I’ve been trekking round the country with No 1 daughter in order to vet universities. I suppose this is only the fitting precursor to the kind of consumer-rational choice that will power tertiary educational provision – and its concomitant improvement – in years to come, but by golly it seems strange. In my day you simply went to university – or, rather, you didn’t, because only about three people matriculated each year.

I very much liked the look of Birmingham University – unpretentious, unstuffy, good solid campus, splendid bijou art gallery and an excellent line-up of fast-food stalls in the main quad; one was serving ostrich burgers, there was a Thai noodle bar, and at another a fellow was offering North African falafels and tabbouleh. I opted for this, and it was easily the best meal I’ve had so far this year – for an outlay of £4.50. When I got home I waxed enthusiastic and Mrs S said: ‘Oh, yes, the entire street-food thing is huge now, it’s a real alternative culinary culture – very vibrant, full of innovation.’

Miss Borrower liked Brum fine – but seemed more taken by Leeds. I, of course, embarrass her by the very fact of my existence, even though I managed to make things still more cringeworthy by querying the student ambassador who was showing us round three times, after she’d told us that we were standing on top of a basement zone containing three nightclubs, the largest of which had a capacity of 5,000.

But, really, while I absolutely accept that da kidz are going to get pissed, stoned and otherwise incapacitated at “uni” (as they so nauseatingly refer to it), there seems no good reason why this should be institutionalised. Surely there’s something deeply counterintuitive about the same establishment that’s aiming to build brain muscle taking such an active part in wasting it. In my day a hot night out was going to see PF Strawson lecture on Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten – after having dropped the obligatory tetragrammaton blotter: LSD soaked into small squares of paper with the name of God in Hebrew written all over them. True, there wasn’t much dancing involved, but we certainly grasped the full force of the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy’s celebrated work “The Bounds of Sense”.

I wanted to check out the food on campus at Leeds – Christ knows there was enough of it, from teensy sushi bars to vast cafeterias – but Miss 9K nixed this. Strolling down the hill, we spotted a branch of Browns occupying a cavernous former bank building (or so I judged from the profusion of granite and porphyry). Ah, Browns! When I was at university there were only two or three of these “all-day brasseries” dishing up posh burgers and ribs in an ambience concocted from blond wood, bentwood chairs and spider plants. Now there are 19 of them, with at least six strategically located close to Russell Group universities. Yes, it seems fair to say that since time out of mind (1973) an elite education in this country has been associated with their signature dish of steak, mushroom and Guinness pie.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and despite the somewhat atrophied Sunday meals I had at Browns – on the rare occasions that one or the other of my parents chipped up to see me – I still have fond memories of the chain. Indeed, what’s not to like about such comfort food as meatballs and pasta, or steak? True, nowadays there are such oddities as chorizo and wasabi incorporated into the menu – but then no one ever said globalisation would be without its downside. Browns’ founder, Jeremy Mogford, has long since sold up to the Bass chain, but I like to think the high standards of employee care that he instituted remain integral.

Certainly, the well-spoken young chap who served us in Leeds had nothing but nice things to say about his job, and admitted ruefully that he’d been “in apron” at Browns for over three years. Given the current level of unemployment, he’d be wise to stay there.

It’s a knowledge-based economy, all right, and I fully embrace it. I see no irony in the government lending my kids thousands of pounds so they can gain an arts degree, then end up hefting broad bean and pea risotto around superannuated financial institutions. But then, as I think I mentioned, I have long transcended the bounds of sense.

The other evening (middle-aged speak for “months ago”), sitting having one of my favourite repasts – slow, bland, achingly solitary – at the OK Chinese restaurant on Wandsworth Road, I found myself shamelessly eavesdropping on the conversation of the couple at the next table. They were a father and son in their late 40s and late teens respectively. They had a large-boned assurance and an ease with one another I found instantly attractive – how else to explain my moment of madness?

After all, a native Londoner, I revile above all things the folly of talking to strangers. Anyway, there was this attraction, and there was what they were saying: the son jollily expounding to his dad that, “In the 1500s, or maybe the 1700s – I’m not sure which – there was a huge flood in London, the whole city was under water, something like 25,000 people were drowned.”

The older man demurred: “No, I can’t believe that! I’m sure I’d’ve heard about it . . .” But the son persisted in his contention that the city had been completely deluged at some indeterminate point in the past, with a concomitant huge loss of life. It was at this point that I could no longer forbear, and leapt in with a potted version of the account of the 1524 flood-that-never-was, as told by Charles Mackay in his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

According to Mackay, a mania for prophecy conjoined with several soothsayers predicting a catastrophic high tide on the Thames for 1 February 1524 – the result was a mounting and wholesale panic.

