“I feel it in my fingers/I feel it in my toes/Love is all around me/And so the feeling grows . . .” So have crooned a succession of pop stars, from the Troggs, who first coined the expression, to Bill Nighy and Wet Wet Wet. But from where I’m sitting a more plausible candidate for omni­presence would be cancer. Let’s make the substitution and see how it sounds: “I feel it in my fingers/I feel it in my toes/Cancer is all around me/And so the feeling grows . . .” Ye-es, much better, I’m sure you’ll agree.

“Both of my parents died of cancer; my wife is receiving radiotherapy for breast cancer; the sister of one of my closest friends is in a hospice dying of lung cancer; I was on the phone recently to another friend whose breast cancer – treated a decade ago with a mastectomy and chemotherapy – has recurred and metastasised into her bones; another good friend is suffering from throat cancer; indeed, cancer is so much all around me that two people I know well are being treated for leukaemia in the same ward of the same hospital.”

Read the rest of Self’s New Statesman piece here.

This time last year, I was in Berlin. One evening, strolling towards Unter den Linden after a concert at the Philharmonie by the Tiergarten, I decided to take a short cut by walking through the Holocaust Memorial.

A lot of print and hot air has been expended on the whys and wherefores of Peter Eisenman’s 4.7-acre “sculpture”, which consists of a grid of 2,711 concrete slabs or “stelae”, implanted in a shallowly sloping depression in the ground. According to Eisenman’s proposal, the memorial is designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere and, let me tell you, alone, late at night in the snowy midwinter, trudging down the long defiles with the slabs rising up above me to twice head height, I felt this and more: an intense oppression and a sense of the man-made as inherently minatory, if not genocidal, began to bear down on me.

This feeling of unutterable desolation was broken only when, mounting up the far side of the memorial, I saw some cheery lights that, as I drew closer, resolved themselves into the neon-lit façade of a Greek restaurant with a name as deliciously inappropriate as Pericles’s Taverna.

I’d like to report that I entered the taverna without demur and replaced the nightmare of history with some stuffed vine leaves – but I’d already eaten. However, the experience did get me thinking on the connections between ordinary eateries and mass murder. A half-Swiss friend tells me that, in his father’s home village in some God-awful backwoods canton, the local Schnitzeleria serves a dish called Chicken Himmler. When my friend asked why, the unashamed answer came back: because Himmler once ate here and this is what he had.

But you don’t have to go that far. In London, there’s a trio of noodle bars with the arresting name of New Culture Revolution. I’ve often passed the one in Notting Hill Gate and wondered what would persuade people to eat in such an establishment. I mean, surely it would be difficult to suck down your ma la niu rou mein without, at least, a stray troubling thought? Possibly the killing that inaugurated the Cultural Revolution would come to mind: in August 1966, the deputy head teacher of a school in Beijing where the children of Mao Zedong and other officials had been educated was kicked and beaten to death by her own female pupils.

This intergenerational frenzy launched a convulsion in Chinese society that resulted in the violent deaths of an estimated three million people . But then, wasn’t it Mao who observed that the revolution was “not a dinner party”? Perhaps I shouldn’t be so squeamish about the sight of dumb-ass trustafarians and baby Cameroons tucking in to dumplings under the banner of a tyrant’s zeal because, after all, I once ate at the New Culture Revolution on King’s Road – and the dumplings were pretty damn tasty.

Still, I couldn’t forbear from writing to David Lau, New Culture Revolution’s senior cadre, and asking about his chain’s nomenclature. Here is his reply:

Dear Will Self,

Our name originates from our style of cooking. This style is from the north of China, which has a colder climate, and where people use wheat flour rather than rice. We cook noodle and dumpling dishes just as people in that region do. Furthermore, we do not use flavour-enhancing additives such as monosodium glutamate. We make our own noodles and dumplings. When we founded the first restaurant, this was an innovation – a revolution – and this made us think of the memorable name.

Culinary art is part of humanity’s culture. If we can be of any assistance on Chinese cuisine in general, please let us know and we will try to help.

Kind regards,

David Lau

Only a churl would press a restaurateur further after such a gracious reply. But I am a churl, so I went on badgering poor Mr Lau. He held firm, even when I pointed out that analogous restaurant names might be New Final Solution (a bratwurst and beer joint in Harpenden) or New Terror (a borscht and vodka bar near Chorleywood). I’m inclined to take him at his word, as I recall the sign my late mother once saw in a café window: “Come in and eat – before we both starve.”

