The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

If the historian Oswald Spengler were alive today, Wimpy is the kind of fast-food joint he’d be eating in. Actually, given how cheap it is – and assuming yet more Möbius strips are torn in the space/time continuum – Giambattista Vico and Philip Toynbee might well join him for a Bender, fries and a foaming beaker of Coke. For Wimpy embodies the history of fast food conceived of with the circularity of a burger bun, rather than the linear progress of a machine-cut chip.

Wimpy’s origins seem lost in the mists of time but, by the early Fifties, there were 12 of them in the US; then stodgy old Lyons got wind of the newfangled burger phenomenon and bought the Wimpy name. The first UK branch was implanted in its Coventry Street Corner House in the West End of London – and the rest, as Spengler might say, is history.

But history of a Spenglerian kind; for while by the early Seventies there were more than 1,000 Wimpy Bars and restaurants in as many as 23 countries, then came the barbarians, swishing their savage golden arches. In response, Wimpy mutated through various takeovers, ceding a province here, losing a satrap there, until, in 1990, the remaining 200-odd counter-service restaurants (the “bars” having long since been lost) were sold off to a management consortium.

I’d like to say that the last 20 years have brought a resurgence of Wimpy, a revival of the ancient virtues that made it the only British burger joint of the imperial age. Sadly, this isn’t the case – true, Wimpys hang on, doling out counter service in Roadchef service centres and mega-bowling alleys (whatever they might be), but the restaurants are reduced to a mere rump, a Flavius Stilicho, exerting pitiful authority from some gastronomic Ravenna.

Yet still they soldier on! Since 2008, the restaurants have been retro-branded in their original red-and-white livery and the menu has been expanded. I took Family Self along to the Wimpy in Clapham Junction for a meal and I have to say it was a most deliciously nostalgic experience. For anyone over 45, the Wimpy Bar is synonymous with the burger. Back in that fabled time, a Wimpy burger had a distinctly beef burger-ish taste – quite different from the modern meat patty; and came also with a particular relish, ready-smeared.

My wife, who, like some latter-day Petrarch, takes pleasure in chronicling the battles of yore, reminded me that when this relish was swapped in favour of a mayonnaise-based gloop in the mid-Seventies, it caused great unrest among the proles. I couldn’t consciously recall being in a Wimpy since the Eighties, so whatever mutations the chain had been through passed me by: here I was, sitting once again at a melamine table, being served by an adolescent reassuringly mailed with retro-acne. I opted for a newfangled jalapeño burger, Mrs Self for a quarter-pounder. One of the boy-spawn essayed – at my urging – a Bender; the other had a chicken burger of uncompromising asperity: no salad, no sauce, just white bread and white chicken unnaturally compressed.

Although I couldn’t quite face one myself, I was keen to find out what the Bender was like. It’s one of the queer involutions of history that, back in the heyday of the Wimpy Bar, “bender” was the derogatory epithet most employed by adolescent boys to refer to homosexuals. I’m not sure when the Bender entered the Wimpy menu, but its presence there is a testimony to how we now live in a more tolerant and inclusive society. I think. Anyway, the Bender is quite simply a frankfurter bent and crenulated so that it resembles a porky laurel wreath that can
be inserted between buns. My boy had a bite and pronounced it “exactly like a hotdog”.

My jalapeño quarter-pounder was pretty feisty for the high street – not the bland madeleine I’d been hoping for: a sweet taste that would transport me back to a less tolerant but more innocent age, an era of Fair Isle tank tops, platform soles, a functioning mining industry and Butskellism. No, no, however much I yearned for a circular history, it was not to be found in the compass of a burger bun. Outside, the traffic groaned while overhead the blue sky yawned devoid of contrails – all aeroplanes were grounded; soon we would be running out of Ethiopian sugar snap peas. Truly, this was the real decline of the west, a cataclysm from which even Wimpy could not escape.

The latest Madness of Crowds column from April 22:

I don’t know Gordon Brown – do you? I don’t know Dave Cameron, either, not even remotely. As for Nick Clegg, he’s an enigma – albeit not one I feel driven to solve. Presumably Miriam González Durántez has penetrated further into the Clegg mystery, hacking her way through the jungle of his id, and so doing has drawn closer to the lost city of Clegg-Dorado.

