For the past fortnight or so, I have been much exercised by the handsome “personalised spoon offer” that Kellogg’s has had blazoned on its Rice Krispies boxes. My youngest and I decided we very much wanted a spoon with our own slogan engraved on it and he began working on the words while I set about eating enough of the desiccated little blebs to justify buying the two further boxes we needed to obtain the “secret code numbers” required to unlock the spoon trove. On the back of these boxes are winsome pictures of happy new spoon-owners – but we were dismayed at their lack of ­imagination. All their spoons were simply personalised with their names (Carol, Keisha, Tarquin, et al) and the Kellogg’s cartoon brand mascots, whereas we were thinking of something surreal and subversive, such as: “Which orifice? Your choice.”

Actually, when I saw quite how innocent the other spoon-personalisers had been – how untainted by corrosive irony – I wondered at the depths of my psyche. What is it about cutlery that spoons up from my unconscious such anatomically perverse thoughts? I meditated on my childhood. Our American mother often used to remind us of her childhood in the Great Depression and used this early experience of privation to justify her habit of nicking cutlery from hotels, restaurants and even transatlantic liners: for years, we stirred our hot chocolate with some particularly chunky Queen Mary-monogrammed teaspoons.

My father brought different cutlery to the table (what a pleasure it is for once to use this expression both metaphorically and literally). An epigone, he entered the marriage with several canteens of old family silver. As a child, I was fascinated by these polished, hardwood boxes, with their green-velvet-lined interiors in which lay odd-shaped fish knives, pinioned in rows, and spoons personalised with family crests. But he – and therefore we – were on the social down escalator, so there were few occasions that merited the deployment of the entire shiny complement: knives, forks and spoons arranged in descending order of size so as to parenthesise the placemats. In truth, such was the queered problematic of my mother’s snobbery that she regarded certain forms of tableware as hopelessly non-U, reserving the full weight of her contempt for those petit-bourgeois families that cinched their serviettes (“napkins” is the acceptable term) with personalised rings.

Hmm, personalised rings . . . I feel rather like the young Freud – the Freud of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life who discovered such rich seams of suppressed psychic content hidden beneath quotidian tongue-slips and semantic glitches. It would be a simple enough spoonoanalysis were I to have grown up intent on repairing the fortunes of the House of Self so that once more, as in days of yore, a quince spoon was required at every meal – but I didn’t. True, I am a reader of Private Eye’s Me and My Spoon column and I also have a fascination with sporks, the liminal status of which is a constant reproof to our collective obsession with cookie-cutter categorisation, but as regular readers of this column will be only too aware, the last thing I want is an amuse-bouche served in a china spoon.

What I do like is the thought that the ancestral cutlery will continue to tinkle and clank down through generations of Selfs and that, at some point in the distant future, one of my descendants will peer wonderingly at the faint letters incised in the handle of a spoon they’ve known since birth but never properly examined; and with the assistance, perhaps, of some late-21st-century optical technology of which we can have no ken, painstakingly decipher: “Which orifice? Your choice.” I would further like it if my hypothetical descendant was then visited with a similar epiphany to Shelley’s “traveller from an antique land”, so apprehending the folly of not just personalised spoons but all human endeavour.

It is a factoid oft retold that the flimsy fork is a comparatively late addition to the solid British table. Right up until the early-modern era, even the highest in the land were perfectly happy to eat with knife, spoon and fingers-in-lieu-of-tines. Were William Burroughs to have written Naked Lunch during this period, he would presumably have chosen a different title for it, given that this one was inspired by Jack Kerouac’s insight that a naked lunch is “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork”. Forks are evil instruments, stabbing weapons composed of four or five épées welded together. Knives are often the subject of amnesties but a spoon amnesty would be whimsical. As for fingers, there’s no telling what they might get up to.

No, when it to comes to putting stuff in your mouth, only the spoon will do. Only the spoon is rounded and smooth and often brimming with milk like a lactating breast. Only a spoon will nurture you and care for you and love you unconditionally. So there’s nothing in the least surreal or subversive about our personalising slogan, because that’s the thing about a spoon: it doesn’t judge you, it accepts you for who you are unreservedly and equally it accepts whatever it is you want to do with it. Which is just as well, because I for one take a dim view of extra-cutlery relationships. Running off with a dish . . . ? Hey diddle-diddle, Spoony, what are you like . . .?

“To get up in the morning, in the fullness of youth, and eat a Pot Noodle – now that’s what I call vicious.” So Nietzsche wrote in 1889, shortly before his complete mental breakdown. Some scholars have attributed the collapse to the philosopher’s aggressive consumption of this instant snack food. He had already condemned the German people – in Ecce Homo, his crazed “memoir” – as bovine consumers of beer and sausages from whom no refinement of thought or feeling could be expected, and his move to Italy had been driven by a love as much of pasta as Palestrina. Still other scholars have pointed out this glaring anachronism: 19th-century gentlemen of Nietzsche’s class would have regarded it as an unforgivable solecism actually to get up in the morning themselves – that’s what you had a manservant for.

Oh, and there’s the Pot Noodle thing – Golden Wonder didn’t actually launch the brand for another 88 years, which means that I for one would still favour the syphilis explanation. However, I agree it is hard to reconcile this with the many references to Pot Noodles throughout Nietzsche’s work, including four stanzas of Thus Spake Zarathustra wholly concerned with pouring the boiling water into the pot. No less an authority than Walter Kaufmann has hypothesised that these references were a “time capsule”, sent by the philosopher to his future readers, so that when the brand was launched in 1977, they’d realise he was right all along about eternal recurrence and the circularity of history.

