I listened to Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference while at stool the other day. This was purely serendipitous: a function of the dispensation of my digestion, the location of the lavatory and my wife’s bizarre interest in such things (conference speeches, that is, not my digestion). Not to gross you out or anything, but had I not been so engaged, I doubt I would have managed to concentrate for more than a few seconds – for whatever else Miliband Jr may be, he’s a worthy successor to Tony Blair, that air-guitarist of political rhetoric.

I kept hearing the “new generation” trope come floating up the staircase, and I managed to gather that what the heir to Keir Hardie was saying was that he and whoever joined him would be in the vanguard of this new generation – a bizarre flying picket of progressivism, seizing the centre ground of British politics.

Good luck to them, I say, for capturing this contested territory makes advancing across the no-man’s-land of the Somme in 1916 look like a cakewalk. The sheer press of suited bodies! The murderous enfilades of blandness! If Babyface Ed manages to survive, he’ll be the last man standing on a heap of corpses – the rest of the combatants having bored one another to death. Not, I hasten to add, that you could have guessed any of this, had you stood at the lectern in Manchester and looked out over the assembled delegates. True, not all of their faces were transfigured with joy but, by golly, they were rapt.

How can one account for the madness of this particular crowd? In Swift’s Laputa, persons of quality were attended at all times by “flappers”, whose task it was to provide “external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing” using bladders tied to sticks. Unless the Laputans were so flailed, they were constantly in danger of slipping into reveries about cosmic matters. But delegates to the party conferences seem to manage to speak and listen with no such external aid.

It struck me, listening to the conference delegates “debating” on Newsnight, that at least one explanation for their ability to withstand the sort of Largactil verbiage dished out by Big Nurse Miliband, Dr Cameron and Clegg, the anaesthetist, is that the younger among them have known no other discourse than this bollocks about “service providers” and “stakeholders”. And when it comes to the fatuities of “choice”, these poor lambkins have had no choice. Such youngsters no longer know whether they believe in anything before being afforded the opportunity to ask a selected sample of people like themselves what they believe in. There are no politically engaged young people any more – just focus groups of one.

Which is why, I suppose, the party conferences are an even more attractive gig than ever before: hemmed in on all sides by the zombies of apathy, the ever-diminishing numbers of activists fight a rearguard action as they back towards the electric doors of this or that conference centre. If the condition of modern man and woman is to find oneself hopelessly atomised, then the only safety remains in the crowd.

The crowd in Manchester seemed to have spent a lot of the week looking at a stage set with a curious simulacrum of a television studio – or even a bourgeois living room. This, then, was the condition of democratic socialism: staring at a brightly lit L-plan of leatherette sofas, upon which were poised increasingly exiguous ministers – fading . . . fading . . . fading away into the long shadows of the political wilderness. Because, for many conference delegates, strangers to the factory floor, or the wakes week, or any other form of group endeavour, this was the closest they’d ever been to collectivism. And what a fine madness it was to look upon the Eds and Davids and Frodos (sorry, I meant “Andy Burnham”) while imagining that, as they were so clearly sitting in a living room, you must be sitting there with them.

For that is the final and inescapable madness of the conference: that these people are your friends, your family, even. Ah, well. I suppose the Labour Party can at least comfort itself with this narcissism of small differences – that no matter how bored, bamboozled and benighted it may be, the Tories are always worse.

Now, back to the toilet.

Will Self’s latest novel, Walking to Hollywood, is published by Bloomsbury (£17.99)

From time to time, I succumb to one of the great delusions of the modern world: namely that a gadget or device will allow me to do something I’ve been doing for years faster and more efficiently, thereby gifting me more of the kind of time I so desperately need: down time. This is how mobile phones, netbooks and now e-books have all entered my life. Each time, I discover that said gizmo does nothing for me and then swear that I’ll never make the same mistake again, but I can’t help it – it’s like a coup de foudre; I see an advert or hear the twittery spiel of some deranged early adopter and off I fly into computer-generated fantasies of techno-adequacy.

The netbook was a case in point. I adore all small things as a matter of course, being at root infantile (but then aren’t we all? Surely the relentless evolution of all gizmos into a sole “white pebble” morphology is proof positive that we yearn to dabble for ever in the rock pools of juvenescence?), and while I already had a very small laptop, I convinced myself that by shrinking the thing an inch all round it would instantly become that much more handy. I would take it with me wherever I went and whip it out in public – a Promethean flasher! – then efficiently answer those pesky emails and swiftly type those columns on, um, the madness of gadgets.

