The last time I addressed you from my bully-beef pulpit I was going to write about my all-consuming yen for a Fray Bentos individual steak and kidney pie, but as there wasn’t one to hand to mouth, I related the electronic cigarette incident at Pizza Express instead. This week, I can report that I have attempted to secure one of the meatylicious treats – and once again failed.

Mr Vairavar, who keeps the convenience store immediately beneath my flat, did have a Fray Bentos minced beef and onion pie on his shelves (and very attractively priced it was, too, at £1.99) but I knew that it wouldn’t hit the suety spot. I had already undertaken a smallish tour of supermarkets in the environs, and although I hadn’t secured the elusive pudding I still found plenty of food for thought.

In Tesco, I was struck by the presence of a paella ready-meal in the chiller cabinet. All convenience foods rely not on a specific ingredient, but rather on its absence: time has been left out, usually in favour of some artificial flavouring. I think of paella as a dish to be prepared over hours, possibly an entire day. Cooked in the warm south, beneath the canopy of a leafy bower and before an azure sea – coaxed into full and piquant fruition by some adipose and moustachioed duenna, while almond-eyed kiddies dangle from her skirts and the menfolk sit around drinking harsh Rioja, smoking black tobacco and spitting.

Mind you, human ingenuity has been diminishing the temporal component of our cuisine for a long time now: in the Middle Ages salt was the preferred preservative, but by the 1900s tinned meat was being despatched from Fray Bentos in Uruguay and making the long voyage to dock in the British duodenum.

Also on Tesco’s shelves was an extensive selection of pasta sauces. All the usual suspects were there, including Loyd Grossman’s and several variations on the Dolmio theme. It had been a bad week for the Dolmio brand, what with Mars Food, which owns it, feeling it was incumbent on it to place a label on these sauces (and its other products) warning punters that they aren’t “everyday” foods but should be eaten only “occasionally” – say, once a week.

I stood in the aisle, my dreams macerated at my feet. Not eat a Dolmio pasta sauce every day of the week (and even twice daily)? What kind of freshly preserved, heavily sugared and salted hell was this? I have clung on for years to a vision of the good life, summed up for me by Dolmio pasta sauce adverts of the early 1990s, in which a tumultuously happy extended Neapolitan family chows down at a long table laid out under the spreading boughs of an olive tree: old crones and rosy-cheeked bambini, voluptuous girls and their blushing beaus, the entire assembly benignly surveyed by a greying paterfamilias, a role I reserved (don’t laugh) for myself.

True, I can count the number of times that I have eaten Dolmio pasta sauces on the fingers of one leprous hand, but as with most commodity fetishism – contra Marx – it’s the thought that counts. So, I bought a jar of Dolmio sauce and bore it home as a sort of edible time capsule; if it isn’t an “everyday” food, I reasoned, I could wait for the Apocalypse to crack off the lid.

I considered buying a jar of Loyd Grossman sauce as well. I’ve no idea if it’s any good but I met Grossman once, in his capacity as chairman of English Heritage’s blue plaque committee. He’d invited me to unveil the plaque for the short story writer HH Munro (whose nom de plume was Saki), which was to be sited on a property on Mortimer Street, London, now tenanted by a firm of accountants.

A scaffold had been put up outside so that the plaque could be mounted, but Loyd and I still had to crawl over one of the partners’ desks in order to reach it. I found him to be a warm and genuine man with no side at all – only a bottom, with which I was nose-to-tail during the desk-clambering. So, that’s the problem I have with his pasta sauces: instead of associating them with joyful consanguinity, I think of systematic pederasty. (Not, I hasten to add, because of Loyd Grossman’s bottom but because Saki had these proclivities and, according to his biographer, whom I met the same day, the writer kept a scrupulous menu of his conquests, including details of their, um, portion size.)

The next stop was Lidl – always a bizarre experience. The last branch of Lidl I’d visited was situated exactly on the death strip of the old Berlin Wall and surrounded by silver birches that looked to be precisely 25 years old. It was sheer foolishness to expect this outlet to have one of the elusive Fray Bentos individual steak and kidney puddings – its stock is discounted stuff that it has picked up cheap.

Fun fact: founded in 1930, Lidl was originally called Schwarz Foods but being referred to as “Schwarzmarkt” would have been a bit of a liability, especially once war was declared, and so the name was changed. There were no black-market puddings here but almost an entire aisle stacked with serrano hams! I would have bought one of these time-infused meats . . . but I had my Dolmio end-of-the-world to look forward to.

The writer Chris Hall, that redoubtable Ballardian observer of the craziness of the modern inscape, recently sent me a link to an Evening Standard item on the redecoration of the Brixton branch of McDonald’s. It may well be that others of these low-esteemed eateries have been similarly tricked out; but if it’s Brixton alone, either the higher-ups in the chain’s chain are complete and utter bastards, or they’re unbelievably shrewd.

Anyway, the form this makeover takes is that the tables, the walls, the chairs and the very lampshades have all been bedizened with pseudo graffiti tags. Yes, yes, you’ve read me right: they’ve made the fast-food joint look as if it’s been subjected to a high-speed attack, in which a maddened crowd of hip-hopping taggers has invaded, armed only with spray cans and a collective identity crisis.

