic environment. “I would’ve enjoyed Les Trois Garçons in Kettering,” such a piece might begin, “were it not for the fact that I was farting like a dray horse; great, sulphurous bottom burps that radiated out from my table causing dismay and ultimately rebellion among my fellow diners.” Or: “The decor at the Obese Hamster in Witney is a teasing amalgam of the kitsch and the Bauhaus; in the ladies, they had a Cath Kidston basket for the toilet paper and – in my stall – a copy of Le Corbusier’s La Ville radieuse. I know this, because I spent a lot of time in there reading about how the city of the future was viewed in the past, due to a bout of diarrhoea.”

Or even: “I’d like to commend the waiter at Merchant’s in Norwich, who, with a certain spirited legerdemain, reacted swiftly to my vomiting into my empty dish before he could serve up the moules marinière by saying, ‘If sir doesn’t feel like the black truffle risotto after all, I’ll return it to kitchen,’ and whisking away the offending portion of last night’s rather rich dinner …”

No, these are not things that you ever read – any more than you see Gordon Ramsay on television, effing and blinding while he scrabbles to open a packet of Rennie – but why not? Wouldn’t this be a better world, with a healthier attitude towards food, if we all acknowledged that the act of eating is a bodily function just like any other? Instead, such is the lack of a bodily context for our daily bread that a dispassionate observer – a Martian, say – could be forgiven if it were to see us as ethereal spirits, floating on white clouds, strumming harps and somehow still managing to sup the ambrosia with our long-handled silver spoons.

Back in the days when I compulsively consumed science-fiction stories – and Smash instant mashed potato was advertised on the TV by crap, animated robot puppets – I remember reading one in which, in the future, if you had anything terminally wrong with your body, your head was simply detached and housed in a life-support system. If I remember rightly, the tale began in this sclerotic vein, with one of these heads saying: “This morning I had eight dozen oysters and six bottles of Chablis for breakfast – and then they emptied the bucket.” Disgusting, possibly – but from the angle I’m currently in (doubled over the keyboard with stomach cramps), emptying the bucket seems like a bloody good idea.

Millions of people in this country get up every morning and put something with a funny name in their mouths – in 2009 (the last year figures were available), some 39.1 million prescriptions for antidepressants were written in the UK; and while I believe this indicates a mass hysteria (among doctors and pharmacists as much as their patients and customers), I’m minded to investigate the queered semantics of proprietary drugs.

Seroxat is the name paroxetine – a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (or SSRI), and the most popular antidepressant pushed globally – is marketed under in the UK but in the US it’s called Paxil and in Australia either Aropax or Lumin. I love to imagine the blue-sky sessions at which drug marketers dream up these monikers. I picture them sitting around featureless lozenges of beige MDF flinging these mangled bits of verbiage back and forth: “Grandax!” one snaps, “No, Pildernox . . .” a second pitches in. I wonder what rationale decides them on one repellent  bit of gobbledegook over another – but not for long because it’s all rather obvious.

Take “Seroxat”; well, the prefix “Ser” it shares with such suitable mental ascriptions as “serene”, “serious” and “servile”; while the stem “ox” is de rigueur for all sorts of drug names (along with “ix”, “ax”, “ex” and even “ux”). The prolific use of Xs in drug names is probably representative of no fewer than three buried intentions on the part of the marketers. One is to evoke “Rx” – the abbreviation of the Latin “recipe” (“take”) used in the US for a prescription – in the mind of the miserable. The second is to introduce a note of futurism – such syllables rarely occurring in English, they tend to imply a shiny, happy realm of neologism. And the third is to subtly imply the near-alliterative and highly desirable state – to be relaxed.

As for the suffix “at” (and please note, I know full well that “Ser” and “at” aren’t really these parts of speech, but I ask you: what the hell else can you call them?), this seems to me to indicate a return to the solid virtues of the Anglo-Saxon, being cognate with such words as “fat”, “pat” and “mat”, unexceptionable terms that anchor this creepy brain-chemistry-bender to the homely and quotidian. I could be wrong about all this and the wonks at GlaxoSmithKline (itself a name to conjure with), have no rationale for naming Seroxat at all but came up with it after making free with their products and lying in a blissed-out heap on the expansive carpet tiling of their conference room.

But somehow I doubt this – there’s Paxil to contend with after all, which says to me: “Take peace and you won’t be ill”. When we get to “Lumin”, it’s crystal-meth-clear that someone gave one of the more lowly marketers her head that day and she decided to call a dull pill a luminous spade.