To be fair to me, I did agonise over the purchase for a good month – after all, I have form – but inevitably I succumbed, only to discover, what? That the netbook not only remained zipped up, but also that, rather than finding it so small that I carried it with me all the time, it was, in fact, so insignificant that I could hardly be bothered to take it with me at all. I supposed that the netbook had done me a favour, that I would never succumb to the gadget gaga again, but then someone gave my wife a Kindle and I was off again.

Before I’d even started to play with the thing, I was fantasising about how it would massively enhance my flagging mental powers. With 2,500 searchable volumes at my fingertips, I would become effortlessly erudite; moreover, there’d be no more agonising over which book to take on a 90-minute train journey; not “either Rosemary Conley’s Complete Hip and Thigh Diet or À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” – but both! Then, I discovered that there were myriad classics that could be downloaded from the Kindle Store for absolutely free. At last, I would get to grips with Middlemarch, Moby Dick and The Man Without Qualities (for some reason it’s the Ms I’ve missed out on), just dipping in whenever I had a few spare minutes.

But you don’t read the classics like that, do you? Any more than you write the damn things on a small slab of plastic and micro-circuitry. Christopher Hitchens observed that if Casaubon attempted to penetrate Dorothea, it would be like trying to fit an oyster into a parking meter – and mutatis mutandis, the same image holds good for my trying to fit Middlemarch into my own tense and frigid brain. And while we’re on the subject of parking meters, what deranged, petty functionary imagined that introducing payment by mobile phone would make life easier for anyone, save the compulsive car-user? For those of us who only drive occasionally, the act of parking now involves 10 tedious minutes of data entry.

And while we’re on the subject of driving, satnav has to be the ultimate useless gizmo when it comes to saving time. I’ve lost count of occasions I’ve had to deprogramme a minicab driver and persuade him that just possibly I know a better route across town than his dash-mounted white pebble, as I’ve lived here my entire fucking life. What’s more, it astonishes me that there has been no public agonising over whether glancing back and forth between the world and a schematic representation of it while travelling at speed might be a distraction.

If satnav can’t be used while driving, it becomes distinctly obsolete – like all the other improvements in automobile technology, none of which has increased the average speed through cities by one jot in the past century. That’s the truth about whole swaths of technological advance: as it is to the individual, so it is to society. Superficial advances in areas such as medicine and domestic science provide us with more disposable time – but then we just fill it up fiddling with our iPhones. How mad is that?

Established in 1976 – or so their crest proudly claims – the noble house of Aberdeen Angus Steak Houses seems always to have been among us, yet I cannot recall ever speaking to anyone who admitted to eating in one.

My own definitive experience of the chain is definitely a case of le lèche-vitrine. Heading dreamily up west on a Saturday afternoon in late March of 1990, I emerged from Leicester Square Tube to find myself in the middle of a pitched battle between police and anarchists. It was, indeed, the pivotal moment of the poll-tax riots: the police, having forced the demonstrators back against a building site in Trafalgar Square, were now being attacked by lithe young men hurling scaffolding poles, apparently with all the skill of hoplites.

I watched, awed, as the Met – some on horseback, others forming a loose testudo with their riot shields – retreated up Charing Cross Road. I was struck by the timelessness of the scene; this, I felt, could have been the Peasants’ Revolt, or the Gordon Riots, such was the perfectly achieved choreography of the Law and the Mob. Still more atavistic were the spectators who filled the mouths of the side roads; they were in festive spirits, laughing and pointing when someone managed a particularly accurate pole-throw or truncheon-swipe.

But most remarkable of all was the behaviour of the diners I could see plumped down solidly on the leatherette banquettes of the Steak House on the corner of Cranbourn Street. These hefty American tourists, far from being intimidated by the biggest civil disturbance central London had witnessed in decades, continued unabashed with their bovine noshing. The rich, far from being eaten – as the Class Warriors would have wished – were still eating.

Back in the day there were 30-odd of these establishments, poised to capture unwary tourists as they staggered from London’s mainline terminuses. With their red paint and black leather decor, and their menus of uncompromising naffness – prawn cocktails, steaks, chips, gateaux – the chain had by the late 1980s become a synonym for “clip joint”.

No self-respecting native would ever dream of setting foot in one. But 20 years on, revolutionary socialism has been reduced to a mere rump – and so, for that matter, have the Steak Houses: there are only four left.

When I rang at Friday lunchtime to see if I could book a table at the Cranbourn Street branch for dinner that evening, the woman who answered was mildly incredulous: “We don’t take bookings,” she said, “and to be honest you really don’t need one.”