With Pot Noodle, it’s certainly the case that what goes around, comes around. I mean to say, it has long been regarded as the Millwall FC of comestibles (“No one likes us! No one likes us! No one likes us AND WE DON’T CARE!”), a status confirmed by a 2004 survey, which identified it as the most loathed brand in Britain. Advertising that played ironically to this negative perception, such as the “slag of all snacks” campaign of 2002 (see below), hardly achieved what the marketers probably wished for: a fast food so pestilential and bad that it became sort of good and hip. Nevertheless, Thatcher is dead, Tony Blair’s gone grey, and yet Pot Noodle not only remains but 155 million of the pots are manufactured every year in Caerphilly. Walking into my local sub-post office this morning (we 21st-century gentlemen are up with the lark), I saw a file of them standing to my attention on a fusty shelf and in a moment of pure Nietzschean will-to-power I snatched up a Beef & Tomato flavour one, stalked to the till and handed over my £1.09.

“You better watch it,” said the man I choose to regard as my postmaster: “some people say that stuff can lead to fascism.”
“What?” I was incredulous: “You mean Pot Noodle?”
“No,” he wearied back at me, “Nietzsche’s philosophy.”

Back at home I scrutinised the writing on the pot. The slogan on the foil lid read “NO Artificial Colours OR Preservatives” – I started to sweat with anxiety and pathetic ressentiment, but then I saw all my old favourites still listed in the ingredients and sighed with relief; after all, what would a Pot Noodle be without lashings of monosodium glutamate, disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate? After that it was all plain sailing as I followed the instructions to the letter; “IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE,” read another cheery slogan on the pot, and indeed it wasn’t. Nevertheless, concocting a Pot Noodle snack is so very simple that as I tore off the foil lid, removed the sachet of tomato sauce and then poured in the boiling water my head began to spin with fervid possibilities. Why not customise my Pot Noodle? I could add porcini and truffle oil – I might fricassee some lamb sweetmeats and chuck them into the mix; I could do just about anything, in short, to further water down this dish, which sat on my desktop looking so very sickeningly real.

It’s still sitting there as I type this – albeit looking a little clotted and malevolent, like the surface of some alien planet. I know the concept behind this column is that I eat the sort of stuff that we all eat and then comment on it, but there are limits – I haven’t actually supped a Pot Noodle since the late 1970s, when they were a key element of my student diet. So key, in fact, that due to overzealous Pot Noodle consumption, contracted while poring over Nietzsche, I developed an allergy to monosodium glutamate which stayed with me for over a decade. It’s gone now, but like the good Nietzschean I am, I believe in the eternal and Grecian verities, such as don’t tempt fate.

In 2005, Unilever (which had acquired the brand from Golden Wonder) launched a new ad campaign for Pot Noodle with the slogan: “Have you got the Pot Noodle horn?” Many complained about this crass association between sexual arousal and instant noodles. In one of its more enlightened judgements the Advertising Standards Authority rejected these complaints on the grounds that because Pot Noodle was so closely associated with Nietzsche, and it was well known the philosopher had in fact died of syphilis, there could be no snack food more likely to lead to detumescence.

I’m not so sure, because wasn’t this the same Nietzsche who presciently aphorised: “Love and hatred are not blind but sickened by the Pot Noodle they bear with them”? Answers on a pot, please.

I take my commitment to public education and to presenting my work in new digital formats extremely seriously, which is why, from now on, each instalment of On Location will be accompanied by a riveting and informative film. The first of these, Will Self’s Alley, can now be viewed on YouTube.

It’s a five-minute film, shot in real time and unedited, which shows my point of view as I take a 35-yard walk along an alley near my house, the camera bobbing, weaving and corkscrewing down into the tangles of ivy and other shrubbery wreathing the chain-link fence to discover exciting pieces of detritus. After about three minutes, a woman and her child pass by – you don’t see them but you can hear them commenting on my dog (the child refers to Maglorian as a puppy; in reality, he’s seven years old but on the small side, even for a Jack Russell); at around four minutes in, I call the dog, and about 30 seconds later I remark on how absorbing it is to film rubbish strewn along an alley. Apart from these interjections, the film is without commentary and silent, other than my slightly laboured breathing and the scrape of my sensible Clarks shoes on damp tarmacadam.

What’s not to admire about this film? In succession we are introduced to the following: the corpse of an Argos catalogue bloated with rainwater; an upended plastic flowerpot; waxed-paper coffee cups; Guinness and other beer cans; apple juice cartons and a paradoxically static McFlurry container; a turkey baster perhaps abandoned after some strange act of artificial insemination (particularly strange because the alley runs alongside a small Catholic church); a Ribena carton and the serendipitous sequence of two empty Polish beer cans – Lech followed by Tyskie – which suggests sexual incontinence followed by an admonition. This is by no means an exhaustive list; nor does it convey the subtlety of the film’s camera­work, as we nose in and out of the shrubbery, teasing apart leaves to expose shyly sheltering Jack Daniel’s miniatures.

