My mother used to say that the difference between American and British anti-Semitism was that in the States they hated you because you were a Jew, whereas over here they hated you personally and it was only incidental that you happened to be a Jew. On the whole I think she preferred the British brand of prejudice, which slipped bigotry under the carpet together with other crumbs they couldn’t quite exercise themselves to clean up properly.

English Jews I don’t think she could get a handle on – we lived at the unfashionable end of the Hampstead Garden Suburb (the Wilsons, the Mandelsons et al were on the other side of the North Circular) surrounded by Jews, but Mother thought them a pretty colourless lot compared with the New York variety she’d grown up with.

On the whole, though, my mother was not much given to either exalting or denigrating her Jewish heritage (which is how she thought of it, ethnicity – or race – being somewhat of a troubling ascription in the first few decades after the Holocaust), rather, she sought to sideline it. Nobody knew she was Jewish, so there was no need to make a song and dance about it. Neither I nor my brothers were raised in the faith – I wasn’t even circumcised, for Christ’s sake! On the few occasions I went to the synagogue with friends, I was preoccupied not by the bearded weirdos with the scrolls, but by the insubstantiality of my paper yarmulke, which I felt was in danger of being wafted up from my head by hot air from a hidden grille, leaving me exposed to the full judgment of Jehovah (or whatever his name is).

Certainly, I suspect Mother’s being American did rather trump all other perceptions for the Little Englanders of the 1950s and 1960s, but that they were unable at least to suspect a touch of the Jew-brush about my mother, I doubt. The sallow-dark skin, the curly hair, the – yes, why not concede it – large and flat-bridged nose, surely these were giveaways? They’re all characteristics I’ve inherited and I’m always struck by how, when I say I’m half-Jewish, people look at me first one way and then – as if adjusting a 3D postcard – another, before saying: “Oh, yes, of course, I thought. . .” before repressing the rest of the thought, which is, “ . . . you had a big nose and dark skin for an Englishman.”

While my mother definitely did, I can’t say I’ve experienced a great deal of anti-Semitism in my life. Up until the late 1980s, I can recall a few occasions when I’d find myself among people in tedious work contexts who’d begin expressing some low-level animus – remarking on how this institution or that business was “run by Jews” – and I always used to enjoy calling them out, using the great prow of my Semitism, as it were, to break through their prejudicial pack ice. But the truth is that, not being acculturated or contextualised by my Jewish heritage (wrong name, most obviously) I could pass – and still do, although it does say at the bottom of my Wikipedia page “British Jews”. British Jews? Puh-lease! Anything but that. Next they’ll be calling me a “British writer”.

Still, people are convinced of my Jewishness – Gentiles and Jews alike. Almost always, following the squint that reveals me – like Woody Allen at the Hall family’s Wasp table – to be a davening frummer with luxuriant payess and a phylactery the size of a rhino horn, they always ask, “Was your mother or father Jewish?” When I concede that it was my mother, they pronounce, “Aha! That means you’re Jewish.”

They may not realise it – these self-appointed judgers of ethnic purity – but their assertion is, in its own insidious way, a small but significant piece of anti-Semitism. I always counter them by snapping back: “It’s only the Jews themselves who say that, so why do you? You wouldn’t tell a woman whose mother was French that it meant she was French.” It’s not that I mind being Jewish – it’s just that given my upbringing, my religious convictions and my blood (yes, Semitism is to some extent genetically defined), such a claim would be, well, bogus – indeed, flat wrong. No, I am half-Jewish by blood, and any inclination Gentiles have to return me to the Jewish fold is a wilful capitulation to some sort of bizarre restorative justice – as if, in compensation for all that hatred in the past, it were possible to propitiate the Jews by offering them up all the souls and bodies they may lay claim to.

The latest Real meals column in the New Statesman:

I emailed my friend Zee who is half German, half Pakistani, but was raised in Britain and now lives in Cologne. “I’ll be on your hof next week,” I wrote. “What’s the most typical Berliner fast-food outlet?” His answer came back faster than the projectile vomiting of vindaloo and lager: “Currywurst – you’ll find one in any of the main railway stations, but mind out for extreme indigestion.” That was good enough for me, but a day or so later there came a much longer communication. Zee had talked to his brother Nav who lives in Berlin, and Nav had recommended a whole raft of other eateries – kebab joints in Kreuzberg, soup stops in Charlottenburg, a Red Rooster in the Reichstag (actually, I made that one up), but it was too late: I knew Currywurst was the place for me.