Chris appended the weblink with a cri from his own bitter coeur: “What next to complete the mise en scène – plastic dog turds on the floor? Or, er, their own-branded litter? In which case they could cut their own costs at the same time by sacking the cleaners . . .” But when I watched the online video clip I found out that Brixtonians themselves felt rather differently. True, there was one interviewee who said the new livery was a slur on the inhabitants, because it implies they’re all delinquent (or, worse still, the sort of idiots who think that a little bit of delinquency adds relish to a burger), but most of those the Standard spoke to used words such as “colourful” and “fun” to describe the patronising paint job.

What can we take away from this takeaway? Are we to assume that the denizens of Brixton are so sheepy that they don’t even realise when they’re being led by the nose? Or are they being ironic? Or could it be that they’re expressing a sincerely held opinion? Assessing the subtle inclination of such velleities interests me: in part because, a few years ago, I got involved in a similar situation – one that also altered the old, raddled and much-loved face of Brixton: I was approached by an arts organisation that was pitching for a commission to produce a piece of street art for Electric Avenue.

The piece was to occupy two large windows of the branch of Boots on the corner of Electric Avenue, which suffered damage in April 1999 when David Copeland, the infamous “London Nail Bomber”, planted one of his evil devices nearby. It’s perhaps a comment on Boots as much as Brixton that the windows remained boarded up for nigh on a decade.

Anyway, my idea for the piece was that I would hang out on the Electric Avenue around the market stalls, earwigging the conversations of traders and shoppers, and then edit this raw found dialogue into a series of phrases. These would be incorporated into a sort of electronic signboard, which would randomly light up one or other snippet of Brixton-speak to create a never-ending and ever-changing dialogue. I confess that I thought it a pretty nifty idea – and I was even a little bit proud to think a mind-child of mine would be taking such a prominent role in the vibrant street life of an area I have known and loved for many years (I live less than a mile away). So – I did my hanging out, gathered my snippets and I submitted these to the then Brixton town manager, a woman of impressive size but gentle mien.

When we next met, the town manager seemed a little worried. “The thing is,” she said, “some of the people on the planning committee feel that some of the phrases you’ve collected aren’t really representative of Brixton’s inhabitants.” Obviously, I demurred, reminding her that, far from being unrepresentative, the words had been uttered by real, live Brixtonians. But she remained adamant: the references to thieving, begging and drug-dealing would have to go. I confess that I slightly took my eye off the street-art ball at this point, so narked was I by the madness of censoring reality in this way. And there was more strangeness to come: I waited and waited for my piece to be installed on Electric Avenue, but then when it did happen it was a bit like the Stonehenge scene in This Is Spinal Tap: it looked like my electronic signboard as I’d conceived it – it behaved like my electronic signboard as well – but it was much, much smaller. In point of fact: it was tiny.

And it still is tiny – and still is there, at the end of Electric Avenue, in amongst all the hugger-mugger of the market, with its shoppers, its traders . . . and its beggars, petty thieves and minor drug dealers. If you happen to stop for a snack at the graffiti-decorated McDonald’s, why not make it a simulation double-header and check out my piece as well?

Brixton is currently at number one on the gentrification hit list, with local colour of all shades being annulled by the beige infill of hipsterdom. If things carry on this way, soon the only graffiti you’ll see in the area will be in McDonald’s, and instead of hearing racy dialogue, you’ll have to read it. I suppose this constitutes progress . . . and I look forward to Brixton’s risqué reputation being fully expunged when, in the not-too-distant future, reconstructions of the 1981 riots will be staged for tourists.

I was going to write about the Fray Bentos individual steak and kidney pudding this week, which isn’t so much a meal as a world entire, but then there was this . . . incident. And so it is I return once more to Pizza Express, and gladly.

I’ve animadverted on this particular purveyor of farinaceous discs in this space several times already, but feel no compunction in returning, doglike, to the colloidal matter which, let’s face it, looks like vomit. Why? Because I’m Homo pizza-expressus if I am anything: not only have I eaten at this chain for as long as I can remember, but I’ve also raised four strapping children on its nosh. The last time I crunched the thin-crusty numbers, I calculated I had paid for several football fields’ worth of Margheritas, Venezianas and American Hots – and although I’m not going to do it again, let me just state for the record: you owe me, Pizza Express – truly you do.

What made the incident so very galling is that after a dip in attendance now that my kids’ palates have grown a tad more sophisticated, I’ve resumed dining there regularly. Why? Its Soho 65 pizza (on a gluten base) satisfies all my pernickety dietary requirements, and the decor – two parts constructivist to one of the Amalfi coast – is easy enough on the eye. True, I never enter a Pizza Express and think, “Wow! What a show-stopper!” But by the same token, I seldom do so and then speedily retreat because it’s an utter shithole.

Take the Pizza Express in Langham Place, just south of Broadcasting House and cheek by jowl with a branch of Byron. I’ve taken to eating there on Mondays, because that’s when I get my fundament greased by Doctor Wong of Wimpole Street. The place is a symphony of pale wood and pale wood-laminate, so, as a dynamic media professional (who requires regular fundament-greasing), I’m right at home there. So at home that I think nothing of puffing away gently and discreetly on my electronic cigarette.

The other lunchtime I was doing just this when the manager appeared and peremptorily informed me: “You’re not allowed to do that here.” I, naturally enough, asked why, and she replied: “It’s company policy.”

Well, surely, a bullish fellow such as me can be forgiven for reacting to this red flag. “Yes,” I snapped back, “it may well be company policy, but it isn’t against the law, and I’m not at all sure it’s legally enforceable – so why is it company policy?”

