On 2 February a crowd of maddened professors wrote to the Guardian to protest against the government’s latest counterterrorism and security bill, which was being hustled through parliament with unseemly haste. The larval bill has now emerged from its neo-Gothic chrysalis to become a beautifully inelegant act. What the professors were so crazy about are the provisions in Section 5 that place an obli­gation on their universities to assist the police and security services in monitoring extremism. In fact, the so-called Prevent strategy has been in place and affecting universities for over a decade. It has hitherto been incumbent on universities that have been signed up to the strategy to allow the state authorities access to relevant computer data, including students’ emails and web history. Now that requirement will become universal and mandatory.

The maddened crowd of professors sought to remind our legislators that academic freedom is enshrined in the Education Act 1986, which places an obligation on universities to “ensure that freedom of speech within the law is secured for members, students and employees of the establishment and visiting speakers”. Those ludicrous Branestawms seemed to think there was some conflict between the law on the statute book and the new legislation. In fact, any British student who’s a member of a group affiliated to Fosis (the Federation of Student Islamic Societies) is almost certainly under some kind of surveillance; not – as regular readers of this column will know – that I regard this as being particularly intrusive, given that the secret affairs of HMG are more often typified by egregious cock-up than by effective conspiracy.

Nevertheless, as a Muslim student recently put it to me, “I came to university believing that I was going to be educated in the Socratic method: that there’d be no bounds on what could be thought or said, and that this was an integral aspect of the inquiry.” No, really, this is pretty much verbatim – and I was tempted to reply: “With eloquence like that at your disposal, you hardly need what passes for a higher education nowadays.” But of course I didn’t, because the truth of the matter is that although I’d heard this debate rumbling on in the background since the 7/7 bombings, I never really considered what its impact might be on young and impressionable minds.

The nub of the problem is that if the aim of Prevent is to, um, prevent young people from thinking extremist thoughts, then any course of study that encourages them to consider extremist viewpoints is, ipso facto, against the law. But if the aim of Prevent is to encourage our espoused values – such as tolerance for different viewpoints, critical thinking and democratic accountability – then precisely such a course of study must be mandated. This catch-22 epitomises our confused and paradoxical thinking about the threat that Islamist extremism represents to our society. (And I say “our society” advisedly: the threat Islamism represents to people in, say, Raqqa, is entirely different.) At a White House conference on extremism and terrorism on 18 February, Barack Obama bloviated: “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam,” and added: “No religion is responsible for terrorism – people are responsible for violence and terrorism.”

It’s difficult to know how to unpick this conceptual tangle, but one place to begin might be to say: OK, clearly nobody can be “at war” with an abstraction such as religion (or “drugs”, for that matter) but surely we can agree that religious ideas are present in the disturbing ideological gallimaufry of Islamist extremism? Well, no, not if you’re a western policymaker, because to acknow­ledge that religious beliefs can be a prime political mover is to lend them the very sort of credence they claim to represent. In the States, where millions of voters regard their religious beliefs as precisely that, Obama’s words must induce still more cognitive dissonance into the collective consciousness; yet for him and our own rather more secular leaders, “politicising” the militants doesn’t help either. After all, to concede that the terrorists may have political aims is implicitly to acknowledge that Muslim communities – in the Middle East and globally – may have justifiable grievances.

And so the whole sad, sorry go-round of equivocation-masquerading-as-moral-certainty continues. Fatally compromised by its own historic compromise between religion and politics (as if the two could ever be entirely decoupled), the west continues to substitute paranoia for the quality most needed to combat extremism: belief. Belief and, dare I say it, nerve. We need to believe in just those values of tolerance, openness and free speech that the new act so clearly vitiates; and we need the nerve to maintain such beliefs in the face of threats against them. Naturally, if we western secularists could admit to ourselves that our own values are articles of faith rather than demonstrable truths we would probably have more success with the young and impressionable crowd of potential jihadists. They may not all be as acute as the student I spoke to, but if there’s one thing young people detect in their elders – and one thing that repels them from their elders’ values – it’s a urinous tang of hypocrisy, such as hangs over a crowd of MPs as they rush through a division lobby.