At Alexanderplatz I was winched up from the U-Bahn into the station plaza feeling about as much like a curried sausage as is possible: I’d had to get up at 4am to make my flight, and now it was a sunny, chilly mid-morning. Out on the plaza a Joseph Beuys lookalike was flogging fake-fur Red Army hats coated in what appeared to be goose fat.

Nobody I spoke to in Berlin could give me the lowdown on Currywurst. To hear them speak, you’d imagine that it had always existed in these parts – that when the Teutonic knights knife-and-forked their way east into what would eventually become Prussia, they encountered whole tribes dining on oblong Styrofoam platters mounded with discs of stinky bratwurst that in turn were mounded with still stinkier curry sauce.

Natürlich, wurst is to the Germanic belly as worst is to the Britannic. Nietzsche, who was a spirited critic of his native cuisine, said that nothing could be expected of a nation “whose bellies are full of beer and sausage”. He fled south to Tuscany, where he lapsed into insanity while trying to devise a canapé that could be eaten by horses while standing on their hind legs. I know how Nietzsche felt.

Inside the station concourse, I came upon a branch of Currywurst open for business. It was indistinguishable from any fast-food stop in any nation with a sovereign debt crisis: glass-topped counters, drinks coolers, cooking apparatus linked to a thick and silvery duct that either sucked out the smoke and cooking odours, or else possibly pumped the curry sauce in.

I could have the Bratwurst Menu for €4.80 (bratwurst, chips, Coke) or the Bockwurst Menu for the same; there was something called a “Hänchen Spezial” that weighed in at €4.50 and, in the lurid photo, looked like a quarter of particularly couch-bound chicken (plus chips and Coke, natch). As for the Frikadellen Menu at €4.99, I had no frame of culinary reference available for this glistening blob of meaty stuff. It could have been a scale model of the soused brain of Heinrich von Kleist, for all I knew.

I ordered the Currywurst Menu and then took my slathered discs to a countertop and propped myself on a stool. The smell was bizarre: pungently chemical – almost acrid – and as I dug in my white plastic tines saliva welled up into my mouth. I’ve heard of aftertastes but currywurst is one of those foods that has a pre-taste. Chewing on the rubbery wurst while trying not to gag on the sauce – which bore about the same relation to real curry as coronation chicken does to an absolutist monarchy – I pondered the mystery of what it was that the Currywurst experience resembled. Then it hit me: the foodstuffs were completely different, but the way they finagled the palate was exactly the same. Currywurst is the homologue of stewed pinkish eels in sage-green liquor sauce.

And with this intestinal London-Berlin linkage established, I was suddenly at home. That shaven-headed character in a tight brown felt hat at the counter was no alien, but Günter Lamprecht playing the role of Franz Biberkopf in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s TV adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. As for me, greedily shoving down the bad after the wurst, I was reminded of Kafka’s immortal Hunger Artist, whose dying words must surely haunt the consciousness of all restaurant critics:

“I had to fast, I can’t help it. Because I couldn’t find the food I liked – if I had found it, believe me, I should’ve made no fuss and stuffed myself like you, or anyone else.”

Ask not what your country can do for you – instead, go to yet another chain Italian restaurant and order some farinaceous foodstuff that will make your stomach swell up like that of a cow that’s gorged on clover; not, you understand, that I believe you to be fashionably wheat intolerant – it’s just there’s so much wheat intolerance in the air, it’s difficult not to pick up on it. So, ask rather what you can do for your country and the answer is clear, in order to promote growth-through-increased consumption: go to Ask, which seems to have a preposterous 135 outlets nationally, from Ashby de-la-Zouch to Truro and back again.

How did that happen? How did this Triffid-like horde of identical eateries rustle up on us, all – presumably – with the same green-and-cream colour schemes, all with the same sense of being conservatories writ large and foodie (hence the ducts snaking across the ceilings from their let-it-all-flop-out kitchen areas), all with white laminated-MDF tables, all with varnished wooden floors and wooden chairs, all with bars behind which there’s a map of the Italian boot fetishised out of wine bottles thrust into plaster, and all with plump, slightly buck-toothed waiters, who, as you push through the glass doors ask, “How’re you today?” their intonation rising into that meaningless interrogative swoop so beloved of the Antipodeans.

Yes, how did it happen – because, frankly, until I walked through the doors of Ask, I had never put to myself a single question about the chain, this empire of bruschetta being as alien to me as a walking plant, while also, paradoxically, blindingly obvious?

I mean, were Ask not to exist, it would be necessary to invent it; and if not with this name, then one called “Hint” or “Allude” or “Quail”. I say this, but when I inquired of Andreas, my waiter, why Ask was so called, he explained that it was an acronym of the names of the three founders. “English, were they?” I essayed, and he conceded that they almost certainly were. At that point I realised the futility of naming an Italian restaurant chain Perché, and gave up on the whole business of human interaction.

