The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

My old friend the writer and academic David Flusfeder and I arrived early at the Ebury Hotel in Canterbury for a dinner after a literary event at the University of Kent. It was the only table our Kentish colleagues had been able to find that wasn’t in a loved-up restaurant – this being the evening of 14 February. In my experience, Valentine’s Day dinners à deux are always an anticlimax. If you need a special anniversary meal to call attention to your mutual love, the chances are it’s already spent. The most passionate dinners, I’d argue, are in fact ante-climactic, because you’ve already made love before you’re handed the menu.

I digress – but I only wanted to set the scene: smallish provincial hotels, often family-run, are a staple ingredient of national life, and because of John Cleese and Connie Booth’s fine sitcom, the notion of dining in them has for decades now had a farcical glaze and a drizzling of outright contempt. When I was a child, my family had an ironic riff that pre-dated Fawlty Towers. Whenever we found ourselves entering the fusty Axminster-carpeted foyer of a hotel in Snoreminster, my mother would stage-whisper, “Sorry, sir, tea’s off, sir”, this being something that was once said to us in one such establishment, and which became for her – a transplanted American – a phrase emblematic of the untranslatable crapness of the British service industries.

Times change, and nowadays you’ll often find better service in Snoreminster than in the frenetic metropolises, but there remains the presumption as you cross the somnolent lobby that things may take a turn for the surly and incompetent worse. The trouble at the Ebury began after we’d scanned the dining room, not sighted our companions, and retreated to the reception desk, where a large golden tit of a bell reposed by the blotter-and-pen set. This being Valentine’s Day, the perky golden nipple of this bell was crying out for a tweak – but if that weren’t sufficient cause, there was also a sign taped to it: a Carrollian “Ring Me”. Anyway, I dinged the necessary, and a flustered, plumpish white rabbit in a striped waistcoat materialised.

He managed to contain his irritation and directed us to wait in a scary little bar full of aggressive black vinyl furniture. Then he rematerialised behind the bar and asked if we’d like a drink – I said I’d like a Virgin Mary and he snapped: “What’s that?” Emollient to a fault, David ventured: “It’s a Bloody Mary without the vodka,” whereupon the infuriated creature said, “What’s that?” Our fellow diners had pitched up by this stage and one began to itemise the ingredients of this outlandish beverage – but half-American as I am,
I couldn’t be arsed to pander to such rudeness, so snapped: “Just give me a Coke.”

The same sort of chilliness was encountered when we asked for nibbles, and the fellow pointed to a row of large mason jars full of nuts on the bar. Still, eventually we solicited drinks and got on with the dining experience. David’s argument was that the Ebury man was hard-pressed, had been dumped in it by colleagues, had to run the entire establishment himself etc – but we both knew the real reason: the bell that dinged for he.
I almost felt like having a word with the man, suggesting that if he didn’t want punters to ring the damn thing, he should remove it – or at least ditch the come-hither sign.

In fairness to the Ebury, from then on things went swimmingly. The food, courtesy of chef M Jean-Pierre Cabrol, was excellent, and although the dining room had that smallish-provincial-hotel ambience – heavy on the pile carpeting and overstuffed bourgeoisie – we had a thoroughly pleasant time. I wish I could say the same for the waiting staff. Whey-faced young women in black suits that would gladden the heart of the flintiest puritan served us with what to my mind appeared to be ill-suppressed fear. When I was the restaurant critic for the Observer, I’d often encounter such cowed behaviour, as I’d been recognised and the establishment was desperate for a good notice, but while not wishing to denigrate the reputation of this noble organ, I hardly think Real Meals has quite the same reach.

No, I suspect the White Rabbit may’ve metamorphosed into the Red Queen, and ensconced somewhere in the bowels of the hotel was shouting at all comers, “Off with her head!”

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

Saturday Live is an innocuous enough Radio 4 magazine programme that goes out – duh! – live on Saturday mornings. I listen to it in a desultory fashion. At times, it seems heart-warming, yet it can also be not only unbearably winsome but a perfect exemplar of a certain we’re-cosy-but-sort-of-liberal-and-compassionate strain in the self-identification of the British bourgeoisie.

