Here’s how Louis-Ferdinand Céline characterises travel in his trippy 1932 novel, Journey to the End of the Night: “An infinity opens up just for you – a laughable little infinity; and you fall into it.” Maybe so, yet sometimes – just sometimes – the falling into that laughable infinity is enough to justify all the very grindingly finite journeys we take in our lives; for if one thing seems beyond dispute, it is that no sooner has the circumnavigation of the kitchen table been completed than the man-haul to the kettle begins.

I went to Ukraine in 2011 to write a piece about the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. I had done a fair amount of research, but it was all concerned with the reactor, its meltdown, the aftermath: I’d given absolutely no thought whatsoever to what lay between the airport and the exclusion zone. By which I mean to say that although I was booked to stay in Kyiv for a few days and do some interviews, I had scarcely any mental picture of the city at all. A photo of a mini-Kremlin basilica snipped from a National Geographic of yore, the hazy spatial analogue of reading Gogol’s Taras Bulba and Bulgakov’s The White Guard – that was about it.

I did have the impulse to find out more; and, in my experience, the surest way of not engaging with a new city is to hale a cab, because with one swoop of the arm you hire a local’s expertise and abrogate your own responsibility for orientation. So I took a bus from the airport to the nearest underground stop, reflecting on how quite diverse cultures display a marked uniformity when it comes to the failure to integrate air and ground transport effectively . . . (Yes, it really is like this in my inner life: the personae Pinteresque and vapid, the atmosphere prosaic yet hectoring) . . . And was still reflecting on it as the train – which was foursquare, boxy, red-painted and liberally plastered with ads – burrowed its way from overground unremarkability (standard-issue warehouses, industrial parks and rusty gasometers) into a tunnel. Switching lines at a central interchange, I jostled through marble halls and marvelled at hefty bronze uplights cast in the shape of caryatids. This had to be the same neoclassical people’s palace shtick as the Moscow Metro, a Babylonian public works project courtesy of God-King Joe.

Reaching my stop, I mounted the escalator and stood, legs and arms akimbo, dangling in space. I could have gathered Kyiv was hilly from The White Guard alone – and from the signature atrocity of the Nazis in Ukraine: the mass shootings at Babi Yar, which took place in a ravine or rocky defile which was itself in . . . Kyiv. In dead time, head heavy with dark thoughts – bonemeal and blood-mortar – I ascended the escalator, and went up it still more.

When I was a child there was something called a paternoster lift at my dad’s work; this was a continuous belt of open-sided lift compartments that revolved non-stop. You simply leapt on and off at your chosen floor; or, blissfully, you could stay in your compartment and go over the top and under the bottom of the entire Heath Robinson contraption. I don’t believe I have ever been happier, the paternoster uniting the lift’s vertiginous elitism with the escalator’s trudging egalitarianism in a way today’s corporatised systems cannot abide. True, limbs were lost – but this was the London School of Economics in the 1970s, and young people – especially young social scientists – recover from serious trauma quickly.

And ascended . . . As I squinted into the Ukrainian lower depths, the bottom of the escalator seemed further off than my mental picture of the escalators at Tottenham Court Road Tube station in London, which I think of as “pretty deep”. (I appreciate it’s not a convincingly objective measure.) Then I peered up, and saw through the bat-black night that there was still about twice as far as this to go before the wood, steel and rubber Sisyphus, ever rolling up the hill, disgorged me on to its brow. The escalator ride to heaven in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death bears close kinship to that Kyivan shaft, not only by reason of its vast extent, but also because both escaliers mécaniques fundamentally alter their riders’ terms of existence. Granted, I don’t imagine every commuter debouching at Arsenalna is plunged into existential crisis as she is winched up each morning: even so, I think Kyiv could make a lot more of having the deepest underground station in the world.

The third-deepest one is in Moscow – but it is hardly likely the disputes between the two nations will be settled by a bout of competitive Tube shaft-sinking. Nor can the Kyiv Tourist Board engineer the sort of pit-and-pendulum experience I had, coming upon their kilometre-long escalator completely unawares. Nevertheless, there should be some way of apprehending the wondrousness of even our most banal transports, for the alternative is an everyday murderousness. We’ll leave the last word, too, to Céline: “At least a hundred people must want you dead in the course of an average day – the ones behind you at the ticket window in the Métro.”

You can find Will Self’s latest New Statesman column here.

Whither the macaroon? I concede that, for those of you condemned to the provinces, this may not seem a pressing concern – unlike being forced to accept elected mayors with spurious powers so that the Chancellor of the Exchequer can burnish his credentials as a devolutionist. However, in this metropolis and many other cities besides, the worst has already happened in terms of local governance, while the bourgeoisie are ascending in a giddy, spiralling fugue-state of hyperglycaemia caused by overindulgence in small, almond-flavoured sweetmeats.