I was eating alone. At the next table, an older woman in a wool appliqué top discussed something with a younger woman with her hair in an Alice band. The older woman’s info-tool was an iPad, the younger one’s was a spiral-bound notebook. Andreas returned with my San Pellegrino and green olives. I sipped and nibbled moodily while consulting the menu. (Ridiculous expression, really, implying as it does that I paid the menu a fat fee in order to justify my own pathetic act of professional closure . . . except that when I stop to think about it, that’s precisely what I was doing.) I wanted to have the agnello brasato (shoulder of lamb with tomato sauce on risotto), or the pappardelle, which came with chunks of Tuscan sausage, but it wasn’t that sort of a day – it was a ruminant day, a green day, a mean’n’moody methane day, so instead I ordered the risotto verde and a rocket salad.

Waiting for it to arrive, I looked up at the tight formation of unshaded light bulbs dangling from the ceiling high overhead. I looked to the kitchen area and saw a white coat withdraw a pizza from the wood-burning oven. I thought of Sylvia Plath and how back in the days of British Gas, its advertising slogan was “Don’t you just love being in control?”. A reference to the “cookability” of gas stoves, not their suitability for those who become felo de se. My salad and my risotto arrived. The former looked like a half-digested meal, the latter like a fully digested one that had been thrown up. But then that’s risotto for you, isn’t it? I mean, if you order a risotto you cannot complain that it looks like puke, because that’s part of the contract: “I want some food that seems to be vomit” translates into catering lingua franca as, “Bring me risotto.”

Andreas came back and asked me how my food was, and I told him it was bland and he looked nonplussed, so I expanded: “Y’know tasteless, dull, uninteresting, obvious . . .” but that didn’t seem to help and his face crinkled up with pained incomprehension.

“Listen,” I snapped, “I don’t mind my bland risotto, in fact, I positively wanted such insipid fare.” At last this seemed to satisfy him and he went away. The bill was 20-odd quid, plus service – as you asked.

Compulsive hoarding is pretty out there, no? I mean what kind of a weirdo saves all that cardboard and bubble wrap, ties it up with string and wedges it in on top of crappy old wing chairs and fake-veneer TV cabinets stacked high with bundles of old newspapers and books, then tops the whole teetering pile off with 30-or-so cat litter trays (full), leaving the felines themselves – perhaps 40 of them – to smarm along the alleys carved through this dreck (for this is but one room of an entire semi so engorged), shitting and pissing wherever?

A complete weirdo – that’s who. And these people, together with their odd pathology, are of increasing interest to the general population, as is evidenced by the arrival on these shores of the British version of Hoarders, a US documentary series about compulsive hoarders that has already been running over there for four seasons and is currently embarking on its fifth. Not that this is Brit TV’s first foray under the sinks of the seriously possessive – there was a stand-alone docco, Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder on Channel 4 back in 2011 – and it may be because I’m taken by the phenomenon (a hoarder of programmes about compulsive hoarders) that it seems to me that I’ve snapped on the set on a number of other occasions only to find the camera’s lens nosing along a skirting board behind which are stuffed sheaths of old discount coupons.

Wherefrom comes this urge to expose such traumatic interiors? After all, hoarding can be nothing new – it’s easy to imagine a Cyclops’s cavern stuffed to the roof with sheep bones, cheese rinds and the remains of hapless Argonauts. The splurge of reality obesity shows that the explanation is simple: schadenfreude. We look upon those poor wobblers being shaken to their core by life coaches and think to ourselves, I may be a little on the tubby side but – Jesus! – I’m not that bad. Actually, my suspicion is that the compulsive hoarder craziness is an even more craven attempt to affect such a catharsis. As the crack team of cleaners goes into the bungalow, black bags and bug spray at the ready, we sit on the sofa watching and, for a few dreamy minutes, can forget all about the landfill-in-waiting that surrounds us.

Every morning of my serene existence I open the door to my writing room and think, I can’t stand this! It’s an avalanche crushing me! The box files full of papers, the shelves piled with books (the floor piled with books), the desk stacked with unanswered correspondence, the desk lamps corralled by tchotchkes – old toys, plastic figurines, broken watches, stones I’ve picked up as mementoes of the places I’ve been and yet forgotten, foreign coins, pine cones – the space below the desk humped with boxes full of camping gear all coiled in dust-furred computer cabling . . . Aaaargh! I want to scream, because there’s no point in turning away from it, for there are scores of books not simply unread but which I will never read. Just as in the pantry there are bay leaves I will never put in a casserole, and in the shed there are trowels that neither I – nor anyone else – will ever delve with.