As the appointed day neared, thousands fled their homes and set up encampments on the heights of Hampstead and the North Downs. The prior of St Bartholomew was so alarmed that he had a well-provisioned stockade erected at Harrow-on-the-Hill to which he retired with a few close friends – shades here of Poe’s tale “The Masque of the Red Death”.

As we know, no flood occurred, and the populace trailed home feeling shamefaced in the way we all do after succumbing to asinine groupthink.

I was momentarily bowled over by the notion that this young chap, circa 2011, might be retelling not a piece of bona fide history learned from some sub-Schama at school, but a folktale that was still embedded in the popular unconscious of Londoners and that had, over the centuries, acquired the verdigris of veracity.

We’re all familiar with the phenomenon of the urban myth, which, despite spawning sodden stacks of toilet books in the past few decades, still continues to culture itself using the minds of the credulous as a substrate.

A recent one (middle-aged speak for “some years ago”) took the form of a round-robin email sent on by a friend who’s a senior editor at a national newspaper – and really should have known better. The gist of this scare story was that night-time drivers in sarf London shouldn’t flash their headlights if flashed by another car, because they would then be chased by the flasher and gunned down in cold blood.

I pointed out to my daffy pal that the spread of this delusion exactly coincided with a local upsurge in gun crime; moreover, didn’t she think it strange that the myth was being transmitted between white middle-class professionals via email, when all the shootings were black-on-black and confined to the lumpenproletariat?

But to return to the brackish matter in hand. My fellow diners heard me out, and then the dad mused: “Well, come to think of it, I suppose London must’ve flooded at some point – or else they wouldn’t’ve built the Thames Barrier.” I was about to explain to him that while London had been subjected to quite devastating floods – notably in 1953 – the loss of life had been in the low hundreds, and that furthermore the Thames Barrier had been built as an antediluvian measure, rather than après le déluge. But then I thought better of it and put my face back in my duck with ginger and spring onions.

Why? Well, you can’t win ’em all – and besides, I was reminded of how I had shared such moments of baseless conviction with my own late father. Our joint delusion had seemed altogether believable at the time, and we had chatted long into the night outlining the specifics of what, in later years, I came to realise was never, ever going to happen.

Socialism, I believe it was called.

“Do you mind if we perch here?” said the chubby little chappie in the blue suit as he and his porky pal – think layered blond hair, quilted gilet, jeans; think Chiswick, or Chester, or Chorleywood – hovered beside our table. “Yes,” I snapped, “yes, I do mind if you ‘perch’ here, it makes you sound like a brace of homicidal birds from The Birds who’re just waiting to pick us clean; however, you may sit here if you like.” They availed themselves of this opportunity and my friend Alex and I returned to discussing the matter in hand: All Bar One. “I’m slightly ashamed of myself,” he confessed, “but I hate it above all other chain eateries.”

“Me too! Me Too!” I cried. “But why do we hate it so much?” I cast a frenzied look around the high-ceilinged room, with its enormous plate-glass windows fronting the busy street, its expanses of exposed wood, its mega-blackboard neatly pseudo-chalked with the menu, its brass-topped tables and bar, its post-office clientele sousing their cares in Chardonnay, its huge earthenware pots from which suspect fronds groped. On the face of it, what wasn’t there to like?

The All Bar One chain started in 1994 with a single outlet in Sutton, Surrey, and has expanded over the years to where there are now 40 of these hybrid gastropub-cum-wine-bar-cum-bistros, from Edinburgh in the north to Portsmouth in the south. Back then, a brace of birds had the idea of opening a joint that was appealing to lone women who found pubs dark and intimidating – hence the trademark big windows, which afford female wine-bibbers a cloak of lightness, while allowing those passing by to check out the interior. Alex, who over the years has shinned up the moisturised pole to become editor of a major British men’s style magazine, knew all about All Bar One’s feminist credentials, but . . .

“I just can’t help it – maybe it’s a snob thing.”

In my case there was no maybe at all: it’s definitely a snob thing. Moreover, All Bar One was arguably the vanguard for all the banal Slug and Lettuce, Pitcher and Piano uglifications that have smeared their corporate slime across Britain’s high streets.

I stalked off between the high tables equipped with highchairs – an import from US sports bars that has no real function unless there’s a screen somewhere in the mid-distance showing NFL playoffs. That there isn’t at All Bar One is at least one thing to be thankful for. A sign directed me to the “LAVATORIES”, a term I haven’t heard spoken for years, although my late mother used to insist that it was the acme of U, as opposed to the horrifically non-U “toilet”.

This further pretentiousness galled me, and in the lavatory itself someone had left a full pint glass of greenish-amber fluid beside the commode in one of the stalls.

