I was meeting up with someone I worked with, ooh, getting on for 20 years ago and whom I hadn’t seen for pushing 15. I was coming from Manchester; she from Soho, London. We compromised on Drummond Street, that row of ethnic eateries parallel to Euston Road. Time was when you could eat a vegetarian thali here, then limp-fart along to the end of the road and buy an ex-Red Army greatcoat at Laurence Corner, a truly legendary army surplus store – so legendary that, when I ran into Paul McCartney at a party once and the subject of Laurence Corner came up, he told me that he’d bought his first double bass there back in the 1960s.

I suggested that we eat at the Diwana Bhel-Poori House “for sentimental reasons” – but this was pretty much a lie, my associations with this south Indian vegetarian restaurant being largely negative. I once ate there before boarding the Deerstalker Express to Inverness, and during the night developed septicaemia of such virulence that, when I got to the hospital in Kirkwall, Orkney, the following day, my infected hand was the size of a nan bread and chilli-hot streaks of sepsis were shooting up my arm. I’m not saying that this had anything to do with the Diwana, which has always struck me as perfectly hygienic and has decor not dis­similar to that of a sauna in a Swedish health spa, but you know how the mind is, always associating ideas willy-nilly for day after day; frank ly, I sometimes think that it might be a relief if the sun didn’t rise tomorrow.

No, I wanted to eat at the Diwana Bhel-Poori House because I happened to know that, at lunchtime, it puts on one of the most curious culinary spectacles known to humankind: the all-you-can-eat buffet. Whoever first hit on the idea of offering unlimited food for a fixed price was some kind of crazed genius, because while you might think that this would be an incitement to gluttony, I’m pretty damn certain the opposite is the case.

A fixed amount of food for a predetermined sum introduces a creeping barrage of anxiety – from menu choice through portion size and on inexorably to l’addition – that can only be assuaged by stuffing your face (or, in modern parlance, “comfort eating”). The all-you-can-eat concept, on the other hand, relieves the diner of her cares, allowing her appetite to shrink to its natural size.

Yes, I’d bet the farm – or, at least, a Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner – that all-you-can-eat buffets put out markedly less food per diner than the menu-mongers. Granted, my empirical sample is only, um, me – and I’m not so much a lady-who-lunches as a girl who favours a Ryvita smeared with cottage cheese come noon. Indeed, apart from strategic meetings – such as encountering someone I haven’t broken bread with since the Major premiership – I’ve long since dispensed with the meal altogether.

So, there I was, standing in the Diwana Bhel-Poori House, waiting for my quondam colleague and watching while happy office grafters piled their aluminium salvers high with rice, chapattis, assorted vegetable curries, fruit, chutneys and so on, but absolutely appalled. A sign tacked above the buffet read: “Please use one plate per person, eat as much as U like.” When it comes to being non-U, substituting “U” for “you” is enough to put anyone off their shoots and leaves. Not that I needed any putting off: the sight of all that tasty nosh, mine for a mere eight smackers, utterly nauseated me.

What would happen if I were to eat all I could? In Marco Ferreri’s 1973 masterpiece, La Grande Bouffe, four dyspeptic gourmands gather in a country villa with the express intention of doing just that, their ultimate aim being death by buffet. The film won the critics’ award at that year’s Cannes festival – fitting when you consider that, taken as a whole, film critics have to be the professional group whose eyes are manifestly bigger than their intellects.

When my lunch partner finally pitched up, I mentioned none of this to her and went about the business of eating lunch as if it were second nature to me – indeed, so relaxed was I that I ended up consuming a normal-sized meal. After we parted, I limp-farted to the end of the road and stood there staring melancholically at the corner where Laurence’s used to be.

I suppose the moral of this tale is that, in the all-you-can-eat buffet of life, petites madeleines are always for dessert.

At the end of the first half of Derren Brown’s current stage show, Svengali, the accomplished prestidigitator and manipulator of minds makes a plea that no one in the audience should reveal any of his act’s content, lest they ruin it for others. Fair enough. A cynic might say that Brown’s more concerned that no one devalue his shtick, but actually these are two sides of the same palmed coin – and besides, I happen to believe Brown is generally a good thing who adds to the gaiety of the nation.

True, he’s not an illusionist with the stature of, say, the Great Lafayette (né Sigmund Neuberger), who perished in Edinburgh in the notorious Empire Palace Theatre fire of 1911 while performing his signature “Lion’s Bride” illusion, wherein a smallish woman was metamorphosed into a big cat. Such was Lafayette’s hold on the public that when a fault in a stage light caused it to plummet and ignite the set, the audience, assuming this was all part of the show, sat still and watched while the illusionist and ten other crew members were incinerated.