I once ate in a revolving restaurant in Minneapolis but only because it was midwinter, too frigid to venture out, and the spinning eatery was atop the hotel I was staying in. Anyway, I alighted from the lift and stood gawping, awed, as empty tables and rigid napery sped along a horizon snaggle-toothed with high-rises and swollen over by snow clouds. Once seated, I could observe the rather skilled footwork required by the waiters as they moved from orbiting table to focal servery and back, incorporating the revolution into their parabolic course calculations. I put it to mine that the restaurant was really, um, going a bit fast; and he said that the management sped it up from time to time to keep everyone on their toes.

I suspect this was apocryphal, but one thing was true: despite the subdued lighting, the inoffensive dark-leather banquettes, the plain white tablecloths and the bland cuisine (when in doubt about anything in the Midwest, order steak), I felt utterly nauseous. I tried fixing my eyes on the horizon, or looking only at my immediate surroundings, or following the lolloping waiters with my sluggish gaze – but it made no difference. Man, I concluded, has not evolved to digest in a giant orrery; and so I resolved never to eat in a revolving restaurant again.

Not only that, I began to look upon the Provisional IRA in a rather more kindly light. True, its members were murdering, terroristic bastards but at least they’d bombed the Top of the Tower, London’s only revolving restaurant, which occupied the 34th floor of the then Post Office Tower between 1966 and 1980. It seemed a curious target choice. At the time (1971), people wondered if the Provos were making some sort of anti-heliocentric statement, but I think their ASU (active service unit) ate there and had a bad experience. Nowadays they’d probably just leave a snarky review on TripAdvisor.

Still, resolutions, like ceasefires, are made to be broken, which was why, on a chilly, smoggy day in January this year, in Jaipur, Rajasthan, northern India, I found myself dismounting from Ricky’s tuk-tuk, breasting the Heraclitan flux of the traffic on MI (Mirza Ismail) Road and entering the Om Tower, which has a revolving restaurant atop its lofty 14 storeys. True, I’d resolved never to become a human rotisserie again but a revolving restaurant in a provincial Indian city? This wasn’t a case of a “real meal”, more one of a “really meal”. As in: “Did you really eat in a revolving restaurant in Jaipur?” To which the only possible reply is: “Well, yes, I did, and it was right tasty.”

That goes for both the food and the decor, because although to someone of my generation the concept of a revolving restaurant still seems utterly modern, the truth is that in their relentless go-round, these gustatory equivalents of the DeLorean DMC-12 simply convey us back to a future imagined in about 1971. From the exterior, the Om Tower even looked like the Post Office Tower – a concrete yoghurt pot on top of a concrete milk carton. Once inside, I thrilled to the expanses of wood-veneer-effect MDF, the dusty-leaved rubber plants, the mercurial mirroring, the greasy pile carpets and the halting progress of the lift as it oozed up to the 14th storey. Time, as any post-Einsteinian knows, is a relative concept, so when I was seated at the window, looking out over exhaust-shrouded domes and minarets towards the nearby park-your-ox-and-ride stop, I had the curious sensation of straddling several decades at once.

It was a sensation that only increased in intensity when the smiling waiter, executing some nifty dance steps, brought me my Revolving Special Thali, which was a snip at 540 rupees. It helped, I suppose, that the thali is a circular, flat-bottomed aluminium dish that put me in mind of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, because although there was no sign of the elephants and the turtle underpinning that fabulist’s cosmology, the conjunction of all these revolving circular bodies implied a syzygy.

Moreover, although I could see little of Jaipur through the smog, I knew that somewhere down there was the Jantar Mantar, the bizarre celestial observatory built by the Rajput king Sawai Jai Singh in the early 18th century. As I tipped out the little aluminium pots – or katori – and filled the thali with a sludge of dhal, rice, curds and vegetable curries, it occurred to me that were I sufficiently attentive I might be able to make some interesting observations using this foodie instrumentation. After all, the instruments at the Jantar Mantar are huge, solid structures of marble, stone and bronze, which are still used to calculate auspicious ceremonial times. Surely I could pull off something similar with my lunch crockery? Especially considering that I, unlike Sawai Jai Singh (and possibly the IRA), have no conceptual problem with the idea that the planets revolve around the sun.