It was originally presented by the late John Peel under the still more winsome title Home Truths. Fi Glover then took the mic for some years and now the Reverend Richard Coles, ex-pop star and current Anglican vicar, is at the helm. I’ve been a guest on the show but rather like Samson at the hair salon, I could feel the will-to-contrariness draining out of me as I chit-chatted away with the cuddly Glover. It’s not a mistake I’ll make again – that way the ossification of acceptability lies. So, imagine my surprise when I snapped on the radio to hear Alastair Campbell in conversation with Coles. I say surprise, but I mean a mixture of admiration . . . and disgust.

I’m not so out of touch that I haven’t been aware of Campbell’s slow, steady and – as befits an erstwhile political strategist – clever campaign of personal rehabilitation, but to my way of thinking the Saturday Live gig was a masterstroke. I didn’t listen for long because, to me, Campbell will – until he makes a sincere and public apology – always be the man responsible for dishonestly making the case for a vile, unnecessary and exterminatory foreign war. He will also remain with the bloody taint of David Kelly’s death in the region of his hands, until the full truth surrounding the “outing” of the weapons expert’s name is known.

As for his work with the first two Blair governments, contrary to his self-estimation of the “good” he did, what many of us who had a glancing acquaintance with Campbell at this time remember him for is a propensity for spittle-flecking abuse. I wouldn’t dream of shaking hands with an unrepentant Campbell – indeed, I’d go further, and, paraphrasing the character of Boris in Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, I wouldn’t waste my own spittle on Campbell, believing it to be too precious a fluid for the likes of him.

Clearly that’s not how others in the media feel: they give Campbell plenty of space to peddle his so-called novels, to expatiate on his love of footy and to beat his manly – yet sensitive – chest on the subject of his battle with depression/alcoholism. In yet another cri de coeur following the death of his friend the pollster Philip Gould, Campbell set out the things he hoped he would be remembered for in life (conspicuous by their absence were the ones for which he actually will) and high on the list was his sterling work to reduce the stigma of mental illness.

I suspect that whether consciously or not, Campbell seeks to encourage the notion that he is “mad” – or, at any rate, significantly disturbed. Why? Because this means that without him ever needing to make the argument, any accusation that he is culpable for some of the murky doings he was involved with becomes weakened; if he was “mad” then, QED, he cannot be “bad”. It’s a brilliantly simple idea.

Contrast this with the thinking of his former political master, “Call Me Tony” Blair. Being a believer and knowing himself to be culpable, Blair has entered the Catholic Church, presumably with a view to cancelling out Protestant predestination and in the hope that absolution will be forthcoming. Even I, who bow to no one in my revulsion from Blair, cannot help but feel sympathy: his easyJetting to Rome is a prima facie admission of responsibility, whereas Alastair “We Don’t Do God” Campbell has given the whole morality thing a swerve. And what’s the upshot? Blair cannot even do a UK book tour for fear of his safety, while his former minion is free to troll from television to radio studio pushing his product.

That mental illness – in all its multifariousness – can be said to vitiate the exercise of free will that we believe intrinsic to moral responsibility is not at issue here. But what seems bizarre – and evidence, surely, of a kind of woolly groupthink bordering on lunacy – is that individuals can self-diagnose such a diminution. I suggest that Campbell produce a letter from his shrink if he wants to be let off this hook, rather than going to “Confessor” Coles to get cosily shriven.

The latest Real meals column from the New Statesman:

Now I know what a susceptor is, I’d like one put inside George Osborne’s pants – actually, I wouldn’t mind having one put inside my own pants, or indeed just about everyone’s pants on this godforsaken Siberian island of ours. A susceptor, for those of you not up to speed on the wonders of dielectric heating applied to cooking technology, is a thin layer of aluminium either seamed through the packaging of microwaveable foods, or inside the small plastic or paper trays they reside on. The metal absorbs infrared energy efficiently and then radiates it inwards towards the food (or the chancellor’s genitals, pubic area and possibly lower belly, depending on whether he’s a briefs or boxers sort of a chap).