As I say, I’ve no desire to rain on Derren’s parade, but I do think the methods he employs to obtain the raw material of his performances are worth discussing because they teach us so much about that critical component of human folly – suggestibility. Besides, I think it unlikely that the Venn intersection between New Statesman readers and potential Derren Brown audiences comprises many members – possibly I’m the sole one. The first time I saw Brown, a few years ago, he told the massed ranks of the goggle-eyed in no uncertain terms that nothing he was doing in any way involved the supernatural. In this he was following a grand tradition of professional magicians acting as debunkers of the paranormal, the most notable example of which was Houdini himself. Nevertheless, during the interval I overheard several people saying to their companions words to the effect of: “Ooh, he says it’s not real magic – but I think he’s lying.”

Two psychological phenomena were operating simultaneously here. First, the average Derren Brown audience member must be more suggestible than most: why else would she or he be there in the first place? After all, if you don’t unconsciously wish to be fooled, why go and see an illusionist? Second, Brown’s impassioned assertion of the rationally explicable nature of what he was doing constituted an example of negative suggestibility – primed, by him, to disbelieve everything he did and said, the audience flatly denied this truth.

I assert that Brown primes his audience to disbelieve everything he does and says, but I should qualify this: like all adroit manipulators, he wishes them consciously to question everything overt while unconsciously they absorb a great deal of covert instruction. To give one example: at the very beginning of each of his feats he throws balls or frisbees out into the audience, then asks whoever has caught one to come up on stage. This appears a completely random way of selecting his participants, but in fact he has already refined his selection to the more suggestible – because, when a frisbee flung by a magician is flying across an audience, who but someone who wishes to be manipulated would stick their hand up to catch it?

Once these gullible souls get up there, he subjects them to a further culling. In poker circles, good players become extremely adept at spotting another’s “tell”, the unconscious tic that reveals when someone is bluffing. Brown is a master of reading these tells: the little spasms we make when someone has hinted at a truth about ourselves we are concealing. Holding their hands, looking into their eyes, persuasively uttering their names, Brown has only to ask these already self-selectively suggestible people a few questions in order to establish whether they are what he requires for the rest of his act – namely, people who can be told what to do without being aware of it.

Hm, I wonder what other social groups exhibit the same characteristics as Derren Brown’s audiences? Let’s see . . . self-selecting for a willingness to suspend disbelief while also desperate to be told by a charismatic figure what they should do . . . That sounds uncannily like the psychological profile of a typical political party member, and, like Derren’s dupes, party members are also fond of hand-holding and first-name-calling. Indeed, the only distinction between the audience for illusionists called Brown and the one for, say, party leaders also called Brown is that the former are unlikely to become disabused given that what they’re after is purely entertainment, practised by some one they actively chose.

Birds Eye sold £7.5m worth of its Traditional Chicken Dinners last accounting year – and as these meals are made in the Republic of Ireland with imported chicken breast, “homestyle” gravy, potatoes and garden vegetables, I can understand why. True, they’re not exactly what I’d call hearty, but the chicken tastes fine, and while Birds Eye cannot vouch 100 per cent for the bonelessness of any given foreign breast, mine was reassuringly pliant, and even had a stippling of recognisable skin. The roast potatoes were firm little nuggets, the stuffing – shaped like a pellet of solid fuel – worked for me, and although the gravy was insipid, the carrots and peas swam friskily in its brown slop, and were surprisingly al dente. I can say with some certainty that I have paid five times as much for a chicken dinner in a restaurant – while enjoying it five times less and having to wait five times as long for it. The only cooking required here was an eight-minute spin in the microwave.

Yet, when I triumphantly bore my Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner home from Mohandra’s convenience store, Mrs Self was dismissive: “Oh, you’re going to eat a TV dinner, are you?” Mohandra, when I queried the £3.90 price tag – there were other frozen roast dinners in the gondola costing less than two quid – observed that: “You pay for the brand.” Both of them implied I was engaging in unspeakably infra dig behaviour. And yet . . . and yet, what could be more real than a Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner?

Patented in the late 1920s by Clarence Birdseye, the quick-freezing method, whereby food is pressed between cold metal plates while bathed in super-cooled air, has become the staple food-processing technique of our era. Birdseye was quite a character, perfecting his method while ice fishing with the Inuit of Labrador. That frozen food should have allowed for a colossal expansion of the volume of exploitable resources in the world, and so undoubtedly assisted in the destruction of the Inuit’s traditional lifestyle, is hardly Birdseye’s fault – unintended consequences of actions that seemed perfectly all right at the time are all around us. I’m one myself.

No, quick-freezing food has to be seen as the fourth agricultural revolution, which followed in a direct line from Mesopotamian domestication, through crop-rotation and the synthetic production of nitrogen fertilisers, to our own benighted decade. No! I was not having a TV dinner – I never eat in front of the television. (Mostly, it must be admitted, because applying a knife and fork to something in my lap always makes me think of the sequence in that film La dernière femme, where Gérard Depardieu cuts his penis off with an electric carving knife.) No! I ate my Birds Eye Traditional Chicken Dinner in the traditional way: at the kitchen table with my children, who were tucking into fancy Waitrose chicken goujons.