Yes, I know there are those who exhibit a different pathology: their homes are pristine, their socks are colour-coded, the second they acquire something superfluous they organise a tabletop sale. But the rest of us are charged with some sort of unearthly static electricity that makes paper clips, hairpins, half-used Sellotape rolls (especially the ones where you cannot detach the tape even after hours of flicking at it under operating-theatre-strength lighting), local newspapers, tins of baked beans missing their labels, jump leads, hair rollers, half-used tubes of athlete’s foot cream, half-popped packs of headache pills, broken folding chairs, Jiffy bags, VHS tapes, etcetera, etcetera, et-bloody-cetera cling to us with terrifying inertia.

If you stand on the banks of the Thames east of Gravesend, roughly where Pip met Magwitch and Boris wants to build an airport, you can watch as giant container ships loaded with discarded electrical goods set out on the ebb tide for China, where all these washing machines, computers and consoles will be recycled into useful appliances for their upwardly mobile rural poor. Some might take heart at this – not I. I see the earth as a compulsive hoarder, spinning through the endless night of space, snaffling up meteorites as she goes.

The transvaginal probe is a long, dildo-shaped instrument used to detect foetal heartbeats – or, at least, that’s what an unholy alliance in the US of state legislators, anti-abortion campaigners and their medical henchmen see as its purpose. Increasing numbers of states are demanding that women seeking abortions be subjected to the probe, so that they can hear the beating heart of the “person” they are about to murder. One doctor interviewed on BBC’s Newsnight – standing in front of the examination couch, probe in his hand – explained that the procedure had no medical utility and was simply a way of traumatising these women.

In his seminal text Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay gave the whole garment-rending subject of religious nuttiness a swerve – and, as a rule, this column has followed his lead. However, once in a while, something comes along like the transvaginal probe that’s so abusively crazy that it demands to be written about.

In the same Newsnight segment, we were treated to a coffee morning of so-called Christians who explained that, for them, the abortions in the US were on a par with genocide: “It is a Holocaust,” one harridan in pastel roll-neck inveighed. (It’s strange how they’re always wearing pastel roll-necks.)

I’ve no idea what Mackay would’ve made of the transvaginal probe but I suspect the general idea of forcing things up women’s vaginas, or subjecting their genitals to abusive “examination”, wouldn’t have been wholly strange to him. The anti-prostitution drive towards the end of the 19th century led to exactly this sort of carry-on, as young, working-class women were plucked from the streets and violated in the cause of hygiene. In order to convince these self-appointed authorities that you weren’t a streetwalker, it was necessary that you be proved to be a virgo intacta. Ritualised sexual assault in the form of “force-feeding” also formed a key part of the patriarchal establishment’s repression of the suffragettes.

And so it goes on: the “virginity tests”, carried out by Hosni Mubarak’s secret police during the Tahrir Square revolution last year, were merely the latest instance of sexual assault being deployed as a political weapon. In the west, we have the arrogance to think that we left this sort of thing behind a long time ago; so we inveigh against the genital mutilation (clitoridectomy, infibulations) of benighted Africans in much the same way as Mrs Jellyby passionately cared for the heathen while neglecting the starvelings in her own home. But once you begin looking, it becomes clear that a barely submerged culture of systematic misogyny continues unabated.

Throughout the 20th century, what were, in effect, state-sanctioned sterilisations of powerless women continued in the west – that they were hidden from view was a function of the way mental asylums and prisons operated as hidden gulags where the state enforced its power over the reproductive rights of women and, by extension, their genitals. The ongoing “debate” about single, working-class mothers who claim benefit is only the perpetuation of this attitude under a guise of social concern. That it has become unexceptional even for the liberal to censure these women is another indication of how this age-old hysteria can camouflage itself as socially acceptable.

Less socially acceptable – but a finger-flick away – is the spectacle of young women inserting transvaginal probes to provide a pornographic spectacle for web voyeurs. That the sight of women pseudo-pleasuring themselves with these cruel instruments should be a staple of the male imagination says a lot about how far we haven’t come towards a healthier notion of eroticism. Possibly we have the hidden hand of the market to blame for this lustful frenzy: in the realm of the collective jerk-off, it seems to maintain a ceaseless blur.

Do I blame Christianity per se for fostering this grotesque state of affairs? No: there are many good Christians who must find the transvaginal probe as disgusting as any feminist secularist. Rowan Williams has a couple of months to go before he sets down his mitre and it would be nice if he took the time to pronounce anathema on the madness and prurience of some of his co-religionists.