The small herd of three prime young men I’d assembled to dine with me were equally thrown when I revealed our destination. They muttered about cholesterol, prions and – most important, this – the terrible solecism of natives eating in such a tourist trap.

“It can’t be that bad!” I cried, leading the way. “Besides, I’m paying.” Such arrogance, for just as the Steak Houses barely survived the BSE and foot-and-mouth epidemics, so the bill took a near-fatal chunk out of my bank balance. It was £130 for a single course for four, with no wine to drink, only four Cokes (plus 15 per cent tip on top). True, the bullocks all had fillet steaks, while I had a sirloin, but there was no tricky preparation involved – just beef + fire – and as for side orders: chips and salad, d’oh!

The strange thing was that although we had to wait a ridiculously long time for our steaks, the meat was of a premium quality and perfectly cooked. The bullocks grazed contentedly, while I too happily chewed on someone else’s cud, ruminating that as beef production is such a wasteful and environmentally devastating business, it was probably entirely apt that those other steak-holders, back in 1990, ignored the civil disturbances within feet of their snouts, for wasn’t I doing exactly the same thing 20 years later? Granted, there wasn’t a riot going on, but all meat is by definition murder, and somewhere else in the world someone was suffering the attendant grief.

Not I, though. I paid the bill, said goodbye to a pair of the bullocks and, accompanied by the third, headed for home. Herding him down Charing Cross Road, I shared some of my thoughts with this, the prime cut of my loins. “Dad,” he interrupted me, “can we get some Krispy Kreme doughnuts?” And people say the young have lost all interest in politics.

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

Broadstairs, the Isle of Thanet, a frowsty sort of an evening in early August, with shadows forming within shadows down the high street – a run of chip shops, chain stores and charity shops that steepens into a ski jump, which threatens to tip you off the dirty-white crescent of cliff surrounding Viking Bay. The consensus following a wholesome chicken dinner was that we should promenade and observe the morris dancers parading through the town; after all, who but a callow sophisticate could fail to appreciate this ancient rite, with its pagan roots buried deep in the loam of old Albion?

A few morris-dancing community support officers were gathered in the gloaming. They pranced, they twirled, they jingled their bells and they clacked their truncheons under the appreciative eyes of beery onlookers, whose faces were eerily leeched of colour by the up-light from their 3G phones. And then, lo, here was the parade! Side after side of morris dancers, some perfectly traditional in white shirts, straw hats and knee breeches, but others altogether mutant: there were Star Wars morris dancers with masks; there were beribboned morris dancers, their garments reminiscent of the straw robes of New Guinea’s tribal warriors; there were even punk morris dancers who pogo-ed down the road.

In recent years, I’ve been spending more and more time on the south coast and it seems to me that a curious cultural convulsion is gripping this landscape of boredom and bungalows, Tesco car parks and shingle beaches; for, just as the once-discrete towns of Shoreham, Hove, Brighton, Lewes, Eastbourne, Bexhill, Hastings, Folkestone, Dover, Deal, Ramsgate and Margate have become joined together into a continuous, urbanised littoral, so there has been this atavistic upsurge of hey-nonny-no-ing, anti-Catholicism and fertility cults.

In Lewes last autumn, we witnessed the parade of the Sussex bonfire societies, groups of largely middle-aged male and female urbanites, dressed up as anything from Darth Vader to pogoing punks. Accompanied by drummers and didgeridoo players and dragging barrels of burning tar along the road, the various societies have a tribal air to them. The same tribes were out again in May to celebrate the Jack in the Green festival – another weird exercise in new paganism, in which a leafy bloke prances through the old town, followed by the anointing of a tree boll with water, or some such flummery. Then they were at it again in Broadstairs, as Folk Week climaxed in an ejaculation of inauthenticity.

All these festivals, parades and bonfire ceremonials are modern inventions. The Lewes Guy Fawkes carry-on began as recently as the late 19th century, when it was formulated by a local antiquarian. The Jack in the Green ballyhoo was revived only in the early 1980s, while the entire jiggling edifice of morris dancing was only re-erected in the early decades of the 20th century by folklorists such as Cecil Sharp.

So complete was the deracination wrought by industrialisation during the 19th century that the folklorists often had to be a bit creative when it came to “discovering” old songs and traditions, and it is this spirit of fakery that we find in the contemporary face-painters and drum-bangers. Indeed, it’s arguable that it’s precisely because we’re in a period of equally profound cultural loss that the volk are impelled to such pretend continuities. Still, good luck to ’em, I say – it’s a jolly spectacle and they don’t seem to take themselves too seriously. Besides, I don’t imagine that any one of them labours under the delusion that he or she is parading along a folkway grooved into the greensward as deeply as a medieval holloway. To suggest such a thing would be as facetious as imagining that all those wallahs gathered together in the abbey for this coronation or that jubilee believe they’re participating in a ceremonial unchanged since time out of mind, rather than a bit of mummery got up by Walter Scott to boost the flagging popularity of the Hanoverian dynasty.

