“I visited the Pacific Northwest quite a bit in the early 1990s. Seattle struck me as having a definite coffee hue, just as many other cities have a predominant colour (the piss-green of Paris springs to mind). A coffee hue, and a coffee smell. Starbucks began frothing in the 1970s, and the chain was set to lash out across the US and then the world on the cusp of the 1990s. But this year, Starbucks’ CEO, Howard Schultz, announced that there would be significant closures among the approximately 700 Starbucks in the UK, and ruefully admitted that the business had expanded far too recklessly.

“I should cocoa. Time was when you couldn’t turn your back on a family-run cafe without the twin-tailed corporate siren – a logo, incidentally, that was once replaced with a crown to facilitate market penetration in the Islamic world, which was offended by the display of the female figure – snaffling it up. Starbucks operated at a loss, saturated local areas, doubled up franchise and company-owned outlets and exploited loopholes in planning laws. The headline in the US satire ‘zine, The Onion, said it all: ‘New Starbucks opens in restroom of existing Starbucks’.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s Real Meals column at the New Statesman.

“I wonder what Monsieur Vigneron, a commissaire général de la Société des Artistes Français no less, makes of it all, assuming that the comings and goings have rendered his shade unquiet. After all, in 1903, when he was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, at the reasonable, if not advanced, age of 57, the notorious sodomite was yet to pitch up. M Vigneron’s tasteful tomb – a petrified catafalque, replete with rigid canvases and stony brushes – stood proud among the crumbling graves. Doubtless the Second Republic arts bureaucrat had some hopes of a few respectful mourners coming to lay fast-fading violets atop his remains, but a scant eight years later, down dropped this monstrous chunk of schizoid-modernism, designed by Jacob Epstein, which is half engine block, half pharaonic sphinx. Then things began to get weirder.”

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

“I suppose I was looking for an archetype that no longer exists. A fusty realm of red flock wallpaper and piped sitar music. I was in search of that unreal establishment, the Indian restaurant – unreal because the vast majority are in fact run by Bangladeshis; but unreal also because, just as second- and third-generation British Asians no longer see any need to kowtow to ethnic indiscrimination (and so style their establishments ‘Bengali’, or as offering ‘Indian and Bangladeshi cuisine’), so they have also hearkened to the foodyism of the past decade, vamped up their decor and even begun flirting with the unsafe sex of gastronomy: fusion.”

To read the rest of Will Self’s Real Meals column, visit the New Statesman website.

“I vividly remember my first experience of hands-free mobile phones. It must have been around 1998 in Stockholm. I arrived by night, in the teeth of a blizzard, and distinctly shaken up by having flown from London sitting between the pilots of the SAS flight. I was, shamefully, on a press junket, and this was the only seat available. I wandered the concourses of Stockholm airport waiting for my onward connection and absolutely freaked by the numbers of soberly dressed businessmen who strode about the place gesticulating and talking aloud, even though there was no one there.

“What was this, I wondered – the atavistic Scandinavian bicameral mind in action? Were these guys talking to Wotan, or were they schizophrenics? It took me a while to notice the little pigtails of flex dangling from their ears, then grasp that this was only the stringy extension of a communications revolution hell-bent on inverting private and public space. Ah! The mobile phone – how can we imagine life without it? (Well, if you’re, say, over 30, the answer is: with perfect clarity – after all, we can remember that carefree era of less paranoia and greater punctuality.) More specifically, what was civil society like before any fuckwit with a portable phone started believing that he or she had an inalienable right to yatter on in public, at inordinate length and as loudly as a trombonist?”

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

“Chicken, chicken! Every place I go there is chicken, every step I take, wishbones and drumsticks crunch beneath my soles, while the blisters in battered old chicken skin crepitate eerily. If, as I do, you live in a large city, you’re never more than a few feet away from some disjointed portion of a poultry carcass. If, as I am, you’re the owner of a dog, you’re never more than a few seconds away from having to shove your hand down its throat to try to retrieve a splintery bone.

“Sometimes I think this great alfresco charnel house is only the just resting place for these poor birds’ leftovers – after all, their miserable and truncated lives were spent boxed, then they were exterminated with Einsatzgruppen awfulness, before being flogged in boxes; at least now – albeit in bits – they’re spread about, as if having been subjected to a strange inversion of a Tibetan Buddhist sky burial, whereby human beings scavenge bird corpses rather than vice versa. At other times I project myself into the dim, distant future; surely, in the course of geologic time, these great middens will petrify, forming some hitherto unknown sedimentary rock, one that will cause geologists of the distant future to dub this the Kentuckyzoic era?”

Read the rest of the Real Meals column at the New Statesman website, though given that Self asks “how can anything that tastes this awful be quite so popular?” perhaps it might double up as his Madness of Crowds column too?

“This column takes its title from Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay’s seminal work on folly, first published in 1841, and subsequently much revised to account for the mechanisation of 19th-century hysteria. Mackay treats of many psychic states, ranging from the innocuously barmy to the downright deranged, but to my mind one of his most interesting sections concerns the way in which a nonce word, or phrase, will grip the masses, until you cannot listen to an exchange between two people without hearing it used. D’you know what I mean?

“In Mackay’s day the London mob were seized by successive manias for catchphrases as various as ‘Quoz’, ‘What a shocking bad hat’ and ‘Has your mother sold her mangle?’. In some instances, he is able to trace the expression back to its origins in a real happening, or a popular ballad, while with others, although unable to explain where it came from, he nonetheless furnishes a wealth of anecdotage. One such is ‘Who are you?’, a line that was so much the rage, it entered the literary canon through the mouth of the caterpillar in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

To read the rest of Self’s Madness of Crowds column, visit the New Statesman website.

“When, in 1996, I hung up my bib as the restaurant critic of the Observer, I went out with a grande bouffe by eating at McDonald’s and La Tante Claire in a single lunchtime. It seemed to me that yoking a Michelin three-star temple of cuisine to a fast-food joint where the keener staff wore three plastic stars perfectly expressed the taste of the nation. If only I could have foreseen what was to come. This culinary de bas en haut was soon to become the very Kulturkampf of New Labour’s Britain.

“I never really wanted to review food anyway. What interested me was fancy restaurants as a theatrical experience – the bourgeoisie ogling itself in mirrored booths. Perhaps now, at last, the time is ripe for a little deflation, and maybe we should all start paying attention to what’s on the end of our plastic forks, not Nigella, Marco Pierre, Fucking Gordon and all the other celebrity egg-flippers. It’s in this, more grounded, spirit that I undertake to survey the establishments where we actually eat, and the real meals they serve. Only a fraction of the population will ever nosh in La Tante Claire, whereas, at current sales levels, the 1,115 McDonald’s in Britain could serve a meal to every man, woman and child in the country given a mere 35 days.”

To read the rest of Self’s Real Meals column, visit the New Statesman website.

“A mania for wood detailing has gripped British architects in its tongue-and-groove. Ouch! It doesn’t matter how dark or twisted the urban alley you wander down is, at the end of it you’re bound to find a spanking new block of ‘luxury’ flats, its façade a chequerboard of plate glass and outsize Venetian blind slats. More often than not, this gallimaufry will be dubbed with some spurious-sounding pseudo-place-name, such as ‘Viking Wharf’ or ‘Visigoth Quay’.”

To read the rest of Will Self’s New Statesman column, visit their website.