“From a distance we must, I think, resemble a particularly duff channel ident for BBC1 – this slow-revolving blur of sluggish human animals”

We are practising mindful walking on the shore of Holy Isle: a group of 30 or so, mostly in our fifties and sixties, we have formed a large and ragged circle. “Lift, raise, lower, touch,” our leader instructs us; and so we do, foot after foot planted on the sheep-shot-bedizened turf where the person in front has just lifted hers. From a distance we must, I think, resemble a particularly duff channel ident for BBC1 – this slow-revolving blur of sluggish human animals. And we are being viewed from a distance: a side-wheel paddle steamer of antique vintage is sailing down the sound between Holy Isle and Arran; there are passengers on deck waving and shouting at us, but we pay them no attention at all, being mindful only of lift, raise, lower and touch – an interior communion between body and locale.

Not many people realise how strong Buddhism is in Scotland today, or that arguably the reason for this is topographic as much as spiritual. Refugee Tibetan lamas were invited to a Buddhist centre that had been started in a house near Eskdalemuir in Dumfries and Galloway in the mid-Sixties. Over the years they transformed Johnstone House into a thriving community and study centre; pupils have included such cultural luminaries as David Bowie and Leonard Cohen. A cynic might suggest that the affinity the Scots have for Buddhism is born of negative character traits: full of anger and deeply sexually repressed, they are obviously ripe for a credo that makes pacifism mandatory and abnegates fleshly desire. A more charitable view is that the connection between Tibet and Scotland was cemented through northern India.

Exiled in 1959 after the Chinese invasion, many Tibetan Buddhist clergy fled initially to Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, where they found a landscape not dissimilar from their own lost horizons – a hilly one of ­coniferous woodland, rhododendrons and isolated tarns. No wonder the lamas who got as far as Scotland felt right at home, inasmuch as any being who has transcended the bounds of earthly existence can feel at home anywhere. (Or possibly this is the whole point: they feel at home anywhere.)

The Samye Ling Monastery in the Borders (ling means “place” in Tibetan) established this outlier community on Holy Isle in the early Nineties, opening their Peace Centre in 2003. Their aim is to make Holy Isle into Europe’s biggest spiritual sanctuary, and to that end they have become enthusiastic curators of the island’s biodiversity. The Peace Centre occupies an old farmhouse, the orchard and gardens of which have been fully renovated and planted with native species; the old stone dykes have been repaired and the community’s water comes from natural springs; electric power is drawn in part from the sun; sewage is disposed of through a natural reed-bed filtration system. All visitors to the island are asked to follow the Five Golden Rules of Buddhism, one of which is to refrain from taking any life.

So it is that herds of wild Saanen goats and ancient Soay sheep remain running wild on Holy Isle while they’ve disappeared from Arran just across the sound. True, no one has morally instructed the Eriskay ponies – a herd of which is also in residence – and during my stay I heard dark mutterings about the corpses of males forced off the cliffs on the uninhabited west side of the island during very un-Buddhistic battles over mating rights. Still, the lack of wanton human predation is palpable as soon as you arrive on the Island: oystercatchers nest on the rocky foreshore and swifts flit over the bracken – up in the skies the upthrust wings of peregrines can be seen turning and turning in a widening gyre over the peak of Mullach Mor (“Big Top”), the 313-metre ­summit of the three-kilometre-long island.

I expect regular readers know I’m not the sort of fellow easily swayed by the irenic – but I have to say Holy Isle soothed my troubled psyche more than anywhere I have been in recent years. The sheer profusion of life in the gardens and open spaces around the Peace Centre banished all gnawing anxieties about ageing and death; the meditation practice ensured that I stayed resolutely in the here and now, rather than drifting away to either that “other country”, the past, or another island that is yet to erupt volcanically from the turbid present: the future. Should I have been surprised by this? After all, Holy Isle has been so called for a very long time – in the 7th century it was home to Saint Molaise, who meditated in a well-appointed cave halfway along the eastern coast. Thus the Celtic Christian tradition of isolated anchorites has mutated organically into the modern Buddhist way, because the Peace Centre has its own outlier cohort of monks and nuns who undertake long, silent retreats in sequestrated cells.

I was so chilled that I didn’t recover myself until I was chugging along on the train from Ardrossan Harbour back to Glasgow Central. I was sharing the compartment with a middle-aged Scots Buddhist nun whom I’d seen wandering about Holy Isle looking very striking, what with her slaphead and her dark orange robes. To begin with, we sat in contemplative silence – but soon enough we began arguing (albeit gently) about independence.