This lunacy surrounding the naming of proprietary drugs is nothing new – since the dawn of quackery (sorry, “medicine”), the snake-oilers have been coming up with appellations they believe we’ll find tasty – and as if to pay obeisance to Big Pharma’s shareholders, we’ve swallowed them. Back in the day there was at least a certain honesty about Bayer’s naming of diacetylmorphine as “Heroin”, although its marketing of the drug as a cure for morphine addiction ranks as one of the world’s most infamous blunders. By the time the swinging sixties rolled around the mutually reinforcing reliance on mood-altering drugs between the legal and illegal sectors of society resulted in a semantic shift towards such cod-Latinisms as “Valium” and “Librium”, the aim of which was to make mass sedation appear positively classical.

In my time I’ve been prescribed a fair number of these drugs and I can say with some bitterness that the pills never worked for me. Ascendis – it keeps you up; Concordin – irenic once more; Lustral – shining through the long dark night of the soul; and Dutonin – sounds like a car tyre, makes you feel trodden down. Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I’m free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do? I suspect that if Seroxat were renamed “chemically equable but non-orgasmic” – or Chemeqnonorg – then instead of 39.1 million prescriptions for it being filled, people might be more prepared to put up with their aptly-named lows and highs.

The joint is called “Mariners” – which is fair enough: somewhere has to be – but there’s nothing oppressively nautical about the place. I ask my 14-year-old bullock of a son (he grazes all the time, you can watch him grow, castration may be on the cards), how he would describe the curtains and he says: “Greenish, pinkish, greyish mush”. The boy’s a natural – he could also have hymned the nauseating carpet, a chequerboard of red and yellow tweedy striations, or descanted on the low and beige-steely ceiling. We plonk ourselves down at a Melamine-topped chair-and-table combo – also in beige steel.

The menu offers Chef’s Curry of the Day, Scotch Beef and Mull Ale Pie, which comes with that delusory thing “a choice of potatoes”; delusory, because, giving one potato preferment over another is no kind of a choice at all, when what you want is to get away from the whole compulsory potato scene. I’m urging my son to consider the Traditional Scottish Breakfast when the translucent concertina doors to the serving area are ratcheted open and the three or four other customers dotted about rise up as one and head for the anti-bacterial hand-lotion dispenser, only to swerve around it and fetch up in front of the heated cabinet full of black-pudding discs, bacon rashers, Lorne sausage, link sausages, potato scones, hash browns, mushrooms and grilled tomatoes.

Standing up, observing the wall-mounted placard that displays the timeless pictogram for muster stations (four arrows, each sustaining a running man in silhouette, all pointing towards a nuclear family group); clocking the framed photograph of Her Royal Highness Princess Alexandra who wielded the shampoo bottle against the stern back in 1987; and seeing from this position the mirror-calm waters slipping past the portholes, I can no longer evade the reality: I’m on a Caledonian MacBrayne ferry once more and yet again I’m about to eat some black pudding simply because it’s there.

What is it about the ferry experience that makes us go belly-up to fried food? We cannot in this exhaust-stinking roll-on, roll-off age make allowance for it because of the sea air – nor can we blame the imminent threat of a watery extinction. No, the compulsion we have to chip-and-bean our way from Dover to Calais, from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, and in my case from Craignure on the Isle of Mull to Oban on the Scots mainland (a voyage lasting a scant 45 minutes), is a function of the most primitive, lab-rat levels of cognitive functioning: the foghorn sounds, we salivate and so we pick up the tray and slide it along the aluminium bars of our floating cage.

On more occasions than I care to recall, I’ve found myself on rough crossings (back in the day, on the old P&O St Ola out of Scrabster and bound for Orkney), battling with nausea and considering whether it’ll be worth the effort of cramming the full Scottish into me, only in all likelihood to see it again, minutes later, pluming down into the maddened waters of the Pentland Firth. I used to treasure the Orkney crossing, not only for the views of the red sandstone cliffs of Hoy – and looking very much as one imagines Avalon would, were it to exist – but also for the raised rims around the saloon tables, and the graticules of rubber mesh that sat upon them, which taken together adverted the fact that you were going to be at a tipping point for some time to come.