Closer, maybe, but such is the ineffable character of human identity (and this, bizarrely, includes even someone as squeakily, blandly, wipeably clean as the boy Cleggster) that we always remain hares in the pell-mell race towards greater intimacy. One may travel half the distance towards knowing someone, then half the distance that remains, then half of that further distance – and so the desideratum of genuine knowledge will remain always beyond reach.

We know this intuitively from our relationship with those who are closest to us: our lifelong partners – even our own blood relations – remain curiously unknowable. We may have smelt their farts beneath the duvet, we may have changed their nappies, we may have administered Oramorph to them when in extremis – yet still we do not know them. If this is the case with those we interact with sensuously, psychically and physically, how much more opaque must be those we’ve never met?

One of the greatest follies of the current era – cultivated by the mass media, reaped in a whirlwind by social networking – is this delusion of proximity: the victims of paedophiles who cruise internet chatrooms are said to have “met” their abductors online, while presumably those ignorami who follow the likes of Stephen Fry on Twitter feel they are treading in his footsteps along a lonely strand.

But it is in the realm of political campaigning that we encounter the most egregious faux intimacy. In times gone by, when the pyramid of power was still more acuminate, those at the apex saw no virtue in manifesting themselves as human at all. The rulers of the ancient despotisms of the near east were gods, and so depicted in suitably hieratic forms: winged and coiled, their features flattened, wreathed in potent symbols. Even the absolute rulers of our own early-modern era had no requirement to be knowable: they were naught save the sum of their powerful parts. Think of Holbein’s Henry VIII, with its geometric configurations of flesh, ermine, hair and cloth of gold, quartering a rectilinear body – this was portraiture as heraldry, not a representation of persona at all.

With each extension of the franchise, it became more and more difficult for our rulers to affect the monumental ataraxy of a Rameses. Nevertheless, they kept it up for as long as they could – even after the Second Reform Act, Victorian politicians were still portrayed in profile as biblical patriarchs, their long beards stiff with the oils of holy rectitude.

However, come the representative democracy, come the representative man (or woman, although less so because they rightly resist such bowdlerisation) – and come also the media that make it possible to delude ourselves that we “know” them. Politicians have come to believe that it’s a requirement for office to establish that, were the electorate in a position to cut them, they would indeed bleed – hence the spectacle of teary Gordon and weepy Dave contending for the title of Lord High Lachrymose of Oprah.

Back when democracy was upfront and highly personal, the citizenry had no need of such attitudinising on the part of elected leaders – they knew Pericles and Demosthenes bled when they were cut, because more than likely they’d been round to their places and seen them shaving. Nowadays such immediacy is impossible, so the attempt to convey an impression of it – for example, by giving interviews in domestic dishabille – is rightly understood by the electorate as mendacious lunacy.

We, the people, know that modern British prime ministers need first and foremost to be efficient managers, administrators and accountants – effective at the core bureaucratic tasks, good at delegating and adept at balancing devilish detail with the wider picture. If such paragons of office work did indeed exist, who on earth would want to know them personally? So, keep it to yourselves, chaps.

The latest Real Meals column is here:

Even people who know absolutely nothing about British politics of the past two decades still know that Peter Mandelson once mistakenly referred to mushy peas as guacamole in a Hartlepool fish-and-chip shop. So widespread is the awareness of this epochal solecism that when I was on an eco-holiday last year, deep in the Congolese rainforest, I was accosted by a group of Ituri pygmies who suggestively poked my groin with their spears while chanting: “Mishy-mushy, mishy-mushy, mushy-pea-Pe-ter!”

I took this all in good part; I certainly didn’t try to persuade them that – as some assert – the tale was apocryphal, and put about by Neil Kinnock as a slur upon the hated spinmeister. Didn’t try, because even if the guacamole faux pas hadn’t happened, it really should have, so perfect an image is this for the rise of New Labour. Mushy peas as an accompaniment to the traditional British fast food of fish and chips encapsulate everything northern, heavy-industrial and emphatically Old Labour; superficially an unattractive green mulch, they are actually tasty and full of protein, and are also a further metaphor for the old-fashioned virtue of collectivism: individual peas pressed into the commonality of the Styrofoam pot.