To begin with, the kids showed some interest in my novel menu choice, and we all marvelled at the non-standard shape of the compartments in the tray (something like cedillas), but they soon veered off on to other subjects – string theory, Boulez vs Stockhausen, the deciphering of Minoan Linear B – leaving me to wonder how they might have fared if sent to sea with Captain Birdseye, an advertising personification of such legendary effectiveness that a nationwide poll once established him as the best-known sailor in the realm after Captain Cook.

I have to say the continued plain-sailing of Captain Birdseye in the current miasma of paedophile obsession is something of a mystery to me. You don’t have to be that paranoid to be suspicious of a white-bearded fellow in a yachting cap who likes hanging around with a “crew” of pre-teens. Still, I assume he’s been CRB-checked – so that’s OK. Nor can my enthusiasm for Birds Eye altogether blind me to the human costs of that form of corporate cuisine, whereby one fat enterprise chows down on another.

In 2006, Unilever sold the business to that sinister form of words “a UK-based private equity group”. This one’s called Permira, which sounds to me like a neologism coined out of pudenda and permafrost – and possibly a rather suitable one. Back in 2005, Unilever closed the Grimsby factory where fishy fingers had been made since 1929, with a loss of 650 jobs. There’s no suggestion that Permira is contemplating any further closures, although when I called the Birds Eye press office to ask for sales figures, they did seem a little . . . wary. So, I thought I’d do my bit for the recovery and urge all of you to stay in this week and eat a Traditional Chicken Dinner – and none of your home-cooked muck: make it a Birds Eye.

What psychologists term the “availability error” is prominent in so many different forms throughout our mental life that it’s debatable whether this constitutes a form of delusion at all. Still, some examples are so egregious that unpicking them may help us in the general direction of better mental hygiene.

A few weeks ago a serviceably pretty young woman went to a big ugly house to meet a handsome man who happens to be the president of America, and his mildly steatopygic wife. For the occasion, the young woman slipped on a fairly nondescript dress. In due course, when photographs of this prettyish woman wearing said dress appeared in the papers, there was a frenzy as thousands upon thousands of crazed punters attempted to log on to the website of the British high-street label Reiss to buy it.

Put simply, the availability error consists in judging by the first thing that comes to mind; in this case, we can summarise the thought processes of the wannabe Reiss-buyers thus: Kate Middleton is wearing that dress and looks good, therefore if I put on that dress I will look good as well. We could elaborate, because undoubtedly there is a further murkier tier to such unreasoning: Kate is wearing that dress, therefore, if I wear that dress, one day I will be queen of England (as well as Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Bongo-Bongo Land, etc), hobnob with the Obamas, wear diamonds the size of pigeons’ eggs – and so on.

A variation of the availability error that I’ve discussed in this column before, in connection with my propensity – or otherwise – for urinating into the Dyson Airblade hand dryer, is the halo effect. The halo effect implies that if one person has a single, very obvious, characteristic, the rest of his or her attributes are invariably perceived in the light of it. This is why – despite all evidence to the contrary – good-looking people are often viewed as sagacious, amusing, possessed of phenomenal ball control, and so forth.

Ms Middleton is no film-star beauty, nor has she ever done anything in her short life worthy of note save part her thighs for the heir to the throne, then marry him. Be that as it may; paradoxically, her approachable, girl-next-door vibe becomes incorporated into her halo, so that potential dress-buyers formulate syllogisms of this sort: “All girl-next-door types wear mid-range fashion labels, Kate Middleton is wearing a mid-range fashion label, therefore Kate Middleton is a girl next door.” This conclusion won’t necessarily sell that many £175 Shola dresses (the Reiss design that Middleton wore to meet the Obamas), but it will, of course, sell the object – the Windsors – to their subjects, at a time when the populace might well resent the spectacle of hereditary multibillionaires lording it over them without even minimal concessions to such coalition virtues as choice and fairness.

The use of the availability error and the halo effect by advertisers is nothing new – when I was a kid, there was a scare to the effect that big corporations were pushing their product by inserting subliminal imagery into feature films. The rumour was that, for a split second during some parched scene of Lawrence of Arabia or another, an ice-cold can of Coca-Cola was flashed up on screen, ensuring that, come the intermission (remember them?) everyone would rush to the foyer and begin guzzling down the sinister sarsaparilla.

In fact, most advertisers have no need for such subterfuge – they can openly supply the imagery and we will subliminally influence ourselves. Thus shampoos provoke orgasms, mobile phones collapse cities like packs of cards and cars . . . Well, cars morph into just about everything imaginable and then chomp up the road. Do I believe that there is something intrinsically wrong with this? Yes, I think there may be.