Anyway, I’ll spare you any more of the back-and-forth; suffice to say I wasn’t very successful in conveying this distinction to the no doubt harassed and underpaid manager who was, after all, only doing her job. The upshot of the incident was that I, considerably aggrieved, did not stop, and she, considerably aggrieved, reported me to some Higher Authority. (I picture a sort of giant Arcimboldo figure, its cheesy features composed of many and varied pizzas.)

I know this, because the next time I popped in I was bearded by another manager. “I need to talk to you,” he said, “because you were abusive to my colleague the last time you were in.” I cavilled at this: “‘Abusive’ is an overstatement. ‘Forthright’ would cover it.”

“The thing is,” he pressed on, “it’s against company policy to use electronic cigarettes . . .”

Again: I’ll save you the repeat-order of dialogue. Once I’d established I wasn’t going to be forcibly exiled from the mozzarella Eden, I engaged more fully with the manager, and he conceded that, no, he had no idea as to the whys and wherefores of this policy.

“All your colleague had to do,” I said, “was give me a reason, and I would’ve complied right away. I’m sure you, in your work, have to do all sorts of stuff that’s ‘company policy’ but which you think is utter bullshit.”

Somewhat hesitantly he concurred, and that is how we left it, after I’d further mollified him by conceding that I could be “a bit of an arsehole at times” (just ask Dr Wong).

And it’s true: I can be. I would estimate that 99 per cent of the time I am completely civil to people in the service industries, and at least 50 per cent of the time I’m a heavy tipper. (Ask Nick Lezard if you don’t believe me: I’ve sat across restaurant tables from him, settling the bill, and watched his mouth gape in disbelief as I bestow on the waiter pretty much Nick’s own weekly wage.)

Yet there are certain things that do drive me completely spark-a-loco. Company policy is one, and the way that baristas nowadays ask you for your name before frothing your coffee, so they can inscribe it on the cardboard cup. Yes, yes, I do understand the practicalities of making several sweet slops at once, yet there is still something so intrusive about it that I always quibble – and the form my quibbling takes is to reply: “Hitler, my name is Hitler.”

Possibly the biggest surprise my life has to offer is how compliant 99 per cent of baristas are with this bizarre (and possibly abusive) request, obligingly scrawling the hateful designator without any cavilling whatsoever. I’ve various theories about why this should be so, but on balance my suspicion is that the reason for their compliance is quite simple – it’s company policy.

Yes, it’s official: standing on busy escalators is faster than walking up (or down) them. Research undertaken by my favourite local transport provider, Transport for London, has conclusively proved that if people stand on both sides of the escalator during peak travel times, the numbers carried can increase by as much as a third.

Well, for once that’s a piece of good crowd news in our febrile and fissiparous world, guiding us towards sensible mass behaviour of a type to appal Yevgeny Zamyatin: think We, people, not a Beckettian I. TfL’s aim is to introduce standing-only escalators at some of its busiest and deepest stations in order to cut down on congestion.

The idea that plonking yourself on an escalator like an inert potato is faster than walking obviously seems absurd if you’re a limber fellow like me, who cannot see a long escalator without wanting to sprint up it or trip lightly down, sole after sole barely glancing the groovy tread – but of course the vast number of London Tube passengers are morbidly obese tourists humping ectomorphic wheelie bags, and such is their aversion to exercise that they clutter up the subterranean halls waiting for a tread to stand on.

Moreover, according to the escalator-flow wonks at TfL, passengers also jealously guard their personal space, often not using up all the treads available, but insisting on at least one between them and the next tubby traveller.

So, from now on, using just signage and other info-bumf, TfL will instruct its passengers at a number of the busiest stations in London to stand on both sides of the escalator. According to the aptly named Peter McNaught, operations director at London Underground: “Anyone who wants to walk on the other escalators will be free to do so, but we hope that with record numbers using the Tube, customers will enjoy being part of this experiment to find the most efficient ways of getting around.”

To which the only possible reply is, “Go fuck yourself!” Because I’ve not only been running up and down crowded escalators for years, I also experience some of my wildest and most bacchanalian pleasure from elbowing aside anyone unfortunate enough to get in my way.

As any true Londoner (or city-dweller generally) knows, observing these mass-travel mores is what divides us thrusting rams from the baaing flocks of docile ewes. To take the escalator at a run is a badge of honour for a metropolitan type – it shows he or she is a force to be reckoned with, fully competent when it comes to navigating the urban millrace.

As I’m pounding up or down I like to cry out, “Excuse me!” even as I barge against unsuspecting shoulders, or kick small children into mid-air – this retrospective “warning” being, naturally, a stern admonition, and even a punishment. Yes, yes, I know my behaviour is obnoxious – I understand that on crowded public transport we should all try to rub along (metaphorically) – but as our cities grow more densely populated, and the pace of life grows more frenetic, we all have recourse to strategies that help us to feel the shape of our individuality amid the crush.

So, Mr McNaught, your signage and info-bumf will avail you naught. I intend to go on escalator-yomping for as long as my legs hold out. Other folk imagine that by piping pop into their inner ears, or fixedly playing Candy Crush as they bumble along, they’re somehow mitigating the ugly reality of being just a number, not a name, but to those of us who view the Tube as a psychic assault course, they’re clearly out of the running: mere drones, waiting for some operations director or other to tell them what to say, and think, and, of course, do.

(And apropos Candy Crush, has anyone else noticed the strange similarity between these streams of cascading and intermittently exploding citrus fruits, and the flows of underground passengers on, er, escalators? People are pretty scathing about Candy Crush, but a reasonable case can be made for it being the legitimate art form of mass transit systems for precisely this reason.)