In keeping with the convergence of downtown Los Angeles – as depicted in Blade Runner (1982) – and Britain’s metropolitan regions, there is an increasing number of noodle bars throughout the realm. I speak here of London, because that’s where I live – but I’ve noodled about in cities as diverse as Sheffield, Bristol and Cardiff. The basic noodle bar format is refreshingly bare bones: strip lighting, melamine-topped tables, wipe-dirty floor and a clientele with its faces over bowls of broth.

I love a noodle bar and often dive over the Euston Road from King’s Cross as soon as I arrive back in town so as to suck up stringiness in the Chop Chop Noodle Bar. Mmm, I exhale, as a mixed seafood noodle soup is set before me, it’s great to be back in the City of Angels – albeit ones with dirty faces and wonky teeth. It could just be me but there’s something very primal about the broth served in these establishments – left long enough, it might generate a new life form. It also has a certain detergent note and a residual flavour verging on the excretory. As I say: this could just be me, because the most significant meal I’ve ever had in a noodle bar came after an adventurous man called Bruno took me down the London sewers.

Arguably a description of a walk through the sewers doesn’t belong in a restaurant column – it’s difficult to picture A A Gill or John Lanchester wading through streams of sewage, although fun to try. But I take the hard-line view that anyone who’s preoccupied by what goes in one end should be prepared to take a serious look at what comes out the other. I met Bruno at the junction of Brixton Water Lane and Dulwich Road and without any ado he produced a pair of wellingtons and some rubber gloves and took out a heavy steel key, with which he opened a manhole cover. Down we went, under the incurious eyes of a shopkeeper.

Steel ladders wreathed in an ancient coralline encrustation of toilet paper were pinioned to the glistening black walls and rushing along the bottom of the culvert was a thick cascade of speedy broth. Still, I could detect no actual turds bumping against my wellingtons, nor could I hear any rodentine cheeping, and as we sloshed our way Bruno pointed out that the concentration of excreta was probably fairly low: after all, the greatest part of what goes down our plugholes consists of water mixed with soap: the waste of all that furious laving, of dishes, of bodies, of clothes. However, the detergent edge to the mephitic atmosphere made it seem more rather than less disgusting and, as we waded on, I gagged and for the first time in my life pitied Harry Lime.

We walked for about 2km. Bruno, an anthropologist by training who plied a cycle rickshaw for cash-in-hand, was the perfect Virgil for this harrowing of the urban Hades – he seemed to find his way unerringly through the colonic irrigation and when we came upon a canyon into which our tunnel’s contents debouched with a roar, I was tempted to suggest that we simply went on over the shitty rapids, latter-day versions of the unnamed narrator in Poe’s “MS Found in a Bottle”. Instead, Bruno led me back up and unscrewed a manhole cover and we emerged blinking into a perfectly workaday early evening in Clapham North, at the junction of Timber Mill Way and Gauden Road.

This being the city, no one paid us any attention as we slopped across the Clapham Road, past the crowds of happy noshers outside the Bierodrome. I wanted to point out to them the secret world that rushed beneath their feet – but instead I walked down to Brixton with Bruno and we went for some supper at Speedy Noodle.

Speedy Noodle, as its name would suggest, is not somewhere you linger: the staff are uninterested, the ambience strained, the lighting on the vomitous side of bright. I love it. Over our soup, I told Bruno about the New Statesman’s investigative reporter Duncan Campbell, who, in the early 1980s, by accident gained entrance to the network of government tunnels underneath London and spent a long night down there, cycling about on a folding bicycle he’d taken down with him. How times have changed. I observed to Bruno: in those days, there probably weren’t any noodle bars in London, while at bottom security was unbelievably lax. The only constant, it seems, is the sewers.

I consider chicken again – and gladly! At night, in sweat-basted sleep, I slip and slide over chicken-skin terrain, popping juice-engorged blisters with my toecaps. By day I wonder if I should try out the new takeaway that’s opened down the road, the name of which – Chicken Valley – appeals to my sense of south London’s fowl topography: a vale of chickens, what might that be like?

But in the meanwhile there’s lunch to be eaten: I foresee the lurid clutter of spare ribs, I anticipate the jolly hiss of chips hitting the oil, I picture the jolly countenance of Mr Rohan Palmer, chicken fryer by appointment to the denizens of this neighbourhood, and my mind is made up: there’s no way I’m going to enter the shadow of the valley of chicken, I will go to my favourite fast-food joint, Favorite Chicken. Why the American spelling? Because over 25 years ago Favorite Fried Chicken dropped from its parent bird, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and became a separate network of franchises; and while the laying was fertilised by two Englishmen, they retained stateside orthography.