Time was when a macaroon was a perfectly sensible thing, roughly the size and shape of a large, home-baked biscuit; the consistency was a little chewy, there was a suggestion of almonds in the dough, with perhaps a sliver of one such nut pressed into its upper surface, and a disc of rice paper adhered to its underside. I cast the preceding sentence in the simple past rather than the present, because that is what we associate the macaroon with: an innocent era, when bat-eared boys rolled their hoops down the back alleys where bat-eared girls were being done to death by illegal abortionists. And everyone loved a nice Eccles cake, or a Bakewell tart, or a macaroon with a cup of tea so strong that if you were to draw 5ccs off with a hypodermic syringe and then inject them into Roger Bannister he’d run the mile in well under three minutes.

But these modern macaroons are quite a different matter, a ghastly Gallic import redolent of decadence, absolutism and maximum frou-frou. They’ve arrived in London piggybacking in the tote bags of French wanker-bankers come to luxuriate in our low-tax regime. Paul (which as we know is the French equivalent of Greggs) began stocking them first, and so ignorant was I that I thought they were miniature and brightly coloured hamburgers. Because that’s what they look like, although the “buns” are egg white mixed with sugar, and the “meat” is a dollop of some still sweeter goo, or “ganache” (which is what I believe goo is called nowadays).

I asked a French friend what he thought the origin of this macaroon madness was – because if it’s bad in London it’s way worse in Paris, where a new macaroon shop opens about every three minutes. (I envision Bannister sprinting from one to the next.) My informant didn’t hesitate: “It started after Sofia Coppola made that movie about Marie Antoinette. All the courtiers were eating macarons, and the Parisian bobos thought it looked cool.” Of course, there’s a long and illustrious tradition of eating macaroons in France; they get a mention from Rabelais in the early 1500s, and by the time Marie Antoinette’s head was being severed they were far more popular than cake among the bon ton.

Indeed, some culinary scholars believe the reason the throwaway line “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche . . .” became so very notorious is that the peasants already suffered very badly from irritable bowel syndrome and coeliac disease because of the vast amounts of cake they were eating; whereas the Versailles court dined exclusively on macarons, which are made without flour and hence are entirely gluten-free. I’ve no idea if this is true, but what I do know is that nowadays if you aren’t fashionably wheat-intolerant you have no business in public life on either side of the Channel.

George Osborne clearly has issues in this area. I’ve been observing him, and over the past few months he’s been losing weight steadily, while his features (never exactly generous to begin with) have puckered up and puckered up still more, until they resemble nothing so much as that portion of his anatomy that I suspect bothers him the most.

Poor George! His relentless drive for personal preferment and status . . . Sorry, I mean: his selfless labour on behalf of the commonweal . . . condemns him to factory tour after company visit, and at each and every canteen he’s obliged to choke down another greasy bacon sarnie stuffed with gluten, so becoming ever more bloated and flatulent. How he longs to get home to No 11 and the fragrant Frances, whose magnificent books – memoirs, novels, cookbooks – all contain plenty of macaroons. I like to imagine the entire Osborne family – George, Frances, Luke and little Liberty – tucking in to a supper of Pierre Hermé’s finest, which Harrods have just delivered. “Ooh, Daddy,” Liberty cries, “can I have the last white truffle and hazelnut one?” And George, ever the Solomon-like paterfamilias, gently teases apart the two toothsome hemispheres, hands one to each of the children, then sits back with a faintly constipated smile as they smear ganache on their downy cheeks.

I have often had cause to remark in these pages that there’s only one word for a culture that is as obsessed with what it puts in its mouth as this one – infantile. The macaroon is only the latest nursery nourriture to grab our febrile imaginations. Who knows, if things keep on this way, Britain may well become the sort of country where the outcome of a televised baking competition becomes a matter of high social and political importance. But then that could never happen; any more than Gideon Oliver Osborne becoming prime minister.

one a fair amount of solo performing throughout my career – in fact, I started out as a stand-up comedian, and from time to time I revisit that sort of shtick, doing little gigs in the upstairs rooms of pubs. But mostly I do “shows” of one sort or another to support the publication of my books. Time was when these public readings were convened in the big chain bookstores: Waterstones, Blackwell’s and – before its demise – Borders. Audiences might be relatively small, but they had usually chipped up because they were interested in the writing; the live act was just an add-on.

But nowadays all bookshops are in freefall and the business of literary promotion has shifted to literary festivals and gigs in small theatres (if, that is, you can put bums on seats). In line with the decline of serious solitary reading, punters demand to be entertained collectively.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I have stared out into dusty velveteen darkness at the rows of upturned faces looming up at me, pale as the caps of poisonous mushroom. At these moments, just before I zing the first one-liner out into the stalls, I try to assay the mood and tenor of the crowd: are they febrile or enervated, in the mood for laughter or tears? And, more to the point, am I febrile or enervated, in the mood for tears or laughter?