I’d like to tell you that Will Self’s Alley was inspired by a recent hit BBC4 film, All Aboard! The Canal Trip, but I heard about this only after it was broadcast – its executive producer, Clare Paterson, was interviewed on the Today programme and she said she was indeed surprised that the two-hour film, shot entirely on a camera attached to the prow of a narrowboat travelling along the Kennet and Avon Canal, had drawn an audience of 600,000 viewers. I’m not surprised at all. We’re a nation of fat and lazy bastards – so fat and lazy that we’d rather slump at home watching the canal banks pass by at a soporific four miles per hour than go to the bother of actually slumping on a narrowboat and watching them pass by . . . live.

Ms Paterson said that her film had no soundtrack – only ambient splishes and ­sploshes – while information was confined to little gobbets of text that were digitally imprinted on passing lock gates or waterfowl. Will Self’s Alley is similarly bare-bones but it has the added virtue of any text portrayed being entirely aleatoric – so stick that in your pipe, Paterson. (Although don’t try smoking it, or the corporation will send you to rehab.)

What Paterson seemed wholly unaware of was the lineage of this sort of film. Patrick Keiller, the doyen of psychogeographic film-makers, has written about it at length in his collection of essays The View from the Train. So-called phantom rides, in which a camera was attached to the front of a train or a tram, were a staple of early cinema: the topographic selfies of the 1890s and 1900s which, as Keiller sagely remarks, paradoxically revealed to viewers the nature of their environment through a new technology that was itself transformative of that very milieu.

If you don’t think that film hugely alters our relationship to place, just consider the phantom ride of our own era. Instead of a single reel depicting the astonishing perspective afforded by wheeled vehicles in an urban context, our licence fees pay – in part – for two hours of lackadaisical nostalgia and lazy nature-gawping. The compelling feature of virtuality (as I’ve had cause to remark in these pages in the past) is that it renders subjective movement unnecessary. The world truly begins to revolve around us, confirming our utterly specious view that we are in control.

I used to think that the most depressing words in the English language were “rail replacement service” but I have come to believe “We are now approaching Staines” are even more dolorous. Yet it’s a misery that we should embrace, because the modern Britain we experience from day to day consists not of beautifully restored 18th-century canals (I’ve walked the Kennet and Avon and know just how bosky it can be) but of Staines and of alleys strewn with detritus. Paterson’s film is a ghostly cruise into a time and a place that never ­really existed (those lovely canals were dug by sweated and immiserated labourers), whereas mine is a walk on the wildly ordinary side. All Aboard! – no matter how utilitarian – will have entailed the expenditure of considerable time and money, whereas Will Self’s Alley cost nothing to make and costs nothing to view. So why not just do that and knock Paterson’s vaunted ratings into a hatted cock?

Granted, the only circumstances under which I’d run a marathon would be if I had to deliver news of a great victory by the Greeks over the Persians and there was no other transport available, but nevertheless I’m not against other people running them. My old mate Nick did the London Marathon some years ago to celebrate getting his breath back following decades of heavy smoking. I asked him what it was like, but he said that after 15 very odd miles, things became a bit of a blur. Certainly, walking through Parliament Square the other Sunday and encountering the closing stages of the great race, I was struck by how blurred the runners were: canalised between steel barricades and overseen by thousands of cheering, screeching loved ones, they paced, staggered and limped towards the finishing line, their features pulpy with exhaustion.

No, I’m not agin’ marathon-running, although I do slightly wonder what it’s all about. A sense of sheer physical achievement, some say, and I can see that: the vast majority of us spend most of our lives in oddly cramped conditions, our bodies hemmed in and constrained by technologies that, though designed to free us from the sordid business of exertion, have locked us up in a sort of padded cell, one in which everything is soft and yielding and renders self-propulsion quite unnecessary.

Technologies become invisible to us once we have integrated them seamlessly into our lives – their automation becomes an aspect of our automaticity, so that while we know something is definitely missing (the wind in our hair, the sweat on our brow), we can’t quite recall what it is. Getting up at the crack of dawn to run around suburban streets isn’t simply training for running round suburban streets with a multitude. It’s a way of recapturing the fierce rapture of our physical being. Because even pain can be a benison: our sedentary, cosseted lifestyle makes us all puling and delicate little flowers, unaccustomed to fluctuations in ambient temperature, chafed even by the warm leatherette of our couches as we angle our potato heads towards gleaming screens. What a relief it is to experience at last the abrasiveness of sole on tarmac, the true ache of well-used muscles and the lancing pain of a busted hamstring or pulled muscle.

There is also the solidarity of marathon-running: you’re all in it together. For weeks and months beforehand, everyone has been jerking about in isolation and now all these revivified bodies are brought blinking into the daylight. Such embarrassment as there is soon dispels in the febrile atmosphere – besides, it’s impossible to feel squeamish about your fat arse/thighs/belly when the runner next to you is dressed as the Honey Monster. It is this charming elision between competitive sport and the carnivalesque that so typifies the big city marathons – an atmosphere caught delightfully by Chris Morris in his film Four Lions, in which police marksmen end up shooting a number of gaily caparisoned runners as they attempt to neutralise a suicide bomber at the London Marathon who is disguised as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

All right, that was facetious – and possibly uncalled for. Morris’s satire was released in 2010 and only three years later real jihadists were killing people at the Boston Marathon. It can be posited that the 9/11 attacks, besides being mass murder, were a spectacular assault on the west’s supreme value of effortless mobility. What does this imply when it comes to the Boston Marathon outrage? Surely, that the Tsarnaev brothers, in some twisted little corner of their f***ed-up minds, wished to trounce another of our cherished values, namely our glorification of purposeless effort. At any rate, having negotiated the packed tunnels of Westminster Tube station in order to re-emerge on the far side of the people stream, I was treated to this spectacle: scores of finishers being assisted by relatives and friends to hobble up Whitehall. Blind, halt and lame with fatigue, the marathon runners staggered past the Cenotaph and the other memorials to the glorious dead.