Oops, I’m being ironic again. But then irony – unlike cod paganism – is the real living tradition of our isles, while all the Viking boat burnings, summer solstice gatherings and assorted saturnalias are nought but another exercise in that very fine human madness: nostalgia for an age that never really existed.

The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman is here:

Did kidult culture spawn kidult restaurants, or was it perhaps the other way round? Certainly, the concentrated ambience of senile juvenescence that saturates establishments such as the Hard Rock Café, Planet Hollywood and TGI Friday’s makes them a suitable vanguard of the kidult revolution. I blame the Sixties. Between the door of TGI Friday’s – beside which stood a life-size model of the Iron Man (although, on reflection, is it possible for a fictional superhero to be “life-size”?) – and our table, the waiting captain challenged us with the phrase “All right, guys?” no fewer than four times, as if we were being subjected to a kidult interrogation.

Being a kidult myself, I didn’t mind, but Luther, who’s nine years old and a bona fide child, was – in his own words – “weirded out”. And when another servitor leapt out at him and barked, “What’s up, boss!?” he almost burst into tears. In fact, our entire trip to Friday’s was in this Vice Versa spirit, with the kid hating every minute and the adult, if not exactly cherishing the experience, prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt.

We were seated between a quartet of Japanese tourists who proceeded to haggle relentlessly over their bill and a Middle Eastern family consisting of black-bagged mum and a dad who footled with his 3G phone. Coyly, Friday’s avers that the “G” in “TGI” stands for “goodness”, but looking around at the multi-faith clientele babbling under a cloud of hickory-flavoured barbecue sauce, I was certain it could represent either a monotheistic “God” or the entire polymorphously perverse Hindu pantheon.

The decor at TGI is actually a pantheon of Americana – the aforementioned Iron Man, an ET, a drum kit, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and so on. “One of the things that’s annoying me,” Luther observed tartly, “is that it’s super-American.” Then he ordered a jumbo hot dog from the kids’ menu. For the duration of our meal, a succession of pop songs percolated through the gloom – you know the ones: Motown stompers, the Small Faces, the Kinks, even Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”. None of them was intrinsically bad, but they all suffered by association.

I toyed with requesting one of the special house burgers, but while not going so far as one of my friends who observed, of an anorexic family member, “For her, food is essentially pre-shit,” I can’t say the idea of seven ounces of beef slathered with guacamole filled me with anything but thoughts of coprophilia. So I settled for the Caesar salad and a side order of shrimps done in the Friday’s signature Jack Daniel’s marinade. Indeed, were it not for Luther’s gloom, I might have fallen further off the wagon than this and abandoned a decade’s sobriety by ordering one of the “Whiskey Wonders” – possibly a Godfather, which is glossed as: “A simple combination of Scotch and Luxardo amaretto that’s as classic as its movie namesake.”

The previous evening I’d had dinner with my nephew, who told me that his girlfriend was constitutionally unable to vomit. I think I’d found a cure. Friday’s prides itself on its cocktails: there are pages of such nauseating descriptions, and, as I leafed through them, it occurred to me that really these are the alcopops of a pseudo-sophistication, and that when all’s said and puked, there’s no fundamental distinction to be made between James Bond’s ultra-dry Martini and Vicky Pollard’s Bacardi Breezer.

Luther pronounced his jumbo hot dog to be “very jumbo”, which I think was a compliment. My Caesar salad was bone-cold strips of chicken laid out on a pallet of limp lettuce and hideous croutons. But then, is there anything more hideously inutile than a crouton in this whole wide world? The big surprise was the shrimps – which were surprisingly tasty; I wolfed them down.

All in all, I hadn’t minded TGI Friday’s nearly as much as I thought I would. It may have been the presence of my depressed nine-year-old, or it could be that I sensed that this was the beginning of the end for kidult dining – after all, with a rapidly declining birth rate, this curious inversion of mores may be about to implode. In the future, with an enormous ageing population, children’s birthday parties will probably take place in establishments like the Palm Court at the Ritz, with string quartets instead of guitar bands. One can only hope.