Now, I hope you noticed the subtle but important reversal in the chiasmus above: for an audience, laughter is a balm and a restorative, lifting it collectively out of the rut its massed feet have worn throughout the daily go-round: for the performer, however, laughter is always an easy way of gaining acceptance. “Laugh,” as the hoary old adage has it, “and the world laughs with you.” But really this formula should also be subject to reversal; from the isolated performer’s point of view, the important thing is that if the world is laughing, and you’re laughing as well, the world will assume you’re part of it, rather than some weirdo scam-merchant trying to pull one over.

In my experience, an audience will have both a lowest and a highest common denominator of taste and discrimination. Tell a crass joke and you may undershoot an audience’s low point; but craft too artful a witticism and it may zing over their heads rather than hitting them in the eye. In either case, there will be muttering and disaffection, and they won’t even laugh at you, let alone with. Audiences naturally long to become a single psyche surging with the same emotion; and producing this state-of-minds is the desideratum for all performers – yet woe betide he who misjudges it, because then, instead of being enfolded by the group mind, he will be abandoned to die alone in the full glare of the limelight.

Even more serious an error is misplaced seriousness. Adjudge your crowd to be too high-minded and you’ll come off looking like a pretentious prat; assay viewers too basely, and they’ll think, “You patronising dipstick.” And of course, all these judgments have to be made lightning-quick, lest the mood curdle and then go emphatically off. So, the temptation – if you’re a performer – is always to pitch low rather than high, and always to aim for the funny-bone rather than the sensitive one. Nevertheless, the allure of this tactic needs to be resisted: for, though audiences may roar with delight, with each mass contraction of their diaphragms, you’re being repelled – because, in your sad eagerness to be liked, you’ve transformed yourself into just another puppet-cum-clown, jerking about on strings of low self-esteem.

I thought about all this the other evening when I went to see Stewart Lee’s new stand-up show at the Leicester Square Theatre in London. Lee is perhaps the most intelligent comedian ever to tread British boards, and the genius of his shtick consists in large part in his willingness to flout all the rules of mass psychology outlined above. Rather than trade on audiences’ basest inclinations, Lee seeks constantly to raise their game. He does this by denigrating them – and himself. On the evening I saw him, he continually told us we were too slow and stupid to get his jokes, and that we needn’t bother laughing, as he considered us of no account. At the same time, he presented a portrait of himself as a deeply insecure man, fed up with the thankless cycle of touring mid-sized venues, who feels an affinity with prostitutes because, like them: “I do something for people they desperately want, but they’ve nothing but contempt for me.”

This seemed like reverse psychology: what we were meant to feel as Lee berated us was that we were perspicacious enough to see through his act and appreciate his real message: namely, that we were sufficiently wise and witty to appreciate how wise and witty he is. But actually, Lee is a good enough actor to keep the other possibility open. In line with Papa Sigmund’s dictum, he isn’t joking at all, but hoodwinking us with his own ironic sensibility as he kvetches and badmouths in plain sight, cackling internally all the while. Now, the Venn intersection between these two, quite high audience denominators markedly reduces Lee’s likelihood of laughs. Not that this seems to bother him … Or then again, maybe it does …

Justin Welby still looks like exactly what he is: a superannuated Old Etonian oil executive from west London with a sideline in religiosity

The most important thing about Justin Portal Welby, the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, is that he’s not Rowan Williams. How we all miss Rowan Williams! The whole point of the Established Church is that its ministry is for all Britons, not just confessing Anglicans; and Dr Williams achieved this difficult task brilliantly. That he did so was, in large measure, due to his appearance: the most fanatical adherent of sharia law hearkened to his fluting emollience, because, resembling as he does a fictional wizard straight out of central casting, they assumed he was either Gandalf the Grey, or Albus Dumbledore, or possibly both.

With Dr Williams’s successor we must bear witness to a marked decline in the archiepiscopal phenotype. Far from resembling some wand-waving sorcerer, and despite all the rich caparisoning, Justin Welby still looks like exactly what he is: a superannuated Old Etonian oil executive from west London with a sideline in religiosity. His is not a bonny countenance; rather, he resembles a constipated tortoise with sunburn. Frankly, he could do with a beard – the more patriarchal the better – simply to cover up that sourpuss.

Doubtless Welby’s supporters will find such a description rude to the point of impiousness – but for those of us who live in an uncloistered world, the most significant indicators of his true nature lie first in his appearance, and second in the manner of his ordination.

Welby is one of Sandy Millar’s men. (And I say “men” advisedly.) When Welby heard the call to be ordained in the late 1980s he was initially rejected by the then bishop of Kensington, who said: “There is no place for you in the Church of England.” Prophetic words, indeed. It was Sandy Millar, one of the founders of the evangelical – indeed, charismatic – Alpha course, at Holy Trinity Brompton, in London, who came out to bat for Welby. The evangelicals must have been delighted when they got one of their own into Lambeth Palace, yet ever since he took up his crosier he’s been insidiously sticking it to them. I’m going to explain why, but first a word or two about evangelicals.