It was difficult, observing this, not to reflect on the changing character of our existential enemies. Once, it was the Nazis who threatened to enslave us and destroy every vestige of our culture. Now, it’s the jihadists, who want to bore us to death in airport security queues and destroy every vestige of our fun runs.

Not that the runners looked like they’d had much fun. I suspect that, as with my mate Nick, it had all become a bit of a blur for the poor souls. For the rest of that afternoon, I saw them sitting outside chain coffee stores slurping down fruit juices, stunned by the enormity of what they had done – and possibly by its futility. Because although the battle had been joined (the blue-and-white pennants of Cancer Research UK, the London Marathon’s “official charity”, fluttered everywhere), the crab had not been kicked to death by 100,000 running shoes.

Yet that may not have been the only reason these doughty pacers looked so down in the mouth: it was a cold day for April and at the finishing line the marathon’s official sponsors had thoughtfully laid on a huge supply of silvery-red space blankets blazoned with their own logo. I mean to say, it’s one thing to bust a gut running 26 miles – but to end up a walking advertisement for Virgin Money seems like adding injury to injury.

We waited by the corner of the choir and the south transept; our guide needed to fetch something. She returned with a plasticised flip-book that was full of photographs of a smiling and slightly adipose middle-aged woman striking various attitudes: standing on narrow stone spiral stairs, squeezing between ancient walls, and crouching to negotiate low and knobbly ceilings. I didn’t want to look at the photographs – but our guide insisted. “It’s for our insurance,” she explained. “We have to inform people of the potential hazards.”

As regular readers of this column will know, I find such representational overload – whereby each location is both anticipated and apotheosised by images of it – to be the defining characteristic of our contemporary relationship with place. I would have happily spent the next hour discussing this weirdness with the guide; after all, we’d paid our money, and we were the only people signed up for the tour – but she took her job seriously and so, having undertaken her mandatory monitory duties, she led us on and up …

… into the upper levels of St Magnus Cathedral. I’ve been visiting cathedrals since shortly before the First Council of Nicaea (325CE), or at least it feels that way; and I’ve been visiting Orkney since 1992CE, but although I’m a great admirer of St Magnus’s it has never occurred to me to undertake a guided tour of this Romanesque hulk, which, besides being the most northerly cathedral in Britain, is also powerfully atmospheric, its red sandstone façade suggestive not of the Lord’s temple, but of Odin’s Valhalla. But that’s because when I’m in Orkney I like to get outside – what’s the point of visiting these whale-backed green islands, with their spectacular cliffs, if you’re only going to squat between four walls? True, even when August is blazing away down south it can still be rather, um, brisk in Orkney; however, that shouldn’t deter those who bear in mind the full weight of this odious maxim: there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.

Unfortunately, my mind hadn’t been bearing much at all when we left London. So it was that I’d found myself succumbing to hypothermia on the cruelly misnamed “sun deck” of the MV Pentalina, as it made the crossing from Gills Bay near John o’Groats to St Margaret’s Hope in Orkney. True, the air temperature was around 4C – but that air was travelling at about 60mph, with predictably chilling effects. I’d had to remain on the “sun deck” because the dog wasn’t allowed in any of the cabins, and if we leave him alone in the car he hotwires it and attempts to drive away. The ferry operators’ insistence that their insurance could be invalidated by a small terrier was a bitter foretaste of the cathedral guide’s unhealthy preoccupation with safety. Anyway, suffice to say that, after an hour standing in lashing rain as the catamaran slid over the glassy boils and anfractuous whirlpools of the Pentland Firth, I was left in no doubt as to the inappropriateness of my clothing.

My youngest son took against Orkney for the same reason and decided the only appropriate clothing for this boreal realm was four thick walls. However, he didn’t want those walls to be Neolithic ones; which is a shame, because besides the beautiful landscape, the doughtily mystical inhabitants and the superb beef, the reason most people visit these islands is to view their astonishing wealth of megaliths and ancient stone structures. I’m partial to a Neolithic tomb myself – there’s something about crouching in one of the stalls of a 5,000-year-old ossuary, reflecting on the vast span of time it encapsulates and the alien world-view of its builders, that makes it a little easier to bear the vast span of triviality modern society encapsulates and the alien world-view of its builders. My son’s view was rather more straightforward: “Those old tombs creep me out.”

So, barred from the truly ancient burial sites and exiled from the great outdoors, we were condemned to the cathedral tour. Standing up in the machicolated gallery, looking down into the disproportionately narrow nave, the guide explained the gravestones we could see lining the lower parts of the walls had been placed there when the tombs of the Orcadian nobs were removed from St Magnus’s to the graveyard without. The factoid logically arising from this was: “That’s the origin of the expression ‘stinking rich’, because when they were buried beneath the nave the congregation could smell them decomposing.” Being a kind and considerate father, I didn’t crow at my son, or observe that in the midst of life we are always in death – rather, I followed dutifully in the guide’s wake as she led us up another corkscrewing staircase.