With the use of susceptors, microwave ovens – which cook at relatively low temperatures – can do all sorts of clever things such as activating the oil necessary to pop popcorn, or possibly stimulating cold fish like Osborne. Look, I’m not suggesting that we actually want a satyromane in charge of the British economy, but I do think the Oik – as I believe the St Paul’s School old boy is known to his Old Etonian Tory colleagues – could do with a little gingering up. Last September, when yet again those tedious allegations of him snorting cocaine with a dominatrix back in the naughty 1990s resurfaced, we were told by the prime minister’s spokesman, “the chancellor is 100 per cent focused on the economy”.

Personally, it’s this that I hold against Osborne – after all, who among us can say that we haven’t snorted the occasional “big fat line” offered us by a dominatrix? The Archbishop of Canterbury has done it with Pope Benedict – Tony Blair did it with Rupert Murdoch; we all, no matter how pure and exalted, have a Mistress Pain somewhere in our closet.

No, it’s this focusing 100 per cent on the economy that’s causing all the trouble – what Georgie-boy needs to do is to take a load off, get out his reusable hessian shopping bag and boogie down to Sainsbury’s where he can pick up a whole series of excellent microwaveable meals-for-two for under a tenner. The other evening my very own Mistress Pain said to me, “What shall we have for supper?” and without more ado I did just that. The Sainsbury’s Indian banquet – yes, banquet! – for two comes in an attractive ministerial-style purple box with attached handle, and there are options of either chicken jalfrezi and chicken tikka masala (which I opted for), or a milder korma/masala version. As well as the two main dishes, there’s a generous container of pilau rice, a plain naan bread and four onion bhajis. This is a lot of food to microwave a container at a time but that’s not a problem because the bhajis and the naan have to be done in a conventional oven, so by juggling appliances and plates you can ensure it’s all piping hot when it limps the ten feet from counter top to tabletop.

Why, I hear you scream, are you banging on about this bloody microwaveable Indian meal!? The answer is simple: it’s all about the economy, dummy. My banquet was reduced to £7, so I was able to satisfy both the insatiable Mistress Pain and my own rather limper appetite for £3.50 a head. The food itself tastes damn good – no, let me rephrase that: this was the best Indian meal I’ve eaten in the past fucking year, and I include in that a state banquet in New Delhi at which I was seated next to the president, and she popped balls of gold-leaf-encrusted saffron rice into my mouth with her own fair hands. Indeed, compared with the average Indian sit-down – let alone takeaway – Sainsbury’s wins hands-down on cost and quality.

I expect Sainsbury’s chicken is sourced no more or less ethically than the fowls cooked up by my local balti house – but it tasted more succulent to me. The sauces of the main dishes were also way less ghee-y than I’m accustomed to – and all the better for it. The onion bhajis were the hot bollocks – Osborne, take note – while the pilau rice was cooked so perfectly that I could comb the grains into perfect regularity with the tines of my fork.

As for the Sainsbury’s naan, well, as a belated anniversary tribute to the Scots Bard I can only observe, A naan’s a naan for a’that. If only Osborne understood this, but I’m afraid for him it isn’t the case that: “The rank is but the guinea’s stamp/The Man’s the gowd for a’ that…” Rather it’s the gowd that counts.

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

I once asked the late JG Ballard if he’d been offered an honour. He told me he had – a KCBE, or something of that stripe – but when he queried whether he’d be able to style himself Commander Ballard, the gong wonk (gonk?) said no, and so he refused it.

The other day I heard a commentator on the radio saying that perhaps every time the newly stripped Fred Goodwin had to book a restaurant table and give his name as “Mr Goodwin” it would remind the disgraced RBS chairman of his own gross moral turpitude. Clearly, this sage – I believe it was “Sir” Digby Jones, late of the CBI and the last government – would rather that Goodwin was burning in a sulphurous pit for all eternity, but failing that, the very common torment of having to enunciate “Mr Goodwin” would have to do.

Personally, I doubt this speech act would be sufficient to unstopper a cascade of penitence – I cannot imagine that Fred – as I prefer to think of him in these PCMT (Post-Call-Me-Tony) times – has the conscience required to feel the pain of every single British taxpayer who continues to have to work in order to patch up the hole he shredded in his former money-factory’s balance sheet – oh, and pay for his pension as well.