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

Sweets and batteries by the tills – isn’t that the way of it? And Good Housekeeping too. I often find myself queuing for the checkout while chewing on a great wad of spearmint gum and experimentally touching the terminals of a nine-volt Duracell battery with the tip of my tongue. Under such a sensory overload, an article about Katie Price’s latest marital schism acquires a giddy surrealism. But then the checkout operative beckons me forward — I replace the magazine and the batteries, then still my jaw, so evading once again the nefarious manipulations of the merchandisers, whose objective is to substitute the instinctive herd behaviour of a bovine consumer for my capricious will.

Supermarkets are the abattoirs of capitalism and we are but so many cattle, driven along brightly lit aisle after aisle until our credit is electrocuted. True, some people hold out and shop locally, discussing the cut of a meat or the bloom of a peach for hours on end with homely, red-cheeked butchers and flaxen-fringed costers – but who are these folk, for I do not know them. Then again, some shop online – although not enough. The story of Ocado, floated recently on the stock exchange for a staggering amount, despite being barely profitable, could stand as an extreme instance of merchandising itself: send products (refrigerated Mercedes vans) scooting up and down the aisles (residential streets) for long enough, and people are bound to buy them.

But by far the majority of us cows graze at the Big Five supermarkets, and this means that, for a significant portion of our lives, we are in a peculiarly divided state of mind, for, at the precise moment when we most compellingly feel ourselves to be exercising a choice, we are in fact being comprehensively manipulated. The sweets and batteries are by the till, but fresh fruit and veg are by the entrance so as to give the entire retail barn that wholesome natural vibe. When I shop at my local supermarket, I often feel as if I’m walking into an Alpine meadow – which is why I frequently find myself buying a new dirndl, a fondue set and a CD of yodelling, all the better to seduce Heidi with.

Actually, with fantasies like that, I’d do well to keep my Von Trapp shut, but in my experience fantasy is the only way to protect yourself against this walk-through brainwash. You may set out intending just to get some chives and a support stocking, but inevitably you end up with the Yugoslavian Riesling, the 24-inch flat-screen TV and … well, chocolate isn’t really a purchase per se, now, is it? It’s more like self-love wrapped in gold foil.

The most disturbing aspect of supermarket madness is that it’s all scientifically determined: from the second the electric doors shush open, every thought you have has been graphically plotted. When I studied economics at university, the theory that most appalled me was the notion of revealed preference, which proposes that consumer preferences are transitive – from one bundle of goods to another – dependent on price and revealed by acts of choice.

Once an individual’s pattern of consumption has been determined, a so-called “indifference curve” can be plotted, which demonstrates how his or her demand will fluctuate between equally preferred bundles of goods. I’ve no doubt that supermarkets situate “gondolas” and shelves so as to maximise sales by the positioning of “bundles” of goods that they know consumers will perceive as more desirable.

This is why the supermarkets have got bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, we have got stupider and more powerless. In perhaps a millennium or two, humanity will have evolved fully into Homo shoppingtrolleyus, a lumbering beast on castors, with four stomachs, one loyalty card and a bar code across its forehead. Until then, we are doomed to being compelled to buy value packs of Quavers against our will.

Or are we? Why not do as I do? Enter the supermarket as if plunging into a Zen trance, allow yourself to experience the giddy whirl of choice as if it were a revolving mandala – then piss off without buying anything. Or else, undertake long treks to remote supermarkets in order to buy one item. A couple of years ago in Chicago, I walked nine miles from the Loop to the Near North Side to get a pair of socks at Wal-Mart. Sure, it was a crazy thing to do – but it was my own madness, not the crowd’s.

The latest Real Meals column is here:

You can’t get realer when it comes to meals than chowing down with the Statesman’s own laureate of the low life, Nick Lezard.

I’ve known Nick for years (ever since, in fact, he compared my prose to that of the classical emeticist Tertullian), and together we’ve eaten some memorable meals, including that Highland police-evading delicacy poulet au hashish, but in recent years – as his column amply confirms – Nick has fallen on hard times. True, he never exactly lived high on the hog, but now he barely scrapes by low on the streaky. It would have been unfair to subject Nick to the snail sorbets and caviar casseroles served up at London’s top tables – let alone stick him with the bill – so I suggested that we rendezvous at the Stockpot near Leicester Square.

The Stockpot is one of a mini-chain of three restaurants offering plain, wholesome British cuisine (with a few Italian fripperies) at scandalously low prices. You can have a three-course meal for two at the Stockpot, with wine, for well under 40 quid. Unbelievable, no? I mean, in most West End restaurants you can barely get a maître d’ to sneer at you for that kind of money.