And continued with her explication: apparently the coastguard often use the cathedral tower for exercises, negotiating its crooked defiles and vertiginous descents being an ideal training for evacuating seamen from stricken vessels. On hearing this, I wondered whether the tyro rescuers had to look at the book of photographs before they made their ascent – but said nothing to our guide, because I knew the answer already. It used to be said that the surest things in life were death and taxes, but insurance needs to be added to these inevitabilities, because you can’t go anywhere now without it.

I never watch movies or TV or play video games on planes. Why? Because those fag-packet-sized screens that they implant in the back of the seats are actually displaying the thoughts of the person sitting in front of you. It isn’t seemly to intrude on another’s thoughts – we’ve all read our Freud and we know that beneath the thin, smooth veneer of socially sanctioned self-awareness (I am an upright, decent, sincere, moral person . . .), there seethes a fetid-fiery pit of the libidinal imagination into which barrels of death instinct are regularly poured. How else can we explain what is plainly in view – a heaving morass of tortured and ecstatic and self-regarding flesh which is hardly ethically minimised by appearing in miniature?

I realise that some of you may find the notion far-fetched: surely even if the technology existed, it would be impossible to implant the necessary sensors in our brains while we were blissfully unaware. But the evidence is compelling. In the past, I often used to while away 155 minutes observing, say, Gladiator, and when I asked the people in front of me whether they’d been thinking about sweaty men hacking each other to death they replied they most certainly had.

But it was only some years after the fag-packet-sized screens began to be installed on planes that I tumbled to exactly what was going on. Heading for the lavatory on a transatlantic flight, I turned back to see that the serried ranks of passengers were absolutely fixated on their fellows’ mental content. Moreover, that mental content was almost invariably the same: in this case, footage of a desert full of burning oil refineries. I stood there, stunned not by the evidence of groupthink (for this was readily explained by the cascade effect of each person’s thoughts being transmitted to the one behind) but by the insouciance they all displayed, munching away on their poached salmon with green beans and dauphinoise potatoes without any shame.

It was then that I cracked a little and began going from seat to seat, challenging their inhabitants: “How does it feel to know you’re being psychically violated even as you rifle another’s brainbox?” And I would have continued, had the woman in the seat behind me not sprung up, crying, “Get back here – I was halfway through an episode of Friends you once saw and were thinking about!” This made me feel, in turn, ambivalent: on the one hand I was pleased not to have been cogitating about the burning oil refineries in common with the herd, but on the other I was depressed to realise that my subconscious seethed with little else but perma-tanned American comedy actors fired up by a high-octane laughter track. I couldn’t deny that I had seen this particular episode of Friends; after all, quite a few others on the plane had, too, and the evidence was directly before us.

So now I never look at anything displayed on those screens – I have no need to know that the inoffensive woman sitting in front of me is sexually fixated on Zeinab Badawi. When I fly accompanied by my wife or one of my children, they labour to convince me that the control unit you can detach from its housing beside the screen enables you to “change channels” and this disproves my belief. Even if I were to accept something so unlikely, it wouldn’t make me feel any better, because if I am in control of what’s appearing on the screen, it could well be that I’m also controlling my hapless travel companions’ thoughts, rapidly spooling them through a frightening series of visions – sweaty men hacking each other to death, burning oil refineries, perma-tanned hilarity addicts – until they collapse into catatonic psychosis.

Since I discovered this alarming instance of technologically mediated mass privacy invasion, I’ve happened on more and more. Apparently millions upon millions of ordinary people spend considerable amounts of time every day exposing intimate aspects of themselves to whoever’s interested – spiritual beliefs, sexual preferences, bank balance. Nothing seems sacred any more. Why, the other day, I ordered a triple-shot skinny macchiato in Costa and the barista, without so much as a by-your-leave, asked me what my name was! Slobbering with indignation, I told this fellow it was a free country and I wouldn’t even be under any legal obligation to supply him with such information if he were an officer of the law. He replied that that was all very well, but it’d make it a hell of a lot easier to ensure he made me the right coffee if I could at least give him a capital letter to felt-tip on the cup.

I gave him an “M” – a teasing come-on to GCHQ and the NSA, should they be watching – but when he handed me my beverage, the barista laughed dryly and remarked, “I don’t know why you make such a big deal about your privacy. Everyone knows your innermost thoughts consist of little else but endless reruns of Friends.” I shouted at him: “One rerun – it was one rerun of Friends! You can’t prove I’m thinking about it all the time!” But he didn’t pay me any heed. He was bantering with the next customer about their thoughts; or, still more sinisterly, telling them what to think.

Can I be alone in finding the new toilets on trains peculiarly unsettling? There is something about all those buttons and lights, about the way the curved door groans shut, that contrives to make these smallest rooms feel provisional and exposed. I miss the heft and security of a toilet door you can shut and bolt manually: what automation gives, it can so easily take away, leaving your buttocks exposed to the commuting multitudes.

Anyway, I was meditating on this the other day as I wandered along the 7.13pm Brighton-to-London train. The first toilet I got to was of the robotic variety, and the automatic door was broken – confirming all my unease – but the second was of the traditional type, so I shuffled happily inside, snibbed, and was preparing to answer the call of nature when I noticed that the toilet seat was haloed by a photographic transfer depicting the London Eye Ferris wheel.