Not only will I continue running on escalators, but I’m going to persist in sprinting on travelators. You can really get up speed on a travelator! And when the wooden passengers fly every which way out of your path, the similarity to a ten-pin bowling alley is most pleasing. I often used to go to Paris just in order to run full pelt along the notorious trottoir roulant rapide installed in the Montparnasse-Bienvenüe Métro station. I like to think my bullish runs alone contributed to some of the injuries that led to its being replaced by a boring old one that runs at 2.9kph.

Every child has experienced the sense of wonder that comes as you watch the once-solidly right-angled risers and treads mysteriously flattening under your flying feet, before disappearing into the steely maw – but if McNaught and his ilk have their way, future generations will be condemned to leaden passivity: standing there, watching the advertisements purl past. That’s the wet-look of capitalism. In Mr McNaught’s happy world all you have to do to progress is stand still.

Of the film adaptations that had been made of his work during his lifetime, JG Ballard vouchsafed to me that he liked Jonathan Weiss’s version of The Atrocity Exhibition the best. It was hardly a surprising verdict; the movie, released in 2000, eschews any of the easy certainties of narrative for a furious collage of extreme images – urban wastelands, nuclear explosions, penises rhythmically pumping in and out of vaginas – all to the accompaniment of a voice-over comprising near-verbatim passages from the quasi-novel. And as the book is a furious collage of extreme images, the film is of the highest fidelity imaginable.

Ballard also liked Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Empire of the Sun, although more, one suspects, because of the opportunity he got to be an extra in a party scene that was set in a simulacrum of his parents’ interwar home in Shanghai. So tickled was he by this Möbius-looping of reality and the imagined that Ballard wrote about the episode in another roman-à-clef, The Kindness of Women. When it was announced in the early 1990s that David Cronenberg was to adapt Ballard’s apocalyptic tale of autogeddon, Crash, and moreover set it in Toronto, I was so exercised that I phoned the writer. “You can’t let him do that, Jim,” I protested (or words to that effect). “Crash is one of the great London novels. The city demands that it be set right here!” He was having none of it and gently talked me down: the point of the novel was to describe a global phenomenon, one Ballard termed “the death of affect”. It was quite irrelevant which city the film was set in – the important point was that Cronenberg’s affectless vision and planar cinematography, all lit at operating-theatre strength, strongly resonated with Ballard.

Again, I rather suspect he liked the furore that surrounded its release – the late Alexander Walker having conniptions, screening bans all over the shop – rather more than he did the film. It would be a very absurd counterfactual indeed to try to imagine what Ballard would have made of the latest adaptation to enter the lists – but then, I’ve never worried about appearing ridiculous. For my money, Ben Wheatley’s film of High-Rise, scripted by his partner, Amy Jump, is a superb piece of work but how far it conforms to Ballard’s notoriously minatory vision is another matter.

I suppose I could be credited with an infinitesimal contribution, as Jump came to see me when she was working on the screenplay. She wanted, she said, to speak to someone who had known the writer personally, but whether she managed to get much of use out of me, I have no idea. All I can recall saying is that she and Wheatley had their work cut out, given that the novel has no proper plot to speak of, being, in ­essence, a series of flashbacks from a scene neatly encapsulated by the book’s opening line: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

Ballard had an impressive strike rate as a prognosticator. His early apocalyptic novels fried, drowned and blew the world apart, anticipating the environmental depredations to come, while his acute apprehension of what he saw as “the marriage of nightmare and reason which has dominated the 20th century” made him sensitive to both the rise of mediatisation and its associated pseudo-events, and also to the peculiar forms that anomie takes in societies that are characterised by material abundance and spiritual poverty.

In Ballard’s novel, the eponymous high-rise is presciently sited where One Canada Square, the iconically dull centrepiece of Canary Wharf, raised its ugly, pyramidal head a decade or so later; and although the notion of a war between social classes occupying higher and lower floors of a giant tower block might, in the mid-1970s, have seemed to be taking flight from the perceived problems of brutalist public housing, Ballard’s tale anticipates the London skyline of today, with its row upon row of “luxury” apartment blocks, inflated into salience by global gusts of flight capital.

It is difficult to locate the site of Wheatley’s and Jump’s high-rise precisely – the film was shot on location in the old Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast but there is a teasing ambiguity in the medium and long shots, with London seemingly ever hovering on the smoggy horizons. Perhaps the boldest decision that the film-makers have made, however, is to set their adaptation not in the near-future of 2016 but in that of 1974. Ballard once said that he was only interested in what will happen in “the next five minutes”; and it is undoubtedly this ­enthusiasm for the inchoate that gives his tales their air of the unexpected. By reverse-engineering an imagined future in which men with handlebar moustaches ply cine cameras while saturnalian suburbanites trash their futuristic pads, Wheatley and Jump have introduced a perverse note of humour to what is otherwise a very grim series of events.

Towards the end of his life, Ballard said to me that he regretted not having been able to write in a more ludic, or even comic vein. I remember remonstrating with him: Millennium People, his penultimate novel, had just been published and I thought it was suffused with the tinder-dry wit that was present in the rest of his oeuvre, but only faintly. Now comes an adaptation of High-Rise that brings that dry wit to the fore. It may not be everyone’s idea of a laugh-out-loud film but, frankly, who cares what ­everyone thinks? I don’t – and nor, quite obviously, did Ballard.