I hoped that this was an ironic comment on the relationship between beer and urine.

Back at our table, Alex had been served with his supper. The menu at All Bar One is capacious: taking in breakfast, specials, fresh from the grill etc, there are scores – if not hundreds – of items. Moreover, each of these items is a sentence in and of itself, complete with entire descriptive clauses, active and passive verbs, adjectives and even adverbs.

This laborious menu prosody documents a cuisine that sounds not so much like a fusion – but a car crash: Sesame tempura chicken fillet served with cucumber salad and a soy & wasabi dipping sauce, or indeed, grilled sea bass fillets with a spiced red lentil, potato and butternut squash ragu served with Asian-style pesto – which is what Alex had opted for, while I risked the tiger prawn linguine with a ginger, lime, saffron & smoked paprika cream.

It was an intimidating list of ingredients that suggested a dish of uncompromisingly strong flavour – not so much piquant as pokey. But I needn’t have worried. It turned out that there was a reason for the highchairs, because both our dishes were utterly, butterly tasteless. Alex’s orangey pulp of a ragu even looked like baby food, and he did it childlike justice by picking at it for a while, then setting his fork down. As for my linguine, a proper menu listing would’ve been: thawed prawns throttled by tasteless pasta. Nevertheless, I ate it all with gusto – after all, there’s a fine line between hatred and love. And if you’re a late bird like me you’re best off settling for anything that looks even vaguely wormlike.

The Peter principle states that employees are promoted to the point where they become incompetent – and there they remain, doing a crap job. What this axiom expresses is our general credulousness, bordering on collective delusion, when it comes to hierarchies. Try as we might to grasp that a more senior position in an organisation doesn’t ipso facto mean a more capable incumbent, we cannot quite rid ourselves of the belief that because, say, someone has the job title “foreign secretary”, he must be a world-bestriding statesman of great acumen.

The problem is that, while an individual may be good at job X, that doesn’t mean he’s fitted for position Y and, by the time he reaches management role Z, he may well be floundering hopelessly out of his depth. In most organisations, the Peter principle is vitiated by the well-known method of “managing upwards”, whereby efficient subordinates learn how to bolster and even control their inadequate superiors. British government ministers, who often have little or no experience of the portfolio they are given, have long been managed by their ostensible subordinates: the permanent undersecretary in whichever ministry it is.

It would be comforting to know that, in the current Middle East imbroglio, British foreign policy is not being formulated by the flamboyant white rose William Hague, but by some colourless wonk called Simon Fraser, who, apart from a brief sojourn in the Department for Business and Blah-Blah and a few years as Mandy’s Brussels bag carrier, has been steeped in the FCO’s arcane ways since the late 1970s. Comforting but, sadly, it is almost certainly not the case, because the political hierarchy is one of the few in Britain to which the Peter principle doesn’t uniformly apply.

Willie H is instructive in all this. He was a political wunderkind who addressed the Tory party conference in 1977, aged 16, with a ringing declamation about demography – “Half of you won’t be here in 30 or 40 years’ time,” and so on – and then went on to occupy the usual “coming man” positions in Oxford student politics. After his obligatory First in PPE and an MBA, Hague worked for McKinsey before entering parliament as the youngest Tory MP in 1987. Haguey-Waguey was in the government by 1990 and was minister of state for social security and disabled people by 1994. So far, so meteoric – but then comes the real zenith of his career: in 1995, Billy Fizz (as he was called by the publicans around Rotherham to whom he delivered soft drinks in the 1970s) was appointed Welsh secretary.

There! I rest my case. Is there any coupling of job title and name more apposite than this: “William Hague, Welsh secretary”?

It doesn’t so much trip off the tongue as deliquesce there, leaving a blissful residue of suitability. Every time I say, “William Hague, Welsh secretary”, I get a warm, contented feeling.

A recent psychiatric study has confirmed that saying “William Hague, Welsh secretary” over and over again like a mantra significantly ameliorates depression (the control, if you’re interested, was reciting “William Hague, Scottish secretary”). It was a happy time for Oor Wullie, too. He met and married the charming Ffion and, unlike most married couples, they still adore ffucking each other to this day.

But all good things must pass and, following the 1997 election defeat, the Tories stupidly ignored their well-tried method of avoiding the Peter principle (which is to have leaders only from a select caste, schooled from birth to assume the role) and tore Hague from his happy valleys with predictably dire results. I’ve no wish to dwell on this disaster and I think we’re all relieved that, after the interregnum of a couple of caretakers, a proper Etonian was installed in 2005; not only an Etonian, but one who had also studied at the Tony Blair Finishing School for Liberal Interventionists. The only sadness is that Cameron appointed poor Hague to be his foreign secretary.