The question raised by the Goodwin debacle is: why is it that people, en masse, go crazy for honours? The answer, surely, is hypnotism: a gong dangled in front of even the most clear-sighted individual sends them into a deep-time trance of reverence for the institutions and powers-that-be (and have always been, as they never tire of telling you). It doesn’t seem to matter who they’re handed out to, or for what, or indeed that the “British Empire” of which so many of them are members, companions, knights, baronesses and order-recipients now amounts to little more than a few fly-specks on the map. Postmistresses and panjandrums, journalists – who really should know how infra dig it is – and junk-bond traders: they all fall into the same trance.

That Lloyd George was spunking off honours on his buckers and cronies a century ago, and that this gushing continues unabated a century later, affects gongers, gongesses and the great un-gonged not one jot. Gong devaluation certainly won’t be the result of Fred’s ritual humiliation – on the contrary, such group-think histrionics produce exactly the opposite effect.

It’s quantitative easing that might well solve the vexed question of knighted, ennobled and otherwise honoured wanker-bankers as well – let’s give everyone a knighthood! True, it would be a bit like that scene in Spartacus, with lollipop lady after manicurist after call-centre operative rising to his or her feet and bellowing, “I’m Sir Fred Goodwin!”, “I’m Sir Fred Goodwin!”, but at least these absurd hunks of tin would become just that. (Of course, poor Liz Windsor’s arm might drop off with all that dubbing – someone will have to design a knighting machine along the lines of Margaret Atwood’s LongPen, the remote-signing device she invented so that she could honour purchases of her books at a distance with a few wiggles of a stylus on a computer screen.)

Defenders of the honours lunacy always point out that it isn’t only crony capitalists and political placemen and women who are cloaked in ermine and topped-off with balls. But the odd ennobled social worker is no match for those furious oxymorons: the Labour lords – surely paradoxes on a par with fascist humanitarians or vegan hammerhead sharks. Indeed, the willingness of quondam social democrats (let alone socialists) to take such titles tells you all you need to know about the English – and Scots, Welsh and Irish – vice of hypocrisy.

I have more sympathy for hereditary peers than I do for Prescott, Kinnock, Mandelson et al. At least they acquired their titles through good old-fashioned expropriation – or brewing – and the notion that we commoners exist in the sub-basements of their Downton Abbeys may be offensive, but it isn’t flat-out ridiculous.

Which brings us full-circle back round the M25 to J G Ballard. He was right, honours are all about how to style yourself, and the stripping of Fred’s knighthood will have no impact on his carefree ability to book a table at the most expensive restaurant in the land – that, clearly, is a matter of substance.

The latest Real meals column from the New Statesman:

“. . . they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas”

So writes Jorge Luis Borges in Tlön, Uqbar Orbis Tertius, in my – not especially humble – opinion, among the finest pieces of short fiction ever written. In conceiving of a world of philosophical idealists, for whom the persistence of objects in space and time is as preposterous as mysticism to Scotto-English empiricists, Borges gets close to explaining my response to the Lorelei, a pizzeria/coffee bar on Bateman Street in Soho, London.

I must’ve first eaten at the Lorelei in the early 1980s, and at that time we youthful students were all struck by the anachronistic air of the place: its Formica-topped tables, rush-bottomed chairs, oxblood-coloured vinyl banquettes and scuzzy lino floor were redolent of an earlier age, an age also enshrined in its Cimbali espresso machine and the sconces of its dim spotlights. As for the mural, it would be difficult to respond to this implausible creature as Heine did to his Lorelei: “There sits the most beautiful maiden/On high, so wondrous fair/With glittering gems she is laden/She combeth her golden hair.” For this one had pretty dun hair, beige skin and a grey tail for that matter – still, it could’ve been the lighting.