It wasn’t the end of this decalcomania by any means: the dinky sink was backed by Big Ben; the ventilation panel in the door was bracketed by the dome of St Paul’s and Nelson’s Column; and the soap dispenser was implanted in the façade of Westminster Cathedral, while one of Battersea Power Station’s chimneys formed a sort of trompe l’oeil pilaster. So I sat there, lurching towards Three Bridges yet surrounded by images of London, and naturally my thoughts turned to the way images of places are stuck on to other places.

Of course, the whole go-round of commoditisation depends on images – but while you seldom see a photograph of a brand new toaster stuck on to an old one, you will often see a beautiful Barbadian beach adhering tenaciously to a grotty billboard in Solihull, or an Andean mountaintop looming above a jumble of cardboard boxes outside the service entrance of a Tesco superstore near Uttoxeter. Particularly at this time of year, the vertical surfaces of the cities and towns we neglect are camouflaged with the holiday destinations we fervidly desire; indeed, for the next few months many of us will happily wade through our daily shit while fantasising about our fortnight of sauntering barefoot across sable sands. But it’s not only exotic places we plaster across our ordinary spaces; in recent years the city’s exterior has become a corkboard on to which are pinned images of putative interiors.

No new development, whether it be office, industrial, commercial or residential, is complete without its own computer visualisation of how it will look once built, stuck to a massive hoarding that obscures the actual construction. Once upon a time such images were simple statements of intent; however, in recent years they have come to embody subtle narratives concerning the good life. Giant and pristine thirtysomethings sip cappuccino, romp in Terry towelling robes, or, clad entirely in Cameroonian casuals (think a pink Pringle cashmere woolly loosely knotted around a lightly tanned neck), stroll hand in hand past postmodernist water features. As our housing stock grows older and older, so these Potemkin village posters grow more and more strident – exhorting us to aspire to being anywhere else than where we in fact are.

The Polish-American mathematician and philosopher Alfred Korzybski coined the expression “the map is not the territory” to express the idea that there is a fundamental disjunction between a representation and what it represents. He believed that it is in the depiction of geographical features that this is most clearly demonstrated – after all, how could anyone mistake a few ink marks on a crinkly bit of paper for a hill or a wood? Nevertheless, Korzybski realised, we do: I, for one, have had the deranging experience of staring uncomprehendingly at a vista, convinced it must be “wrong”, because a feature detailed on my map was nowhere to be seen. The errancy used to creep in when we were confused about our location, our orientation, or both – but nowadays, with GPS-enabled hand-held technology, we always know where we are, and which way we’re facing has become quite immaterial.

Why? Well, if the map is not simply of the territory, but stuck on to the territory; and if the map doesn’t represent the territory as it is – albeit at a reduced scale – but rather the territory as we would like it to be, either now or some time in the future, and at an enhanced scale, then who can dispute that its epistemic value is greater than that of some scabrous office block or muddy building site? We no longer live in real cities, towns and villages, but rather in virtualisations of bizarre, chimerical places: the Blue Danube waltzes along beside the Manchester Shipping Canal, while the Potala Palace hovers mystically above a Portaloo …

… Which brings me, rather neatly, back to the 7.13pm Brighton-to-London train. Why, I thought to myself, need I go to the Smoke at all, when I’ve experienced most of its iconic architecture simply by squatting in this malodorous cubicle? And so I rose, girded myself up and detrained at Three Bridges, only to find myself standing in front of the Bridge of Sighs. I would’ve been discombobulated had I just left Brighton – because so far as I’m aware there’s no direct rail service from there to Venice. However, the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express departs daily from St Pancras station, an image of which was plastered across the bin in the facility I’d lately quit. So the old toilet was, indeed, deeply reassuring.

In his story “An Outpost of Progress” – a prototype for the novella Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad writes of his colonialist protagonists that they were “two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organisation of civilised crowds”. This perspective on the crowd is alien to us; we are perfectly prepared to believe that the crowd “dehumanises”; that when we find ourselves in a stampeding herd of crazed people, we ourselves may lose our reason and thereby our very individuality. What we find it harder to accept is that we may be who we are at all solely by virtue of the crowd. Conrad continues: “Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.”

So safe are those surroundings – for the average New Statesman reader, at least – that we forget all about the way our being is shaped socially, and start bellyaching about our fellows; as if it is they who constitute “the crowd”, with its weird panics, fads and delusions, while we mysteriously arrogate to ourselves the most exalted freedom of the will. I am always on the lookout for evidence of swarming behaviour in Homo sapiens, and I find it most tellingly in the epiphenomena that result from collective behaviours it is quite impossible for us to change.

Take the BlueMotion Volkswagen Golf. I drive one of these from time to time because the car club I belong to uses them. They’re perfectly sound examples of German engineering, but for some daft reason every time you come to a halt – at a traffic light, say – and disengage the clutch, the engine cuts out. Then when amber glows and you re-engage, the engine snorts back to life. Madness! Yes, yes, I know the thinking that informs such technologies (we’re going to use them to avert global warming); but even a few seconds pondering the matter leads to the conclusion: this can’t possibly work. Humanity burgeoned precisely because of its interaction with technology, but progress – inasmuch as it’s occurred at all – has never been a function of central planning, but rather a piecemeal series of fixes.