Take Chinese Elvis. He runs a not terribly successful restaurant on the Old Kent Road, and once or twice during the evening’s sittings he emerges from the kitchen dressed as the King to sing “Suspicious Minds” or “Heartbreak Hotel”. He doesn’t look a bit like Elvis, and he certainly doesn’t sound like him, but such is the potency of the late rock monarch’s halo effect that, even years after his death, it can still garrotte the unsuspecting. In fairness to Chinese Elvis, he’s only helping to sell his food – which isn’t too bad – but it remains a bizarre aspect of contemporary commerce that stuff can now be sold not only by the famous, but also by their impersonators – and how mad is that?

There are 55 branches of Yo! Sushi in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, so this is clearly a threat worth paying attention to. Naturally, when Scotland secedes, it may take its Yo! Sushis with it; the alternative – that they be expelled from the country to form a latter-day Antonine Wall of conveyor belts bearing tuna maki – is a strange, though not altogether displeasing, possibility. After all, the resistance of Scotland’s premier to a foreign cuisine, one of whose chief components is a raw version of his near homonym, would be entirely understandable.

Not that there’s anything very Japanese about Yo! Sushi. For a start, I don’t imagine any self-respecting Japanese person has ever said “Yo!” in their lives, as such a fatuous exclamation runs utterly counter to a culture that prides itself in a disciplined and meditative conformity. No, Yo! Sushi is the brainchild of some clever Brit who sold out to a big corporate years ago, and who now enjoys his moneyed reclusion – I imagine – listening to old Steely Dan albums and raising epigones.

Indeed, it’s equally difficult to imagine what cultural nexus Yo! Sushi belongs within as it is to analyse the semiotics of, say, Hey! Cottage Pie or Whoops! Sorghum. The restaurants feature lurid orange paint jobs, curvilinear vinyl booths straight out of 2001 (the movie and the year), functionalist ducts trumpeting down on the diners, and the much-talked-about conveyor belts.

Let me get this straight: I love the conveyor belts at Yo! Sushi, just as I adore any food delivery system that incorporates the automated. To sit at the counter picking colour-coded dish after dish from the cheerful, rattling segments of the conveyor belt, and to watch that belt wend its way past the diners, then loop back into the exposed food preparation area where another dish is added . . . Well, this is some kind of crazy bliss. The first time I visited Yo! Sushi

I said to my companion: “I haven’t had so much fun since my childhood, when I would spend mealtimes at my grandparents’ with my head stuck inside the dumbwaiter.” Nowadays most people would probably call that paedophilia.

I love the conveyor belts at Yo! Sushi – love them rather more, I suspect, than the food they convey. Not that there’s anything bad about the sushi rolls, sushi nigiri, sashimi, etc that they churn out at Yo!, but the sheer fact of it arriving on a conveyor belt sadly militates against the credo of freshness otherwise promoted by having the kitchen in view. It makes the eating experience curiously confusing – there you sit, watching your titbit being assembled right in front of you, yet by the time it’s made its way around the counter you’ve become convinced that because it’s on an assembly line, it must be stale factory food.

Once, in the Yo! Sushi at Paddington Station, I was so discombobulated by these countervailing gastronomic currents that I tried to eat the conveyor belt instead of the food on it. The management immediately called the police, and I was detained. I mean, as a campaigning journalist, one expects to get arrested from time to time in the pursuit of one’s beliefs – but to be banged up for eating a conveyor belt, the shame of it! Still, it hasn’t put me off Yo! and I’m glad of that, because the other evening in Brighton I took Number One Son along to his local branch and we had a rather tasty repast. Why? I think ordering mostly off the hot menu helped, that way avoiding the conflict between preparation and conveyance. I also took full advantage of the Yo! deal whereby if you order green tea or miso you can have unlimited refills. There’s something about a grossly distended belly, like one of those happy pseudo-Buddhas, that makes it impossible to think ill of the world.

There were these factors – and there was my golden boy, first fruit of my loins, a budding historian studying at Asa Briggs’s old university. It was a pleasure to sit with him beside the trundling conveyor belt of bogus futurism and discuss the rumbling tumbrels of the recent past. Golden Boy, being something of a rightist, took the view that the extrajudicial killing of Osama Bin Laden was wholly acceptable; I demurred, pointing out that Bin Laden didn’t pilot any of the 11 September attack planes and that, far from being a hierarchical command structure – like the US army – al-Qaeda was more in the manner of a franchise: you approach them with your death-dealing idea, and they provide funding, expertise and branding.

“Sort of like a restaurant chain,” GB mused, “like al-Sushi . . . or possibly Yo! Qaeda.”