Some psychogeographer or other has stencilled a phone junction box on our road with this apposite slogan: “Have You Ever Walked Down This Road Before?” To which the answer always is: “Yes, thousands of times, because it’s the way to the Tube station.” In fact, the walk to this Tube station is almost exactly the same distance as the walk to East Finchley Tube station that I made from my natal home, twice daily, throughout my childhood; so, embarking on it, I feel myself to be a Start-rite kid yet again – and for ever. Then, when you round the junction box, you see on its other side this slogan: “Do You Know What’s Around the Corner?” To which my answer – both existentially and geographically – is all too often: I haven’t a clue.

I’m obsessed by locale rather than location this week, because I’ve rented a tiny “work flat” up the road from my house, and the mere act of walking to and from this mini-gaff, and sitting in it for a few hours a day, has made me apprehend the neighbourhood in a new way. I’ve lived in the same inner-south London terraced house for twenty years now, and every morning at around eleven, I see from my study window a generously proportioned woman making the bed in the flat opposite. I’ve never spoken to this woman – never even seen her in the street, to my knowledge – and yet I’ve shared this important ritual of her quotidian life with her for two decades. This, for me, is the very essence of the urban: the ceaseless mash-up between the intimate and the anonymous.

Equally essential to city life is going down the same street again and again, wearing a groove in the Yorkstone paving. The flat the plump woman plumps her pillows in is part of a low-rise but brutalist estate that stretches for about half a kilometre, and which at the further end includes the small block containing my mini-gaff-nouveau. This makes me feel a little strange – as if the rest of my body has finally been compelled to follow my eyes, out from my window, in through the adipose duvet-smoother’s, then out through her back door and along the winding lane that bisects the estate lengthwise. Perhaps it’s little other than the shock of the new (either that or getting old), but I’ve fallen in love with the little estate. I particularly like the way the blocks are arranged along the S-shaped lane to form either 3D crenulations or 2D castellation; you have the sense, as you walk through the defile, that the architect of this modest 1960s public housing development really believed everyone should have the opportunity to live in a built environment that fused the domestic with the dramatic.

Why might this be the rose-tinted-window-glass perspective of a valetudinarian? Well, older readers will have noticed how, with each successive decade, buildings they formerly believed to be naught but expensively piled-up excrement have begun to acquire the lineaments of classicism. We’re all little Betjemans, really, merely waiting our turn to found our equivalents of the Victorian Society, so that we can save another batch of much-loved eyesores.

For my generation it’s the system-built point blocks, slabs and low-rises of the 1960s and 1970s, but no doubt in another twenty years there’ll be a Postmodernist Society fanatically dedicated to preserving Terry Farrell’s legacy. Outside my mini-gaff-nouveau there’s a waste chute that takes the form of a single stalk of concrete beams – the bulge in the middle being the trap door you deposit your rubbish bags in. There is something about this form – at once utterly fabricated and yet sinuously organic – that sets my sclerotic heart aflutter.

Inhabiting any new locale involves adopting new perspectives, and relocating a few hundred metres up the road makes the adjustment particularly uncanny (in the strict, Freudian sense of something that’s very close to being homelike but doesn’t win the cigar).

From my fresh purlieu I can see a lot of the stale old landmarks: but of course they seem slightly strange; just as all my local trips – to the corner shop, the café or the post office – have had to be recalibrated. A friend of mine who was abandoned by her mother during childhood told me it wasn’t the desertion that had traumatised her most, but the discovery, after over a year had elapsed, that her errant parent was in fact living only a couple of hundred yards up the road.

I know what’s freaking me out most, though: sitting typing in my new office the other evening, I became aware – as they say in the military – of eyes-on; and, looking through the window, I saw a man standing on the exterior walkway of the flats opposite. He was slightly above me, and thus at a similar distance and in exactly the same position as I used to be in relation to the well-upholstered mattress-turner. For a frozen moment, I considered my fate: had I become potential subject matter for another scribe? In the future would an article be published (or, more likely, downloaded directly to interested brains), in which this nameless man descanted on the strange melange of intimacy and anonymity with which he has been regarding me, day in and day out, for twenty years?

A little under a year ago I wrote in this place about an encounter I’d had with Barry Sheerman MP and a Virgin Trains snack box on a train travelling from Manchester to London. At the time, what most bothered me about the snack box was its weird appearance: the cardboard printed with photo-real wickerwork so as to give the impression it was a sturdy hamper full of wholesome victuals ideal for a leisurely picnic lunch, rather than the flimsy packet of salty and sugary titbits Richard Branson was “giving” me for my real-life meal.

I swore at the end of my column that I would keep the hideous snack box for ever to remind me never to eat such toxic pap, but when I was tidying up my office the other day and came upon it looking just as vile – with its fake leather luggage tags that read, respectively, “Virgin Trains” and “Follow a Different Train of Thought” – I did indeed follow a different train of thought: “I happen to be going up to Manchester in a couple of days. Why don’t I take the snack box with me and, when I get there, eat it?”

Yes, yes, I know – eating the contents of a Virgin Trains snack box at my age looks like giving in to a dreadful taedium vitae, but I liked the idea of negating the entire Sheerman/Branson/snack box cluster-fuck by performing this odd little ritual; perhaps, I unreasoned, if I eat it mindfully enough I’ll succeed in flipping us all into a parallel universe where Richard Branson doesn’t exist, and where the business empire that occupies the same niches as his is branded “Promiscuous”.