By mistaking this wholesome staple for a faddish dip – the sort of thing that the quintessential arriviste Abigail would have served at her ghastly party – Mandelson incontinently exposed himself as the effete, southern bourgeois that so many socialists (remember them?) believed him to be. Years on, as we career towards an election that will be decided entirely on least-preference votes – for the candidates electors least despise – what is left of the once-groaning Labour board? The bag-Byerses and rat-Hoons have scuttled away with the crumbs; cheesy Blair has faded until only his cosmetically whitened grin remains. Yet there sits that behemoth “Lord” Mandelson, dipping his silver spoon into the guacamole of the Prime Minister’s ever-envious brain.

If Mandelson’s mushy pea moment was the apotheosis of the British labour movement – you can’t be what you don’t eat – the beginning of that whimpering end lay years earlier, when an EU directive terminated the ancient eco-ritual of wrapping battered cod (or haddock) in sheets of newsprint.

Soon enough, not only will the notion of wrapping takeaway food in newsprint seem hopelessly outdated, but newspapers themselves will have gone the way of all flesh. Who’d have thunk it, as the Guardian might say, that of this triumvirate – mushy peas, Mandy and an influential regional press – only the former will still remain?

Yet since time out of mind the noble chippie has stood proud on the British high street, a zinc-and-white-tiled shrine to unsaturated fats, wreathed in the mephitic yet queerly wholesome odour of fryers as deep as the Mariana Trench. Why, just the other evening I repaired to my local chippie and ordered some plaice and chips (to be told there was only cod – or haddock – available), and was served a repast that oozed conservatism. The fish went straight from the freezer into the batter, then the fryer; the chips were fat and tasteless; I stood waiting, staring abstractedly at a Pukka Pies advert that had never seen better days, but, best of all, my mushy peas came in a tiny Styrofoam pot, of a size suitable for a dip – guacamole, say – rather than a serious vegetable.

The quest for the perfect fish-and-chips meal can remain endless. Such is the diversity of chippies that there is always another greasy mountain to slither over. I have sought this deep-fried unicorn horn the length and breadth of Britain, motoring through Lanarkshire to the town of Biggar, which boasts “the finest fish-and-chip shop in Scotland” (it wasn’t too bad; the chips were a bit soggy), standing in line outside the famous Sea Shell of Lisson Grove (plaice available!), and even crunching batter behind the fishing sheds of Hastings Old Town.

This last experience was depressing, for while Hastings boasts the only inshore fleet still to land on the south coast, the fish wasn’t fresh at all. It’s an irony that Mandelson would no doubt appreciate, that while it was deep-sea trawling that first made fried fish a viable, cheap food for the working class of Victorian Britain, it’s the same industrial fishing that will ensure it ends up as a scarce delicacy. As for avocados …

The latest Madness of Crowds column looks at sponsored charity events:

The other evening I saw Eddie Izzard, the celebrated Jack-and-Jill of all theatrical trades, complete 43 nearly consecutive marathon runs. Obviously I didn’t witness him doing this in the flesh – it took him 50 days – rather, I sat in a well-upholstered chair in the desiccated warmth of my own home and watched his astonishing feat on television.

I witnessed Izzard jiggling along the verges of arterial roads, I watched him serving ice creams to fans from his special van, and then, as the long miles began to take their inevitable, crippling toll, I looked on while he writhed in agony beneath the competent hands of his sports therapist, Jo, as she massaged his legs on the unsettling coverlets of mid-price provincial hotels.

For infinitesimal moments I wondered why it was that Izzard chose to stumble-stump for day after day within inches of lorries vomiting fumes – but of course, I knew the answer: if he had gone off-road, it would have been impossible for his support crew of vans and rickshaws to remain with him, filming every pace of this very modern odyssey. On the one occasion when he did divert along a canal towpath, Izzard had to film his own progress using his camera-phone, wonky footage that duly ended up in the finished documentary.