There are many waymarkers along the winding trail of a man’s life, but few can be quite so dismal, so minatory, so like unto a psychic gibbet from which a rotting corpse twists in the mephitic breezes from the nearby abyss, as logging on to the Clarks website to look for a comfortable pair of walking shoes.

“How did it come to this?” I asked myself as I examined critically the Storm Walls, the Rangle Mixes and the Fall Proofs (need I mention that each of these shoe models is also appended “GTX”? How ineffably sad is that? It’s as if middle-aged men were boy-racing towards the grave in sensible footwear) before settling on a pair of the hideously named but achingly suitable Rockie Los (GTX).

I – I! – who for years had near furled my feet in order to feed them into suede winkle-pickers; I – I! – who had once fallen asleep in an overheated Vienna hotel room wearing patent leather Chelsea boots of such exemplary snugness that when I awoke I’d contracted a vicious fungal infection that tormented me for the next decade. I! – well, you get the point: I used to be a hipster, but now I can see the hip-replacement approaching at a brisk limp.

But before I clicked the “Add to Order” button I did something still sadder than buying a pair of Clarks shoes: I read the reviews that other Rockie Lo purchasers had posted on the site. Who does such a thing? Who has either the time or the inclination to write a shoe review? Is there some lost cohort of the Trollopian clerisy, who spend the mildewed years of their reclusion tapping out these clap-happy analyses: “Probably the most comfortable pair of shoes I have ever had, well made and keep your feet dry in very wet conditions. I wear them for work and needed smart and durable shoes, they fully meet my requirements. Highly recommended”? Or so contended Stephen from Barrow-in-Furness, who I pictured wearing a mildewed cassock as he crouched over his laptop.

Still more deranging was the small button at the foot of this screed labelled “Inappropriate? – Report this”. I mean, to write a shoe review at all is perverse, but to write an inappropriate shoe review, that way madness lies – and besides, what could such a thing be like? “Your Malone Class grey leather shoe is almost unspeakably arousing . . . No sooner had I opened the box and seen my new pair lying there, soixante-neuf, tongue to upper, than I reached for the tube of lube and eased my trousers off my potbelly . . .” Or possibly: “Your Talon Mid men’s sport boots are a must for any fedayee who seriously wishes to take the jihad to the infidel, the heels are large enough to conceal several ounces of Semtex or other explosives, while the Velcro fastening means that the shoes can be speedily removed in the event of an abortive mission . . .”

I wondered quite how vigilant the webmasters at Clarks were; how long could I get away with posting inappropriate shoe reviews before the cyber-police arrived and hauled me away like some still weirder version of Julian Assange? I idly considered marking out a portion of each day to doing just this – and why stop at inappropriate shoe reviews? I could also comment outrageously on oven gloves, children’s toys, medical supplies; anything, indeed, that caught my fancy. But then it occurred to me: there’s a big crowd of nutters who are doing just that.

While the abuses, bullying and all-round lunacy of social networking are well attested to, to my mind the more homely realm of shoe reviewing is just as bonkers. In the sphere of political comment, the web replaces the nuanced analyses of those who have thought long and hard with the jaundiced ejaculations of saloon-bar bores who don’t even have the balls to show their face.

In the world of books, the typographic bile of illiterates who’ve yet to learn to spell or punctuate achieves equal billing with the opinions of William Empson. Just as with the madness of calling the PM “Dave”, so the posting of comments on the web represents a reaction against the loathed “cult of the professional”, setting up in its stead an equally deranged “cult of the amateur”.

So, I took Stephen of Barrow’s comments with a pinch of salt and hied me to my nearest branch of Clarks, where I was ably assisted by that professional anachronism: a salesman. Rockie on.

Within a Budding Grove, with its hint at the similitude of erectile clitoral tissue and burgeoning plant life, is the somewhat suggestive translation of Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs given by CK Scott Moncrieff. The more literal “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” is not without its sexual problematic – but, anyway, I invariably think of first one rendition and then the other every morning as I walk up St John’s Road from Clapham Junction, because tripping towards me comes a loose procession of young women, hurrying towards the station. Young women neatly groomed; young women in charming dishabille, frowsty from their beds; young women homely; and young women caught in that brief and startling window of beauteous opportunity that makes it inevitable that the human race will continue to propagate.