Such speculations entertained me as, like some interstellar traveller in a Christopher Nolan film, I described an arc through space-time that took me, oscillating, between Jaipur and London, 1971 and 2015. My speculations were so absorbing that I forgot I was eating in a revolving restaurant until the bill came. I paid up, tottered across the greasy-carpeted empyrean, felt suddenly nauseous, found the gents and vomited copiously. The moral is: you can put the boy in a revolving restaurant but you can’t keep a good meal down. Or something like that.

Will Self is going to be reading from his work and reflecting on the art of fiction at Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre on 11 March 2015, from 6pm to 7.30pm. For free tickets, visit the New Statesman here

Dubai, 1.30am. I totter, unsteady as a newborn foal, along the gantry from the Emirates Airbus that drove me here. In the curvilinear spaces, the potted palms and the glass booths full of cigarette smoke I see this: the topological analogue of international jet travel. Here, time, which has been smeared across the heavens, is once more balled up into the simulacrum of place. I note this: the trail, waymarked by cairns of Johnnie Walker Black Label and Dior Addict,which S-bends its way through the duty free, has been designed purposively so that at any point during his journey, the passenger in transit will be able to view the greatest possible amount of merchandise.

In the American criminal justice system, when the notorious accused is led, handcuffed and shackled, before the eyes and camera lenses of the press pack, this is described as “the perp walk” – perp being short for “perpetrator”. It occurs to me, as I stare out over the peaks and valleys of serried giant Toblerone bars, that this is the purch walk, where purch is an abbreviation of “purchaser”.

What to do? What to do? Being a transit passenger skyside in a major international airport in the dead, jet-howling middle of the night is surely the purest possible mode of the modern human condition – and the powers that be in Dubai seem alive to this, for as I slump up an escalator I notice an advertisement for the shopping centre at Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. Its slug line reads: “The Centre of Now”. I stare at it, thrilled by the audacity of the copywriter; to propose the slave-built city of timesharers as the centre of the world is one thing, but to conceive of it as a sort of zeitgeisty black hole, into which the future and the past alike ceaselessly gurgle, requires true vision. This is how commoditisation looks sub specie aeternitatis.

So, I buy some painkillers – a kind of Panadol that will, the pharmacist assures me, knock me out cold on my next flight to London – and head for McDonald’s. To eat McDonald’s skyside of an international airport in the middle of the night is to take the true Communion of our contemporary Church – for do we not fervently believe that as we place the meaty wafer on our tongue, it dissolves into the body of branding? By which I mean that the standardisation of products throughout the world is our version of transcendence: the McDonald’s cheeseburger we paid for may have disappeared, leaving behind a few ketchup smears and a roundel of dill pickle, but the real McDonald’s cheeseburger remains for ever immanent. Looking about me at my fellow human flotsam, all of whom seem to be eating their food with the same guilty spasms as I just did, I am forced to concur: this is indeed the centre of now.

In March 2008, I flew to Dubai from London and walked for two days across this great city of unbecoming. The building sites lay idle. Dusty Baluchis, Afghans and Somalis sat about in the shade; deprived of passports or the wherewithal for a plane ticket, they were, in effect, prisoners in a penal colony equipped with extensive shopping facilities. I spoke to men who cried as they told me that they hadn’t seen their families in years, nor did they expect to for years to come. In retrospect, I wish I’d been able to tell them they were at the centre of now. Instead, I headed out into the desert, navigating with a compass and following a sight line because there were no maps available with the right human scale, and eventually reached Bab al-Shams, a resort hotel where orientation was lain on in the form of a metal roundel screwed into the bedside table indicating the direction in which Mecca lay.