It is a cliche much beloved of the ­British that all things American are bigger. Of course this gee-whizzery doesn’t apply to every standardised object, and ever since the oil crisis of the 1970s there have been plenty of dinky little hatchbacks on US roads. Even so, there are occasions when even I – a demi-American – am stunned by its embrace of the gargantuan. One such occurred last summer, when Family Self arrived in Los Angeles. I had reserved a standard rental car, but as we waited, bleary-eyed, in the Alamo queue, I reflected on the huge amount of freeway driving I’d be doing and thought, sod it … when in Rome … so I requested an upgrade to an SUV.

“Will that be a standard SUV?” the Alamo woman asked. I concurred, and five minutes later the biggest thing I’d ever seen on wheels not transporting a Saturn V rocket was driven on to the lot.

Observing my amazement, the Alamo woman said, “It’s a Chevy Suburban. They’re real popular.”

“Suburban!” I expostulated. “That thing’s big enough to contain an entire suburb!” Needless to say, I sent it back. (Either that or, given the Chevy Suburban’s enormous mass, it could be we managed to achieve the velocity necessary to escape its surly gravity.) Anyway, this incident gave me cause to reflect once more on the plague of vast private vehicles now afflicting our cities. Not so long ago, even in LA, I wouldn’t have dreamed of driving an SUV (or four-wheel drive, as they’re confusingly called on this side of the Atlantic water feature); I passionately concurred with the view that these hypertrophied hunks of death metal were the dernier cri of a civilisation choking on its own tailpipe.

Don’t you remember how they were nicknamed “Chelsea tractors” and their headscarved and gilet-wearing, yummy-mummy drivers were excoriated as pluto­cratic planet-despoilers? The grim joke was that the only reason they were driving these behemoths was so little Barnaby and Charlotte wouldn’t be jolted by the newly introduced speed bumps. I recall quite continent pundits arguing like the crustiest ecowarriors that right-thinking folk should feel no compunction about running an ignition key along the glossy flanks of these big beasts in an effort to drive them from our tarmac pastures.

A decade on, no one so much as raises an eyebrow when they see a Humvee inching its way into a city-centre parking place – while we share our twisting and ancient thoroughfares with a bewildering array of VW Touaregs, Porsche Cayennes and Volvo XC90s. Indeed, no major car marque is now without its model engorgement, and the British, who usually are among the highest spenders on car flesh worldwide, have embraced them enthusiastically.

Embraced in particular the model that’s the grandaddy of them all: the Land Rover. Once upon a time, a Land Rover was a mud-caked, boxy object full of threadbare Barbour jackets, spittle-streaked collies and rolls of wire fencing, to be found only securely off-road. That all began changing with the launch of the Range Rover in 1970; since then, and throughout many iterations, the Range Rover has transmogrified into a vehicle that resembles nothing so much as the gun wagon of a Mexican cocaine cartel. I see them round my way all the time: severe militaristic body; matt-black paint job; tinted black windows; black wire mesh over head- and tail lights; bonnet slightly humped like the nacelles of an aircraft; carburettor intake like the steely gills of a predatory shark. The overall impression conveyed is one of extreme menace and imminent danger.

Which is why I never cease to be flummoxed when, upon squinting through their glass darkly, I see dear little kiddies in their car seats, and perfectly ordinary-looking mummies driving them to school. There are all sorts of ways we externalise the anxieties we are prey to yet can’t accept: we starve and scratch and medicate and exercise obsessively; we booze and fornicate and gamble and count the cracks in the pavement to ward off the bears – but surely these suburban armoured personnel carriers are the strangest reification of our fears there has ever been. Or, rather, the strangest reification of the terrors we inflict on others.

Because when I said they resembled gangsters’ wheels, I wasn’t being strictly accurate; what they actually look like are Special Forces vehicles that have been adapted for nefarious civilian use. Yes, their most obvious design affinity is with Predator drones or stealth fighters, and if the average Iraqi or Afghan were to see one come cruising down their way they’d probably leap for cover.

What crazed and febrile people we are! Like the biblical Nebuchadnezzar, we reduce other nations to dungheaps – but then, terrified by our own deathly potency, we pop out to the shops in cars suitable for a war zone. I doubt the average Range Rover Evoque owner would admit to this (not without a little gentle waterboarding, that is), but at least there’s one True Brit who is prepared to speak his truth. As Jeremy Clarkson is on record as saying that the Range Rover TDV8 Vogue is “the best car in the world”, we can only conclude that it’s the best car for menacing those folk Clarkson has a proven antipathy to. People who – for instance – have the wrong sort of paint job, and who are woefully underpowered.