As they click-clack past Phones 4u, the pawnbroker and the Santander bank, their resemblance to Marcel’s covey of adolescent girls bowling along the promenade at Balbec is, at best, tenuous (especially given that the fabulously flirty Albertine was, in fact, based on Proust’s stolid Belgian chauffeur, Albert). But they still have that vivifying effect on me – their dash, their absorption into the hamster wheel of the working day that is yet figurative of the wheel of life itself! Their tense unconsciousness! And never am I more à l’ombre of the Clapham girls than when one of them breaks step and dives sideways into Greggs, the bakery. Fresh baking and jeune women – you don’t have to believe in the capacity of tea-soaked cake to summon involuntary memories to understand what a powerful gestalt this forms.

Branching out I like to think that I’m not alone in this – and, as there are 1,400 branches of Greggs throughout the country, it’s a fair bet that I’m not. Standing in the queue this morning, meditating on whether to opt for the £1.99 or the £2.25 breakfast deal (the distinction is about 500ml of tea and orange juice), it occurred to me that there was something rather special about the considerable niche Greggs has carved in the national unconscious. After all, Greggs is more ubiquitous than McDonald’s, it serves around a million breakfast customers each day, and yet its public profile is as flat as a Scotch pancake.

It’s the body snatcher of British fast food. Started on Tyneside in the late 1930s, the chain has expanded by snaffling up other bakeries – in Glasgow, Thurston in Leeds, Broomfields in London, Bakers Oven all over – and “rebranding” them with its own non-look: blue melamine fascias, wood-effect laminated floors, er … that’s it.

Greggs has become the archetype of what a certain kind of baker is: not a retail baker per se (and although “baking” is done on the premises, I suspect that this is only heating up pre-prepared dough), but rather a dispenser of farinaceous snack food – sandwiches, filled rolls, sausage rolls and so on – within a bakery ambience. I doubt that most people go to Greggs to buy bread, despite the stooks of French sticks and the baskets of bloomers. Rather, the bread is synonymous with nutritious, maternal bounteousness; that’s why the working girls, the labouring lads, the morbidly obese on incapacity benefit – all of us – roll in to get our fill. Most mornings, all I buy at Greggs is a 40p gingerbread man for my own little man (I’m a firm believer in the idea that education can only be undertaken with a high blood-sugar level) but, today, I had a sausage roll. I was expecting some ghastly, flaccid thing, but the pastry was puffy and the meat not too, um, worrying.

I also bought the local delicacy on offer, a piece of so-called London cheesecake. This was pretty strange, being not cake at all but rather a square of puff pastry not dissimilar to the casing of my sausage roll, while so far as I could tell there wasn’t any cheese incorporated into this sweetmeat, which instead was garnished with some sort of coconut or mallow shavings. Sounds disgusting, I know – but I ate it while writing this and, after dipping a morsel of the cheesecake into a spoonful of my tea, then letting it dissolve on my tongue, I found myself being mysteriously transported about an hour back in time – to Clapham Junction.

One thing Ed “Claymation” Miliband won’t do in his search for a “narrative” to unite the Labour party under his leadership will be to espouse the least little hint of republicanism. On the contrary, if he’s still the top Gromit come 29 April, you can be absolutely certain he’ll be sitting in the Abbey with the rest of the paltry and the compromised (latter-day versions of “the great and the good”), all grinning and gooey-eyed as Will and Kate make their vows.

The palace – in association with the coalition – has of course already cornered the narrative market with its X Factor fairytale of how the daughter of a flight attendant and a flight despatcher nabbed her regal helicopter pilot. On this reading, the nuptials represent just another chapter in the long democratisation of the monarchical principle; a story of ordinary sceptr’d folk that began in a meadow at Runnymede and will end … well, never, for while the Windsors may aspire to the condition of salty earth, they can never achieve it, being ineffably, um, royal.

In the current era of crazed quantification, the monarchy’s detractors and its supporters tend to frame their arguments financially. So, no analysis of the wedding is complete without the figures being trotted out: the Queen’s £300m personal fortune, the £10m and more to be spent by her, Chucky and – preposterously – their new commoner in-laws; the policing bill to be footed by the taxpayer; and the estimated £6bn to be lost by the British economy because, with the extra bank holiday, millions of subjects will cop an 11-day foreign holiday (and how patriotic is that?).