At times like these, unless we’re all to go crazy, we need a foreign secretary who’s as steady as a rock, a colossus who bestrides the petty animosities of warring tribes. If we look back to the last time we were caught up in a situation like this, the name “Jack Straw” has just such a resonance – it’s no wonder things turned out so well.

The latest Real Meals column:

Only one kind of meal comes with an erratum slip: the catered formal dinner. My slip reads, “Please note: there is no pancetta wrap on the guinea fowl.” Fair enough – presumably some religious scruple is involved, although I’ve forgotten whose beanfeast this is: Jews or the Jewellers’ Association? Black-clad servitors are moving efficiently about the lily pond of circular tables, depositing plates at each setting. I was at a funeral of a friend recently where the eulogist recalled that the deceased had once wept at a formal dinner, upon realising his placement. I’m not feeling teary despite being flanked by middle-aged men in business suits, because, after all, I’m a middle-aged man in a business suit, too – and I’m as charismatic as Gurdjieff, with the coiled sexual intensity of a rutting rattlesnake.

Besides, the man on my right turns out to be witty and insightful. When I observe – apropos of the entrée being plonked in front of us – that the plated meal is a comparatively recent phenomenon, dating only from the late 1980s, he takes the conversational baton and runs with it: “I know. Twenty-odd years ago, all you ever got at one of these gigs was roast meat of some indeterminate kind, swimming in brown gravy.” We’re tucking in to our artful salads of French beans, grilled artichoke, black olives, confit tomatoes and soft-boiled quails’ eggs. “Nowadays, it’s always quails’ eggs,” says my man. “Which is fine, but I do wonder where they’re keeping all these quails. I mean, you never see an item on the news about how battery quails are being kept in unspeakable conditions.”

I resist the temptation to say “true dat” like a character in The Wire, confining myself to the observation that quailing conditions must be even more unspeakable than those of battery chickens, in absolute if not relative terms. Some sort of thumping electronic music has started up – I now notice that there’s a podium behind me on a stage flanked by visual display monitors and conclude that this must be some sort of awards dinner. This is confirmed when a man with one of those newscaster faces that has been basted by the regard of the multitude springs on stage and starts handing out small, gilded statuettes of the god Hermes. Jewellers – or Jews? – begin making their way to receive them; however I’m not paying much attention, transfixed as I am by the pat of butter that is positioned on a small square of bluey-grey slate in front of my plate.

I’m lost in reverie. As a child, I visited a slate mine at Blaenau Ffestiniog with my parents. After we’d been rumbled through the dripping caverns, a horny-handed miner demonstrated the divine suitability of the stone for roofing – or butter plates – by taking a chisel and hammer and tapping out thin leaf after leaf from a large block.

I come to and find that my guinea fowl has arrived: a breast stuffed with spinach mousseline and bare of its pancetta wrap lies in a semi-circular pool of jus, beside a weird, rectilinear chunk of compressed potato and two dollops of pre-splodged veg. I’m not in a position to judge how good this food is, because I haven’t eaten for 24 hours and would probably fall on Turkey Twizzlers, grunting and squealing with delight – all of which is by way of saying: it’s bootiful.

I’ve read all sorts of grisly things about how catered dinners are prepared, and I’ve no doubt that such things do occur. But this event is obviously in another league, and I’m not in the mood to be picky. Before my solipsism became pathological, I used to dread events where I had no control over who I talked to, but these days I welcome being forced to be other-centred. I’ve enjoyed talking to my fellow suits and, when the poached pear arrives, I’m so buoyed up that I cannot forbear from thanking the waitress.

“I bet you don’t get thanked that often in your line of work, do you?”
“No,” she replies. “We largely get ignored.”
“That’s why they make you wear black,” I continue, warming to my reheated theme, “so that you become invisible.”
“Possibly,” she replies, looking uneasy.
“Beneath contempt, Untermenschen -”
“You’re starting to bother me now.”

But she needn’t worry, because, at that moment, the man on my right plucks up my name card and cries: “You’re not Howard Jacobson!” Seconds later, I am being bundled from the hall by security. Ah, well. It was a real dinner – even if I wasn’t meant to be attending.

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

“You-oo-oo-ve lost thaaat lovin’ feeeelin / Now it’s gone, gone, gone, /Whoa-whoa-woh!” belts out the busker in the long tunnel that connects the Central and Northern Lines of the London Underground at Bank Station. He’s accompanied by a tinny boom-box that builds a Lego-sized version of Phil Spector’s “wall of sound”. I’m not saying he’s a bad singer – because he’s not a singer at all, more a shouter who strikes attitudes with the mic. It’s strange because, in these quality-control-obsessed times, you now have to audition to torture people in this way. I try hard to imagine what such an untalent show would be like, but can’t – unless, that is, the Simon Cowell equivalents of Transport for London were actively seeking crap musicians.

