“One of the realest meals there is in the so-called developed world is a hotel breakfast. I say this for a simple reason: no one – unless they are close to expiring – refuses it. You may stagger back to your chipboard hutch, which fronts on to some godawful bypass, at 1.30am, swearing never again to drink with colleagues/clients/long-lost siblings, but the card lying on the bed still gets you salivating.”

“Because the whole point about the hotel breakfast is that it’s included: you’ve paid your £65.99, so you may as well have it. It’s not only included in the hotel bill, it is also, by extension, inclusive of all the guests. Good morning, Britain! Good morning, all you munchers and crunchers and belchers – wherever you may be. Speaking personally, the novelty of having breakfast served to me in my room has long since palled. I find the whole experience of staying in hotels alone alienating, and the mornings are worst of all: lonely Onan, in his pants, caffeine-jittery and staring at the traffic coursing by the unopenable window like so many steely worry beads on a tarmac string.”

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

“A couple of years ago, a locksmith high on junk food pulled out of a McDonald’s drive-thru without looking and wrote off my car. At the time, as I went in a split second from steel-cosseted calm to rain-drenched shock, I wasn’t that pleased; but as time has gone by I’ve realised that he did me a big favour. However, it isn’t the madness of autogeddon that I wish to examine this week but the plague of overfamiliarity that has swept British society.

“Sitting in the police transit van a few minutes after the accident, I was chivvied through my statement by a couple of officers: ‘Calm down, William,’ said the WPC, reading my name from my driving licence. ‘We need to get the facts straight here.’ I was annoyed by the young woman’s tone, but it wasn’t until my shock wore off – a few hours later – that I sat bolt upright and ejaculated: ‘She called me William!’

“The absurdly youthful police officer is a standard-issue accessory of middle-age, but it can only be in the past decade or so that they’ve begun to address valetudinarian members of the public by our first names. I blame ‘Call Me Tony’ Blair for this insane inversion of social mores, as it wasn’t until the kidult air-guitarist acceded to power that such informality became de rigueur. Now everyone calls me Will: people I’ve never met before, writing me formal requests, employ the ghastly salutation, ‘Hi Will’, or even more absurdly, ‘Dear Will Self’ – as if I were a Quaker – and as for those I encounter in the flesh, only in the US or Germany do they use my proper title: Mister Self.”

Read the rest of Mr Self’s Madness of Crowds column at the New Statesman here.

“Wagamama has been serving a bizarre fusion cuisine – part Japanese traditional, part English nursery slop – for nigh on 20 years now. When the first restaurant opened in the early 1990s its exposed kitchens and austere interior design seemed the dernier cri in foodurism. Checking out the T-shirted waiting staff, punching orders into handheld computer terminals, one was convinced that this was exactly the joint where Deckard the blade runner would chow down, were he sent to hunt replicants in London.

“However, nothing is ever so dated as the future – or, as Theodor Adorno put it: ‘The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself.’ And while during the fin de siècle we may have yearned for flying cars and sexy cyberwomen, what the Noughties brought instead was robotic waiting staff and a strange syncretism of occidental consumption and oriental production, which means that there must now be a significant proportion of British yoof who inhabit an entirely Japanese materiality: shopping at Uniqlo and Muji, eating at Wagamama, reading manga comics and fiddling about with Sony netbooks. All while remaining utterly ignorant of Shinto, Buddhism, the films of Akira Kurosawa and the novels of Mishima. Everything has been lost in translation except the profit motive.”

Read the rest of last week’s Real Meals column at the New Statesman here.

“I’ve been putting it off, hopping up and down, tensing first one buttock then the other, waiting until the pain is insupportable . . . but although it’s a dirty job, someone has to let go and ask the question: why is it that so many men piss in the streets nowadays? Time was when the average British male would no more publicly urinate than he would fornicate or defecate – but now the streets round my way run yellow. Indeed, there’s an alley opposite my house that I can see from where I’m typing this column, and if I chance to glance in that direction I’ll often clock some perfectly ordinary-looking chap duck into it, unzip, then splutter.