Still, there was a grim fascination to the tale, the watching of which was itself a kind of endurance – I mean to say, he was mad to be doing it, and I was equally deranged to be watching him doing it, when there were thousands of things more profitable and enjoyable I could have been doing. There were further parallels between Izzard and I; while he was proximately solo – the only transvestite comedian to be running 43 consecutive marathons – in the wider scheme of things he was part of a crowded field, for not a day goes by without some celebrity or other embarking on a punishing go-round.

Nor is it the notorious alone who do such things; the great commonality of our nation – if such a thing exists at all – often appears to me to be bound together by nothing so much as a bizarre collective impulse to run, jump and skip about the place, usually en masse, preferably while dressed up as gorillas and waving little flags. From an anthropological perspective, an observer would be forced to conclude that if these inutile and painful exertions have any purpose at all, it must be a sacred one.

Such an alien philosophe would be right. There was a religious impulse driving Izzard on his round-Britain hobble, the same one that drags the rest of the Volk sportlich out on to the highways and byways: charity sponsorship. Sponsorship is the alpha and omega of contemporary beneficence – its sole commandment: Thou Shalt Sponsor (and be sponsored).

Do it, because not to do it is to be marked out as someone who is, ipso facto, both mean and mean-spirited – because it’s fun, isn’t it? Fun for the fundraisers, and fun for those for whom the funds have been raised. Fun even for the fund donors, for they can join vicariously in these noble achievements while funnily toggling their mobile phones so as to donate.

But what is sponsorship, really? My late mother was wont to observe that if people really want to help, say, dementia sufferers (as Izzard did), why don’t they do a sponsored bedpan emptying, or Complan-feeding, thereby killing two birds with one altruistic stone? The answer is that, by and large, the people who solicit sponsorship couldn’t give a toss about the eventual use of this money. It’s a colossal displacement activity, this charity sponsorship lark, for if all these kilojoules of energy were geared to the commonweal, we’d be living in a far happier and more equitable society.

Moreover, charity-sponsored events tranquilise those unquiet spirits who might question the prevailing status quo. Worse still, the activities that are sponsored decouple achievement from the realm of the meaningful. In place of martial prowess, we substitute speed-eating Melton Mowbray pork pies; in lieu of discovering new worlds, we pogo-stick along the M62; instead of agonisingly bringing news of a crushing naval defeat by the Persians just the once, Izzard scrapes his soles over the bitumen again and again – ad tedium, and ad nauseum.

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

The age of criminal responsibility in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is – as has been remarked on many times in the past few weeks – almost the lowest in the EU.

A child of 10 can be convicted of a criminal offence everywhere in Britain with the exception of Scotland, where an eight-year-old can be found bang to rights. Probably, given the deep-seated Calvinism of some Scots, they wouldn’t mind hauling a foetus from the womb and putting it on trial.

Not only is there this deep-seated British belief in the moral culpability of children, but also the current government has abolished the presumption known as doli incapax, which meant that it was up to the prosecution to prove that a child under 14 knew the difference between right and wrong before he or she could be convicted. Why are we so keen on demonising our children in this fashion? The answer I think lies in the madness of the crowds, whose rage is whipped up by the tabloids into a hysterical fervour to rival that of any medieval witch-hunters.

At root, in the deep, dark 3am of the soul, we all know that we are all capable of the basest and most vile acts. Lord of the Flies isn’t on every GCSE reading list simply because it’s a thumping good read. Moreover, the Milgram experiment, conducted at Yale in the early 1960s, proved that ordinary people will subject those they believe to be innocent of any crime to sustained levels of violence purely because they are told to do so by those they assume to have some authority.

Mostly, our violence is restrained by raw sanction and canalised in acceptable ways: young men are sent off to kill other young men in distant lands, and this is glorified by the entire apparatus of state and society. Other young men kick seven kinds of shit out of each other on the football and rugby field, and this, too, is seen as irrefutably glorious. More disadvantaged young men punch each other in the head until they sustain brain damage, while older men in evening dress look on – it’s a grand sport.