That might well be the case, I continue to hypothesise as I allow my jaundiced eye to scan the oncoming people stream: goofy and glassy, split-endy and bendy, tall and short and hopelessly fat, all of them click-clack-slapping the tiles with that mounting frenzy that heralds the evening rush hour. After all, a critical consideration for public transport planners has to be a concept used in the science of fluid dynamics, namely, laminar flow. In a restricted column – such as a pipe, or a tube – streams of liquid will move parallel to one another without disruption, but if there are checks or disruptions, eddies may form. A good busker, by encouraging rush-hour commuters to slow down, might create dangerous cross-currents.

During the off-peak period, a proficient up-tempo musician might be desirable, provoking dense knots of dunderheaded teenage language students and valetudinarian tourists to get a fucking move on. The complexities of scheduling good and bad buskers with different tempi utterly preoccupy me until I find myself in a people puree struggling to mush itself into a Morden-bound train. “Please allow the passengers off the train,” crackles the PA system, and then: “Move right down inside the carriages.” I’ve grown up pulsing through the teeming arteries of the urban circulatory system, happy to be just another corpuscle. Arguably, on public transport systems, big-city rush hours exemplify not the madness of the crowd, but its sanity. You get your head down and go with it; too much thought is a dangerous thing, because if you pause to consider your situation – hemmed in by the herd – you might well lose it altogether. Which I’m in danger of doing, because one train has come and gone, then a second, and still there’s no let-up.

Worse still, as we snuggle up to one another in the pack, the clones around me begin to become dangerously individuated. The tall man in the camel-hair coat whose buttocks are grinding into my thigh, I mark him well by the brocade of lost hairs on his collar, and by the shaving nick on his blueing jaw. And that young woman whose elbow is tucked beneath my ribcage, well, her pinched brow and smudging beige lipstick suggest premature despair; I can see her an hour or so hence, shovelling down microwaved Lean Cuisine in front of a soap opera, tearful in a bathrobe she stole from a Comfort Inn.

At last I manage to get on a train – or, rather, the three of us do, still welded together like conjoined triplets. It’s such a tight fit, the driver has to open and shut the doors several times, and my neck is uncomfortably kinked to accommodate the leading edge. As is always the way, within feet of this 3D jigsaw of limbs there’s ample space, because no matter how many times it is urged to do so, the crowd is too unthinking to move right down inside the carriage. Over there people are reading newspapers, while over here our forced intimacy compels us to brainlessness – if I look into Camel Hair or Lean Cuisine’s eyes, I can detect no more self-awareness than you would in the eyes of heifer being prodded towards an abattoir.

But then they probably feel the same way about me – and as we jiggle and jounce our way through London Bridge, Borough and all points south, it impinges on me how wrong I was: oh yes, you can be blithe about the crowd’s sanity so long as it’s achieving laminar flow, but in this frozen turbulence there is nothing but mental derangement. My gargoyle face distends and twists, my mouth gapes and unbidden the words splurge:

“You-oo-oo-ve lost thaaat lovin’ feeeelin, now it’s gone, gone, gone, whoa-whoa-woh!”

The latest Real Meals column considers The India Club on the Strand

As I have the gall to pontificate fortnightly on the places where people actually eat, it seems only meet that I should occasionally fess up to my habitual gnawing spots. Not, as regular readers of this column appreciate, that I’m one of those foodinistas who never chew fast’n’low. I even enjoy an occasional trip to McDonald’s late in the evening, when the sebaceous whiff of the departed teens has merged with the odours of the chip fat, the meat and the polystyrene.

I like to sit there in the artificial twilight, picking my teeth with the fries, wolfing a simple cheeseburger and washing it all down with glugs of a coffee-style drink; comforted, certainly, by the rock-bottom prices but also savouring that particularly poignant solitude that comes from eating solo in a public place. Yes, that’s my buzz – I admit it; far from looking upon mealtimes as social affairs, I gain the greatest of pleasure from masticating alone. Indeed, when I first saw Buñuel’s Le fantôme de la liberté, I found the scene in which the guests at a bourgeois house sit around a table on commodes discussing defecation politely while shitting, then retire to small locked cubicles in order to eat, anything but surreal.