But while this may seem to be the very meat of the matter, the truth is that it’s a useless garnish of persiflage, for the true lifeblood of the monarchy is, was and always will be the madness of the crowd, not the capacity of the citizenry for rational calculations of cost-benefit. The statistics have remained remarkably consistent over the years: broadly speaking, two-thirds of the British public support the monarchy, while a third oppose it. Under such circumstances you don’t need to be a focus groupie of old New Labour to grasp that republicanism of any kind is electoral folly. But is it, really? Because when you ask people why they support the monarchy, their answers reveal a great deal of this column’s favourite symptom: cognitive dissonance.

Almost everybody believes that while they themselves understand that the royals, as people, are deeply flawed, if not entirely useless, they nonetheless cleave to the notion that there exists a heartland out there of boneheaded proles who need an organic Duchy Original political principle to keep them in line. The political class, this unreasoning goes, cannot possibly expect to command the full assent, let alone the respect, of the masses, so the best that can be hoped for is a kind of adoration-by-proxy. That Tories should cling to this patronising drivel is understandable – it’s encrypted in their DNA – but that supporters of what was once a proudly socialistic party should endorse it as well is frankly deranging.

And so the long tables will be laid with paper napkins and the little Union flags will flutter and the whole tawdry spectacle of willed ignorance will continue. Oscar Wilde asserted that the English were a nation of hypocrites, but nothing exemplifies the genius of their hypocrisy more (besides looping in the Scots, the Welsh and even the Irish to the charade) than this capacity to mouth “democracy” while bending a collective knee to all the baubles of autocracy.

Of course, were Miliband to propose a republic as part of his grand policy review, an entire swath of vexed constitutional questions would be thrown sharply into relief, from devolution to the European Human Rights Directive to reform of the second chamber. But that would be far too genuinely progressive; that would imply that a key aspect of democracy is that sovereignty truly resides in the will of the people, rather than the will of the elite.

And we wouldn’t want that – oh, no.

And so the monarchy will endure, crouching like a jewelled toad on the blanched body politic, and from time to time it will spawn in a disgusting fashion: the well-oiled pornography of primogeniture, gloated over by a voyeuristic multitude.

“John Lanchester’s Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (Allen Lane, £20) did for the financial crisis what Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time once did for theoretical physics. This is a book that manages to demystify a subject that has become increasingly wreathed in the arcana of spurious quantitative analysis and preposterous predictive formulae.

“The outrageously self-serving and divisive behaviour of those in the financial sector depends for its field of operations on the bewilderment of the masses, making it impossible for the general reader to understand exactly what’s been going on.

“By restoring discussion of political economy to plain – and often very witty – prose, Lanchester has produced a very radical text. Whoops! empowers individuals. This book isn’t a programme of action – it’s something more valuable: a means for all of us to think constructively about our political and economic choices, or our lack of them.”

My aunt Phoebe – bless her – is obsessed by sell-by dates. I say “bless her”, but really it is infuriating to watch her reverently examine the label on some perfectly edible packet of broccoli or bacon, and then ruthlessly consign it to the pedal bin. In vain do I remonstrate with her, pointing out that there are now two dates on each label – the “display until” and “use by” – and that while her Cheddar or chives may have passed the former they remain safely within the bounds of the latter. “Ooh,” she’ll say, shaking her snowy head. “You say that, but best be on the safe side . . .” Ker-chung!

What makes Phoebe’s behaviour all the more deranging is that she grew up on a farm in the 1930s, drinking unpasteurised milk fresh from the cow and eating meat that was hung until it was as high as a . . . well, you all know what rotten meat smells like. I say to Phoebe: “Revered Aunt, surely with your upbringing you’re well placed to make your own judgement about what’s fit for human consumption, and don’t need to be a passive tool of this shamefully wasteful system?”

And then I go on to explain how the entire food labelling protocol has evolved, not so much to guarantee the health of the consumer, but rather to maintain the stock control of the retailer. I point out that the “display by” label is there to ensure that perishable products are repeatedly moved to the front of the shelf, or rack, or the top of the gondola, so as to minimise costly wastage.

The correct way of regarding sell-by dates, therefore, is as a form of temporal marginal preference enacted by the business upon the individual. In order to maximise my turnover, the supermarket thinks to itself, I will choose him rather than her, because he has troubled to look at the display-by label and acted accordingly. William Burroughs observed of heroin that it was a unique kind of product, because rather than it being sold to people, people were sold to it. But Burroughs was being disingenuous, and his characterisation was only of an extreme – and quasi-outlawed – form of late-capitalist consumerism.