And that’s what BlueMotion is: a way of making vaguely “environmental” types with large chunks of disposable cash feel better about themselves – because any reduction in CO2 emissions the technology affords will be cancelled out many times over if they take a single plane flight. The melioristic view about global warming, advanced in the Stern report and now given a new lease of life by Naomi Klein (World’s Most Earnest Person), is that we can fix it by being better, kinder, more co-operative and cleverer people. Easy-peasy, eh? Yet if we listen to Conrad, who we are is solely a function of who everyone else is: “The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd . . .”

Note well: “every great and every insignificant thought”. So, even if we all have the thought: “Wouldn’t it be great if we all worked together to lessen inequality, curtail consumption, and so at least palliate the fervid atmosphere,” as night follows day this is obviated by the insignificant thought: “Wouldn’t it be great to fly to Faliraki”, or, “I bet a 56-inch ultra-high-definition TV would look great in that corner.” We like to envision society as an orchestra; individual players may fluff the occasional note or phrase but the overall coherence of the band mitigates this, and so the piece being played still sounds harmonious. However, Conrad was perfectly clear about the nature of our crowd mentality: “[It] believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of the police and of its opinion.”

This isn’t a subtle, supple, self-aware and self-correcting orchestra at all – rather, it reminds me of the Portsmouth Sinfonia, an experimental musical group set up by the composer Gavin Bryars in the 1970s. The only requirement for joining the Sinfonia was that you couldn’t play your instrument. The results were great chuntering and yawping versions of popular classics; nevertheless, from the squalls of sound the alert listener would still piece together the traduced melody of Thus Spake Zarathustra, or “The Blue Danube”. The Sinfonia were so successful that their single “Classical Muddly” reached the Top 40 in 1981. How can we account for this lunacy if not by evoking the blind faith in institutions of which Conrad wrote?

We believe so blindly that when a group of people in evening dress sit down in a concert hall and begin to play they will produce music, that we are prepared to ignore the racket; and, by the same token, we believe so blindly in our own ineffable individuality that we neglect to notice how beautifully articulated our stereotypies are: we saw away at the same old tunes – reason, progress, the good, the beautiful and the true – quite convinced that it’s our arm willing the bowing. Yet if we allowed ourselves even an infinitesimal fermata, we would be assailed by the cacophonous crowd of automata surrounding us. This is the “high organisation” that renders our very existence possible – not the music of the spheres, but a caterwauling classical muddly.

Sometimes I ask myself in all sincerity – is Richard Branson real? Please note, the question is not “Is Richard Branson for real?” (the sort of locution he himself might have used back in the days when he edited Student), but rather: “Does he exist in any meaningful sense at all?”

I continue to ask myself this question even though I have actually met Branson and shaken him by the hand. Seeing wasn’t believing – nor, it appears, was touching; Branson will have to work much harder than Jesus Christ, for instance, if he wants me to lend him any credence, let alone have faith in his heavenly transport. True, he does have important similarities to the Christ: both are depicted as bearded and long-haired; both are fair-skinned; both have a message for all of mankind. But in Branson’s favour: although I have only hearsay to go on when it comes to Christ’s catering, I have feasted on Virginal loaves and fishes many times.

All of this flashed through my mind the other day when a steward plonked a complimentary Virgin snack box down on the Virgin table in front of me, and then strode on along the carriage of the 12.35 Virgin Trains service from Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston. “Wow,” I said to Barry Sheerman, the MP for Huddersfield, who’d come looking for the steward and found me instead, “that’s a hell of a snack box.”

And indeed it was: a foursquare little thing, its flimsy cardboard manifold cleverly printed with trompe l’oeil wickerwork, leather luggage labels and handle so that it resembled a miniature picnic hamper. I knew that as far as Barry was concerned, fakery was the order of the day, because when he’d clapped eyes on me he said: “You’re an actor, aren’t you?” I had to spend some time disabusing him – after which we both had to spend a lot more time chatting, because Barry was taught by my dad at the London School of Economics, back in the days when there went out from Caesar Augustus a decree that all the world should be taxed.

To me the pseudo picnic box was yet more evidence of Branson’s unreality, and yet Barry believed the Virgin Richard’s corporeality was evidenced by a simple fact: “You realise he’s won the East Coast Line franchise, don’t you?” I did indeed know that, but I was still worshipping the iconic snack box, and although I tried to explain its significance, eventually Barry grew bored and wandered back to his own seat. I remained staring at the snack box – it wasn’t the most bizarre foodie-industrial skeuomorph I’d seen that week, but it was up there. As regular consumers of this column will know, a skeuomorph is a once-functional design element repurposed to be purely decorative. In the case of the snack box this was its printed wickerwork’s evocation of lazy afternoons on the river at Henley, with Montmorency performing tricks, and with the hamper’s lightweight yet sturdy construction keeping sandwiches and bottled light ale gently aerated.

However, my youngest son had spotted a weirder bit of trompe l’oeil earlier in the week: a Chicago Town Stuffed Crust Four Cheese Melt pizza box that had, printed along its edge, the fake edge of a cardboard box (two-ply cardboard, with a wavy cardboard line in between). We both examined this packaging mutation, marvelling at a world in which a product designer would choose to camouflage a cardboard box as a cardboard box. Mind you, the Chicago Town pizza itself was only masquerading as a pizza – yet this didn’t help much when it came to accepting the reality of the Virgin snack box and, by extension, the existence of Richard Branson. Abandoned by Barry Sheerman, whose ministerial experience might have shed some light on the problem, I fell balefully to examining the snack box. It inspired me to an act of epoché or “bracketing”, as defined by the philosopher Edmund Husserl: I suspended all judgements about the existence or otherwise of the external world, and therefore my own capacity (or Richard Branson’s) to act within it.