“What used to freak me out about the repasts they prepared was their meaty mimicry: bean burgers, nut roasts and – worst of all – pizzas decorated with roundels of aubergine cut and cooked to resemble slices of pepperoni.”

I have become a vegetarian – inadvertently. Here’s what happened: I went away last weekend to stay with people who eat not the flesh of the kine, so from Friday to Monday neither did I. Then on Monday I came down with a severe stomach bug, so although I haven’t eaten any meat for the rest of the week, nor have I eaten much of anything else either. Granted, this sort of vegetarianism by reason of necessity hardly counts: at least not if you believe that such a diet should be ethically enjoined. It has occurred to me over the past four days that I’ve had some sort of pacific revenge inflicted on me, my herbivorous hosts having detected – although I never said anything – that my belief in their lifestyle choice was less than wholehearted. “Why not,” I imagine them saying to each other, “give the rotten old carnivore a bad case of the trots with a dodgy mushroom? That’ll teach him to ridicule us.”

But I didn’t! I didn’t ridicule you! Don’t you remember? I snaffled up the nasturtiums and the polenta and the cracked wheat and the quinoa as if it were all going out of style. I earnestly engaged with the whys and wherefores of gut flora . . . I helped shell the peas, for Christ’s sake! Actually, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned the C-word, because in my experience ethical vegetarians are seldom Christian; which is understandable, as the central ceremony of this religion involves either symbolic or actual cannibalism. Anyway, now I’ve become a vegetarian I think I’m free to say what the hell I like about the practice, much in the manner Jews are allowed to crack anti-Semitic jokes (a privilege I frequently avail myself of) and black people to say nigger.

I remember in the early Eighties sharing a house with a bunch of fellow students, most of whom were of the herbal persuasion. What used to freak me out about the repasts they prepared was their meaty mimicry: bean burgers, nut roasts and – worst of all – pizzas decorated with roundels of aubergine cut and cooked to resemble slices of pepperoni. There are many disappointments in life, and things are often not what they seem, but to bite into a pizza and get a mouthful of roasted aubergine is enough ironic reversal for any one lifetime. Naturally, I used to debate with these veggies; haven’t we all? It’s a never-ending topic, one calculated to rise on a methane-rich afflatus at any mixed gathering of ham-heads and Brussels sprouts brains.

If the contention is that our present methods of meat production are a disgusting abuse of our fellow creatures, you’d have to be a purblind idiot not to concur. If the contention, further, is that these methods are not environmentally sustainable, and that if we wish to feed a world population which (contra all neoliberal Panglosses) continues to rise, universal vegetarianism is the only workable option, then I say: “Fine! Right!” Because we’ve done brilliantly with encouraging sustainability in all other areas of consumption, now haven’t we? And people are so less greedy when it comes to food than, say, fossil fuels, aren’t they? No, no, such dreams of a brave new meat-free future are just that: dreams. Equally dreamy are those influenced by eastern mysticism who imagine we are entirely what we eat, so that a human species full of arugula would, of necessity, be altruistic. To them there is, was and always will be a one-word riposte – Hitler.

But we mustn’t caricature vegetarians (of whom, I think I may have mentioned, I am one). For the most part the perspicacious muesli-munchers I know accept that human beings are omnivorous garbage-heads by nature. One of the best ways to understand who we are, in fact, is to imagine what it would be like if rats were the apex predators. They also accept that in our hunting and gathering past we evolved a complex belief system that honoured rather than despoiled the ecosystems on which we depended. Indeed, the fashion for organic and free-range meat attempts to replicate this belief system within the context of market capitalism. How many times have you read a screed of this form on a packet of dry-cured Wiltshire bacon: “At Sunnybrook Farm our piglets all have names and their own comfy room, and receive a prep-school education before, aged three, being flown club class to Zurich for assisted suicide. We believe this gives their meat a special flavour of reverence. We enjoy it, and hope you will, too.”

And yes, the bacon brought in at Sunny­brook Farm is tasty – but it will never be tasty enough to mask the evil taint of all those de-beaked and de-clawed chickens pumped full of antibiotics, or the veal calves kept penned up in the dark until the poleaxe falls. No, the only possible course for the ethical meat-eater is to accept that our diet, in common with so many other of our lifestyle choices, is a matter of what we feel comfortable with, and to leave it at that. My brother became a vegetarian when he set up a company producing high-end dog food. He told me he was so revolted by visiting abattoirs that he threw away his steak knives. That he continues to manufacture dog food in increasing quantities is a ­testimony to his utter irrationality – and to ours.