So, in answer to that vexed question: which came first, FFC or KFC? The answer can only be supplied by Mr Palmer, who was there when it happened. I stand one side of the counter in a tweed jacket, and he stands the other in a fetching semi-transparent blue plastic apron. Between us there is a sign reading, “Mild Chilli Cheese Poppas, Crispy Coated Delicious Melted Cheese with a Mild Green Chilli Warmth, 4 – £1.19, 12 – £3.49”. Overhead there are strange pictures of Styrofoam beakers, chips and chicken pieces arranged in meal-deal groupings that are oddly reminiscent of Richard Hamilton’s pop-art collages.

Mr Palmer tells me there are roughly 120 FFC franchises now – and that he’s held this one since the great disjointing from KFC. I’ve been intrigued by his name ever since I saw it on his certificate of halal authenticity, and he explains that his father named him after the Indo-Guyanese cricketer, Rohan Kanhai. Apparently when he was a boy it was an unusual name – but now there are lots of Rohans in Jamaica, which Mr Palmer left when he was 11. I imagine that he’s seen a lot of changes in the fast-food business in the past three decades, and Mr Palmer tells me that back in the day they had a floor-to-ceiling steel grille through which the pieces were doled out: “We don’t have the rude boys like we did before,” he explains, “they’ve all grown up and moved away – the CCTV helps as well.”

It’s refreshing to talk to someone who, far from having an irrational fear of crime, takes a generally sunny view of social change. Is the favourite at Favorite the chicken pieces themselves? “Absolutely,” Mr Palmer replies, “although it’s not the same at all the franchises – down at Caterham, where the clientele is more . . . well, English, they serve a lot more burgers, but round about here they like their chicken.” We like our chicken, too, but while not wishing to impugn Favorite’s food-sourcing, it’s difficult to conceive of it being especially ethical – which is why we mostly go for chips. Mr Palmer and his staff fry a mean chip: firm, nicely crunchy, not too greasy and with a genuine flavour. What’s your secret? I ask him, and he just shrugs. If only those celebrity chefs would just shrug – it’d be a much quieter, happier place.

We like the FFC chips so much that we often send one of the kids across the road to get some when we’re having steak at home. I love augmenting home-cooked food with fast fare – or even supplanting it altogether. This, surely, is what being an urbanite is all about – I once lived opposite a café called Rosa’s, and I’d skip across with a plate and get them to pile it high with a full English. True, it was a little bizarre sitting in my own chintzy interior with that very distinctive film of egg and grease coating the inside of my mouth – I kept expecting burly truckers to barge in the front door and start calling me “luv” – but I got used to it.

I’ve got used to Favorite Chicken as well, with its Rappa Meals and its Fillet of Fire Meals, and its mirror-splintered interior. Mr Palmer says that he’s had ’em all in over the years – Frank Bruno, Craig Charles, Dean Gaffney off EastEnders, and even the most celebrated soap star of them all: “Two Jags, he came by here once.” Really, I say, my curiosity piqued, and what was he like? “I dunno,” Mr Palmer replies imperturbably, “he sent his driver in to get the grub.”

People say social media are enormously important. Yes they do. Presumably they tweet this sort of thing to one another: “Social media are enormously important because they create new virtual communities that offer all the advantages of propinquity without the drawbacks of phys prxmty.” I say “presumably” because I’ve never actually tweeted myself, so I don’t know if they compose their pithy 140 character apothegms intuitively – or aim for an approximate count then abbreviate as above. In the giddy months when Twitter was trilling up and up to its current state of cacophonous ubiquity, I was asked on a radio panel show if I’d ever consider tweeting and replied that the only circumstances under which I could imagine doing such a thing would be if a songbird flew into my mouth.

Nowadays, I’m not feeling so secure on the matter. A friend who works in publishing told me recently that use of social media is now part of her regular job assessment; and furthermore, claimed that in 10 years no one would be able to have her sort of career if they couldn’t tweet. It does seem surpassing strange to me that an ability to discover, assay then disseminate 140,000-word texts should be predicated on the broadcasting of 140 character slogans – but then what do I know? I wasn’t even aware that F Day had been reached on 13 February this year – hell, I didn’t even know what F Day was. My next door neighbour filled me in: “F Day is when the number of Farmville players in the west officially exceeded the number of actual farmers.”

But when will Peak Farmville occur? This being the point at which so many people are engaged in playing Farmville, Angry Birds and all the other little time-wasters embedded in social media sites, that there’s no one left to produce the food necessary to keep them alive. And if Peak Farmville, why not Peak Twitter? Apparently the tweets currently posted on the Twitter site each day could fill 8,721 copies of War and Peace.