But that was the periphery of then – this, as I believe I’ve already had cause to remark, is the centre of . . . now. And just as time solidifies in these non-places (as Marc Augé typifies them), so it also becomes diffuse – a will-o’-the-wisp. Under such conditions I find it doesn’t matter how many announcements the airport staff make, or how many bits of paper I’m given with departure time and gate printed on them; I still always manage to be the last one to buckle up.

The first officer proudly informs us that there are 18 flight crew members on board this morning and they speak 18 languages. However, he doesn’t clarify this statement, and as the Airbus – which is as long as a cathedral nave – makes its pilgrimage along the runway, I find myself wondering if there’s one polymath among them and 17 monoglots, or if the distribution of tongues is a little more even. This even though Emirates, displaying a sensitivity to physical location that is remarkable in commercial aviation (the central objective of which is to standardise places as if they were cheeseburgers), has placed cameras on the plane’s wings and tail, so that the passengers can experience take-off visually. Or can we? For in the microseconds it takes for these images to reach the brain, we have moved away from the centre of now. My suspicion is that I’ll never return – at least not in this lifetime.

To read Will’s other New Statesman columns, visit their website here.

Will’s latest column in the New Statesman can be found here.

“Earth hath not anything to show more fair;/Dull would he be of soul who could pass by/A sight so touching in its majesty:/A crowd of highly self-conscious beings behaving like a flock of sheep . . .”

Yes, yes! The year 2015 begins – as have previous years for readers of this column – with your fearless reporter standing on Westminster Bridge and contemplating the reckless conformity of our fellows. Recall: it was here, in the very omphalos of our noble nation, that I noted the lemming-like glee with which tourists chuck away their euros “playing” the shell game. It was also from this vantage that I contemplated the gaining of “peak photo”, that numinous – but, for all that, profoundly real – summit at which the amount of photographic imagery we produce exceeds our capacity to experience it meaningfully.

They’re still there, the peak photographers, striding up and down the bridge, striking attitudes by the parapet, with the mother of parliaments looming over their shoulders. They’re still holding up iPhones and iPads and all sorts of other digital-camera-enabled devices; and they’re still utterly secure in their delusion that this – and this alone – is the finest image ever captured of a man/woman/child with Big Ben in the background.

But what is this? Something new is to hand in the febrile world of instantaneous simulation. These Iberian proctologists and Swabian veterinary surgeons are armed with fresh kit, to wit: what look like those aluminium grabbers meant for chair- or bed-bound folk which never work quite as well as they should. And what are these Montenegrin web designers and Luxembourgeois dieticians doing with their grabbers? Why, they’re using them to take photographs of themselves, of course, because these are what we must, perforce, call “selfie sticks”.

I’m often asked if I find it odd being called Self – and although this has happened pretty much my entire life I’m still flummoxed. Where to begin? Is it really necessary to explain to anyone capable of cerebration that, having always had this appellation, I’d find it far more peculiar to be called Smith? (Apropos of which, people who recognise me in the street and feel they have to say hello frequently address me as “Will Smith”. Given the obvious disparities in looks and income between me and the actor, I can only assume that human beings must have a misfiring brain centre dedicated to notoriety.)

When the “selfie” appeared in the cultural firmament, it was a matter of weeks before Private Eye published a cartoon showing me holding an outstretched cameraphone while gurning into its lens. The caption read: “Will Selfie.” Fair play – although, in common with most of my age group (the exceptions being “world leaders” such as Obama, B; Cameron, D; and Thorning-Schmidt, H), I’d already done all the self-depiction I’d wanted to long before. Digital cameras with timers have been available for well over a decade and though the first time you pose for yourself may have a certain frisson the novelty soon palls. So, how to explain this latest ratcheting up of – to paraphrase the title of Schopenhauer’s most celebrated philosophic work – the world’s will to misrepresentation?

One way of looking at the selfie stick is that it’s simply a handy little gadget for those friends and families who all want to be in the shot – and why not? Another perspective is, in my case, to take it personally: why else would teeming hordes of Tran­sylvanian dental technicians go equipped with selfie sticks, if not to beat up on poor old Selfie?