In truth, under conditions of optimal distribution, all people are sold to all products at both ends of the supply chain. Food producers are compelled to accept the enormous discounts imposed by the retailers’ de facto price cartels, while food consumers are driven to carry about sugar snap peas or sugar for a few days before discarding them. The entire point of the process is not to sustain the people, but to facilitate the viral spread of the products.

“Don’t patronise me, young man!” my aunt will invariably say once I reach this point in my analysis. “You forget that I grew up during the Great Depression – and I know a thing or two about getting by on very little.” When she reacts like this, I’ve pretty much achieved what I was after: middle-aged men invariably bait older people so that we can fraudulently earn the ascription “young”. But while Aunt Phoebe may have witnessed the terrible consequences of speculative fever (and what is this particular madness, if not the human correlate of an asset bubble?), it hasn’t stopped her falling victim to all the delusions perpetrated by 21st-century retailing.

So what, I hear you chide, should I do in order to avoid becoming the passive tool of some Parmesan? Are you saying I should wilfully ignore sell-by dates? Or that I should buy only stuff I find in the cut-price bin? To which my reply is: neither. On the contrary, what we should all do is only buy the stuff that’s at the back of the shelf, the rack, or the bottom of the gondola. This simple act, if undertaken by the masses, will completely banjax the system – in a matter of days the supermarkets’ stock-control systems will break down and they’ll be chock-full of rotting food.

The “ker-chung!” of a cosmic pedal bin will awake us zombies from our merchandising fugue. No longer will we totter along the aisles, brainlessly checking sell-by dates. Within a matter of weeks, wholesale breakdown will have happened and the hegemony of the products will have collapsed. I like to think that I’ll be at Aunt Phoebe’s shoulder on that magnificent day when, once more, she finds herself standing in a street market, contemplating a rotten mangel-wurzel and jingling a few heavy copper coins in her palsied hand.

My wife told me recently that “panini” is a malapropism, being the plural rather than the singular. Think about it: every time you ask for “a panini”, you are in fact requesting several of these inoffensively phallic snacks, or speaking complete nonsense – depending on which way you want to look at it. Either way, you’re giving Italian-speaking café workers an opportunity to snigger at you behind their polythene-gloved hands as they take sundried tomatoes from one Tupperware container, mozzarella from the next, pastrami from a third, and incorporate them into the eponymous white roll.

Not that anyone could be that sad – even though Italian amour propre can be staggering, especially when it comes to the English, whose style every self-respecting Italian intellectual seeks shamelessly to emulate. I well recall meeting my Italian ex-publisher for the first time. We’d arranged to rendezvous at a pub in Kensington, and as I came cycling down the road I saw a man wearing brown corduroy trousers, a tweed jacket, a Viyella shirt and brogues. I pulled up beside him and said: “You must be my Italian publisher,” at which salutation he jumped about a foot in the air, yelping: “But ‘ow deed you know?” I can’t remember if on that occasion Carlo Brugnatelli and I ate panini – but I doubt it, as we were at a gastropub and the ethos of such establishments couldn’t be further from this foodstuff: gastropubs disguise continental European mores in the tweedy fug of the saloon bar, while panini are basically just ham-and-cheese sandwiches by Emporio Armani.

No wonder they’ve taken over the country. There’s this whiff of pseudo-sophistication about them; but more than that, they’re firm, warm and portable, and by some weird sleight-of-mind they allow otherwise health-conscious Brits to ignore that they’re eating a huge chunk of white bread. Not that warmth is intrinsic to the panino; in Italy they’re just as frequently served cold, becoming by the absence of heat and pressure merely a regional variant on the pan-European baguette. Indeed, the Italian colloquialism for a toasted panino is quite simply “toast”, yet another example of Italians’ devotion to lo stile degli inglesi.

Listen, far be it from me to promote any culinary nationalism. Quite self-evidently, as it is to all aspects of culture, so it is even more so to cuisine. Were it not for the Italian POWs who stayed behind after the Second World War and opened ice-cream parlours, cafés and chip shops, entire swaths of Caledonia would be uninhabitable due to the ghastliness of the indigenous diet. (The same is true for the rest of the Union, too.)