I make some apology for writing about the Paul chain of French bakeries – some but not much. After all, the first Paul opened in Britain only 11 years ago, and while there are just 29 outlets in the UK to date, all confined to London, you can confidently expect, given the gathering speed of its territorial acquisition, to have a Paul on most high streets within another decade or two.

The Blair government argued for the liberalisation of licensing laws on the grounds that it would facilitate a change in our national drinking pattern. No longer would we be northern horn-heads, knocking down pint after short until we went berserk (or, at any rate, berT-shirt); instead, we would sip vin de pays at sidewalk cafés while gently tinkering with our boules.

But how could major thinkers such as James Purnell have failed to anticipate this development? That, instead of taking French cafés as our model, we would seize upon the bakeries. If anything characterised the Blair years, it was a huge appetite for speciality breads. We began the 1990s as a nation besotted with Ridley Scott’s atmospheric Hovis adverts and stuffed full of Mothers Pride; we ended the decade deftly dipping focaccia in olive oil, our hot heads wrapped in Egyptian flatbread.

In la belle France, many regard Paul rather derisively. It may be une maison de qualité, fondée en 1889, but as it is the largest chain bakery in the land, it has the cachet of our beloved Greggs. My French teacher, Arlette, would often refer with disdain to the branch of Paul on High Holborn next to the language school where she was valiantly attempting to inculcate me with the grammar of Montaigne, the vocabulary of Sainte-Beuve and the speech rhythms of Baudelaire. So often did she employ patisseries and coffee-style drinks from Paul as examples in our conversations that I began to conceive of Paul as an individual, picturing him in my mind’s eye thus: a dapper type with a waxed moustache, sporting a lightly checked suit and sitting in a fake empire saloon – reclaimed wood panelling, chandeliers and so on – awaiting the arrival of some pseudo-salonnières. “Ça va, Paul,” I found myself saying involuntarily, when I popped in to get a coffee on my way to our lessons.

Still, however much we can deride Paul for his – I mean, its – French finish, the fact remains: Paul is the French Greggs! That’s how advanced French gastronomy is, in comparison to that of our own bicarbonated isle. Instead of sausage roll, there’s a “chaud saucisse” (complete with béchamel sauce, Emmental cheese and pain à l’ancienne); in lieu of a polystyrene cup full of tepid tomato soup, there flows a wide variety of soupes du jour; and where Greggs might tempt us with a mere iced bun, Paul enacts a full seduction with his grand macaron framboise, a titbit of such extreme sweetness that I suspect it may be more than 100 per cent refined sugar.

The other afternoon, feeling that life was altogether de trop and finding myself limping through the subterranean concourse of London Bridge Station, I didn’t hesitate to stop off at a dinky little branch of Paul for a tourte aux légumes followed by a tarte aux abricots. “Wow!” I thought to myself, as I staggered towards a table laden with boxes labelled “Paul” in that distinctively neoclassical and austere typeface. “This is a lot of pastry.” And it was – about the most I’d eaten at one sitting in around a decade.

There’s a lot to choose from when it comes to contemporary fast food – within sight of my table at Paul London Bridge, there were branches of the following: Banger Bros, the Bagel Factory, Cranberry, a South African-themed delicatessen called (get this) the Savanna, and a Cards Galore. I suppose some readers might object that Cards Galore isn’t, as such, a food outlet – but as I’d never consider buying a card from there to give to someone, eating them seems a reasonable course of action.

What I’m trying to get across is that, until Paul has secured market saturation, elbowing out Greggs and even taking down Subway, it will remain the thinking man’s – and woman’s – bakery. Apart from me, there were only femmes d’un certain âge at my Paul – at least, I thought this was the case until the longish, dyed-blonde coiffure at the next table turned to expose the careworn features of . . . the former secretary of state for culture, media and, um, sport.

In his column in the London Evening Standard, Sam Leith writes – apropos allegations that the Energy Secretary persuaded an aide to take his speeding points – “Which of us . . . wouldn’t try to wriggle off that particular hook – however much we may tut-tut when others do it?” But can Leith really mean this? I wouldn’t lie in order to avoid the consequences of an illegal action (so long as I believed the law justifiable), and nor would I “tut-tut” if I heard someone had perverted the course of justice; I’d get on the horn to Plod Central and suggest they arrest the malefactor.

I suppose by “particular hook” Leith only means avoiding a driving ban and not, say, committing perjury at a libel trial in order to cover up your dalliances with prostitutes while scooping up half a million in damages (Jeffrey?Archer style). But whoever you are, lying is lying.

Wherefrom comes this peculiar moral latitude in respect of driving offences? Well, just as collective tolerance of that deranged institution the monarchy derives in part from residual belief in the divine right of kings, so all sorts of madness can be explained by the divine right of drivers. Unlike the stars of the popular US science-fiction TV series Heroes, the average Briton possesses only one superpower: the kind measured in horses. To drive a car is to experience a huge augmentation of strength; push your foot down a few inches and you – together with a quarter-tonne of steel – are thrust hundreds of yards in a matter of seconds. Depress the other sole and the entire shebang screeches to a halt – hopefully in time to avoid killing someone.