I suppose my ideally real meal would be consumed in one of those small family-run bistros you can still find in central Paris, with a few tables covered with check cloths, a prix fixe and some specials chalked on a board – the sort of gaff you imagine Inspector Maigret dining in when he’s fed up with sending for beer and sandwiches from the Brasserie Dauphine. I always liked the atmosphere of Simenon’s novels because of their concentration on the sensuality of the quotidian: a solitary appreciation of the texture of food, the play of tobacco smoke and the taste of wine.

Still, needs must, and since I live in dirty old London my equivalent is another anachronism – the India Club Restaurant on the Strand at Aldwych. I used to eat here as a penurious recent graduate in the 1980s. Back then I was amazed by the timeless quality of the place: the chequerboard of grotty lino leading up a flight of stairs, then another flight and into a dining room redolent of the 1950s: plain bentwood chairs, plainer melamine-topped tables, grot-brown floor, yellowy distempered walls, and on those walls affectingly naive portraits of Indian notables. Gandhi, in dhoti and granny specs, his hands held thus far apart as if to indicate the size of the great celibate’s . . . what? and captioned “On His Historic March to Dandi”. By the door there’s an even murkier daub of a gentleman with a patriarchal beard, who, the restaurant’s current patron, Yagdar Marker, told me, is none other than Dadabhai Naoroji, Britain’s first Asian MP and one of the founders of India’s Congress Party.

As I say, when I first went to the Indian Club it seemed beautifully old-fashioned – and not like an Indian restaurant in 1950s Britain, for there were hardly any of those, but like one in 1950s India. At that time, the place was frequented by Fleet Street hacks who referred to the food as “Gandhi’s revenge”. This is unfair, but no one is going to claim the Indian Club is a gourmet outfit. It offers up today exactly what it always has: serviceable Madras cuisine, heavy on the ghee.

Just as I like to eat alone, I hold to Wittgenstein’s dictum that it doesn’t matter what you eat, so long as it’s always the same thing. At the Indian Club I have the rasam, a tamarind, tomato and chilli pepper soup; the mixed bhajis – some are mild peppers, others are fiendish chillis; the tandoori chicken, some dal and some chapatis. All of this is washed down with masala tea.

I was eating this meal in the early 1980s and when, after a 20-year hiatus, I started going to the India Club again, I resumed eating it. In the meantime nothing here had changed! The world outside had horribly mutated but in this sepia burrow it was still India in the 1950s. Mr Marker dolefully informed me that when he took over in 1997 he was obliged to refurbish the hotel upstairs by Health & Safety, but he remained as dedicated to preserving the vintage ambience of the restaurant as I was to imbibing it.

So, if you’re in town and desire a break from the frenetic present, stop by. Some might say the Indian Club is a delusory place, but for me the real maya lies outside. I’m sure Dadabhai Naoroji would agree.

The latest Madness of Crowds column considers the halo effect of Dyson products:

A large part of mass human behaviour is dictated by our gullibility; by which I mean not just a simple compound of ignorance, obedience to authority and conformity to one’s peers but a more fundamental – and, in many ways, quite charming – will to be fooled. The etymology of the verb “to gull” is ascribed by the Oxford English Dictionary to the Old Norse gulr, meaning “pale” or “yellow”. Until recently, I found this derivation rather dubious because a far more plausible provenance is the simpleton sea fowl. Gulls are oppressively social: they take flight in great flapping clouds of conformity and their cries – at once plaintive, raucous and infuriating – sound to me like those of children disabused of a cherished belief.

Consumerism, the popularity of Jeremy Clarkson, fascism, advertising, all manner of speculative manias from tulips to property – to explain phenomena as irrational and diverse as these, it is not enough to suppose human beings to be easily swayed. Rather, we must be congenitally in the swing of things and only awaiting the slightest push to soar still higher. An example from my own life will tease this out.

A few months ago, the vacuum cleaner gave out and I went to buy a new one. Being design-conscious bourgeoisie, we’ve always favoured Dysons but the man at the local appliance shop said, “Oh, no, you don’t want one of them – we call ’em ‘2CVs’ in the trade ’cause you always see them fallen apart by the side of the road. They’re dear, too.”

I took this intelligence home and suggested we break brand loyalty but my wife snapped at me, “No, think again: we’ve had that Dyson for seven years. It’s amortised at less than £50 a year and it’s a good machine.” So, in the space of a few minutes, I went from rejecting something to ordering another one on the internet, simply because of my innate gullibility. Then again, I was at the British Library a week or so ago and found myself marvelling at the efficiency of the Dyson Airblade hand-dryers that have been installed in the toilets.

The Airblade, for those not familiar with it, utilises thin, high-speed jets of cool air to dry the hands in seconds. Its manufacturer claims that this makes it more environmentally friendly but, whether this is true, it’s damnably effective at desiccating.