We ate at the Lorelei because it was cheap – very cheap. And the pizzas were … fine – not great, but acceptable. There was a small corkage fee and you brought your own rotgut. I never forgot about the Lorelei, but we are all gastropods and over the decades my stomach inched me off elsewhere. Then, about 10 years ago, I happened to detour along Bateman Street – a quiet backwater – and there she was, still beckoning from the bricky bluffs alongside La Capannina “Gentlemen’s Club” (another mysteriously long-lived establishment). I went in and the joint was exactly, uncannily the same – right down to the row of dusty rubber plants in the front window and the pile of 25kg flour bags on a chair by the door. As I sipped an espresso and smoked my pipe, I wondered if the Lorelei might be a sort of mystic portal, through which I could reach the fabled Tlön, so unaccountable was its persistence in space and time: after all, the rents round here are astronomical and most eateries have the life expectancy of subalterns on the Western Front.

At home I Googled the Lorelei, and found a woman writing about eating there in the 1960s and how it was unchanged since then apart from the loss of the jukebox, which had a great selection including Edith Piaf singing “La Vie en Boeuf-Sang”. I began to have weird thoughts: Might some little-read essay of Hazlitt’s – “On the Stagione”, perhaps – include observations of eating there in the early 1800s? Was the Lorelei a hangout of the Ivy Lane Club, one not immortalised by Boswell only because he objected to grated carrot dominating the side salad?

Anyway, for at least half a century the Lorelei has been doing its thing, so it seemed only just to take some boys there. Robert Graves said that as a child he was kissed in his pram by Swinburne, and that Swinburne had been kissed in his pram by Tennyson, and that Tennyson . . . well, you get the picture: I liked the idea of confronting these pizza-obsessed whelps – it’s pretty much all they’ll gnaw – with such an ancient lineage of Margheritas. Besides, where else in this world – or any other – can you read on a menu the enticing phrase “topped with prawn sauce”?

Needless to say, they found the Lorelei surpassingly weird. The youngest put his face in his hands within minutes of our arrival and moaned, “Well, this is depressing.” His older brother couldn’t quite credit the prices on the menu, which were in pence, saying, “How can it be so cheap?” It’s true that the prices had gone up in the 30-odd years since I first ate there, but a signature Lorelei pizza (sardines, mozzarella, tomatoes, anchovies, olives, oregano) will still only set you back 690p. I had a rigatoni matriciana for 600p and a side salad (still with Boswell’s hated grated) for 250p. For four the bill was a mere 3,233p – but how long can this go on? Il Padrone is, to be frank, getting on, and so to paraphrase Heine, “I know not what evermore grieves me,/What makes me sorrow so:/A tale of old times never leaves me,/A tale of pizza ago …”

The latest Madness of Crowds column:

My kids as a rule don’t say the cutest things, but the weirdest. As a result, I’ve learned to strip-mine ruthlessly their inchoate brains for ideas – which is why, presumably, they can’t wait to leave home. My youngest is still only ten, so he can’t get away, and I’m glad of that because he’s proved especially helpful in furnishing topics for this column. Yesterday morning, on our way to his school, as the bus grumbled along the Wandsworth Road, I asked him if he could come up with anything for this week’s Madness of Crowds. He thought for a second or so, then said: “What about all those shops that open knowing that they’re going to have to close down again?”

I knew what he was referring to right away – the melancholy sight of “closing-down sale” stickers blazoned across shop windows, behind which lurk uncoveted stock – but I cavilled at the way he put it. “I don’t think they know they’re going to have to close down,” I said. “On the contrary, I think each new shopkeeper believes devoutly in the likelihood of their success.”

There is, it seems to me, a great pathos in the lunacy of the wannabe shopkeeper. In essence, the condition of the retailer is the closest any human being gets to inhabiting the ecological niche of the Venus flytrap. Like the carnivorous plant, the human must remain immobile, seeking only through subterfuge – bright colours, teasing scents, pleasing goo – to lure the prey. Even once the meaty treats have snuck inside, there’s no guarantee that the poor mites will end up drained of their fiscal blood, because it takes so damn long to close those leaves/sales.

Whenever I’ve had a friend who’s opened a shop, I’ve observed the same insensibility creep over them as they realise that the only thing they’ve sold is themselves, downriver. Even before the collapse of the pyramid-selling scheme that was New Labour economic policy, chest-beating was already under way over the decline of the British high street. Previous governments have brought in dashing outsiders to advise on media, health and science but, as far as I know, Mary Prêt-à-Portas is the first retail guru to go to Westminster for a song (or possibly a fat consultancy fee).