Car manufacturers understand the mystical character of driving only too well, which is why their more or less identical little boxes are commonly advertised as shape-shifting chimeras. It’s a panther! It’s a giant dancing robot! It and you are melded together into a serpent of light that coils over hills and loops through valleys. In adverts, cars and their drivers stop time, leap over tall buildings and otherwise contravene the laws of physics – which is bonkers, considering that what drivers on our right, tight little island mostly do is exhibit inertia as they squat, motionless, in traffic, the exhausts of their £15,000 padded cells farting out carbon monoxide, lead, particulate matter, petrol that hasn’t been combusted, etc etc.

The image of the car, which was forged during a time of expanding horizons and – naturally – low levels of car ownership, has yet to adapt to our current era, when motorways are car parks abutting airfields tessellated with the steely oblongs of unsold cars. If modern-day drivers took a long, hard look at themselves, they would realise that they exist pretty much to pilot these carnivorous vehicles through time, rather than space; that the private car has become a strange parasite that depends on us for its obscene propagation, forcing us to slave long hours so we can buy the next expensive phenotype.

I don’t need to tell you what madness transpires when the unstoppable divine right of drivers impacts with the immovable traffic, because you’ll all have witnessed it thousands upon thousands of times. From the odd obscene gesture and shouted epithet to full-blown Kenneth Noye-style beatings to death, the experience of driving on modern roads is more akin to the chaotic moiling you can witness on a crowded psychiatric ward than locomotion as rationally understood.

No wonder that, when the opportunity presents itself, people speed – to speed is to slip the surly bonds of earth and dance the skies on laughter-silvered wings; while to be pulled up by some time-serving traffic cop is to collapse back into a present in which you’re confined to an old metallic Nissan stinking of new-car-smell air freshener.

The divine right of drivers is responsible for the rise and fall of governments, the death of hundreds of thousands and the most comprehensive alterations to our physical environment since the woodland clearances of the Bronze Age. Truly, we revolve the roundabout of life according to its precepts. And if it’s bad enough to be an ordinary human being deprived of said right, what must it be like to be a thrusting, puissant Lib Dem politician so arraigned?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all airline food aspires to the condition of potato dauphinoise – or, possibly, Irish stew. Any given dish may start out its life in the great catering kampongs of Gate Gourmet, being fluffed, beaten and otherwise teased into a variety of shapes, but, by the time it’s been wadded into foil trays, covered, stacked, chilled, loaded and lifted off into the tame, grey yonder, it will have been compressed into layers of a slightly undercooked, whitish, root-vegetable consistency, interspersed with a reassuring, beige juice.

I say reassuring because airline food is all about comfort and nothing else. Unlike other meals, its taste is solely a product of the diner’s anxiety. The nervy flyer, wedged between John Grisham fans and contemplating a death that, for sheer, quotidian pathos – “Died in that air crash, you say? On her way to a city break in Tallinn? Blimey, what a pointless way to go!” – is equalled only by slipping in the shower stall on a cake of Imperial Leather, will reach joyfully for the proffered tray because, after all, if you’re eating, you must be alive, no?

All of this flickered through my mind as the British Airways Airbus 320 grumble-bumped over the tarmac of Boryspil Airport near Kiev. Visibility was meagre, rain was lashing the plane window and the wind speed was probably some ghastly rate of knots – it was Polish-president-killing weather and I was in pole position to experience it. I’d had a hefty dinner the night before in a themed “Soviet-era” restaurant, where I was served – get this! – a chicken Kiev by a waitress in a knee-length, flared, black skirt and a white, lace apron. My Ukrainian hosts, whom I’d asked to order for me, couldn’t understand why I roared with laughter when the butter-stuffed fowl was plonked in front of me – and I had to go into a long, halting explanation that took in the 1970s, Abigail’s Party, the winter of discontent, blah, blah, blah.

Then, bleak dawn found me in the restaurant of my upscale hotel, woefully contemplating a buffet of Romanov extravagance: everything from sushi to custom-made omelette and back again was on offer, when all I wanted was a slice of toast and a glass of orange juice. However, it was a flat fee of 320 hryvnia – and, at those prices, I wasn’t about to be short-changed.

So, as the plane strained aloft, there was I, caffeinated to the gills and with an unpleasantly distended belly. I was also still stuck in my 1970s reverie, and mulling over the awful truth that if the plane was diverted, then crashed on to a mountain range, mine would be the buttocks the other passengers would make a beeline for, plying their 50mm-long nail clippers. This was why, when the BA trolley dolly came back after take-off and offered me hors d’oeuvres, I naturally said, “Yes.” Yes to scary roundels of white bread, topped with scary roundels of cream cheese, scattered with a few limp chives; yes to the cutlery wrapped in its linen winding sheet; and yes to the main course of pork, which turned out to be greyish nodules, accompanied by peas, carrots and . . . yes! Potato dauphinoise.