Its modular form and positioning next to the urinals mean that, sooner or later, someone is bound to put it to the ultimate test. When the subject of Dyson products came up at lunch with a group of design professionals a day or so later, I said quite casually, “I pissed into a Dyson Airblade the other day and it completely evaporated all of my urine in mid-air.”

One woman was a little shocked; a man contended that my flow can’t have been that great; another man said there must have been some sort of spume – but the important thing is that none of them doubted my claim for an instant. This, I realised immediately, was yet another example of the well-attested “halo effect”, whereby when an individual is possessed of an egregious characteristic, it renders people insensible to subtler ones.

True, it grieved me a little that my overriding characteristic was to be the sort of man who people instinctively believed would piss into in a hand-dryer but there was a complementary explanation: the halo effect of Dyson products. These design professionals, while disputing the excellence of Dyson’s cyclonic separation system for vacuum cleaners, nonetheless remained convinced that, if there were to be a hand-dryer that could dissipate a stream of urine in mid-air, that hand-dryer would be a Dyson. Put the two halo effects together and a sort of aurora of credibility enveloped the entire pissing-in-the-Airblade scenario.

There was all of this and there was also that other key component of gullibility: people’s need to conform. Meditating on the incident later, I realised that it had been the woman’s outrage that had confirmed the veracity of my story; had she merely dismissed the tale, the others would no doubt also have begun to demur. As it was, this small crowd continued to reinforce one another’s group-think throughout a long lunch. By the time I got home, I, too, had begun to believe that I had pissed in a Dyson Airblade hand-dryer; I was also more susceptible to the OED’s etymology for “gullible”. Pale? Yellow? It made perfect – albeit faintly disgusting – sense.

“I’m more loyal to Caffè Nero than I am to any other institution. I care more for the Sicilian lemon cheesecake it serves than I do for parliamentary democracy and, while I would sooner have my penis surgically removed and sold as a pestle in a branch of Recipease, Jamie Oliver’s delicatessen chain, than rise to toast the Queen, I stand up proudly by the counter in Caffè Nero, near-saluting when the time comes to pay for my triple-shot latte and the aforementioned cake. If you want the clincher: I possess a Caffè Nero loyalty card, a scrap of blue and black card that stands in the same relation to the contemporary left-liberal bourgeoisie as a party membership card did to earlier generations.

“However, in the past few months, a certain scepticism has crept in – this could be the post-Hungarian Revolution moment in my relationship with the chain. It’s become such a shibboleth among the caffeinated classes to babble that Caffè Nero is the only coffee shop worth its cinnamon sprinkles that I began to be suspicious of the orthodoxy.

“This seemed like a good week to put my loyalty to the ultimate test. There’s no doubt in my febrile mind that a coffee and a snack is what passes for a real meal in this day and age and, besides, I had a botched molar extraction last week and have developed something sinisterly dubbed a ‘dry socket’ (alveolar osteitis, if you want some real Latin), a hole through the necrotic gum to the exposed bone that feels to the pained and probing tongue bigger than my mouth – hell, bigger than all 400-plus branches of Caffè Nero put together. Eating, as you can appreciate, seems faintly preposterous under such circumstances.

“So, one grey morning on the clone high street, with the terrier snapping at his leash, I commit the ultimate act of disloyalty by buying a single espresso at Starbucks, then strolling three doors down to Caffè Nero, entering and buying a second espresso.

“For cover, I also select a honey bio-yoghurt, an orange juice, a blueberry muffin and something called a ‘brunch pot’, which sounds like a dubious sexual practice but is, in reality, ‘creamy, half-fat, Greek-style yoghurt with blueberry compote and crunchy muesli with dried cranberries’, or so the label assures me.

“‘Will you have this here?’ asks the charming Slovak girl by the register and I moan: ‘Sure, I think I’m going to stay for ever. I can’t go home.’ Which is all by way of further cover, because there I am, in the oxblood-painted interior of Caffè Nero, eyeballing a weird arrangement of woody stems, decorticated dried tangerine skins and artichokes (what’s that about?) while sipping a Starbucks coffee! Surely such a profanation is tantamount to pissing on the Kaaba or committing B&E at the Vatican, then eating a saintly relic, and yet … and yet … nothing happens. The Starbucks espresso is still hot and it has that distinctively watery, sourly flat taste I always associate with the chain. But what of the Caffè Nero espresso, coddled in its china egg cup? Yes, yes . . . It’s fuller and rounder and definitively better.

“What a relief! My breast swells once more with loyalty, but I rein in my impulse to down the whole shot – I’ve already had my customary four at home before the school run and if I carry on, my thoughts will spill from my buzzed-up bonce like polystyrene pellets from a slashed sag bag. Even so, as I plough through my yoghurts and pop Nurofen with slugs of OJ, I find myself salaciously eyeing the other customers who are, almost to a woman, what I understand – from surreptitious glances at the magazines my local newsagent Mohandra shelves above the NS – to be Milfs and cougars.