Prêt-à-Portas’s conclusions were deliciously loopy: in a retail environment in which a third of businesses were “failing or degenerating”, the solution was to appoint “town teams”; laws on market traders should be relaxed and parking charges cut. Put simply, the only way to prevent the madness that ensues with the crowd’s departure was to drag it back again.

The one thing Portas wouldn’t counsel – oh, no! – was a moratorium on ex-urban shopping centres. (Nuking the internet wasn’t tabled at all.) This is a bit like a consultant on hungry Venus flytraps recommending more insecticides. But you can hardly blame Prêt-à-Portas. This particular liquidation sale has been going on for a very long time.

After all, it was Napoleon who described the British as “une nation de boutiquiers” and, by the time we reach 1910, we have these prescient lines about them being penned:

Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses, which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever.

Step forward, HG Wells (The History of Mr Polly), on the money as ever. We’ve talked about cognitive dissonance – or psychosis-lite – in this column before but no condition warrants this designation more than that of the consumer who believes passionately in the knock-down prices afforded by “the secular development of transit and communications” and equally devoutly in the socially cohering charms of ye olde mercer. No condition, that is, except that of the ye new olde mercer himself (or herself), who sets sail against the wind of change with only a sheet of plate glass as a means of propulsion.

The latest Real meals column:

For those of us not so much bitterly disappointed by the Obama presidency as predictably disillusioned (I knew he’d gone to the dark side when he snuggled up big-time to the lokshen soup lobby), the GOP primaries present a somewhat ambivalent spectacle. On the we-like side there’s the spectacle of one clown after another performing political pratfalls, but on the we-no-like recto is inscribed the saddening truth that to win against any of the current contenders – Gingrich included – would be like beating a dolphin at table tennis: it’ll say nothing whatsoever about the incumbent’s record except that he can, at least, hold a bat.

From the Real Meals perspective, the most important Republican candidate for 2012 has already quit. That Herman Cain got as far as he did says everything you need to know about the extent to which American democracy – so-called – marches on its stomach. If only Cain had simply gone on warbling “Imagine there’s no pizza . . .” every time he was popped a question, then he’d still be in the race – pepperoni being far more important than a mere peccadillo. Yes, Americans love their pizza with a deep-pan and all-consuming 15-inch passion, and while the idea of an actor being president still seems absurd despite the fact that it’s happened, no such cheesy whiff attaches to the notion of a former pizza company executive tossing dough balls about the Oval Office.

Hell, it wouldn’t even need to be an exec; given the oven-baked circularity of the American Dream, a pizza delivery boy – or girl – would certainly fit the bill. If only they didn’t require that tedious qualification of being a US citizen born stateside, I’d encourage the young man who delivered my Domino’s pizza the other evening to run. Encountered on the doorstep, he was courteous, nimble-fingered and open when I asked him about his travails: he worked, he said, a 12-hour shift most days, but on Fridays and Saturdays it could be 14. When not delivering pizza, he was far from idle, but rather scrubbing down steely surfaces, buckling cardboard and performing all the other labours that contribute to his employer turning over $1.5bn worldwide, while he putters along on minimum wage.

I thanked him and carried the boxes downstairs. My 14-year-old and I had already had a run-in about the vexed question of the cheese-stuffed crust – a revolting embellishment that he insisted was only available on the large 13.5-inch pizza. His little brother was content with 11.5 inches of “original” pizza, and I had the same of Firenze (Ventricina salami, pepperoni and Peruvian roquito peppers on a thin crust base – although what the fuck this has to do with the city of Dante is beyond me).

“That, boys,” I announced, “was the first time I’ve ever ordered food online.” Stuffed Crust stared down at me from the peak of his contempt: “I know, Dad,” he sneered, “because you sat in front of the computer in those stupid reading glasses of yours looking like some mad professor as you goggled at the screen.” This may have been true – but as I pointed out to him: “There was just so much choice!” Yes, choice between equally unappetising-sounding dishes, because I’d get on my moped and ride a long, long way simply to avoid a Meatilicious (pepperoni, ham, chicken breast, smoked bacon rashers and Cumberland sausage), let alone a Mighty Meaty (go online if you want to check out all the dead swine heaped on this dough bier).