Twitter seems to be a way of getting together with people and showing off, or having a good old gossip. On Twitter some tweet streams are open-access, others are confined to followers, still more are mere birdbaths sipped on by a pair. An adept twitterer can shift between all these conversations, scanning the tweet deck as a socialite of old might’ve worked the room – dropping in on this colloquy, passing by that chronic bore, peering over this obstructive and insignificant shoulder to see if anyone more important is in the offing.

I know all this because I’ve been talked through the practice and considered it anthropologically, as Mauss did the sexual goings-on of the Trobriand islanders. Thus all the things that happen in the messy world of physical propinquity do end up – albeit distorted – taking place in the realms of social media: people buddy-up, seduce, bully and ostracise; the Twittersphere fuses and fissions like a murmuration of birds hovering over the tidal flats of our culture.

Is all this human twittering in any meaningful sense crazy? Not, I’d argue, if you see it for what it is – but if it’s considered to be an advance of some kind in the sphere of human relatedness, that has to be nuts. I spent a great deal of the 1970s avoiding bores with slide carousels who wanted their holiday slides writ large on suburban walls – why on earth would I want to reacquaint myself with such tedium in the form of Facebook’s petabytes of snapshots? I think it was the anthropologist Robin Dunbar – one of the proponents of the “social mind” conception of human cognitive evolution – who theorised that language developed as an outgrowth of the group cohesion that other great apes cement by picking parasites from each other’s fur.

I always find parties, dinners and meetings go with a certain swing if I visualise all the attendees naked and nit-combing one another . . . The other day my wife, who has a long tail of Twitter followers, looked up from her laptop to say that she’d been tweeted by a man who asked whether I might be prepared to engage with my followers on Twitter a bit more directly, rather than palming them off with automatic tweets generated by my website, to which the only possible response is, Sorry, I’m fully occupied visualising naked furry humans grunting – oh, and imagining what it would be like to have a live songbird in my mouth.

Will Self’s latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

I remember about half a decade ago being on a metro in Barcelona, rattling out through the suburbs towards some beachfront resort, and a young man getting on with a life-size puppet of Madonna that he proceeded to dance with – her stuffed legs were tied to his live ones, her insensate hands clasped in his feeling ones. I can’t recall which Madonna record was playing on his beatbox but it was big that year. I thought the performance exquisite and witty but then I was in touristic mode while the other passengers were commuters. I dobbed up a two-euro coin – they sat there stony-faced.

This came back to me over lunch the other day: I sat there stonily facing a strip of perforated steel sheeting wrapped around a pillar while on a flat-screen monitor Madonna cavorted in a leotard. She did the splits, she gyrated, she smarmed but mostly she thrashed on the floor simulating the spasms of sexual ecstasy. About me in the university canteen there were many modular table-and-chair units fully occupied by young women in hijabs but none of them paid any attention to this carry-on; it occurred to me that it was me – and me alone – who was the proverbial picture in the attic, sicklied o’er with the malaise of prudery and age.

I could see the future: me, lashed into a tartan rug in some underfunded care home of the 2040s, a bowl of soylent green cooling by my paralysed elbow, and as my palsied eyelids drooped for the last time, flickering 3D TV images of Madonna’s perfect ass tormenting me unto death . . . The dying Oscar had said of the garish wallpaper in his Rive Gauche hotel room: “Sooner or later one of us will have to go.” But it’s always the wallpapers and Madonnas of the world that stay the course. It was enough to put a man off his stir-fried chickpeas and vegetables with plum sauce, and would’ve done so were it not that the food was so damn tasty.

I’d approached the canteen with some trepidation on my first full day at work in over 20 years, as a professor at a London university – but having been given an office, a security pass and a computer log-in there seemed no alternative to going for the full institutional experience. I had vague memories of eating lunch in hall when I was at university: we paid for the food using a bizarre Oxonian currency of little pink tickets called – I think – battels, and sat at long oak tables under oil paintings of long-dead dons, while a few moribund ones occupied a dais at the far end. It was a pompous environment within which to eat the same sort of food that was dished up in the café round the corner: chips, axe-shaped bits of fried fish in breadcrumbs that you could’ve performed seppuku with, and baked beans.