From when I stepped on to the bridge by St Thomas’s Hospital until I debouched at Westminster Pier, I must have been smitten at least five times by Cantonese software engineers cack-handedly wielding the bloody things. As I gained the middle of the bridge, I came upon an actual duel being conducted between two tourists armed with selfie sticks; a ring of Viennese patisserie chefs were gathered, chanting: “Töten! Töten! Töten!” From them I learned the fracas had begun when one of the software engineers’ selfie sticks accidentally appeared in the other’s carefully framed shot. As I observed the two men deftly feinting and parrying, it occurred to me that although the selfie stick is, functionally speaking, a prop with which to hold up the great imagistic canopy of the web, it nonetheless has a physical actuality that belies its virtual role.

I have a dream – no, really, I do. I have a dream that all the selfie sticks that were given as Christmas presents this year will be recognised by their recipients as dual-use technology. I have a dream that instead of sticking their cameras on the end of these aluminium poles and wandering around crowded public spaces accidentally poking other people with them, they will adjourn to an open space; dividing into two groups, or “teams”, the quondam photographers will then bowl their smartphones at one another and bat them away with their selfie sticks. I dream of a brave new future in which computers of all sorts will be repurposed as sporting equipment . . . Yes, yes, I know it’s not cricket, or even iHockey, but you don’t need to be Will Smith in order to appreciate that arranging to have yourself constantly filmed represents the very zenith of narcissism.

Being a sensitive soul (no, really), I was struck by my old mucker Nick Lezard’s plaint about his Thanksgiving predicament in his column in the issue before last. If you’ll recall, he said that his parents were too old to stand around in the kitchen cooking a turkey et cetera (the et cetera are the trimmings), then there was a palpable half-beat pause in the prose before he supplied an ironic afterthought: “Come to think of it, so am I.”

Hearkening to his catarrhal wheeze against this dual-generational dying of the light, and wanting to do a bit more for him than just chortling at his misfortune week after week, I arranged to descend on the Hovel with some care cigarettes: I’ve given up and am de-accessioning one of the finest tobacco stashes still in private hands. Anyway, I thought we might have a sort of freelancers’ Christmas party together; usually I just stand by myself in the corner of my writing room, chug on a bottle of crap white wine while shouting at the wall, then masturbate under the desk. When I wake up a couple of hours later I swear I’ll never do it again – but perhaps if I did it with poor Tiny Nick (or so I unreasoned), I might feel more wholesomely festive.

I had an ulterior motive as well: I can’t be alone among regular readers of Nick’s column in finding his portrayal of the Hovel slightly implausible; this, despite knowing him personally for twenty years and having witnessed his complete inadequacy in the face of the most routine household tasks (apart from cooking). Trust me, he is indeed completely boracic – the last pot he was pissing in has long since appeared in the window of Cash Converters by the Edgware Road – but the Gormenghast-inflected portrait of his gaff, complete with rats, filth, cobwebs and indigent ne’er-do-wells, has always struck me as a little de trop. I had to find out for myself whether it was really that bad, and perform a public service by either exploding the myth or confirming the reality. Anyway, the day before I was due to chip up, Nick emailed suggesting he feed me.

Such largesse! There were further exchanges about my high-class food intolerances before he settled on the idea of doing pork belly. Then, approximately three hours before I was due to arrive, he texted saying perhaps it would be better if I ate before I came. Narked – but still sensitive – I texted back asking if he was broke, but the reply came: “No more than usual, it’s just that I’ve had a rather large and bibulous lunch at the Gay Hussar . . . however, there are leftovers available.” This mollified me: despite his inability to put on his own underpants (the problem occurs when he’s lifted the first leg up; forgetting he’s done so, he’ll often raise it a second time, fall heavily, and spend hours unconscious before he’s discovered) Nick is a superb cook and his leftovers would be anyone else’s culinary triumph.