I’m not altogether certain what the genesis of the Stockpot was, but all three outlets have a powerful ambience of having been there since time out of mind. Granted, the Stockpot is a metropolitan phenomenon, but I like to think that every British city still has its equivalent: somewhere that dishes up liver and bacon, bubble and squeak, fish and chips – all the binary conjunctions that once made up the bedrock of the British diet before the creation of chicken tikka masala.

I often used to eat at the branch (now closed) on Basil Street, behind Harrods, which was much frequented by cabbies, and there was nothing more comforting than watching these cockney knights of the open road spoon down their jelly and custard while inveighing against wobbly modernity.

I pressured Nick towards the liver and bacon with onion gravy and veg – a snip at £6.50; while I had chicken kiev with rice and veg – a relatively expensive £7.90. I say “pressured” because I wanted to know what the liver and bacon was like, without having to eat it myself. But then I’m like that in relation to a lot of experiences, both sensual and aesthetic. I also want to know what the foam night at Space is like, but I have no intention of going. Jules Verne picked up on this tendency over a century ago, when he remarked of Phileas Fogg that he was the kind of Englishman who sends his manservant to see the sights for him.

Passepartout also had the whitebait to start with, at my insistence. He enjoyed both heartily. “Um, um,” he ummed, “this is really quite good – you should try some.” And I did, just to please him. My soup wasn’t too bad either, giving the lie to that school of thought which says you can spend all day making soup only to end up with something that tastes marginally worse than what you get out of a can.

However, with the chicken kiev, I hit the culinary rumble strip and juddered to a halt. Like The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, chicken kiev was an integral part of the early 1970s. They were disaster movies; it was disaster cuisine – a great lowering lump of crap chicken, filled with garlic butter and herbs before being coated in breadcrumbs and fried. Chicken kiev felt anachronistic at its inception. Forty years on, I felt as if I were in a 1970s episode of Doctor Who in which cavaliers duelled with cyborgs.

Nick was faring no better with his liver and bacon; it had begun promisingly – the meat was tender and tasty – but soon ploughed into the escape lane filled with onion gravy. We tried to stimulate our jaded palates by putting these plates aside and ordering peach-and-apple pie with custard (£2.95), and chocolate sponge pudding with chocolate custard (£3.20), but it was too late – we were stuffed. The only thing we had any appetite for was the bill, which came in at £40, allowing a generous 20 per cent tip for the waitress.

I say “we” had an appetite for the bill, but in the spirit of this column I must tell it like it is: I’d gone out without enough cash, and obviously the Stockpot hasn’t heard of plastic – yet. So, Nick was obliged to pay the greater part of the bill. No wonder he’s down and out.

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

Arnold Bennett – a bestselling novelist in his day – was said to have carried a mint-condition £10 note in his wallet wherever he went. If he chanced to see someone reading one of his books in public, he was going to give this lucky individual (it was a considerable sum in the 1900s) the tenner. Needless to say, the money was still in his possession when he died.

I’m not certain what this apocryphal anecdote says about the nature of bestsellers, time, literacy and so forth, but what I do know is that, were the Swedish thriller writer Stieg Larsson to return from the grave and wander through modern Britain, he’d need a sack of banknotes on his back in order to honour all his readers. To date, the three books of Larsson’s Millennium trilogy have sold three million copies in the UK. Assuming an RPC (readers per copy) of 1.5, it means one in ten of the literate population has read at least one of these books.

I find this deranging – just as I find the mass consumption of assorted John Grisham legal thrillers, Harry Potter junior wizardry and Twilight teen vampirics equally bizarre. No doubt all books that become bestsellers have intrinsic qualities that make them attractive, but it seems to me that, beyond a certain point when the sales become exponential, other more irrational factors come into play.

In part, bestsellers must partake of the general hysteria of any craze, from the Rubik’s Cube to Sudoku and back again. With books, however, the underlying dynamic seems to me much crazier. Books are involving – even the worst of them – and they call upon the reader to project herself imaginatively into other psyches and situations. Books take a long time to read: a Larsson, weighing in at over 500 pages, is a good ten hours plus for the average reader. It’s one thing to engage in a craze for something akin to masturbation – repetitive, staple sensuality – and quite another to give your entire conscious mind over to a lot of tedious Swedes cutting each other to pieces.

To be fair, I’ve only read half of the first Millennium thriller and everyone tells me that they get better. Even so, I was shocked by quite how greyish and pulpy the prose was, with nary an involving metaphor nor even an amusing juxtaposition of two words. Instead, clichéd description is followed by actual cliché, and always there is a devilish amount of detail about clothes, about office routines, about laptops – about Swedish social services ferchrissakes. This could be because of the translation, but I doubt it.