OK, this is a live-action exercise – I have the snack box in front of me as I look down on the Shudehill transport interchange in central Manchester, and I’m now going to fiddle with its “leather” handles and open the damn thing.

Inside are the following:

1. One 330ml bottle of Wenlock spring water, “bottled at source for Virgin Trains”.

2. One 20g bag of Ten Acre “hand cooked crisps”.

3. One Squash Stix – a sachet of orange concentrate to be mixed, I assume, with 200ml of the Wenlock Edge.

4. One 22g bag of Cathedral City Baked Bites (mini biscuits baked with “real Cheddar”).

5. One 20g bag of yoghurt and raisin mix by the Dormen.

6. And, finally, one 22g bag of Cadbury Mini Fingers (“For the Good Times, Wherever!”).

OK, I confess: even as I was typing this list, I managed to chomp my way through the crisps and I now feel nauseous. Not that the crisps are especially revolting – it’s just that the little screed on the back of the Ten Acre bag makes distinctly queasy reading:

“Maybe you’re sitting on a train right now looking at the back of this packet, or maybe you’re relaxing on the sofa enjoying a good read . . .”

Really? Surely, if I were enjoying a good read it could only be these actual words I was reading – a reflexivity as bewildering as the whole snack box exercise itself.

Ah, well, better press on with the next course. I, for one, have never understood the thinking behind crackers infused with cheese during the baking process. Isn’t the whole point of having crackers wedded to cheese to perform the ceremony yourself, just as you marry horses to carts and eggs to bacon?

Besides, I’ve never tasted a “cheesy” cracker that was any good at all, and these Baked Bites are no exception: glazed little pucks of yuckiness I regret saving, and certainly cannot savour. I shall have to rid myself of the aftertaste with a swig of the Stix.

Yech! The Styx might well be more refreshing and even less lethal-tasting. A E Housman maintained that “On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble”; and now that I’ve got this Wenlock Edge inside me, my belly feels like a big bowl of wrong.

I’ll press on to the dessert course and hope that out of sweetness will come forth the strength necessary to complete this gruelling trial. The yoghurt and raisin mix from the Dormen consists of raisins cowled with some sort of dairy goo. They aren’t particularly offensive; indeed, arguably the Dormen is being a responsible victualler in this age of obesity by handing out only 20g of these powerfully moreish sweetmeats at a time. I’ve been known to eat kilos of the bloody things when I’m at the cinema, which leaves me feeling sullied and my fingers tacky.

An appropriate condition, you might say, in which to tackle the Cadbury’s Mini Fingers. The claim “For the Good Times, Wherever!” suggests that a brace of these niblets would make a suitable final meal for an inmate on death row about to be wrongfully executed.

I don’t know whether Cadbury’s is using more substandard chocolate and cocoa mass than the Dormen, but the Fingers are the first thing from the snack box that has both looked and tasted not quite right. Nor does the “Brain Teaser Time”, a set of simple puzzles printed on the inside of the snack box, appeal to me.

Overall, the entire experience was at once desultory and . . . fascinating. Although I’m now suffering from dyspepsia and lassitude, most of the snacks were as fresh as the day they were manufactured – rather like Richard Branson.

It’s difficult, simply sitting alone in a small room in south London, really to get a feel for how mass human behaviour is affecting the world. But it’s too cold in late February to go out much, and besides, by this point in winter, my sense of autonomy has been so savagely eroded that I fear for what little sense of individuality I have – if I stand next to as few as two others I can sense myself being sucked into a maelstrom of the masses. So, this week, I have decided to trust to algorithms rather than observation and I offer you the top “lucky seven” maddened crowds as compiled on our behalf by Google News. It took 0.53 seconds for the HMRC-compliant search engine to come up with a humongous crowd of 91,600,000 results – so I hope you’re grateful I’m not doing the entire countdown.

OK, that’s right! Sit tight! In at number seven is someone called Adele; I’d never heard of her before, but apparently she’s a popular crooner. Anyway, this Adele woman performed a concert on 12 February in Los Angeles, and the “historic” Wiltern theatre was stacked with some 2,300 fans who, it seems, “knew the words of every song”. Adele charmed them all, remarking that she felt so hot, “I feel like my make-up’s about to slide off me face!” But the true insanity ensued when she revealed that it was at her own insistence that the ticket price had been held at $50. According to the Yahoo Music website, this drew “thunderous applause”. Of course it did! I remember attending a Martha Argerich recital at the Wigmore Hall where her ethereal rendition of Bach’s partitas was entirely drowned out by the drumming of elderly, bunion-ridden feet, as we noisily protested at having to pay over the odds.

A new entry at number six are the crowds who, crazed by Promethean scientific advance, flocked to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) near Hanford, Washington State, after it was announced that scientists there had detected the existence of the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein. Setting to one side the observation that there was absolutely nothing to see at all, we can still marvel at their marvelling.

Annette Cary reported in the Tri-City Herald that Jason Jones of Seattle had driven 200 miles to visit the observatory. “I’m in awe of the science that happened in this place,” he told Cary. “It could fundamentally change our view of reality.” This may be true, although so far it hasn’t had any effect on people nonsensically massing.

Number five is an old favourite that’s perennially re-released – a sports crowd kicking off. In this case, they were Corsican, so naturally they took their anger outside the ground, and to a . . . police station. About a hundred hardcore Bastia fans launched the attack, which followed another of their number being injured in a scuffle with police during Saturday’s away match in Rheims. I, for one, think this widening of footie fracas is a heartening development – perhaps West Ham’s so-called fans can take on the so-called Islamic State?