From without in the chilly night, the Hovel – which is a maisonette above a shop – looked cosy; I could see lamplight and books ranged on shelves. Mein host appeared pretty chipper as well when he answered the door. He led me up tip-tilted stairs past a half-landing piled high with old wine boxes; on the scruffy carpet pile lay dust-devils the size of tumbleweeds, while the walls and doors were covered with bilious textured wallpaper of a kind I’d last seen in a B&B in Bideford circa 1974. In the kitchen there was a lot of lino, some of it on the floor, and a shelf of greasy jars and sticky bottles full of desiccated crap. Somewhere in there, I was convinced, would be a small canister of arrowroot that no one had ever opened. But the sink and cooker, though old, appeared serviceable – and there were good smells wafting from the oven. Nick took a pot of boiling rice off the hob; I held the strainer and we drained it together.

Then, just before he was about to dump the rice in the casserole with the lamb I reminded him again about my vampirism: “You’re absolutely sure there’s no garlic in that lamb?”

“Well,” he conceded, “I probably used a clove or so when I was cooking it, but it’ll have long since deliquesced by now.”

“Um, Nick, that’s still some garlic. And anyway, let’s get real: no one cooks lamb with just one clove, now, do they?” He admitted that this was surpassing unlikely, and I – being, as I think I’ve remarked, sensitive to a fault – made light of it, saying: “That’s all right, I’ll just have some rice.”

So we sat in the Hovel’s front room at a table strewn with books and papers; Nick had a glass of wine, I had a plate of rice. It was pretty good rice, actually, and I savoured it as I looked about at the broken-backed furniture and the huge collection of valetudinarian “holiday” booze bottles some former flatmate had piled up in the nook by the book-filled fireplace. After supper I went upstairs for a piss. In the bathroom the bath had been turned into some sort of art installation: knock-kneed drying racks were arranged in it and draped with dog-eared fitted sheets. And I saw, lurking in the otherwise empty cabinet over the sink, a medieval box of Alka-Seltzer and thought: “I should be so lucky.”

I wonder what’s happened to the Channel Tunnel – no, seriously, I do. All the romance has been sucked out of its guts, as an enema sucks half-digested foie gras from the bowel of a Lyonnaise brassiere manufacturer. I’m old enough to remember when a tunnel beneath the English Channel was a preposterous fantasy worthy of Jules Verne or HG Wells. In the 1960s and 1970s, such grands projets were often anticipated in the form of wide-eyed info screeds and graphic visualisations printed on the back of cereal boxes and you would read about them as you dribbled milk slowly into individual Weetabix, waiting for the thrilling moment when they became saturated and crumbled.

True, most of the space stations and ­undersea communities envisaged by these box-boosters never came to pass – but the Chunnel (as it was once affectionately styled) is a fact on the ground (or, rather, souterrain). There was a certain amount of brouhaha when it was opened: monarchical and presidential ribbon-severing; anxiety about incoming rabies (although you’d have thought the last place a hydrophobic dog would want to rave was in a tunnel beneath the sea). And then there were some operational bugs in the first few years: overheated trains catching fire, passengers having to be led to safety along the service tunnel. But soon enough the novelty of being able to get on the Eurostar at Waterloo and get off at the Gare du Nord was over.

In Scandinavia, the vast bridge thrown between Denmark and Sweden has become the focus of all sorts of intercommunal reappraisals – the TV thriller series The Bridge is only the visible apex of this complex shift in attitudes. In part, the impact of the bridge on Danish and Swedish psyches can be explained by the bizarre demi-­comprehensibility of their ­respective languages: both can understand each ­other’s tongues but, for the Danes, Swedish is quite a bit clearer. In The Bridge, much of the ­tension and humour is generated by this ­semantic fudging and blending – all of which is, by definition, quite untranslatable. I know about it all only because my brother, a slightly obsessive linguist, took it upon himself a few years ago to learn Swedish.