It’s disconcerting the first time it happens to you: you’re standing up in church, ready to groan your way apathetically through another fusty Victorian hymn, when instead of the moaning of a clapped-out organ, an electric guitar strikes a resounding chord and the worshipper next to you bursts into enthusiastic song. Worse is to follow: for, as she warbles, she slowly raises one arm, extends it, and begins to wave it about like a tree bough while the other arm remains rigidly at her side. Looking around you, you see that the congregation is like unto a forest: so many raised and undulant limbs are there. Yes, you have fallen among evangelicals – and if you thought ordinary Anglicans were a bit too nice then you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Purely to show open-mindedness, my wife attended an Alpha course run by one of our son’s schoolfriend’s parents, who was an evangelical minister. After a few weeks she began to seem a little – how can I put it? – spiritually pained, and when I asked her what the matter was, she said she was having something of a crisis of no faith. “It’s just that they’re so very nice,” she said, “and the God they believe in is so very nice, too. They make me feel anxious I might be upsetting Jesus by not believing in Him as well.”

Nice as he may be, Welby remains an evangelical, and evangelicals have a tricky time when it comes to homosexuality, because although not exactly fundamentalists, they nonetheless cleave strongly to the Word of the Lord, rather than chipping up to the church fête from time to time to buy a few tombola tickets. So, simply by looking into his own heart, Welby knows the situation is intractable: those homophobic Africans and redneck Americans cannot be appeased, and though he personally is opposed to gay marriage, he has said he’s “always averse to the language of exclusion when what we are called to is to love in the same way as Jesus Christ loves us”.

Welby seems to feel Jesus loves us by letting us go, because he is now making noises about a “looser relationship” between the various Anglican churches: one in which – while they all remain attached to the Church of England – the connections between them become more attenuated. Some of his evangelical chums must be swaying with anxiety rather than enthusiasm but they should rest easy; on all other important matters the archbishop is behaving in an exemplary fashion.

Not a week goes by without him making some anodyne statement or futile gesture condemning food banks (then asking people to give to them), offering refugees tokenistic accommodation in the grounds of Lambeth Palace, and generally mithering on about the scourge of poverty while giving spiritual succour to those who’re doing very nicely out of the status quo. ’Twas ever thus: our Established Church may well be for all Britons, but, in Justin Welby, we have a prelate who speaks eloquently for the … few.

‘I’d done it once before with impunity; but to go there twice smacks – as Lady Bracknell would no doubt agree – of carelessness’

Guernsey Airport is pretty weird; but then, so is the rest of the island. I was standing in the queue on the stairs leading up to my Gatwick-bound flight, when the young man in front of me – a player for the Guernsey Tigers, according to the patch on his navy tracksuit – jerked his thumb up at the fuselage and exclaimed, “Now that’s what I call a proper plane.” I guffawed, then explained myself: “I certainly hope it’s a proper plane, or else we’re all fucking dead!”

Yes: dead in the waters around Sark, where apparently the piffling politics of this picayune place have been poisonous since the Barclay brothers pulled their investment out of the local economy; or perhaps plummeting from the skies over nearby Brecqhou, the weirdo twins’ own fiefdom – but either way, brown bread, duck food. Dead.

As the plane taxied and turned, I saw the runway rolled out before us, an undulant grey tarmac wave, swooping into and out of a substantial dip. It had been folly to come to Guernsey, I thought – and now I would pay for it with my life. True, there’s nothing wrong with visiting the thinking man’s Jersey once: I’d done it once before with impunity; but to go there twice smacks – as Lady Bracknell would no doubt agree – of carelessness.

The first time I visited it was because of a series I was writing for the aptly named British Airways in-flight magazine High Life. (Aptly, because long ago it used to be said that some BA employees were monged out of their brains on major psychotropics.) The conceit was this: I’d board an early-morning flight from London to some remote location in the British Isles, take a long walk, then return to the metropolis in the evening, thereby demonstrating the perfect fit between their domestic flight schedule and our sceptred isle. It was a crap idea, of course, representing a new nadir when it comes to environmental insensitivity; moreover, by combining two flights and a country walk in a single day, I managed to ruin all of these experiences.

Still, as fly-to-walk outings go, Guernsey had been one of the better ones. I’d arrived on a sunny day, strolled along the southern coast marvelling at the multi-storey gun emplacements that the Second World War German occupiers had built, then turned back towards the dippy airport. I don’t remember talking to a soul all day, which was something of an achievement, given that the island’s population density is 844 of the buggers per square kilometre.

This time it had been different: a nice young man called John met me at the airport and we walked together into the main settlement of St Peter Port. John was born in Guernsey, and despite having tasted the fleshpots of Portsmouth while he was away at university, he had returned to make his life on the island – which was fair enough, although he seemed a little bemused when I asked him if he knew a way of avoiding the main road.