Britain is a particularly inventive culture when it comes to this channelling and exteriorising of violence – and so successful at it that large numbers of us remain firmly wedded to the delusion that we aren’t simply contingently, but absolutely, law abiding. The lynch mobs who would like to see Jon Venables strung up seem on the face of it to be far removed from the MPs who voted to abolish doli incapax, but in fact they occupy positions on a single continuum.

Both groups cling to an irrational belief that distinguishing right from wrong is innate, intuitive and commonsensical, and the more that belief is challenged the more crazed they become. The lynch mob expresses its insanity as the righteous conviction that their collective violence will annul the impact of individual homicides – as if, were Venables to be spontaneously executed, James Bulger would be magically resurrected.

The parliamentarians express their insanity by mirroring the lynch mob, and so seek to annul violence by enacting more and more “criminal justice” laws. For both groups the end result is what the psychology trade terms “cognitive dissonance”; a painful state akin to that of lab rats subjected to continuous white noise while at the same time self-administering increasing doses of cocaine hydrochloride.

Britain’s woeful attitude towards children who commit crimes – just like its determination to send teenagers to kill Afghan peasants – can be seen as a successful strategy of scapegoating. After all, while it’s true that I can’t walk round my local park without seeing socially excluded young men goading their roid-enraged weapon dogs, the fact remains that, as societies go, this is a reasonably irenic one.

But that’s just the problem: this pragmatic ethical overview disavows the very nature of the crowd’s madness, which seeks not to restrain our worst collective impulses, but to inaugurate a new world of diamond geezers who love their mums and wouldn’t harm so much as a hair on a kiddie’s head. Ever. And if you so much as whisper a contradiction to this, just see what that gets you …

But seriously: it’s easy to identify the sentimental child-lovers who’d like to string up child malefactors, but how much more difficult it is to acknowledge that their irrationality is only our own writ large and ugly.

“I find it absolutely mind-boggling that on our high streets there are more than 214 branches of Nando’s, a restaurant chain originally started in South Africa by ethnic Portuguese refugees from Mozambique – but then I suppose that says everything about my failure to grasp the following: capitalism, globalisation, the free market and the great British public’s gnawing desire for chicken.

“Yes, we’re back in the chicken coop again – but in fairness, as this column treats of real meals that people really eat, we should probably never stray too far from the chicken wire. The Nando’s website thoughtfully provides a map showing the distribution of its outlets that makes it look as if doughty Britannia is being pecked to death by sinister, strutting, stylised cockerels – the chain’s logo. Using said map, you could quite easily complete a coast-to-coast walk, à la Wainwright, solely provisioned with the Nando’s signature dish of peri-peri chicken.

“This being noted, there seems to be a marked preponderance of Nando’s in inner-city areas, and I would wager – although I haven’t checked up on this personally, I do have a life you know – that many of these areas have high ethnic-minority populations. It could be that there’s an awareness in the black community of the African roots of Nando’s but, if so, it’s pretty residual. Certainly, when I mentioned this to a black friend who eats there regularly, she didn’t know about it, having just assumed the gaff was Portuguese.

“Indeed, there’s nothing obviously southern African about the Nando’s decor, which is heavy on the faux-adobe, the faux-corrugated iron, the job lots of clay pots and plenty of cockerel-related tat – cages, feed bins and so on. There are also hokey signs on the walls bearing fowl sayings, which stick even in the human craw. Still, the overall feel is tastefully muted: the tables are dark wood, the floors are tiled and the lighting is angled down.”

Read the rest of the latest Real Meals column here.

“Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), to which this column owes its title, devotes a chapter to the subject of men’s hair and beards. However, while Mackay locates the fashion for western men to wear their hair short in St Paul’s declaration that ‘long hair was a shame unto man’, his reticence when it comes to the mass follies of religion means that he only dichotomises his way through history, noting that this faction wore theirs long, while that one went for the No 1.

“Mackay is unwilling to venture into the semiotics of hairstyle, although he concedes that during the English civil war ‘every species of vice and iniquity was thought by the Puritans to lurk in the long curly tresses of the monarchists, while the latter imagined that their opponents were as destitute of wit, wisdom, and of virtue, as they were of hair’.