I was talking to a small crowd of doctors a while back and came out with one of my favourite headlines from the US satirical magazine the Onion, which reads: “World death rate holding steady at 100 per cent”. Most of the medics dutifully chuckled at this evidence of their own lack of omnipotence – but one of them objected. “Strictly speaking, that isn’t true,” said the stethoscope-toting pedant. “Given that all the people currently alive constitute half of those who have ever lived, we can only confidently assert that the death rate is 50 per cent.”

I thought about this the other day because, walking into the 3Arena in Dublin, I came upon a sizeable cohort of these potential immortals, and I have to say they weren’t in terrific shape. Making our way to our seats, we had to ask several of them to stand and I’m afraid they made pretty heavy weather of it: palsied hands clutched canes and ineffectually gripped seat backs, jowls twitched with the effort, and at least one pair of bifocals clattered to the floor. Meanwhile, on stage, Messrs Daltrey and Townshend belted out the line that more than any other in recent memory has come to exemplify shutting the stable door after the valetudinarian nag has bolted: “I hope I die before I get old.”

Yes, we were at the Arena for one of the gigs on the Who’s 50th-anniversary tour, and while the old boys on stage seemed pretty spry, their fans were … Well, frankly, we’re getting on a bit, and many of us share at least some of Tommy’s disabilities – although, unlike the deaf, blind and dumb kid, we’re no longer capable of playing a mean pinball. For us baby boomers, whose culture of aggressive juvenescence came to dominate the burgeoning global population over the past half-century, the spectacle of an aged crowd is deranging to the point of … well, dementia. And it would have been deranging at any previous point in history, given those damned statistics.

To Daltrey’s and Townshend’s credit, they neither tried to avoid the reality of the situation nor made too much of it. The stage backdrop was – as is so often the case at gigs nowadays – an enormous screen, and throughout the set images were projected on to it of the lads when they were indeed lads.

The impression was that they were jamming with their younger selves: one confirmed by the presence on drums of Ringo’s boy Zak Starkey. (At least superficially; the intergenerational shtick doesn’t quite hold up when you realise that Zak himself is about to turn 50 and could theoretically be the grandfather of the skinny young pill-popping mods in the videos.) I must confess that, some time before I reached my own half-century, amplified electric music became an anathema to me and I began hanging out at the Wigmore Hall instead of the Wembley Arena.

The great advantage of rocking out to the Schubert Ensemble, or getting your rocks off over Matthias Goerne singing Schumann’s Dichterliebe, is that even if you’re a year or two older than Ringo’s boy you’ll still feel refreshingly youthful compared with the rest of the audience. Actually, I felt refreshingly youthful compared with the Who’s audience as well, but while they were equipped with hearing aids, I had opted for earplugs. These made the experience seem a little muffled – as if my ears had been tucked firmly into a tartan rug – but I could still see all the horrors going on around me: the bingo wings flapping in time, the myriad chins wagging like metronomes, the liver spots caught in the spotlights, and the grey hairs being whipped into a blur synchronous with Townshend’s wildly revolving arm as he crashed out the chords.

When I reflected on the gig later, it occurred to me that the only possible summation would be a paraphrase of Dr Johnson’s infamous remarks about female preachers, which is to say, I was amazed not so much by the Who playing well, as that they were capable of playing at all. The two surviving members of the original line-up are septuagenarians, and come September it will have been 37 years since Keith Moon popped his clogs. At 53, I barely have the stamina to sit still listening to the band – but these Freedom Pass-holders were belting it out like there was no tomorrow. (Which indeed, given the Who’s demographics, might well be the case.) True, Daltrey’s corybantic excesses have been somewhat curtailed along the darkening passage of time: at one point, in lieu of dancing, he did a little jog around the stage, as if to demonstrate there was life in the old dog yet.

But of course scenes such as this are only likely to become more common as humanity “advances” towards mass senescence. The median age in Britain hit 40 this year, which means the archetypal Briton is one among a vast crowd of middle-aged folk. It remains to be seen what the consequences of this will be for our collective behaviour. Arguably, an older crowd is a less febrile and suggestible one. Moreover, it’s difficult to stampede when most of you need a Zimmer frame to walk.

But I wouldn’t bet on it. The hoary old ­adage has it that you’re as young as you feel – and although I have been feeling like Methuselah since the early 2000s, all the evidence is that my contemporaries side with the number-crunching physician. Good luck to them, I say.