Mmm, yummy, I thought as I chowed down. People are so snotty about airline food, but this stuff was great. On I munched, reflecting on how there was something existentially lovely about the two Ritz Crackers wrapped in clingfilm that accompanied wedges of Cheddar and Cheshire cheese. I ate it all – every last crumb, even the scary-looking dessert: a spongy cake, sitting in a pool of cream, which looked as if it had lost control of its bowels. I ate it all – and ate it with relish – and then I finished off with one, two, three more cups of the superfine British Airways coffee. I also fell in love with the steward. I pictured our civil partnership ceremony at the Camden register office on Judd Street and his Ealing flat that I’d move into. On his layovers, he would bring me airline meals he’d filched and I would grow morbidly obese on the oh-so-comforting potato dauphinoise. This was better than the cannibalism daymare I’d had during take-off, but we were now dallying down over London and it was time for me to face the facts: I was alive, I had survived, I’d eaten three huge meals in the space of 12 hours and I now had suitably punitive indigestion.

An army may well march on its stomach – but for a civilian to fly on his has to be a strategic mistake.

Good afternoon. I’m glad you were all able to join me here for a brief presentation on some of the key issues that will be affecting us in the medium term. Since our organisation was founded in 2002, we have aimed to provide clients in both the private and the public sectors with real-time analyses of structural capabilities and help them to interface these with logistical support. Since 2007, we have increasingly recognised the importance of sustainability as a key component of our best practice. Previously, “sustainability” was a technical term applied in the environmental sciences to those ecosystems that achieved high levels of diversity and so were able to withstand negative impacts – but that all changed with the full assimilation of environmentalism to what passes for mainstream political debate.

Our sustainability group has dated the precise moment at which environmentalism ceased to be sustainable outside the party-political context to some period between the publication of the Stern review in October 2006 and the installation of a wind turbine on the roof of David Cameron’s Notting Hill home in March 2007. Some have argued (Parris, Procter, Phelps et al, “Sustainability and Metonymy in Post-Millennial Meaning”, British Journal of Ephemera, volume nine, August 2010) that the sustainability of sustainability itself, far from being a vicious circle, is a virtuous one and that some sort of perpetual motion machine could be built using this principle – one that would deliver a sustainable energy supply at minimal cost.

Others disagree, pointing out that simply because district councils have sustainable public transport provision, sustainable vandalism prevention and sustainable dog-waste schemes, it doesn’t mean that sustainability can be sustained, given the reductions in government spending overall. One thing is beyond dispute: “sustainable” is the mot du jour. During a recent PMQs, I heard the Prime Minister employ the term in all its variants – nounal, verbal, adverbial and even conjunctive – no fewer than 375 times, while the so-called leader of the opposition even managed an inspired example of tmesis:

“If the honourable member honestly believes that I give a sustaina-fucking-able-shit, then he’s sustainably mad.” To which the Prime Minister rejoined: “Sustain yourself, dear.” Whereupon the opposition benches erupted, waving order papers and chanting over and over again: “Sus-tain-able! Sus-tain-able!” in a manner strongly reminiscent of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.

When I stood up this afternoon to address you, I myself wondered whether it would be possible to speak on this subject at length without some form of sustenance – which is why I’m taking frequent slugs from this Vimto that’s been liberally admixed with vodka – but the truth is that, once you begin talking about sustainability, it’s possible to go on for a very long time.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to join a field trip last year that journeyed to an isolated plateau in the Venezuelan jungle. Hacking our way up a vertiginous precipice through sustained undergrowth as dense as purple-stemmed broccoli, we came upon a strange, lost world full of jargon and buzzwords that time had forgotten. Here, ongoing situations and consumer demand frolicked in sylvan glades of “minded”.

I was amazed at the diversity of these lexical throwbacks and unsheathed my digital recorder, determined to capture them for posterity. But, then, disaster struck! A jejune member of our party uttered the S-word and, before we knew it, sustainability was crawling about the place in such profusion that the entire semantic system was undermined and became . . . unsustainable.

In conclusion, then, when we look forward to 2012 and consider what sort of strategies may be sustainable, given emergent trends, we need to bear in mind that sustainable can mean any – or all – of the following: maintainable, supportable, viable, self-supporting, justifiable, defensible, expedient, deniable, larger (as in the expression “sustainable profits”), smaller (as in the expression “sustainable rates of emissions”) and the same (as in “sustainable growth”). So long as we remain absolutely clear about this, I feel certain that a way of bullshitting that we’ve all come to revere will remain, in the medium term, sustainable. Thank you, Jeremy.