The boys made free with their carbs, but I found my Firenze distinctly cardboardy and instead began to fixate on the box it had arrived in – densely corrugated, bold and smelling sweetly of melted mozzarella and tomato purée. I took an experimental nibble and found to my surprise that the box tasted perfectly all right, its texture paradoxically less cardboardy than that which it had formerly enclosed. My sons looked on appalled as I ate, tearing off strips and dipping them in the garlicky goo that had come in a little pot embedded in its lid.

For those of us not so much disillusioned by the Obama presidency as revolted, the discovery that a Domino’s pizza box is as palatable as a Domino’s pizza points the way to a sustainable future, and with the current Mega Deal – 7 Days of Crazy Prices! – you can get any size box delivered for a mere £9.99. You don’t have to be Herman Cain to imagine there’s no pizza.

The latest Madness of Crowds column:

To Mortlake Cemetery for the funeral of an elderly acquaintance – it was only my second funeral in the past year or so and I was struck by the sparse turnout compared with the previous one, which had been for a considerably younger person. But then it’s difficult to reach a ripe old age without the windfalls having rotted away already, while the funerals of the young have at least this small compensation: they’re mostly pretty well attended, unless the deceased was especially loathsome.

A stroll through the cemetery grounds was the usual pathos parade: “Sadly Missed . . .”, “Much Loved . . .”, “Together at Last . . .” and so on. Then there were the graves themselves, which, in progression from the marmoreal splendour of the High Victorian – complete with columns, petrified laurel leaves and caryatids – to the post-war modernism of row after row of miniature Mies van der Rohes, reflected the evolving urbanity of their constructors.

To observe that cemeteries are the deathly analogues of the living cities within which they’re implanted is as trite as noting that the funerals of the old often aren’t that popular – still, on some days a plastic bag snared in park railings emanates tremendous profundity, while on others mortality itself is pretty, um, dull. That our town plans are shaded in with these greyfield sites is something we take so much for granted as to scarcely notice it: the train pulls away from a terminus built on top of a overcrowded catacomb and accelerates past the tightly packed headstones of inner-city graveyards; then, as we reach the leafy outskirts, we find the green swathes of garden necroburbia.

London, being a large and old city, displays this character very plainly: the inner boroughs, having filled up their allotted plots by the early 19th century, bought up tracts of open land further out and soon developed thriving cemeteries, which is why – to give just one example – St Pancras and Islington Cemetery is located between Finchley High Road and the North Circular. They order these matters better elsewhere: the Glasgow Necropolis looms over the living city like a Caledonian fantasy on a theme by Arnold Böcklin; while in the polymorphously perverse context of Los Angeles, an Elysium such as Forest Lawn Memorial-Park seems homely.

Clearly part of Americans’ Manifest Destiny is to plant corpses further west. Here, however, the fashion for cremation came about because of our right, tight little towns becoming overpopulated by cadavers. But there were still those pesky cremains to deal with and in due course our cities have become almost as cluttered with their containers. My father’s leftovers reside in a multi-storey columbarium, while my mother had to make do with a collective marker on Hampstead Heath that she shares with other Jewish people who died of cancer.

I say she had to make do – but I mean me and her other formerly nearest and dearest, because, while I bow to no man or woman in the militancy of my agnosticism, I still think the odds are pretty much stacked against a purgatory that consists in hanging around Hampstead Heath – or Mortlake for that matter. Which is where collective irrationality enters the picture: why should the biodegradable remains of human beings be lumped together in this fashion? Is it that having been a part of the crowd in life they cannot bear to experience a solitary afterlife?

Obviously not. No, our necropolises are the product of two irrational beliefs that synergise, eating up quality real estate. On the one hand we have the childlike conviction that the plains of heaven closely resemble the gardens of suburbia – right down to concrete wishing wells and dinky picket fences – while on the other we have the livings’ need to do everything, including “visiting” the dead, en masse. You see this in Scotland in particular, where on a Sunday afternoon cemeteries are packed out with relatives indulging in the al fresco housework of dusting headstones and rearranging floral displays.