“Blimey! Who’d have imagined a mid-morning chain coffee shop to be such a sensual moshpit? Is it just me or is there an actual hormonal haze wreathing the counter? When one of them comes across to pat the terrier, who’s lying on my lap, I nearly leap out of my chair. I can barely read the screed on the board, which is just as well because, when I put on my glasses, the blur resolves into: ‘Super-thick and finished with whipped cream and Belgian chocolate’. As for the sign above the muffins – ‘Don’t squeeze me until I’m yours’ – there ought to be a law against it. Or perhaps a law in support of it, because, I now realise, having come into Caffè Nero to test my loyalty, I’ve instead assayed my fidelity. I should definitely get out less.”

The latest Madness of Crowds column looks at, er, the dynamics of crowd behaviour:

“It’s been a fantastic three months for those of us gripped by the dynamics of crowds. First, we had student demonstrations here in Britain spiralling out of control; then, we saw Tunisians link arms to push out their corrupt regime; finally, millions took to the streets of Egyptian cities, pitting their sheer weight of numbers against the sclerotic – but still vicious – government of Hosni Mubarak.

“Perhaps the most celebrated analyst of the crowd was the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, whose 1960 magnum opus, Crowds and Power, aimed to do for modern mass movements what Frazer’s Golden Bough did for “primitive” ritual. To Canetti, both socialism and capitalism were political systems defined by “the modern frenzy of increase”, in which production led to ever bigger crowds of goods and consumers.

“This sense of industrialised society as a crowd, at root, directs Canetti to his definition of power as the coincidence of the desires of the ruler(s) and the ruled.

“By this view, it’s easy to understand the presence of crowds of people on the streets as symptomatic of a disjunction between the two: only when the crowd has been reabsorbed into the social fabric has synchronous equilibrium been achieved. In Canetti’s jargon, the crowd in Tahrir Square was ‘stagnating’, whereas the crowds of the quiescent Cairene unemployed before the revolt could be characterised as ‘rhythmic’.

“Canetti showed a nice understanding of how masses of people make their own political weather when he caustically observed that ‘fire unites a theatre more than a play can’ – but his vision was underscored by the apocalyptic mood music of mutually assured destruction. ‘Rulers tremble today,’ he wrote, not ‘because they are rulers but as the equals of everyone else . . . Either everyone will survive or no one.’

“Fifty years on, and with examples of people power toppling regimes from Iran to Russia and Ukraine and – almost – back again, we’ve come to believe that there is an inherent ‘goodness’ to the crowd. At least, this is what we believe in the west, where, apart from kettled teens jiggling to dubstep and lobbing firecrackers, the mob has become a purely recreational event. Our crowds hold up lighters and sway in stadiums; their mobs do away with tyrants, replacing rulers we were happy to do business with, one hopes, others we’re even happier to do business with.

“One man who experienced an epiphany while holding up a lighter at a stadium-rock gig was the inappropriately named Professor Keith Still. This mathematician was moved to invent the science – if it is one – of ‘crowd dynamics’, a discipline he teaches at Bucks New University and on a course at the UK Cabinet Office Emergency Planning College.

“A few weeks ago, I heard Still speaking on the radio about his work for the Saudi Arabian government, ensuring that the millions of pilgrims descending on Mecca for the Haj don’t crush each other to death. I was struck by the technicality of Still’s exposition and so, when crowds took to the streets across the Middle East, it seemed to me that he was the person to consult, rather than some woolly-minded foreign-policy expert.

“I sent Professor Still a suitably humble email: ‘I appreciate that your methodology is not able to tell us whether or not crowd power will oust Mubarak but, nonetheless, it does occur to me that there is some kind of metric at work in the interaction between largely unarmed demonstrators, passive troops and active police – I wondered if you had any comment?’ As quickly as a stampeding mob came back the prof’s reply: ‘We have a range of models for assessing risk to the crowd and this is the sort of application we use for training purposes. I’m not sure I could comment further, other than that the type of work I do is related to understanding crowd behaviour and anticipating action/ reaction in this kind of situation.’ He then referred me to his website.

“Rather than being chagrined, I was gratified. There’s a fabulous section on Still’s site that details incidents of ‘crowd crazing’, when businesses hype up crowds for sales and openings. One fatal ‘crazing’ happened in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2004, when 20,000 people turned up for the opening of a new Ikea. I dare say Still’s crowd dynamics might have prevented this – but only Canetti could have explained it.”