“I’ve got so fed up with it that on one occasion, when I saw two men taking a dual leak, I went across and asked one of them where he lived. ‘Why d’you wanna know?’ he said. ‘Simple,’ I replied. ‘So I can come round and piss outside your house.’

“Of course, I’m not so ignorant as to imagine that the taboo against al fresco relief was always in place, but I should imagine that apart from wartime it endured for much of the 20th century. Certainly, I can never remember seeing British men do this when I was a child – it was a dirty foreign habit, indulged in by the likes of the French, whose pissoirs were in any case barely decent. Even in the late 1990s a trip to Paris always began with a distinct urinous tang as you stepped forth from the Gare du Nord, whereas now the smell hits you at St Pancras.”

Read the rest of last week’s Madness of Crowds here at the New Statesman.

“I’d like to be able to say that I’ve no idea how many Pizza Express pizzas I’ve eaten – but that would be a lie. Unlike all those burgers, kebabs, chicken drumsticks, chips and sandwiches, which, when I try to focus on them as individual taste experiences, are subsumed to the great undifferentiated mass of comestibles, the Pizza Express pizza has an eerie precision about it. This could be due to geometry alone: even a mathematical ignoramus such as me can calculate the area of a 12-inch pizza to be 3.14159 (6 x 6) = 113.09724 square inches. And while that seems a preposterous size for a disc of unleavened bread topped with melted cheese and tomato purée, the very fact that no matter which one of the chain’s 370 branches you sit down in, you can guarantee being served with substantially the same 113.09724 square inches, tends my mind ineluctably towards further quantifications.

“Every fortnight between 1997 and 2007, I would take my younger children to have supper with my older children at the Pizza Express in Shepherd’s Bush. But those 250 pizzas are only the baseline around which the rest of my statistical analysis proceeds. I can assert that at least another 250 pizzas were consumed during that period at extempore family meals out and even gatherings when nominally ‘adult’ friends said, ‘Why don’t we just have a pizza?’ in response to the bewildering array of foodstuff choice.

“Then there’s the outliers. I began eating at Pizza Express with some regularity in the mid-1980s and still eat there to this day – that’s another 14 years during which an estimate of a pizza a month is conservative. So, 668 pizzas consumed by me alone, but if I add in the pizzas I’ve bought for my four children during the core period (1,000); the pizzas I bought for the older children between 1994 (when my son was four and my daughter two) and 1997 (150); then the pizzas since the regular Shepherd’s Bush visitations ceased (approximately 75), we have a total of 1,893.”

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

“What is one to make of the shrines that are now regularly erected in the aftermath of fatal car crashes? It may be a failure on my part but I can’t remember these extempore street furnishings being part of the British landscape or urban environment until the late 1970s. Indeed, the first shrines – such as the one in Barnes that sprang up after Marc Bolan’s accident – were an obvious outgrowth of the hero worship their subject inspired in life. It followed that depositing flowers, cards and handwritten poems at the site where he died had a certain logic: these were funerary gifts suitable for a pop star, adulation to sustain him in the netherworld.

“I think it highly likely that this is the sort of cosmology cleaved to by serious fans, whose belief in the quasi- or wholly divine nature of guitar-pickers, and even actors, supports an entire iconography, complete with relics and – after Elvis – resurrections. The religion of fame is a syncretism, of course, between deep-seated animism and whichever monotheism happens to be locally dominant. If a 20th-century boy such as Bolan was accorded a kind of sainthood by virtue of his notoriety, then it also made sense to pray at his shrine for a similarly glittery and platform-soled career.”

To read the rest of the latest Madness of Crowds column, visit the New Statesman.

“I’m not altogether sure Christmas dinner is a meal at all, let alone a real one; rather, it is the focus of all the faith, hope and joy – as well as the transgenerational neuroses and psychic dyspepsia – that we load on to that already heavily freighted barque ‘the family’. Granted, not everybody who eats Christmas dinner does so with their family, but even childless friends who refer to the rest of us – not a little contemptuously – as ‘breeders’ seem to end up pulling crackers and donning paper hats, thereby making up for a lack of infants by infantilising themselves.