I’m not quite so monstrous as to suggest that we require no ritualised remembrance or our dead, but need it be quite such a grim parody of our own quotidian existence? After all, there’s an awful lot of countryside crying out for bodies to be buried in it. I can readily imagine a shift in our ritual life that would see people six feet under areas of outstanding natural beauty, and their loved ones visiting on foot. English heritage indeed.

Here’s the latest Real Meals column in the New Statesman:

Well, here we all are – this is the last Real Meals of 2011 and I for one would like to go out with a bang, rather than a whimper. My charming editor at the Statesman suggested that I might like to write something “Christmassy” but why would I want to do that? I made my feelings about Christmas dinner perfectly clear in this column at about this time two years ago and they haven’t changed one jot during the intervening months. Frankly, I’m about as likely to set out on the highways and byways of Albion as a sannyasin as I am to begin at the age of 50 rhapsodising about a meal I’ve never ever enjoyed or even seen the point of.

Actually, I’m a good deal more likely to become a mendicant, because if there’s one thing writing about food confirms me in, it’s my ever-lurking manorexia. I like to review fast food outlets rather than fancy restaurants because if there’s one virtue they have, it’s that they exist to satisfy the hunger of the masses, rather than to stimulate the jaded palates of the privileged few – it’s an axiom of gastronomy that the hungrier you are, the better something will taste and, when you’re starving, any old shit will do, so long as it has “US food aid programme” stencilled on it.

My late stepmother once served up a Christmas dinner at the picnic site on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin. I want you to picture the scene: the lake is an artificial one in the middle of the Australian federal capital, Canberra, and on the far shore, the parliament building rises up, a queer pre-postmodernist spaceship of a structure surmounted by what appears to be a giant hypodermic syringe. Possibly the architect’s idea was to suggest that the legislature needed injecting with a hefty dose of common sense, or irony, or both.

In 44 degree heat, my stepmother doled out turkey, bread sauce, roast potatoes, sprouts . . . God love her, you might well say, and with the benefit of 20 years hindsight, I do feel that I cruelly misjudged her on that occasion. What aroused my scorn was the small charity collecting envelope she had put beside our plates that featured – if my memory serves me – a photograph of some Somali starvelings. Nothing, I withered at her, could be more calculated to ruin a feast than the presence – even as representations – of these ghosts! Now I see that her reasoning – whether conscious or not – was perfect: Christmas dinner is a meal fit only for ruining, so why not cut to the chase. And if it offends you to think of all the bellies swollen with air, then I suggest you look away now and get back to pickling your nuts.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s statistics, there were in 2010 925 million people in the world suffering from innutrition. Innutrition is the preferred term for starving nowadays since the ambit of malnutrition has been expanded to include the obese as well as the meagre.

Actually, I think we can all benefit from this new form of usage over the festive season. When roly-poly Uncle Henry, or blubbery Auntie Roberta wallows along, why not greet them at the door saying, “My, you look awfully malnourished, you’d better come in . . .” The facts are that, despite all the love-bombing of Bono, Sir Bob, Tony “Granita” Blair and the rest, world innutrition levels have increased substantially since the mid-1990s. The reasons for this are obvious: the neglect of appropriate sufficiency agriculture by governments, the current world economic crisis and rising food prices.

But as ever, the most significant impediment to Tiny Tim gorging himself on goose are the Scrooges of this world, who girdle the earth with the political equivalent of a gastric band so that not enough food reaches southern bellies. There’s more food being produced worldwide than a decade ago; unfortunately there is also more inequality, instability and in the past three years a huge upsurge in refugees, which is why around one-in-seven of the human family will be tucking into bugger-all on 25 December.

Why not join them? I hold no brief for tokenistic charity efforts designed to make the moneyed feel better about their status but fasting is another matter: it clears the mind and concentrates the thoughts on both the spiritual verities and the hard realities of life. No wonder all serious religions include it as a key part of their practice. It’s very effective against malnutrition as well – at least, the sort we get down my way.