At number four is another crowd they might cheerfully lay into: the estimated 230,000 people who attended the National Multicultural Festival in Canberra over the weekend. Given that Canberra is a distinctly white and triumphantly dull city, this hardly surprises – last year 73 local people were killed attending the opening of a Tetra Pak carton.

Still, all power to those ockers – they’ve come a long way since they granted their own indigenous people citizenship in 1968, to embrace multiculturalism by keeping refugees in concentration camps.

Number three are the police in the Indian state of Haryana who’ve abandoned their rubber bullets and water cannon, and taken to subduing angry mobs with “specially designed” and locally manufactured slingshots that fire plastic balls full of chilli powder. But lest we imagine these followers of the Mahatma are becoming too non-violent, they’ve said they’ll catapult marbles if the chilli powder doesn’t work.

At number two is the ageing meerkat lookalike and tedious “raconteur” Garrison Keillor, who apparently addressed a crowd of more than 2,000 the other afternoon at the Holland Centre in Omaha, Nebraska. They were febrile to begin with but Keillor’s signature monotony soon pacified them, and several elderly audience members died when their hearts skipped too many beats. They should get out less.

And finally, at number one – for now, then, and for all eternity! Yes! That’s right! Sit tight! It’s the Supreme Father, His Holiness Pope Francis, who addressed a vast crowd in the Mexico City suburb of Ecatepec. Numbering around a third of a million, the flock of faithful was shepherded by some 10,000 armed police. The Pope told the adoring crowd: “With the devil, there is no dialogue . . . although I’m reliably informed he has the best tunes,” a reference to the drug-fuelled violence that has made Ecatepec one of the most dangerous ’hoods in the world – especially if you’re a woman. And if you’re a Mexican woman living in terror from a bunch of super-violent misogynistic bastards, where better to seek succour than from a cross-dressing celibate who hears voices?

The other day, I bought a chocolate-chip cookie from a little boy called Rocco who had set up a stall round the corner, stocked with all sorts of buns, muffins and other home-baked goodies, in order to raise money for SportsAid. “How sweet is that?” I thought, as I handed over my dosh – but when I passed by again a few hours later, I found that Rocco’s little stall had transmogrified into just one of the hundreds of branches of Rocco’s Patisserie, all of which were decorated like a pseudo-French café and were now serving ghastly, industrially produced sugary comestibles at inflated prices.

I have written before in this column about how deranging it is to see chain restaurants or cafés clink-clankingly metastasise across our greenish and bilious land. This week, I want to consider another egregious example: Patisserie Valerie. Once upon a time, if you were something of a Soho flâneur, after you’d picked up a few poppers behind Raymond Revuebar and visited one of the walk-ups (take note, Crispin!), you slaked the thirst your exertions had produced by downing a half-pint at the French House, or going for tea and a pastry at Maison Bertaux or Patisserie Valerie. Neither establishment was particularly good but both had the virtue of being long established and – more importantly – unique.

Maison Bertaux, which is still going, has the further cachet of being the older, having been established in 1871 (possibly by ex-communards fleeing the counter-revolution), but Patisserie Valerie was always more accommodating. It was opened in 1926 on Frith Street by the eponymous Madame Valerie, but moved round the corner to Old Compton Street after the Blitz hit the eclairs and a massive euphemistic explosion ensued. True, in 1987 the café was bought by the aptly named Scalzo brothers (what else are you going to do with a name like that except snaffle up Soho businesses?) but they only managed to open a further eight branches before selling the mini-chain to the man we must perforce call the Führer of mid-price British restaurant dining: Luke Johnson.

OK, OK, I realise that’s a little outré – I certainly don’t mean to suggest that Mr Johnson has any Hitlerish political opinions or personal traits, although the Johnson family (in common, it seems, with other prominent Johnsons) does hang to the right. Nevertheless, even Luke wouldn’t dispute that he is always seeking to expand and find more Feedingsraum; after all, this is the man who took Pizza Express from 12 outlets to 250 in a mere six years; the man who started Strada from scratch (it is now so ubiquitous that there is probably a Strada up your bum, dishing out great, steaming mounds of tagliatelle); and the man who took over Gail’s Artisan Bakery in 2011, since when it has become the synonym for yummy-bourgeois-mummyness.

At least with Johnson’s other enterprises, what you see is pretty much what you get, but Patisserie Valerie, shorn of its belle époque window-dressing, is nothing more than Costa-with-attitude. Yes, yes, the floors are brownish and woody-looking . . . Yes, yes, there’s a decal of the Eiffel Tower stuck to the ceiling . . . Yes, yes, the benighted members of staff have to wear stripy waistcoats . . . And yes, yes, there are signature French café furnishings: bentwood chairs, club ones with oxblood-leatherette seats. But a few bottles of syrup and a handful of macaroons doth not make for café society – or even a café where you would like to socialise.

At the counter, I admired the hat-shaped lampshades dangling overhead (so witty!), then ordered a pot of Earl Grey and a “lovingly handmade Belgian chocolate gluten-free brownie”. The nice serving woman told me to take a bentwood chair and, shortly afterwards, tea and titbit arrived: the former in a heavy china pot (excellent!), the latter in a plastic box (sucks dogshit – if I wanted a brownie in a box, I’d go to a petrol station). If I had ordered the full afternoon tea, I’d have been presented with a wrought-iron stand holding individual pots of conserves; and that has to be worth a premium price, doesn’t it? Well, no. It takes more than a pot of jam and some dangling bowler hats to conjure ambience, especially when there’s a harsh, neon, anti-insect lamp on the wall and a garish yellow “CLEANING IN PROGRESS” sign on the floor – easily the brightest thing on the premises.