“No one really likes Christmas dinner. It squats dumpily in the middle of the festive season, a throwback to an age before all of East Anglia was given over to factory turkey production, and when gorging yourself stupid was a rare event, combining both the attributes of a heartfelt orgasm and spiritual ecstasy. In the pre-Christian era, winter saturnalias involved a social bouleversement, and this endured until the early modern era.

“Nowadays, however, far from the masters serving their servants, we have all become the slaves of an appetite we no longer feel.”

Read the rest of the December 17 Real Meals column at the New Statesman.

“The odds are that, if you’re reading this piece, you don’t play the National Lottery. I say ‘play’ advisedly because, for millions of your fellow citizens, there’s nothing playful about the Lottery at all. Yes, they may say, they’re only having a bit of a flutter, but in the back of their clouded minds, as they stand hunched by the till on a rainy Tuesday morning in Solihull or Swindon, there lurk the phantoms of freedom, effortless sexual conquest, power and possession – all the things that near-limitless money might buy.

“I’ll go further. (Don’t I always?) The odds are way higher that you’re reading these words while standing behind someone in a queue in a newsagent’s in Solihull than they are of that someone winning the jackpot. There’s a 1 in 13,983,816 chance of picking all six winning numbers in any given week’s Lotto draw and, good university-graduate statistician that you undoubtedly are, you know those odds remain the same no matter how many times someone plays, just as it doesn’t matter how many times you flip a coin: the odds of landing on Queenie’s constipated smile will remain absolutely even.”

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

“If you’re anything like me, you probably find the global dominance of the Subway sandwich chain bewildering. There are now 32,046 Subway branches in 90 countries, making it the biggest fast-food purveyor the world has ever seen. But for why? The outlets are nothing but tiled slots with an interior design suggestive of a post-apocalyptic New York: the subway map, brownstones and Brooklyn Bridge, seared like the silhouettes of atom bomb victims into the shit-brown decor.

“Many pundits attribute the success of the chain to one simple perception – Subway is the healthy option. In marked contrast to the super-sized food fascism of the beef-farting, chicken-black-hole-of-Calcutta merchants, some joker in Florida actually lost weight on a Subway-only diet. Needless to say, he’s been a poster-boy for the chain ever since, a sort of Horst Wessel of hearty Italian bread. I’m not arguing with the idea that you can eat healthily at Subway, but then you modulate your nutritional requirements just as effectively at any corner sandwich shop.

“No, the secret of Subway’s success rests, in my view, on two things alone: first, there’s the very fact that it is a chain, offering a modular eating experience that can be simply replicated from Bloemfontein to Bangor. Nothing succeeds like ubiquity, and the more Subways there are, the more the sandwiches they serve approach the Platonic ideal. Then there’s the store-baked bread. I’m not sure what the actual mechanics of this are, but most probably the bread arrives in the form of pre-kneaded and portioned dough, and is simply popped in the ovens. No matter: the by-product is that warm, yeasty stench that wafts from the door of every Subway, selling the scurrying punter the idea that here be Mama.”

Read the rest of this week’s Real Meals column at the New Statesman.

“Last summer I was walking through an interminable caravan park atop a cliff in Norfolk when I began clocking the makes of the vans. There was the Windsor and the Coronation and the Aspen. Naturally, the Aspen, I said to myself as I plodded past its gemütlich net curtains, what could be better branding for a mobile home? The quaking aspen of North America – or Populus tremuloides – is noted for its spectacular autumnal display. The round leaves in myriad shades of red and yellow twist freely on their stalks, producing the heady illusion that the very earth itself is in motion. Oh yes, were I to be as free as Margaret Beckett, the Aspen would be the covered wagon for me.

“A few weeks later, I found myself in a friend’s kitchen while he was caramelising some sugar, and chanced to note the make of his gas cooker. It, too, was an Aspen. Aha, I thought to myself, that’s a pretty cool bit of branding for a hob – but the manufacturers are probably referencing the Colorado town rather than the tree. A Silver Boom mining camp that by 1893, within a decade of its foundation, boasted banks, a hospital, two theatres and electric lighting, Aspen was bust by the turn of the century. It didn’t resurge until after the Second World War, when it became a ski centre for the Rockies and subsequently an upscale tourist resort.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s The Madness of Crowds column, at the New Statesman, here.