“It’s billed at a flat rate, £50. Steep for a stopgap smackerel, but not quite so appallingly plutocratic if you treat it as an all-you-can-eat buffet”

I’ve written before in these pages about the terms of my grandparents’ gustatory existence: born in the late 1880s, they stuck fast to their ­agglutinative Victorian roots by putting away three square meals every day, and a couple of hefty snacks hardly less angular. Even as a child I thought they must be involved in some strange act of religious mortification (my grandfather was a lay preacher and president of the Modern Churchmen’s Union) in so flagellating their own insides.

Breakfast was tolerably full and English, with eggs, bacon, grilled tomatoes, several rounds of toast, and sausages so thoroughly baked we named them “Granny’s Wooden Sausages”. Elevenses was bearable, because it consisted at most of a Bakewell tart, and possibly a Welsh rarebit. Lunch was solid – but by then we’d usually been out for a windswept walk on the seafront (they lived in Brighton) and so could just about choke the meat down, if not all of the three veg, and the roly-poly jam pudding. Making so much as a feint towards the cheeseboard was well beyond me until I reached my teens. However, even at that age, by the time tea hove into dyspeptic view the game was usually up.

My grandparents’ cook, the redoubtable Doris, would lay the table for exactly 4.30pm: white lace tablecloth; floral-patterned Royal Doulton crockery; silver teapot and hot water jug; cow creamer, honey pot, etc. There would be a plate of cucumber sandwiches, one of ham or tongue, and one of fish paste. There would be scones, or triangles of buttered white bread. The pièce de la résistance was an ornate cake stand, atop which sat the brown and menacing presence known as “Doris’s Chocolate Cake”, a ­comestible of such legendary heft and density that my father maintained, were anyone to choke down a slice without adequately masticating, that its sharp corners could be seen poking through the taut walls of their belly.

Anyway, you can imagine that with such childhood experience I have never found myself lying in some foreign field and wondering whether the church clock stands at ten to three – let alone if there’s still sodding honey for tea. But an American friend was in town and wanted the whole English-afternoon-tea experience, so I arranged to meet her at the Savoy. True, you can summon a repast styled “afternoon tea” in many less elevated establishments, but it usually consists of a desiccated macaroon and a stewed solecism of Twinings English Breakfast. If you want the real and authentic afternoon tea, such as would have gladdened Doris’s heart, it has to be the Savoy.

Mind you, I can never enter in under the art deco portico of the great hotel without thinking of Georges Bataille’s emetic-erotic classic Le bleu du ciel, which opens with the dissolute protagonist, Henri Troppmann, holed up in the Savoy with his still more rackety lover: a dipsomaniacal English aristocrat whose sobriquet, Dirty, is amply justified – the reader realises – when she calmly pisses herself in front of the chambermaid. I felt pretty dirty myself, striding across the foyer in my scuzzy blue jeans and descending to the famed Thames Foyer, the fons et origo of that great British institution, the thé dansant. Waiting for the maître d’ to find my name in the reservations ledger, I reflected that my adipose grandparents could have done with a lot more corybantic ­activity and rather less of Doris’s chocolate cake – and then my friend arrived, and beneath the wan, vernal light that fell from the restored glass cupola, we began seriously pigging.

A selection of finger sandwiches, including Wiltshire bone ham on coriander bread and coronation chicken on olive bread; freshly baked scones with home-made lemon curd and clotted cream; pastries, including a particularly toothsome éclair filled with vanilla pastry cream and slathered with lavender icing – and the whole schmozzle washed down with lashings of flowering osmanthus tea. Mmm-mm. You may wonder, gentle and socialistic reader, what possible justification I can provide for pigging out so egregiously in such a fat-cat environment. The answer is simple: afternoon tea at the Savoy is billed at a flat rate, £50. Steep for a stopgap smackerel, but not quite so appallingly plutocratic if you treat it as an all-you-can-eat buffet.

So we kept on – calling for more finger sandwiches (smoked salmon with lemon-infused crème fraîche and watercress this time), more pastries and yet more blooming osmanthus. The trolley was stopping at our table so frequently that other tea-timers were beginning to look askance; I’d drunk so much diuretic I was in danger of doing a Dirty, while my companion was surreptitiously unzipping her skirt to allow for further expansion. Then they brought the cake. I suppose in homage to Doris I should have had the Three Chocolates, but I couldn’t risk it, so instead carefully took the slice cut for me by the waiter and enfolded it in a napkin together with some spare finger sandwiches and a rather dishevelled scone.

A few hundred yards along the Strand from the Savoy, a “selection” of London’s homeless gathers each evening to receive soup and sandwiches from the Sally Army. I beat the evangelists to the punch with my Savoy doggie bag, which seemed to hit the spot – although an ex-soldier on crutches said the Three Chocolates cake was “a little on the heavy side”.

Doris would have approved.