Really, to live all your life on a fly-speck of land a mere five by three miles and not know such a thing defies reason – until, that is, you stop thinking about Guernsey as a physical fact and start considering its human reality. The only island I have ever lived on (besides the sceptred one) is Rousay in Orkney; it is roughly the same size as Guernsey, but there the resemblance ends: Rousay’s population is around 200 rather than 65,000, and the island thoroughfares are so unused that nobody has to pay road tax.

John’s car was parked up at the airport – but on a sunny Saturday morning everyone else had decided to go for a cruise. Car ownership on Guernsey in fact exceeds one per capita, and although no one can actually drive two cars at once, the second you step on to any of the main island routes it feels as if they’re doing just that, such is the density of potentially death-dealing metal. That the speed limit is a mere 30mph throughout the island makes the vast amount of car-flesh on display still more disturbing. Contemplating these cavalcades of tax-dodgers in their dodgems was more than I could bear.

Luckily, I didn’t have to: John led me down a lane into a bosky realm of miniature flowery dells and sidelong views of crystal waters lapping against rocky cliffs. Bees bombinated, butterflies flitted, and we didn’t meet a soul for an hour, besides a rather patrician-looking gent in a fleece who John told me was one of the island’s superstar investment gurus. True, we had to take a bus the last mile in order to avoid swimming in the traffic stream – but if I squinted a little I could still imagine I was in some desert place. And I kept up the pretence the rest of the day, despite the crowds milling around St Peter Port.

John accompanied me on foot back to the weird airport, I checked in, went through security. And there I am: forever waiting to leave Guernsey – just like its 65,000 inhabitants, who, despite their mobility and their wealth, still can’t take it with them.

Yup, you read me right: one of the “names” the Kellogg’s website actually suggested that punters might like to personalise their free cutlery with was . . . Butt Munch.

There was, for a while, a certain amount of tension; then it faded, as tension does. We’re all experimental animals, really, subject to vivisection by means of a scientific method we ourselves promulgate. The electric plate is charged, we yelp and try to struggle over the wall – but once we realise our struggles are futile we collapse, and lie whimpering as we’re subjected to shock after shock.

We collected the tokens assiduously, even though it entailed visiting several corner shops, often late at night, and rummaging through dusty shelves under the sleepy lenses of duff CCTV cameras. Why? Because such is the parsimony of the mighty Kellogg Corporation that it can afford to be capricious: an offer will be proffered – then, without warning, the free-gift-bearing hand will be retracted, as if it, too, has been subjected to an electric shock.

Anyway, at last we had the three tokens required and we sat down in front of the computer and logged on to the mandated site. I wrote in this column in May that my 13-year-old son and I had leapt at the Kellogg’s “personalised spoon” offer, our only desire to have a spoon engraved with the legend “WHICH ORIFICE? YOUR CHOICE”. But when we saw the options on offer we were dismayed; “personalising” turned out to mean branding your name on the eating iron, not using its steely surface as a sort of miniature toilet wall on to which you could graffito such off-colour remarks. We scrolled through the names on offer, hoping against hope we would find something that approached the sentiment we wished to convey – and then, miracle of miracles, there it was: Butt Munch.

Yup, you read me right: one of the “names” the Kellogg’s website actually suggested that punters might like to personalise their free cutlery with was . . . Butt Munch. My boy and I goggled at the screen until the pixels began to pop, crackle and snap before our eyes. Who in the mighty Kellogg Corporation had authorised this bizarrely subversive insertion, in between all the Keishas, Kellies and Kevins? We goggled at the screen some more, half expecting the letters to waver and dissolve into a sweet and milky sludge. Not a bit of it: Butt Munch remained on the table. So we selected it, entered our postal address, clicked the button, sat back, and waited.

And waited . . . and attended some more. My son was of the opinion that the Butt Munch was the work of computer hackers. After all, it was simply beyond belief that Kellogg’s, with its ethical roots sunk deep in the socially conservative soil of Seventh-Day Adventism, could sanction the idea of people munching on butts – let alone actively promote it. You’ll recall that even the tolerant and sexually adventurous Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, when awakened by her husband indulging in a little late-night butt-munching, is rather . . . shocked. It’s one thing for fictional characters to practise butt-munching in the privacy of their own home – quite another for breakfast cereal consumers to have such perversions urged on them from the handles of their spoons. Besides, Kellogg’s has its dietetic reputation to uphold. Seventh-Day Adventists are much preoccupied by the health of the “whole person”, and the company was established in part to disseminate notions of healthy eating. Now, even though butt-munching isn’t necessarily unhealthy, nor is it holistic: for that, you have to munch the “whole person”.

As we continued to wait for our subversive spoon – May ladled into June – still it didn’t come. I never thought it would, because whether the “Butt Munch” option was deliberately offered by a maverick employee, or maliciously by an infantile nerd wearing a V for Vendetta mask, there was no way several Kellogg’s staff were going to collude in making and despatching it. I set to one side the vision that had originally animated our quest: my descendants, many years in the future, staring bemusedly at the faint inscription on their inherited cutlery. I got on with my life – it was a disappointment, true, but no more of one than realising Ronald McDonald isn’t a really funny clown but a cynical advertising tool. I went to Australia and travelled deep into the Outback, visiting remote regions where few proper spoons, let alone personalised ones, are ever seen, and the sparse local population has to eat its Rice Bubbles with cumbersome, makeshift tools beaten out of bits of corrugated iron.