No less a thinker than Michael Gove has called for greater emphasis on the narrative history of these islands, and appointed no less a historian than Simon Shawarma-Kebab to smear wholesome dripping on the national Hovis. Shawarma-Kebab would do well to begin with snacking; after all, it was a noble Englishman – the Earl of Sandwich – who invented the sandwich. True, I find it impossible to imagine His Lordship’s eureka moment without recalling Woody Allen’s inspired riff on the subject: “1745: After four years of frenzied labour, he is convinced he is on the threshold of success. He exhibits before his peers two slices of turkey with a slice of bread in the middle. His work is rejected by all but David Hume, who senses the imminence of something great . . .”

But there’s nothing risible about the modern British sandwich, which has done everything in its power to keep abreast with the times by incorporating ingredients, from tandoori chicken to hummus to salt beef, into all manner of breads – seeded, sourdough, pumper-fucking-nickel.

And yet . . . and yet . . . It’ll take more than Gove’s planet-sized percipience to prevent the sense of presque vu we all still have, even when biting into a marinaded fugu with julep and endive on manna. For, somewhere not far from the tip of our collective tongue is a recollection of that national humiliation – the soggy beige triangle of unwonderful loaf, seamed with bilious cheese and garnished with wilted lettuce and E coli. We long to escape the cold misery of the sandwich, just as our valiant forefathers longed to escape Colditz. And so it is, that when we find ourselves at the lunch counter, we cast aside all thoughts of patriotism and call for panini. Lots of them.

Arguably a crowd comprising 59 men (and, perhaps, the odd – very odd – woman), between them carrying 109 guns, is about as mad as it gets, especially when they’re all milling about the elegant terraced houses of Chelsea. I’m not too interested in dissecting the minutiae of the five-hour “siege” that ended up with the 32-year-old barrister Mark Saunders receiving five fatal shots from four police marksmen – but what must be countered is the ludicrous ruling of the jury at the coroner’s inquest, held on 7 October this year. Ludicrous, because there is no way that 59 armed officers could be construed as acting in “reasonable self-defence” under such circumstances. Saunders was an alcoholic. The shotgun he was waving around has an effective lethal range of 50 yards at most, and he was up in his flat – the marksmen were down on the ground. Besides being able to take cover, they were all wearing body armour.

As in other, similar cases, the coroner had already debarred members of the jury from delivering a verdict of “unlawful killing”, so we cannot blame them for not checking the madness of this particular crowd. But they did criticise the way senior officers had handled the “siege” and, with due contrition, the Metropolitan Police subsequently conceded that there were “lessons” to be learned. But it seems the one lesson which cannot be learned is that it’s unacceptable in a democratic and open society to have any group of people, let alone armed police officers, who are in effect above the law.

Saunders was gunned down in 2008 and this year we had the revolting snuff newscast of Raoul Moat but, overall, the British police are fairly parsimonious when it comes to wasting citizenry: there have been 29 fatal shootings by police since 2000, of which 13 were by the Met. Nevertheless, no officer has ever been prosecuted for unlawful killing and I have had it from sources close to the apex at the Met that no officer can ever be. On one occasion – when there was a flagrant failure to give due warning before a man wielding a chair leg was gunned down – spokespersons for the firearms officers made it abundantly clear that they would down tools if any of their colleagues was charged. What a peculiar Mexican stand-off! The very police officers charged with the greatest responsibility on our streets, acting like a juvenile gang – it doesn’t exactly instil confidence.

Ah, say the lovers of Laura Norder, but what would you have done? Well, I don’t know exactly what operational errors the senior officers at the Met are conceding, but the very presence of the armed mob would seem to be one, as was how Saunders was killed while a “trained negotiator” was talking to him. Such is the modern way that this horror show was broadcast for all to witness: the poor, disturbed man waving his shotgun about while we hear a woman saying: “You need to pick up the phone, Mark. You need to pick up the phone.” Seconds later, the fatal shots were fired.
Trained negotiator she may have been, but she sounded as sympathetic as a raddled barmaid calling last orders. Is this snobbery?

I rather suspect it is: vocal snobbery. If I’m ever in a dangerous stand-off, I want someone plummy and faintly amusing to talk me down – think Joanna Lumley, Simon Callow, or the chap who used to do the voice-overs for Mr Kipling. Perhaps if any of these exceedingly calming voices had been deployed, Saunders might still be alive.