You are what you eat, after all, and anyone who eats a Peperami is, by definition, a sad little prick

It’s time to talk jerky! For too long now this column has pussyfooted around the issues and refused to give it to you, the reader, straight. The buck stops here. From now on we’ll call a spade like this: “Hey! Spade!” And when it comes we’ll use it to beat every cliché in the vicinity to death.

Yes, yes – I know we haven’t exactly shied away from discussing the sexual aspects of food, yet there’s always been a metaphoric cast to it. Some foods might be aphrodisiacs, just as others (if you squint at them or sniff them in a certain way), might seem like genitals. I was listening to Jay Rayner’s Kitchen Cabinet on the radio the other day when he observed – apropos of caviar – that there are hardly any foods that aren’t held to be either detumescent or arousing. With the possible exception of Shreddies.

I once asked the almond-eyed heiress of the Caviar House chain what was the best way to eat caviar and she obliged by digging a silver spoon into the glistening anthracite cylinder of a kilo of Beluga she’d just de-tinned; then, neatly depositing a fifty-quid dollop on the perfume-testing (or razor-slashing) portion of her wrist, she invited me to suck it up, while purring: “It must be eaten off nothing but bare skin.” Setting aside the grotesque idea there “has” to be a way of eating the entire ovarian production of a creature belonging to a species on the verge of extinction, this was mos’ def’ an aphrodisiac.

But if there’s one food that incites me to impure thoughts more than any other, it has to be dried or cured meat. If you cast your mind back to the Falklands war, not the least of our anxieties during those late spring months of 1982 was the absence of a prêt-à-porter meat snack in British corner shops and petrol stations. That deficiency ended shortly after our forces achieved victory, when a shipment of the comestibles was mistakenly rerouted from Germany and Peperami arrived on our shores. The pork sausage may be marketed with a portmanteau of “salami” and “pepperoni”, but it bears scant likeness to either of these foods, resembling instead a particularly long, thin and stiff . . . penis. OK, OK, I realise this is pretty crass (after all, what sausage isn’t phallic?), but there’s a distinction, surely, between encountering a phallic object where you expect to – at a butcher’s, say, or in your trousers – and coming across one dangling next to the Twixes and Mars bars.

The penile aspect of Peperami is only enhanced by its packaging: not just the one thin, polythene condom, but also an outer prophylaxis of gaudily foiled cellophane. Nor does the snack’s long-running advertising slogan (“It’s a Bit of an Animal”) detract from its sexualised aura.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR1dgpAsYk4

Looking back, it seems strange that Peperami ever caught on – after all, the late Eighties were typified by a Thatcherite return to Victorian values, so table legs were presumably being covered up even as we unsheathed our skinny pork swords. Now, of course, you can barely move in the average newsagent without running up against one meaty treat or another: packets of beef jerky rustle next to Slim Jims, Mattessons Reduced Fat Smoked Pork Sausage (yum-yum!) and Bundu Biltong.

On the subject of biltong – which often comes, Peperami-like, as a long, thin sausage – I was barely aware of this Southern African meaty snack, until five years ago when I happened to walk into a shop near Richmond Park, looking for a bottle of water, and found instead a sort of enchanted biltong forest, with scores if not hundreds of withered and skinny dicks dangling from the ceiling.

Biltong St Marcus – as it’s called – is still open for business, so if you fancy a beefy bite flavoured with anything from chilli and cumin to crack cocaine (OK, I made the last one up) then hie thee thither. Not that you’ll necessarily have to go that far; biltong is now available from a stall in London Bridge Station, and I dare say there are plenty of other outlets offering trail food to commuters. Because that’s what all these snacks have in common: they are designed to preserve protein for long periods so it can be easily consumed by travellers. It is said that back in the day a cowboy would cure beef by cutting a steak from a newly slain steer and slipping it under his saddle – but I have my doubts about that.

So why should foods designed for trans­human pastoralists and hunter-gatherers come to occupy such a capacious niche in the diet of sedentary ­information-processors? I suppose the explanation Unilever (the current owner of the Peperami brand) might offer is that these are convenience foods – but surely, the convenience they embody is that of globalised supply lines: easy to pack and ship, while requiring less refrigeration both en route and on display, dried and cured meat snacks extend the range of products that corner shops can stock. At the same time, they further blur the distinction between sit-down meals and grazing on the hoof (if you’ll forgive the interspecific and cannibalistic metaphor). There’s that, but there is also the phallic argument: flaccid and impotent, the British office worker seeks to put some lead in his own pencil by sucking on one of these hunger-erasers. Poor fool! You are what you eat, after all, and anyone who eats a Peperami is, by definition, a sad little prick. At any rate, that’s how I feel every time I do so.