On the MV Isle of Mull there’s none of this drama: a man with a skid-mark goatee divvies up a bacon-and-egg roll to bullock-boy, while I have the blood sausage, some mushrooms, a half tomato and a round of toast. The waters slide on past the portholes, spun-sugar-white cloud flows over the hills, sunlight lances sharp and low: we’re on the 6.45am sailing and have been privileged by one of those dawns that turns the Highlands from driech to divine; on such a morning even the blackest of puddings can be toyed with, as BB inhales his roll in a yolky spume.

Princess Alexandra. Pretty insignificant HRH really – but then this is a pretty wee ship. There must be more minor royals and smaller ships out there – on a boating lake near Stirling the last Stuart Pretender is probably launching a pedalo with a bottle of Buckfast Tonic Wine as I anoint my toast with a pat of butter and then a second. Because if there’s one thing still more inevitable than the ferry breakfast, it’s that one portion of anything is never enough for man, woman, or bullock.

I am distressed to see that the hateful expression “builder’s tea” doesn’t have an entry in Jonathon Green’s monumental, three-volume Green’s Dictionary of Slang. “Builder’s bum” does, with its allied coinage – previously unknown to me – “Dagenham smile”; and, Green’s being a dictionary on historical principles, the first recorded entry in print, from 1994, is quoted in full: “His monstrous pink buttocks were being forced upwards and were protruding above his waistline like tumescent pillows (‘the Dagenham smile’, this phenomenon is called on London building sites).” This is from Joseph O’Connor’s The Secret World of the Irish Male and, if you think about it, while both neologisms must derive from a time when low-cut jeans coincided with a boom in the construction industry, “Dagenham smile” is more likely a self-attribution – said of builders by builders – while “builder’s bum” has the hallmarks of a slur.

Not least because “bum” is neither an especially cockney nor an Irish working-class ascription, both moieties being more inclined to “arse”. No, “builder’s bum”, like “builder’s tea”, is one of those modifiers of social class that can be smuggled into English via the capacious portmanteau of slang. Back in the day, from upper-middle on up, the term “chippy” was deployed with the same intent. Once again Green’s nails it: “in middle-class use and often as a means of dismissing genuine complaints, the implication is that such ‘chippiness’ has no real justification other than class-based resentment”.

Naturally, the covert assumption that to be “chippy” is on a par with living off the income obtained from the surplus value of others’ labour remains uncontested, and the moral equivalence of so-called “inverted snobbery” with snobbery itself becomes established. To accuse middle-class people who offer their guests (though probably not those employed in refurbishing their properties) “builder’s tea” of snobbery would almost certainly call forth the rejoinder: “Oh, but I was being ironic.”

If they’re smart, that is. Stupid bourgeois who define certain commonplace Indian tea blends as befitting artisans (rather than as “artisanal”) tend to fluff at this point and say things like: “Oh, I don’t know what you mean – I drink builder’s tea,” as if this in some way constituted a levelling of the social pyramid. Irony does pertain to slang terms inasmuch as some examples have their foundation in the semantic shift occasioned between defined and intended meaning; irony can also have a dramatic or situational aspect – the disjunction between what the parties involved know – and this can be information of any kind, including linguistic.

Irony thrives on class distinctions for this very reason: by creating scenes in which diverse social groupings are thrown together, there are endless opportunities for some people to be “in the know”, while others are ignorant or disempowered. It is often said of the English – by themselves! – that their great capacity for deploying ironic tropes is what makes them such sophisticated folk. But might it behove the English (the rest of the archipelago is a case apart) to concede that irony is itself a measure of the steepness of the hierarchical acclivity?

The madness of the crowd thus consists in the assertion that “builder’s tea” is a value-neutral term, when it owes its existence to systemic inequalities that have increased over the past quarter-century. The great success of the British upper classes (and this does apply to the Scots, Welsh and Irish, as they have all long since taken their accent and slang from London) is in simultaneously mutating to accommodate the social mores of North American egalitarianism and teaching the newly rich to speak their own immemorial, subtly arrogant argot.

If you look at it this way, the sign that you have truly arrived is not that you can employ a chippie, but that you can damn him for being chippy; not that you can get in the builders, but that you can give your pals a choice between builder’s and Assam. In the fullness of time, the arriviste will find herself no longer cosseted by this new social position – and its linguistic perks – but trapped by them. Fretting in the claustrophobic ambience of dull dinner parties, she will look for a way out . . . a divertissement . . . As she takes the tray of builder’s to the builders, her eye will alight on a cheery Dagenham smile giving her the come-on …