Then, upon my return, there it was! A visitation! A miracle! A beautiful red cardboard box with a transparent cellophane panel in it, through which could be seen the slim, shiny handle of a spoon – and on this handle the delightfully suggestive appellation “Butt Munch”. The packaging alone was a provocation to lust, resembling as it did silky, translucent lingerie. Soon enough I’d torn it off and was feverishly caressing my new spoon.

I grew still more fervid when I turned the insurrectionary implement over and saw “Kellogg’s®” engraved on the back of the handle. So there they are: a puerile invocation to sexual activity and a multinational snack-maker, united for ever in a spoon. What a joy it is to be alive in Jeremy Corbyn’s Britain.

The atmosphere in the Red Ochre Grill is distinctly chilly – not exactly what you would expect in the middle of a desert. There was an early-bird discount of 20 per cent for guests of the attached hotel, if you booked before 6pm for a table before 7pm; but we screwed up by 15 minutes and the maître d’ was emphatic: we’d have to pay full whack. Now I’ve been sitting over the remains of my kangaroo and macadamia salad for a full half-hour, waiting to pay the inflated bill, and my temperature has been plummeting the while. There’s nothing more real than this sort of tourist gouging – and Alice Springs is a tourist town, among other things. A tourist town serviced by tourists: mostly backpackers, most of whom in turn are from Britain.

Last night in Casa Nostra, a Calabrian restaurant sited on the parched banks of the Todd river (it flows about once in an average lifetime), we were served by a nice young man from Aberdeen, and the many miles between the Grey City and the Red Centre were eliminated by his opening remark: “I read something you wrote recently about Scots independence. I myself am not in favour.” Then this morning, at a café in the mall, he popped up again – working a second job, this time with his Edinburghian girlfriend, so they can gather a sufficient sum to keep on truckin’.

All down the Stuart Highway (known colloquially as “The Track”) from Darwin, we’ve been waited on by young folk from East Grinstead and Letterkenny, Dewsbury and Great Malvern. They come on working visas, not available to the nationals of countries that aren’t either historic (Britain) or contemporary (United States) overlords of Australia, and work these jobs out in the back of Bourke, where young Australians are loath to go. To the backpackers the Outback is a mythic realm suffused with wonder, presided over by an ancient people steeped in sorcery who are also wizard at graphic arts – but to most young Australians it’s too much of nothing, while their largely deracinated and welfare-dependent Aboriginal fellow citizens are a source of perplexity, shame and ignorance.

All this is running through my mind as I ask the waitress where she’s from. “Israel,” she replies.

“Ah,” I say, “I didn’t know you could get a working visa for Australia on an Israeli passport.”

“You can’t,” she says, “but my parents are American and I also have a US passport.” Of course it’s not this young woman’s fault in any way, but there is still something slightly nauseating about this: the Americans have a spy base outside Alice, called Pine Gap. So it is that geostrategic “considerations” and neoliberal “economics” vibrate through the rudaceous rocks of the MacDonnell Ranges as our elders sing up a nightmarish dreamtime.

“Ah, well,” I say, “you must be used to desert country, then.”

“Ye-es,” the Israeli waitress bridles a little, “but Israel isn’t as desert as here.”

One of the many great things about Australia – where I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years, my first sojourn being on a working visa exactly like the waitress’s – is a genuine, if slightly abrasive egalitarianism: the original Digger mentality of mateship suffuses even the 21st-century globalised food industry, such that tipping is frowned on as shameless evidence of a de haut en bas attitude. These young folk are being paid adequately by the establishment, but that’s the problem: they have no incentive to get the tucker to the table quickly, and they aren’t trained. Thus my long wait for the undiscounted bill has become tangled up in my mind with all the world’s woes, and I snap back: “I’ll thank you not to lecture me on geography, young lady. Your state has been snaffling up deserts throughout my lifetime, beginning with the Sinai. Granted, its most recent acquisitions have been relatively piecemeal ones on the West Bank of the Jordan, and only semi-arid, but still . . .”

Later on, my eldest takes me to task for this solecism, bringing the misfortunes of the Middle East into the heart of the great southern continent, but I am unrepentant. True, the parallels aren’t exact, but both Israel/Palestine and Australia are polities that have pursued the old colonialist agenda under modern dispensations; both are states in which there’s a grotesque disparity between the conditions in which the indigenous people survive and those that the expropriating incomers enjoy. The Red Ochre Grill, with its pseudo-gourmet dishes confected out of “native” ingredients (emu, kangaroo and camel meat mostly), is a perfect instance of this phenomenon, a sort of gustatory colonialism, if you will.