Even so, snob that I am, as I chomped my way through Larsson’s cardboard prose, it began to seem curiously flavoursome. This was probably because of what it lacks. Don’t get me wrong: I’m no fan of literary fiction that lays down egregious simile after precious metaphor like speed bumps on a suburban street. “Slow Down,” it proclaims, “and Admire My Style!” Bestseller prose has the virtue of being solid paper engineering – not this fancy découpage.

But more importantly, I was aware of a commonality of felt experience. I was a Larsson reader in a way that I could never be a Jamesian or a Conradian; moreover, as the plot ratcheted me forward with the inexorability of a funicular grinding up a Stockholm hillside, it occurred to me that the readability of bestsellers may have an occult origin; by which I mean not some hocus-pocus, but a mysterious attribute of the collective human mind. A decade or so ago, quite serious research was published on the concept of “morphic resonance”, which appeared to demonstrate that texts are more easily absorbed if they have been learned by other people; that if 2,000 Japanese schoolchildren memorise The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, then 2,000 Hungarian kids will commit this poem to memory with greater facility than, say, Sweeney Agonistes.

Morphic resonance would certainly account for what it feels like to read bestsellers. When I read The Da Vinci Code (worldwide sales in excess of 80 million), it seemed as if my eyes were being dragged forcibly along the lines of text, such was the speed with which my mind sucked in the – admittedly facile – meaning of Dan Brown’s prose.

In the last analysis, the truth of the matter – and this is something that Bennett understood only too well – is that nothing succeeds like success. How mad is that?

The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

My nephew Jack and I are heading south after an unsuccessful attempt to reach the remote Hebridean island of St Kilda. Facing the implacability of a force-nine gale, Angus the skipper demurred. Mind you, when we arrived at the quayside in Stornoway, I’d felt like demurring as well; it wasn’t so much the prospect of 40 miles of heaving North Atlantic as the spectacle of hungry gulls mobbing the back of Angus’s pick-up. “They got a whole load of sausage rolls earlier on,” he admitted.

Now we’re midway through a long day of transport food. Jack gave the full Scottish on the Ullapool ferry a swerve but, for want of anything else to do, I tucked away egg, bacon, black pudding and toast, then sat burping Buddhistically as the ship lurched and groaned. There was nothing to eat on the coach to Inverness – probably just as well, because a sick bag was looped round every armrest and the atmosphere was charged with static electricity and the fumes of stale puke. Jack managed to cram a wrap of some sort down his neck at the Costa in Inverness; I had the driest ham sandwich of my life as the train jogged through the Grampians and down to Edinburgh.

So, we’re standing in Waverley Station, waiting for the 5pm East Coast service to King’s Cross to pull in. Jack has been unable to resist 12 Millie’s Cookies mini bites for £3.95 – and I’m with him on that one: I doubt I’d be able to resist a Millie’s cookie in front of a firing squad, eschewing the blindfold for their toothsome chewiness. “Look,” I instruct him, “when we board, we need to get seats right by the buffet so we’re in pole position for the dining car. If we go in for a sitting after an hour or so, we should be able to hang out there for the remainder of the journey, thus blagging ourselves a first-class seat.”

It’s little tips like these that I see as the very essence of the avuncular, but when I present myself guilelessly to the steward, she’s having none of it.
“If you’re in second class,” she says unprompted, “you’ve to eat and then return to your seats immediately.”

“You mean right away?” I query Bertie Woosterishly.

“Immediately.”

Even so, a railway supper is always worth having; it doesn’t matter that the decor is Noughties-utilitarian, nor that the view is of the cooling towers of Eggborough Power Station. The mere fact of a waiter staggering towards you with a steaming platter conjures up the romance of the Stamboul train – or, at least, the Brighton Belle of my childhood, when we ate kippers under plush shades and my father excoriated Lord Beeching again and again and again.

Leek and potato soup, £4. A spicy roast breast of chicken with preserved lemon and served on a bed of basmati rice, £16. Not even the miserable vers libre of menu language can frustrate the punctuation of those rounded-off prices. Nonetheless, I had the leek and potato soup; Jack had the ratatouille tart. I had cod; Jack had a steak. I had the pear and hazelnut pastry; Jack crammed down a chocolate fudge cake – even though the Millie’s mini bites were eating him from within. When the un-Spartan boy protested at all this noshing, I snapped at him: “Keep at it! But masticate each mouthful at least 40 times – I’m not going back to second class.”