As soon as I’d oriented myself with the local fast-food joints, I decamped – and didn’t sup at my college again until a few years ago when I ate at high table as the guest of the rector. The food was the same ancient slop but after dinner we got offered a silver box of snuff along with the port doing the rounds. I horned up a generous spoonful that thankfully obliterated the taste of the food, as well as getting me as high as an oriel window. Ah, well . . . but at my new university the menu – like the student body – is decidedly more polyglot. Roast pork, stuffing and apple sauce for £4.50; a salad “meal deal” with Glacéau mineral water for four quid – pizza and pasta options; baked potatoes piping hot from the Bakemaster Victorian bakery oven; potato, leek and watercress soup with a fat wedge of granary bread for two shitters . . . and then there were the stir-fries, which are wokked right in front of you by chefs that seemed happy enough in their work: when I failed to take the additional portion of vegetables to which I was entitled, they called me back.

As regular readers will know, lunch isn’t really my thing, but now I’ve embarked on a revved-up life of the mind I feel the need of it – what I’m not so sure I feel the need of is

Madonna and Timber Just-in-lake, but I suppose I’ll get used to them. Anything has to be better than “sconcing”, a tradition at my old college whereby anyone caught talking “shop” in hall had to drink three pints of beer in a single draft from a sconce – or giant cup. But then, come to think of it sconcing – like so much else in our coalition-led society – has become democratised. Now any student can chug-a-lug beer until she pukes, which is only fair. But a noodle bar has to be better for your noddle.

It’s often said contemptuously of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, that he has a degree in traffic management. In fact, his degree is in civil engineering and traffic management, but as the latter is almost always subsumed to the former, it’s impossible for us to know to what extent his expertise lies in designing and constructing roundabouts, and how much in assessing their capability for regulating traffic flows. Anyway, what’s wrong with traffic management?

It may well be that in his native village of Aradan in Semnan province, Ahmadinejad was exposed from an early age to traditional patterns of vehicular movement that rendered him sceptical of the sort of western models shoved down his throat when he reached the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran. I like to picture the future president inveighing against the systems of chicanes, speed bumps and traffic lights imposed to regulate Tehran’s turbulent traffic flows, and instead proposing a return to the principles enshrined in the layout of Aradan: no perceptible division between sidewalks and the roadbed, no signs, and the speed of all traffic only determined by drivers’ – whether of bullock carts or cars – consciousness of pedestrians.

If this hypothetical situation did occur, then Ahmadinejad would’ve been in sympathy with the work of the pioneering Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who inverted decades of baseless theory by doing away with signage and reintegrating the troubled world view of the average car driver with the saner one of the pedestrian. Monderman’s innovation was that it’s the very devices designed to protect pedestrians – standardised signs and markings – that have ended up imposing traffic on the social context. He realised that in a realm governed by statutory directives – Stop here! Wait! Go! – drivers will respond by obeying these signs and signals, while neglecting the wider world through which they barrel.

Anyone with the least experience of walking through city streets knows the truth of this: so preoccupied are car drivers by these cues that they are oblivious to what goes on around them. I often sneak up on cars when they’re stuck in jams and, employing skills long-honed in the pits of Formula 1 racetracks, remove all their wheels without the drivers noticing. How I laugh when the driver is left impotently revving! But more seriously the madness of this approach leads directly to the stop-go frustrations of drivers who are alienated from everyone around them. “Road rage” isn’t simply a condition afflicting these poor souls – it’s a chancre eating its way through the built environment and all who inhabit it.

About 40 years too late, one small portion of central London has adopted Monderman’s approach – Exhibition Road in the heart of the museum district of South Kensington. A year or so ago, I noticed that a new roadbed was being laid here that had no curbs, and that instead of the usual black macadam there was a snazzy terrazzo of granite setts devoid of any white lines. Unfortunately, the traffic managers of the Royal Borough have neglected some of the most important aspects of Monderman’s thesis – there are signs at the beginning of the road posting a speed limit of 20mph, and furthermore the zone of shared road space is bisected by the sign-heavy Brompton Road.

No wonder drivers and pedestrians are confused – and last month a pedestrian was knocked down and seriously injured by a slow-moving truck. Needless to say, local residents were quick to blame the Mondermanisation of Exhibition Road for this accident and call for further signage to promulgate a 5mph speed limit – but the truth is that it hasn’t been extensive enough: a proper “street for living” needs to be coextensive with either a sizeable district of a city, an entire town centre, or a whole village, so that drivers entering the area need to have psychologically reinforced the idea that they are no longer on the open road.

“He blew his mind out in a car / He didn’t notice that the lights had changed . . .” I like to think of this as a couplet that the young Mahmoud might have grooved to, wearing his trademark windbreaker. That his political drive seems to have been full-speed-ahead to crazy intolerance shouldn’t bituminise Monderman with the same brush.