Outback of the restaurant, in the sandy slough of the Todd river’s bed, the “Long Grass people” – Aboriginals bushed by the grog – stand in for benighted Palestinians. The rates of alcoholism among them are eclipsed only by those of diabetes. An old Australian friend in Darwin put it to me thus: “As you drive south to the Alice you’re travelling along a broad highway of renal failure.”

True, from time out of mind all sorts of holidays have been taken in other people’s misery. Yet there is something particularly queasy about whites working away in the well-appointed restaurant while, out in the darkness, welfare-dependent blacks are killing themselves with Coca-Cola.

A friend of a friend comes by to pick up some fags I’ve obtained for him – Gauloises filters. Global markets being what they are, you can buy cocaine (DOC Colombia) and heroin (DOC Afghanistan) on the street corners of almost any British city, but when it comes to child-murdering nicotine, certain varieties are tightly contrôlés, in particular those whose denominated origin is that faraway land of which we know so little: France. I picked up a carton for him at La Cave au Tabac by the Gare du Nord in Paris, because his normal supply line was being disrupted by “hordes” of migrants and asylum-seekers trying to board lorries and trains bound for the Channel Tunnel.

The one time I took a trip to Booze Alley, the strip of hypermarkets outside Calais where Brits stock up on cheap(er) plonk and snout, I made a side-excursion to the bidonville that had sprung up beyond the razor-wire-topped fences surrounding the Tunnel infrastructure. This would have been at least a decade ago and the migrants were only (!) in the hundreds, yet the situation was already accorded a national disgrace – the problem being to identify which nation’s face should have been empurpled by embarrassment. Now the benighted are in their thousands, yet Hollande, Cameron et al continue to kick the political football back and forth across the Channel with an ease envied by all those who – from committed smokers and long-distance hauliers to the shanty-dwellers themselves – are suffering from new restriction on their movements.

The late Paul Fussell was that rare thing: a literary critic who’d also been a professional soldier. In his marvellous book The Great War and Modern Memory, he advances the theory that the first few months of the First World War represented an ironic reversal of unprecedented sharpness – more like an ironic handbrake-turn, in fact. In August 1914 the troops marched off to victory, gaily caparisoned, flutes a-tootling, drums a-thrumming, and within months they were bogged down in the hell-hole of the trenches. For Fussell, this was the wellspring from which the blackly absurdist bile of Beckett in due course bubbled, but I wonder: isn’t the current impasse de Calais of a similar ironic cast? In August, when London and Paris feel crumpled and vacuous, so much of the population having been squeezed out of them, one becomes conscious of the great migratory flows of the lesser-spotted bourgeoisie. They all head off gaily caparisoned, iPhones a-tootling, stomachs a-rumbling for French grub; meanwhile, the Syrians and the Sudanese, the Libyans and the Baluchis are trapped in the hell-hole of a shanty town that can be seen clearly through the tinted windows of your southbound SUV.

What can we do to help the poor migrants? The answer is: we’re doing all we can by taking our holidays as near to their immiserated homelands as we dare, in the hope that some of our safe and prudent sterling will seep sideways into their economies. We’re doing all we can by descending on retail opportunities in our hordes, because, savvy types that we are, we know things will only get better once they are bought in larger quantities. There’s a JG Ballard story in which all the northern European holidaymakers basking on Mediterranean beaches are simultaneously informed that their services are no longer required at home, but nor can they return. Happily, if fantastically, the exiled hedonists form themselves into a new nation, whose territory is enormously elongated but only a few sunlounger-lengths deep.

Perhaps the solution to the migrant crisis is of a similar order. Rather than attempting to discourage others from following them by treating those already here like shit, the government should strip our most egregious vacationers of their citizenship, starting with Labour MPs hanging out in honey-coloured Tuscan villas. The many central London properties left vacant can be easily adapted to act as hostels for the incomers; one well-appointed study could be easily partitioned to house, say, 40 or 50 Eritreans. I know this seems harsh, but you have to consider the facts: at this point in the political calendar, apart from working tirelessly to have themselves elected as leader or deputy leader, most Labour MPs are woefully economically unproductive, and many of them are ageing. Some, such as Chukka Umunna, wouldn’t even make the effort to campaign. By contrast, the Calais migrants have a proven record of initiative, daring and hard work. They are youthful, determined and – contra right-wing slurs – passionately committed to the free market.

I don’t mean to suggest it’s Labour MPs alone who should be swapped for migrants; I’ll happily declare Tories, Scots Nats and entire marauding phalanxes of Pilates instructors stateless as well. As for those hauliers parked up on the M20, they can stay put – there’s far too much heavy-goods traffic on British roads; forcing them to settle in their thousands actually on the motorway will kill thousands of birds with a little bit of gravel. As for my mate’s mate, we didn’t develop this sophisticated transport infrastructure just so he could buy cheap fags; so I suggest we do away with it altogether. He can buy his Gauloises filters from the hauliers, who undoubtedly have whole container-loads of them – certainly sufficient, given the epidemiology of lung cancer, arterial sclerosis and respiratory disease, to last him the residuum of his life.