Thankfully this scepticism worked, and the reality or otherwise of box and Branson ceased to trouble me. Then I tried rebooting by examining the phenomena that were given to me immediately in consciousness – and the trouble instantly recurred, because the phenomena I perceived were: first, an idea of an egregious bearded entrepreneur; and second, a snack box printed so as to resemble a miniature picnic hamper. It was a devilish conundrum, one such as might have been devised by Descartes’s malignant deceiver. As to breaking the spell by, say, opening the snack box and eating its contents, such an action was anathema to me. What if it contained a Branson homunculus, one that tried to sell me Virgin Money?

I resolved instead to take the snack box home with me and keep it for ever, for ever sealed. It is sitting on my desk as I type this, and although it has the innocent appearance of a mass-market catering pack, I know that it is really a veritable Pandora’s box, from which all the world’s ills might erupt, should I be foolish enough to fancy a light bite.

The 20ft-high statue of brave Achilles that stands at the southern end of Park Lane, beside Hyde Park, wears a curious aspect. The first male nude statue to be erected in London since the Roman era, it was cast from captured French guns and dedicated by “the women of England to Arthur, Duke of Wellington and his brave companions in arms”. The women of England turned out when, in 1822, Richard Westmacott’s statue was conveyed through the streets to its plinth; however, it isn’t recorded whether they were abashed or amazed by Achilles’s, um, classical proportions. The critic Leigh Hunt described the statue as “manifesting the most furious intentions of self-defence against the hero whose abode it is looking at”. And indeed, the great bronze warrior cowers to this day, shield upraised, as if Apsley House (aka “No 1, London”, the nearby house given to Arthur Wellesley by the grateful nation) were about to rise up into the heavens and drop on his head.

Whenever I drive up Park Lane and see craven Achilles it makes me feel naked and vulnerable – and that’s before I’ve clapped eyes on the rest of the so-called public art cluttering up the median strip between the Hilton and Marble Arch. Over the years we’ve had upturned horses’ heads, an anodised Fiat 500, Gordian knots of extruded steel and God knows what other botched attempts at realistic figuration, subjective expression, or conceivably both.

I blame the women of England: before Achilles began his (to date) 193-year-long flashing incident, statues were first and foremost hieratic, either expressing the sacerdotal nature of power or emphasising the power of the sacred. Just like the nobs who commissioned them, the nudes of the 18th century only gradually came creeping out of country-house salons and into the landscaped garden – but by the mid-19th century there were all sorts of bizarre statues being plonked down hither and thither.

That certain mega-figures became asso­ciated with their respective cities only goes to show … Well, what? I’ve ridden the switchback railway up Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro; standing at the summit was Christ the Redeemer, performing a benediction while wreathed in clouds. He didn’t look very happy – and nor was I. On the flanks of the mountain, and spreading away inland, are Rio’s favelas, where the homicide rate is such that more people have died in the city since the beginning of the First Intifada (1987) than have perished in the whole of Israel-Palestine. If Jesus Christ is Rio’s genius loci then He is not the milquetoast depicted in the New Testament but one of the manifestations of Olodumare, the creator-deity of the Brazilian Candomblé religion, a syncretism of Catholicism and Yoruba beliefs whose adherents believe not in striving to be moral, but in fulfilling their individual destiny whatever the consequences.

The figuration of the Roman goddess Libertas that stands, torch upraised, on a plinth-island in Upper New York Bay formed by the shells of myriad extinct bivalves could be viewed in a similar light. This touchstone of the Enlightenment is the default destination for all benighted tourists. I took the boat trip round the statue for the first time last year. It was the climactic day of the week-long Gay Pride celebrations in Manhattan, and, dragging my offspring through overcooked streets crammed with revellers, I began to feel a certain – wholly unjustified – heterosexual resentment. It looked to be cooler out in the Bay, but in fact we were treated to a wittily bilious hour-long commentary by a woman from Queens whose native New Yorker pride was offset only by her animus towards Wall Street’s deluded Masters of the Universe.

In his poem “For the Union Dead”, Robert Lowell anatomises the memorial that stands in the north-eastern corner of Boston Common, featuring a bas-relief of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first volunteer force of African Americans raised to fight for the north. Lowell writes:

William James could almost hear the

bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone

in the city’s throat.

I’d argue that all such monuments – godly or temporal – stick in cities’ throats. In Straw Dogs, his chapbook of aphorisms, John Gray notes: “In cities, persons are shadows cast by places, and no generation lasts as long as a street.” An aperçu that makes of every civic dignitary an Ozymandias, drawing a bead on us through the gunsights of Time.

This isn’t at all reassuring, because I don’t think I can bear the thought that some (if not all) of the tat that passes for public art in Britain will long outlast me. It’s just as disturbing as the inverted scenario whereby an ancient statue of great beauty – such as the Bamiyan Buddhas – is destroyed within one’s lifetime. Yet it is chilling to picture some survivor of the apocalypse clambering through the rubble of St Pancras and coming upon the sightless eyes of Paul Day’s crappily kitsch giant lovers. Will they see the statue as evidence of a long-gone civilisation populated by cartoonish humanoids? Or will they set to excavating the rubble from the embracing figures so as to find out whether the male one has a more impressively thrusting sword than … Achilles?