A film director friend of mine once explained to me the wherefores of successful film distribution in Britain: “It’s all down to your T-sides, Will,” he maintained. “Get your T-sides sorted or it doesn’t matter how many screens you open on, you still won’t get the bums on seats.” I had no idea at the time what a T-side was, but ever since he told me I’ve seen them everywhere. Often a T-side will glide across my field of vision when I’m least expecting it – supplanting my view of the Holloway Road, for example, with the winsome spectacle of a giant Carey Mulligan, red-cheeked and wind-tousled against a Wessex backdrop.

Yes, a T-side is the T-shaped advertising space on the flank of a double-decker bus, and industry types assure me you can’t get a maddened crowd for Far from the Madding Crowd unless your distributor can outbid all the others clamouring for these valuable sites. There seems a compelling irony here when we consider that, despite the enormous success of Hardy’s novel in his lifetime (it first appeared as a serial and then went into four separate bound editions before he died, each one extensively revised), he remained repelled by the new mass culture that emerged in the late 19th century. In John Carey’s path-breaking revisionist cultural history The Intellectuals and the Masses, he quotes extensively from the journals Hardy wrote during the 1880s, when the writer was living in the leafy ­London suburb of Upper Tooting. Haunted by the proximity of the mighty city, Hardy felt he was being watched by “a monster whose body had four million heads and eight million eyes”.

But this wasn’t only a distant dehumanising prospect: the Great Romancer was equally revolted when he encountered the multitude up close and personally. At the British Museum he was nauseated by “crowds parading and gaily traipsing around the mummies, thinking today is for ever . . . They pass with flippant comments the illuminated manuscripts – the labour of years – and stand under Rameses the Great, joking. Democratic government may be justice to man, but it will probably entail merging [with the] proletarian, and when these people are our masters it will lead to more of this contempt, and possibly be the utter ruin of art and literature!”

Poor old Tommy-baby. His entire oeuvre, when you stop to consider it, seems like an illustration of Dostoevsky’s dictum: “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.” His novels usually pit the intelligent and – Alan Johnson, take note – aspirational individual against entrenched privilege; yet while inequality may maim a Jude or a Tess or a Gabriel, often what finishes them off is the ignorant prejudices of the yokel mob. Thus Hardy has it both ways: valorising the simple and homespun but simultaneously decrying the herd mentality of the benighted Wessex peasantry. I shudder to think how freaked out he’d be by these crowds of Bathsheba Everdenes and Gabriel Oaks gaily traipsing across towns on the sides of buses.

Still, he must have given permission for the first sale of the novel’s film rights – because there was an early silent adaptation in 1915, while he was very much alive; since then, we’ve had John Schlesinger’s 1967 take on this pastoral of necro-narcissism, a TV movie in the 1990s, and now the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg has brought to the tale the same unvarnished sensibility he applied to his incest-shocker, Festen. The first screen Bathsheba was played by Florence Turner, the so-called “Vitagraph Girl” (after the studio whose movies she starred in). New York-born, Turner pursued a successful career on both sides of the Atlantic, on stage and screen, throughout the Teens and Twenties of the 20th century. As well as acting she wrote scripts, and played a part in directing and producing her own vehicles – so, not an instance of typecasting at all.

In Hardy’s novel, the stolid sheep farmer Gabriel Oak is first ensorcelled by Bathsheba Everdene when she lies back on her horse as it trots through a tunnel formed by low tree boughs. It’s an arrestingly sexual image: the beautiful young woman undulating in time with the strong rhythmic movements of the large body upon which she lies prone. Hardy’s crowd-phobia was certainly shared by many of his contemporaries, but you don’t have to accept unreservedly the thesis described in John Carey’s book in order to understand its queered provenance. Like all the great writers, Hardy was good at noticing things – and in particular he was good at noticing those involuntary human gestures that reveal our true animality.

Perhaps this is what he really feared: not the prejudices and warped taboos of human society, but the overpowering desires such a culture imperfectly restrains. We all like to separate ourselves off from the mob. It’s they who graze on popcorn and slurp on slushes of ice and sugared water. Their love is bestial – the beast-with-two-backs they make is subject to a geometric progression: first two beasts, then four, then eight, then a multitude. Our love, by contrast, is as pure and soft as one of Gabriel Oak’s newborn lambs; our thoughts as elegant and symmetrical as an arabesque. Which is why it doesn’t matter how many T-sides they get: when we see a madding crowd heading in one direction, we head in the other – together with our own maddening one.