In the wake of the Jean Charles de Menezes killing, the Met went through the hoops backwards in an effort to exonerate not only the actual shooters, but also the entire chain of command involved in this colossal and tragic cock-up. After writing certain trenchant remarks in the press, having been given an off-the-record briefing by the late, lamented Liberal mayoral candidate Brian Paddick, I was summoned to Scotland Yard for a chat with the then headmaster, Ian Blair.

There was tea and biscuits and he came on soft, for all the world like a sociology lecturer at a former polytechnic. I got the message: it’s fantastically bloody hard, policing this city, and we’d be grateful if you weren’t so mean to us.

Wassums. Still, should the current commissioner wish to have a chat with me about Saunders’s killing, my door is open. Just don’t rush round.

A weird, piratically themed Cornish pasty takeaway outlet has mounted a sustained assault on English railway terminuses and high streets. Casting my eye over the mock-treasure map of store locations on the West Cornwall Pasty Company’s website, I counted 40 of them between the Tamar and the North York Moors. I’d been creepingly aware of the pasting being dished out by the pasties – their black-and-yellow livery has been ousting the tricolour of Delice de France and other such baguette bars for some time, and a year or so ago I even found myself buying one of the buttock-shaped savouries.

I say “buttock-shaped” because someone has to make the obvious point: Cornish pasties are the most arsiform food known to humankind, even crinkled along the rim as if they were an engorged perineum. In my experience, while the British have a great love of double entendres, there are still statements of the obvious (usually those connected with the nether regions) that we refuse to make.

Alain de Botton is another example; he’s a perfectly amiable chap – if a little thin-crusted when it comes to criticism – and a good enough philosopher-lite (think a pinch of sage, but lots of onion), but I cannot be alone in finding myself unable to hear his name spoken without registering it as “Alain de Bum-Bum”. If I were he, I’d go the whole way and simply change my name to Alain de Bum-Bum. Surely everyone would be impressed by my post-Freudian honesty?

Anyway, there I was, in the stinky shaft of Clapham Junction Station, eating a chicken balti pasty, and inevitably my thoughts went first to bums and then to the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life. As I say, I’ve nothing against Alain de Botton at all, but the thought of becoming unable to eat a Cornish pasty without thinking of him was . . . insufferable. To try to distract myself, I struck up a conversation with the “captain” manning the pasty bar. Was he French? No, he said, he was Polish. This was promising. Maybe with a little positive reinforcement – I took another bite of the balti-flavoured buttock – I could come to associate pasties with seafaring Polish émigrés: Joseph Conrad, perhaps.

Because the truth is that the West Cornish Pasty Company makes a pretty mean pasty, and I find myself eating more and more of them. My seafaring pal told me that the most popular pasty after the traditional was a chicken and mushroom: “It has a really creamy sauce.” I didn’t find this helpful at all, because whenever I bite into an Alain de Botton I half suspect a really creamy sauce to come oozing out.

Conrad – as I couldn’t help but think of him – also confirmed that the pasties were indeed made by hand in Cornwall, then frozen and transported around the country. The West Cornwall Pasty Company does seem a pretty enlightened outfit: it tries to source the bulk of its ingredients in Cornwall and has even encouraged the harvesting of Cornish wheat and onions (not by any means traditional crops) in order to bolster its slow-food credentials. Sadly this enlightenment doesn’t extend to human resources, because its pasty bar staff are paid a scant few pence over the minimum wage, just like any other fast-food peons.

Still, I suppose this association between low-paid work and pasties is a tradition in its own right. If I narrowed my eyes a little I saw, instead of the shaft of Clapham Junction, the shaft of a Cornish tin mine. True, it should’ve been Conrad rather than me chowing down on the pasty, but really the only thing within sight that contradicted this minatory vision was the pasty shack itself, which was bedecked with surfboards and sub-Alfred Wallis, pseudo-naive-St Ives daubs.

I had chosen the chicken balti in a mood of transgression – a real Cornish pasty can only be filled with uncooked ingredients, and it seemed unlikely the West Cornwall lot had managed to invent a self-currying pastry. Not that the trad pasty need only be filled with steak, potato, onion and swede – back in the day, those clever miners even had pies with both savoury and sweet compartments. I pondered the notion of this dualistic pasty while Conrad dealt with a teenager who wanted a £1.40 waxed paper cup of potato wedges. Pondered this, and also the chain’s naff pirate theme. But then it dawned on me, what did pirates like? Rum, sodomy and the lash, of course – hence the bum-munching.