In February 1542, Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, was executed under the terms of speedily concocted legislation that made it a capital offence not only for the Queen to have committed adultery, but also for her “handlers” to have concealed that she had had sexual liaisons before her marriage. Henceforth it would be treasonable to keep from the king information concerning any “will, act or condition of lightness of body in her which for the time being shall be queen of this realm”. The penalty for said light bodies and those who didn’t rat on them was to be the same: death.

Half a millennium later, another Kate is getting hitched to an English monarch (albeit one in embryonic form); and while physical death probably wouldn’t be Ms Middleton’s penalty if it were discovered that she had spent her student days at swingers’ clubs swigging back liquid Ecstasy while taking on all comers, she would certainly endure the modern equivalent: death by media. This Kate’s head would be digitally severed from her body and pasted on to a billion tabloids, and the sanctity of public opinion would be withdrawn from her – a latter-day excommunication.

Sadly, we can be reasonably sure this ain’t gonna happen. Ms Middleton’s old linen has been thoroughly mediatised already, while MI5 will have gone over all her known associates with the proverbial pubic lice comb. Unlike poor Katherine Howard (or, indeed, her groom’s late mother), no one is saying that the soon-to-be Princess of Wales should be virgo intacta, and yet the phrase “a past but no history”, has been used approvingly of her.

Some may feel that my concentration on the sexual hinterland of the royal bride is a little prurient, but let’s get this perfectly straight: this royal wedding, like all other royal weddings that involve the line of succession, is all about sex and nothing else. I say sex but what I really mean is procreation – I say procreation but what I really mean is breeding, although not “breeding” in the sense used by old-fashioned snobs, but breeding as practised selectively by members of the Kennel Club, or, indeed, adherents of a satanic cult that uses a so-called “broodmare” in its rituals.

It is difficult in the early 21st century to account for the stands along the Mall, the bunting here, there and every-bloody-where, the memorabilia, the unmemorable blether, and all the other manifestations of hysterical approbation that float around these nuptials in a great cloud of unknowing. Most Britons are pretty clear-sighted folk: they know there’s nothing special about members of the royal family in and of themselves; they also understand that, in constitutional terms, the monarchy is a kind of feint, designed to distract us from our gerrymandered electoral dictatorship.

William Windsor seems to be a fairly decent young man, especially considering his upbringing; and while Kate Middleton is ostensibly blameworthy – having chosen to get mixed up with this farrago – she, too, is young and probably wouldn’t take much deprogramming. Still, I’ve known crack dealers with a more aristocratic bearing than this heir to the throne, and I’ve consorted with prostitutes who were almost certainly wittier and smarter – and who indisputably have far better dress sense – than our future queen. I’m sure that so have most of you. How then do we account for this marriage madness?

The answer is that, just as with that founding father of serial monogamy, the reginacidal Henry, the British crowd is driven mad by the quest for an heir. And so, at a subconscious level, this perverse exercise in humans being treated as if they were miniature Schnauzers grips a good part of the nation.

To themselves, and to anchorwomen from the American TV networks whose visages closely resemble cling film stretched over cold chicken, the royalists will stolidly proclaim the virtues of the couple: their exemplary capability for public service, charity, forbearance, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, they will be unable to view the ceremony except through retinas and camera lenses smeared with royal sperm.

Freud viewed the hysteria of his female patients in fin-de-siècle Vienna as the result of suppressed sexual desire – in his memorable coinage, such phantasmagorical symptoms resulted from a failure to achieve “full genitality”. The British body politic is similarly afflicted by delusional thinking. Due to a repressive convention that makes the statement “I want a republic” as unutterable for front-bench politicians as “I want to get laid” would have been for Freud’s patients a century ago, the entire nation has become unable to achieve what we might term “full constitutionality”. And so the people fall prey to voyeurism and other perversions, seeking their jollies in the consummation of the royal couple’s union. Following the days of Pearly Spencer and her genuinely adulterous hubbie, the whole miserable syndrome seemed to be fading away. We had the Prince of Biscuits to thank for this, as his egregious exploits helped expose the grotesque chauvinism that lurks beneath all that satin, silk and tulle. I used to deride Chucky as “Prince of Tampons”, but I now think there’s something rather affecting about his leaked sex talk, and his blatant refusal to do only who was expected of him – by the public, if not the court.

Now his son is riding to the rescue and the whole storybook phantasia is under way once more: the queen-to-be is a clotheshorse to be serviced, the institution of monarchy is a honey trap for tourists, and so we carry on sending our armed forces – of which the prince is an exemplary officer – off to impose our ways on the Mad Mullah de nos jours.

With lunacy like this abroad in the land, now is not the time to be cutting down funding for mental health services, is it?