There are many ways of going for a walk; my friend Antony and I have been walking the length of the Hoo Peninsula for over a decade now. Obviously we haven’t been promenading non-stop – from Gravesend in the west to Grain in the east is only about 20 miles’ comfortable strolling – but doing it in instalments. We did the first leg around 2005: out along the Thames’s south bank to the weird Second World War ruins at Lower Hope Point; then inland, skirting Cliffe marshes to the village itself. While we were waiting for the minicab to come and take us back to Gravesend we committed to completing the walk, but what with one monumental artwork on Antony’s part and another modernist novel on mine, it was only a fortnight ago that we finally returned.

This is a reversal in the ordinary order of things: normally our traverse of space and time is correlated well enough to convince us at the subjective level of their absolute character; but if you take ten years to walk approximately 14 miles, relativity becomes only too apparent: space-time begins to warp and buckle, as if it were a squeeze-box manipulated by a sozzled busker, bringing disparate events into proximity and ­simultaneously separating once-contiguous locations. Needless to say, such effects become still more noticeable when you stomp around somewhere like the Hoo Peninsula, which is a landscape at once over-imagined and under-imagined.

What do I mean by that? Well, it is on a yacht moored downstream from Gravesend that Marlow tells his tale of the heart of darkness – and it’s in a churchyard a short distance away that Pip first encounters Magwitch. Looked at this way, the Thames Estuary’s littoral is at the very heart of Englishness, while the river mouth remains the key entry point to the physical reality of the country. Yet hardly anyone comes here; and unless I’ve missed it, I can’t think of a single depiction of the Hoo Peninsula in contemporary popular culture. From Cliffe, where the austere medieval church is rendered with unusual bands of knapped flint, Antony and I walked through housing estate outskirts, then across fields and past the bramble-entangled towers of Cooling Castle to St James’s Church.

I’ve no doubt if we’d been on a deliberately “Dickensian” tour, accompanied by the pathetic fallacy of a “raw afternoon”, with the wind rushing from the “distant savage lair” of the sea, we probably would have felt nothing when we came upon “Pip’s Graves” in the churchyard. As it was, in bright late-May sunlight, we looked upon the ten ­little cylindrical tombs, the two gravestones and the three larger tombs that Dickens appropriated for the family of his orphaned protagonist, and we were visited with a profound sense of the uncanny. In front of us – as for Pip – the land fell away, yet this was no “dark, flat wilderness” but a bright green strip of land, beyond which a giant oil tanker, blazoned with another place name, HAMBURG, was coming in to dock by Coryton Wharves on the Essex bank.

It may be because London’s docks have migrated downriver that the city has so little psychic involvement with its own far-eastern hinterland – or it could be because the Isle of Grain (an alternative name for the peninsula) has ceased to live up to its name, and instead of remaining a rustic breadbasket, transmogrified throughout the 20th century into lodgement for the vast and sooty hulks of carbon-based technology: the power stations at Grain itself and Kingsnorth, together with acres of storage tanks and gasometers. Or possibly it is the anatomical queasiness of the place that dooms it to obscurity; because if we view the British Isles as a seated figure, then the Thames ­becomes its anus, the Medway its vagina and the Hoo Peninsula its green and pleasant perineum.

From Cooling we went on to Northward Hill, which at a towering 65 metres is the highest eminence hereabouts; and next, we descended towards Kingsnorth, with the Medway mudflats glinting in the late-afternoon sun. Yes, late afternoon – because in this relativistic landscape, the ordinary measures no longer seemed to apply: it had taken us hours to travel a scant eight miles. Across a railway line, at the river’s edge, we found a group of travellers squatting. They had a pickup, a caravan and a pair of fine-looking bay horses cropping the ferny floor. We went on, and found a deep creek full of boats, some obviously utilitarian – dredgers, tugs, fishing smacks – the others narrowboats and Thames barges converted into dwellings by water gypsies. It was a peaceful scene: rigging tink-tinking in the breeze, while in the mid-distance a freighter inched its way towards the port at Sheerness.

We turned our backs on the estuary and, munching on salty sea kale leaves Antony had gathered from the mudflats, we walked up towards Upper Stoke. On the outskirts we passed a neat little cul-de-sac lined with newly built Tudorbethan houses. A sign on the verdant verge read “DICKENSIAN CLOSE”. Yup, you read me right: “Dickensian”, not “Dickens” – which might imply that its inhabitants are raising their children “by hand”, as Pip’s sister did with him; or that they’re all rather jocose and exaggerated, like the characters in a Dickens novel. I chose to interpret the sign differently: for with my queered space-time perception the Dickensian was indeed . . . close.