I’ve no idea how Luke Johnson sees the future of Patisserie Valerie. He has taken the Scalzos’ nine outlets and added a cool 115 more in nine short years. At this rate, he’ll have a millefeuille in every British suburban cul-de-sac by the turn of the next century. And, as with so many other high-flying business types, one wonders: what’s in it for him? Can he get that much satisfaction from stuffing ever more food in our faces? His employees don’t seem to be getting much – the nice woman on the till at one branch told me that, as a manager, she was obliged to do up to 10 hours a week of unpaid overtime. As for the ordinary staff: “It’s so quiet at the moment, I sometimes have to send them home.”

Poor bastards. But at least at home you can have a cup of tea for free and one of Rocco’s very reasonably priced and charitable cookies.

That we always kill the thing we love may be a tedious truism, but that can’t make us feel any better when the warm body that we once cuddled and cooed to is lying on the ground at our feet while our hands are bathed in its warm red blood. Last week, the head of the UN World Tourism Organisation, Taleb Rifai, spoke out, saying that travel as “a celebration of life” is under threat. Rifai, of course, was referring to tourism, rather than a broad idea of travel.

Apparently, global tourism rates have been rising faster than expected – there was a 4.4 per cent increase in 2015, the sixth consecutive year in which the numbers of people wearing garishly patterned shirts that don’t suit them went up. And what is the world total of tourists? A whopping 1.18 billion – which represents a hell of a lot of Germans lunging for the sunlounger ahead of you. If, that is, they aren’t stuck at home being bombed, shot, stabbed or sexually molested by the refugee cuckoos they’ve allowed into their gemütlich nests.

Rifai’s concern is just this: that the security measures taken by governments in response to the perceived terrorist threat will have a severe impact on an industry that accounts for one in every 11 jobs. (Yes, that’s right, one in 11! I was just as surprised as you to learn that one out of every 11 people I pass in the street very likely keeps a hot caramelised peanut stall.) But while we’re chewing over the statistics let’s just bite down a bit more on that 1.18 billion figure. It’s the equivalent of the world’s entire population in 1850 packing bucket and spade, shouldering their cumbersome Fox Talbot photographic apparatuses and buggering right off for a fortnight. Which rather suggests the question, who sold them their hot caramelised peanuts – aliens?

Look, I don’t want to piss on anybody’s parade (unless it’s the ghastly fake kind you find at Disneyland, complete with drum-twirling majorettes and Uncle Sam on stilts), and I appreciate it’s the time of year when hard-pressed workers of all stripes are making their holiday bookings, but isn’t the notion of a global economy substantially – if not primarily – dependent on vast hordes of tourists maddening by definition?

Currently, 9 per cent of global GDP comes from tourism, which accounts for a whopping 30 per cent of the world’s service industries. Western aid donors don’t like to allocate funds to tourism in the developing world but Rifai believes this is short-sighted, given that investment in such projects can have a multiplier effect as overall infrastructure, personnel training and other services improve.

I don’t want to come over all Paddy Leigh Fermor on you, but is a two-week package tour to some benighted Middle Eastern country really a “celebration of life”? I remember when the British tourists were all stuck in Sharm el-Sheikh last year, how flabbergasted – not to say outraged – some of them were. “How could such a thing have happened to us?” they wailed, as if it were some sort of human right to be allowed to sip sugar water and paddle in the Red Sea at the tip of a peninsula that’s been the site of a savage insurgency for well over a decade. Left to me, if I’d been given the job of sorting self-aware sheep from gormless goats, I’d have made sure anyone who complained never got home.

Years ago, JG Ballard wrote a short story predicated on just this idea: the thousands of Brit tourists sunning themselves in the Med receive a communication from HMG informing them that they are surplus to requirements and are being let go of. Far from being enraged by this summary curtailment of their citizenship, the doughty holidaymakers create a bizarre sort of “ribbon territory”, thousands of miles long, incredibly squiggly, but only a beach deep – then they declare unilateral independence.

Of course, with Europe’s Mediterranean beaches now becoming de facto Bantustans for Syrian, Afghan and all manner of other exiles, they are looking a lot less attractive as sunlounger locations. Still, I don’t imagine this will badly dent the numbers of tourists heading there for their hols, because the organising principle of tourism is, as Rifai makes clear, perception.

It is one thing to share a sable strand with a few washed-up beggars – the hyper-rich do it all the time in the Caribbean – but quite another to touch down in a country where every waiter and water-ski instructor nurtures a deep and burning desire to exterminate the infidel and establish Allah’s kingdom on earth. The only problem for the dumb and ovine tourists is that while they’re away in Tunisia or Egypt or Turkey enjoying a cheap holiday in someone else’s failing state, flying columns of refugees are occupying their own homeland.

There would be a sort of poetic justice in this if it really were to become a systematic scheme, whereby those whose work is deemed unproductive or irrelevant were simply swapped for the doctors, dentists and accountants who are now shivering to death in the waters off Lesbos.

I speak fearlessly about such penultimate solutions because I understand full well that the British economy can do without the product of my labours down t’word-pit; so I’m ready to celebrate life to the full. Are you?