‘Instead of checking their privilege, these .99-calibre twerps are more likely to check their wing mirror and overtake at speed, chortling all the while.’

During the Kosovo crisis in the late 1990s, the sight of Tony Blair’s snake hips, cinched by the waistband of his black Levi’s 501s and wiggling their way between displaced Kosovans, impacted on me in much the way the ordinance dropped by USAF bombers did Slobodan Milosevic. He was forced out of office: I dropped my trousers. Up until that point, I had considered black jeans a reasonable bridge between the dandiacal excesses of my youth and the soberer sartorial realities of middle age, but Blair eradicated my false consciousness. Indeed, looking back, I am hard-pressed to think of any more significant “legacy” of the Blair years than this: from that day on I’ve been unable to contemplate such strides without nausea and uncontrollable shivering.

Perhaps only Jeremy Clarkson has had a comparable effect on my wardrobe. I say “Clarkson”, but of course I really mean the trinity of Clarkson, Richard “Hamster” Hammond and James May. Between them, the three erstwhile Top Gear presenters embody the worst a middle-aged man can get: flowery-patterned shirts worn either loose and smock-like or tucked into jeans; an orphaned suit jacket or skimpy “bomber”; sensible Cornish pasty shoes or daft ankle boots. It has been said in the press that Clarkson’s adoption of denim as a second skin (including on occasion the hideous “double-denim” solecism) has single-handedly brought the fabric into disrepute.

I’m sure I’ll never wear black jeans again, but I have continued to affect the blue variety. I have also gone on driving cars although I haven’t actually owned one for almost a decade. I don’t live in the Cotswolds, nor am I a multimillionaire; and while I may have the occasional meltdown, I like to think I behave in an open-hearted and egalitarian way towards people I work with, regardless of their status or seniority. As for the weird racist dog-whistle Clarkson has blown repeatedly over the years, well, words fail me: this behaviour is so unbelievably crass and revolting, it calls into question all our assumptions about what it is to be a Briton in the 21st century.

I say “a Briton”, but what I mean is that moiety of modern Britons who find in Clarkson, whether willingly or with revulsion, aspects of ourselves writ large. Very large. Yes, I mean it: Jeremy Clarkson, like it or not, is the archetypal middle-aged, middle-class, white British man: the John Bull de nos jours; and his success as a journalist and TV presenter is almost wholly a function of this capacity he has to personify a great, indigo-legged mass of privileged pricks, many of whom labour under the delusion, as Clarkson does, that they’re an embattled minority. Instead of checking their privilege, these .99-calibre twerps are more likely to check their wing mirror and overtake at speed, chortling all the while.

In our fervid nightmares, Clarkson is the Little Englander who smirks at us from behind his vast leylandii hedge; the sexist pest who seems to think your name is either “darling” or “love”; the saloon-bar bore trumpeting “Land of Hope and Glory” with nary a care for those who always, always will be slaves. Together with Nigel Farage and Richard Littlejohn, Clarkson forms a triumvirate of British bullocks who seem always to have reigned over us. But where Clarkson differs from Farage and Littlejohn is that he’s both a lot smarter and, I suspect, rather more handy. I once did a radio programme with Littlejohn and when things inevitably grew heated, the sad skinny bigot began quivering with fear lest I give him a clump. As for Farage, having laboured through his political memoir The Purple Revolution (don’t worry, I was paid), I can assure you: what you see is indeed what those around him also get.

But Clarkson’s newspaper columns are invariably witty and well written: back in the 1990s my wife used to edit him, and she reports that he was a delight to work with: always filing on time, his copy letter-perfect. Moreover, on screen his blokeish persona is, gulp, distinctly engaging. Even I have been known to watch the occasional episode of Top Gear, despite not giving a tinker’s fart about whether one car is “better” than another. It would be nice to imagine that Clarkson’s petrol-filled head is sloshing with suppressed homosexuality, which is often the case with men who prefer the company of their own, but I fear this isn’t the case. Nor can we comfort ourselves by imagining him to be deluded, suffering from a denim false consciousness akin to my own. No, Clarkson is comfortable in his skin, comfortable in his arrogant bellicosity, comfortable in stinking up the atmosphere with his self-promotional hot air, and most of all he’s intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich so long as those people are him, May and Hammond.

Was anyone surprised when they clicked on the Amazon icon and saw the Three Whizzing Men swim into being? I wasn’t: after all, they’ve driven cars in some of the most exotic and inhospitable environments on earth. After that, the cruise up the broad brown concourse of Jeff Bezos’s back passage was always going to be (as Clarkson might well put it) a doddle.

To celebrate the new car show by Clarkson, Hammond and May on Amazon Prime, Will Self has uploaded the first episode of his own new car show, “Bottom Gear”, to YouTube.