“The association between plentiful hair and the farouche is easy to divine, as is its paradoxical tangling of effeminacy and machismo. In our own era, the Janus-faced view of hippies – at once filthily feral and girlishly gentle – would seem to have been the apogee; by the mid-1970s, one might have hoped, the tedious go-round between long and short hair would have been abolished, peace and prosperity having been instantiated in the valiant figure of Richard Branson, with his carefully oiled locks flowing over his well-laundered collar.”

Read the rest of the latest Madness of Crowds column at the New Statesman here.

“At what mute, inglorious juncture in the history of British cuisine did the ‘all-day breakfast’ make its appearance? I can’t recall it being scrawled on a yellow cardboard sunburst in Magic Marker until the early 1990s – which makes sense, dating it to the same era as 24-hour rolling news and the export of western values through the cross hairs of a USAF bombardier.

“This is not to suggest that Saddam could have been ousted during the first Gulf war by laser-guided egg, bacon, sausage, baked beans, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, chips and toast – but the all-day breakfast coincided with a devastating new onslaught by irony on Britain’s social structure. Certainly, as the British middle classes loft-converted their way out of the recession of the early 1990s, they began eating all-day breakfasts (or ‘fry-ups’, as these are known to graduates), while washing them down with copious amounts of ‘builder’s tea’. Before this jumbling of mores, a café was a caff, and its clientele was decidedly proletarian.

“Lunching with the writer Nick Papadimitriou at the Max Café on the Wandsworth Road, we mulled over caff food as we dabbled our chips in the shocking fauvism of our oval platters. Nick observed that the meal was a Proustian madeleine, a sense datum linking one unerringly to the past. But which past specifically, I wanted to know? Nineteen seventy-four, Nick snapped – it’s always associated in my mind with leaving Emerson, Lake and Palmer concerts feeling incredibly hungry. But why, I pressed him, were you famished after prog-rock gigs? He grimaced: because they went on and on and on – especially Greg Lake’s bass solos.”

Read the rest of the latest Real Meals column here at the New Statesman.

“Conspiracy theories are articles of faith for the masses in an age of unbelief. You will have had the same experience as me on numerous painful occasions: a perfectly ordinary exchange with someone about current political events suddenly veers off-piste and disappears down a crevasse yawning with credulousness. ‘Everyone knows,’ your interlocutor asserts, ‘that Princess Di was assassinated by MI5 to stop her having a Muslim baby … that the September 11 attacks were mounted by the Bush government to provide a pretext for their Iraq oil-grabbing venture … that global warming is a fiction devised by the scientific establishment in order to stop us enjoying our city breaks … ‘

“It’s altogether pointless trying to winch these people out of their crevasse with a thin cable of reason, because they’ve already made the brave leap into believing something for which there is no real empirical basis whatsoever. Indeed, if you do challenge them along these lines, they simply turn on you with words to the effect that you cannot prove your version of these events, while they, at least, are maintaining a healthy scepticism – the implication being that you’re merely another dupe.

“What got me thinking about the collective insanity of the conspiratorial laity – besides running into it almost every day – was the experience of a young friend of mine who is studying philosophy at a perfectly respectable university. She was given by her tutor the assignment of watching on YouTube a ‘documentary’ called Loose Change. This, for those of you fortunate enough not to have seen it, is a series of ‘facts’ and ‘observations’ that, taken together, are intended to support one of the ‘arguments’ above; namely, that it wasn’t a group of Islamist jihadists who engineered the destruction of the twin towers and the attack on the Pentagon, but elements within the federal government itself who conspired to take the lives of thousands of their own citizens.

“When my young friend taxed her tutor with the ridiculousness of this thesis, she was told that watching Loose Change was integral to her study of Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

“That the September 11 attacks should have generated so much conspiratorial guff is woefully predictable. Loose Change is only a wilder and more explicit version of the thesis bruited by Michael Moore’s asinine Fahrenheit 9/11. In that feature-length exercise in infantile tendentiousness, Moore made great play of the connections between the Bin Laden and Bush families, hinting that these were causally implicated in the attacks. The truth is that it would be surprising if the Bin Ladens – whose vast construction company is by appointment to the House of Saud – didn’t hobnob with the Bushes.”

Read the rest of the latest Madness of Crowds column here.