A man came along the aisle with a large plastic bag and when he passed us, I saw the slogan “Cleaning your East Coast train” on his back. What is this modern mania for ceaseless rubbish removal, if not the flip side of excessive packaging? Do we hope to unwrap, discard and clear up our way out of recession? These and other observations I shared with Jack as we thrummed towards Peterborough. He looked at me the way I used to look at his grandfather over kippers on the Brighton Belle.

Still, I knew we’d passed that faint but nonetheless significant line: all it took was a judiciously deployed Clydesdale Bank £10 note and the hefty steward was in our metaphorical pocket – there was no way she’d chuck us out now, even though it wasn’t really legal tender. So, a three-course dinner with drinks and coffee, plus hefty tip: £65.55. It was a fraction of the price differential between second and first class.

True, the cod was thrashing around in the leek and potato soup like an ocean-going yacht in a force nine, but sometimes you’ve got to suffer for your luxuries.

The latest Madness of Crowds column:

I hope you have noticed my forbearance throughout the recent football tourney, resisting the urge to prate upon the follies of fandom, let alone the poisonous catalysis that ensues when they are admixed with patriotism. But now, with fair Albion lain out upon the veldt, the Boerfarter’s jackboot on her heaving breast, the time has come for me to put my own boot in.

On the day after the catastrophic defeat, Richard Littlejohn “wrote” in the Daily Mail: “If the Few had defended as badly as England, we’d all be speaking German now.” Someone in television once told me that he’d been present at a meeting where a reality show was pitched called Daily Mail Island, the conceit being that contestants were marooned on an island where the only news they had of the outside world came to them via the Daily Mail. Needless to say, the pitch failed when one of the commissioning execs observed that such a land mass already existed – and it was called “Britain”.

But even on Daily Mail Island, the equation between la gloire of football and national self-regard is delusory. The sage Montaigne once wrote words to the effect that it was unwise to trust a man who took games too seriously, for it meant that he didn’t take life seriously enough. But I’m perfectly willing to concede that there are millions of men and women who take both football and life seriously indeed.

Therein lies the madness, because it must be utterly bizarre to be one moment living in a world in which your entire sense of wellbeing is concentrated upon how well 11 super-fit adolescents (and I say “adolescents” advisedly, for recall: these are “men” who almost mutinied over their access to their PlayStations) are kicking about an inflated leather bag, and the next to accept that this previously all-consuming passion is not important at all.

In psychiatric circles – which encompass me rather more than is healthy – the maintenance of two such utterly inconsistent belief systems would be termed something catchy like “acute mental diplopia”, but in my part of the country we just call it Dagenham (two stops short of Barking). In fairness to all you England fans out there, I do perceive some political logic in your passionate advocacy; harder to comprehend is the gut-churning empathy experienced by the supporters of English Premier League teams.

I suppose I am a bit of a dinosaur – and a triceratops at that – but when I last went to see Arsenal play, I felt as if I’d inadvertently slid into a parallel world. It didn’t help that my companion, a season ticket holder, is an eminent psychoanalyst who has written numerous papers on acute mental diplopia. Like Papa Sigmund whacked on cocaine, he was his own case history, for within seconds of kick-off, he transmogrified from a calm, urbane man into a screaming loony.

“Youuuu fuuuuucking f-f-f-f-fuckers!” He strafed the Gunners with his own fricative fusillade; and so it continued, volley after expletive volley, until at half-time I taxed him: “How can you feel such a close affinity with this polyglot team, drawn from the ends of the earth by the lodestone of gelt?”

“Aha,” he explained, “you don’t get it – it’s not about partisanship at all, it’s about catharsis. These young players are mythological heroes for middle-aged, middle-class men such as me. We rant and we rave, we bellow and exult; then, when the hurly-burly is done, we can return to the dull accommodation of our strip-lit lives.”

“You don’t really believe that bullshit, do you?” I asked him. “Surely you of all people understand that to flip from hysterical identification to passive indifference is tantamount to psychosis?”

“Maybe.” He bit into his gourmet sausage roll and small flakes of pastry speared my tender cheeks. “But what’s the alternative? Think back to when, everywhere you went, you saw men and women in No 7 England shirts with ‘BECKHAM’ blazoned across their shoulders. What a fine madness it would have been if all those fat Beckhams, short Beckhams, infant Beckhams and ancient Beckhams really had believed themselves to be England’s striker. No asylum in the land would’ve been big enough – they’d have required some kind of special colony.”
“Daily Mail Island.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, nothing.”