This isn’t easy, given the Swedes’ fluency in our own mother tongue. My brother had to pay to stay on an island in the Gulf of Finland, where the inhabitants are provided with a regular stipend in return for agreeing never to speak English. It worked for him; and now it’s impossible to sit down to a Scandinavian TV show with him because he will insist on laughing in all the right places. But the Channel Tunnel seems to have done little for Anglo-French relations. I’ve detected nothing in the way of enhanced mutual understanding. The French still believe that all Englishmen are deeply repressed sadomasochists – and this perception is returned in unkindness.

Yet the effects of the tunnel on our sense of place are significant. It’s no longer possible for the Continent to be cut off in stormy weather. When the train hammers down through the Pas-de-Calais, dives under the sea, then re-emerges in the Kentish countryside, it’s difficult to resist the conclusion – looking out at the smooth, green shop floor of pan-European agribusiness – that these two locations are fundamentally the same place. It’s been a source of puzzlement on the left for some time now why the Medway towns and the Isles of Thanet and Sheppey have gone over so precipitately to the dark-yellow side. Kent has always had its contingent of working-class true blues but immigrants are by no means present in sufficient numbers to explain such rampant xenophobia.

In sociology, the concept of the “narcissism of small differences” is used to explain the vehemence with which similar groups attack each other, whether these groups are defined by class, ethnicity, nationality or location. The harsh truth of the matter is that nowadays you can have a frothy chain-store coffee in Canterbury and, by the time you need a refill, you can be sitting in a Starbucks in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. The tunnel has brought us into such uncomfortable proximity that we are driven either to denial – or to rage. Our intrusive press may have wormed its way into the Élysée Palace but, in return, the French have sent us huddled masses of wanker-bankers seeking a more favourable tax regime. Our Anglo-Saxon austerity may have begun to subject the bloated French state to a crash diet but their cuisine is on display in Morrisons.

I only animadvert on these matters at such length because my work commitments require that I take the F-train pretty regularly at the moment. And the lack of any mystique or glamour is striking. It feels more of a culture shock taking the tram from Manchester Piccadilly to Sale.

The only possible solution to the rise and rise of Little England is not, I’m forced to conclude, political but spatial. The tunnel must be filled in and, while we’re at it, we should probably stuff that half-digested foie gras back up the Lyonnaise brassiere manufacturer, where it belongs.

There was a piece by John McTernan in the Guardian the other day inveighing against the “knee-jerk Blair backlash”. The casus belli was Blair’s “global legacy award” from Save the Children for his work combating poverty; 200 staff at the charity signed a letter protesting against this bauble being handed to the former premier, but McTernan argues that Blair’s work in the field has been substantive and effective, and that his detractors should not confuse their long-standing ire over the Iraq war with the admiration he should properly occasion.

Well … maybe, but actually it wasn’t the matter in hand that preoccupied me as I stared at the image of Blair’s shopworn grin and straining-still-to-be-boyish features; no, rather, I felt like Winston Smith, staring up from his table in the Chestnut Tree Café at the poster of Big Brother, his eyes brimming with tears of love. True, I haven’t exactly had my face gnawed by rats, and nor do I feel anything like love for Tony Blair. Nonetheless I still find this emotional shift momentous: I no longer hate him. It’s possible the moderation in my antipathy is purely a matter of snobbery; after all, when it comes to Blair-hating, I was a distinctly early adopter, penning an anti-Blair piece as early as 1994, when he was still only (only!) shadow home secretary. Since 2003, with the exception of diehard Blairites, it’s been pretty much de rigueur for anyone left-liberal to fashion a voodoo doll of the man and stick pins often in it, so it could be that I’ve resiled from all of this because, although I still feel plenty of antipathy to this individual, it’s my fellow masses I really can’t abide.

Yet isn’t Blair hatred something fine and true and just? Doesn’t hating Blair make you feel righteous and pure of heart? Moreover, the tradition of loathing former prime ministers (and sitting ones as well) is so well established in our great nation that it could be seen as constitutive of our democracy; after all, though our votes may count for bugger all, our hatred is honoured – sanctified, even. Not least by the presence in London of anything up to eight priestly policemen (I pass by often and count them), armed with Heckler & Koch 9mm semi-automatic machine-guns, guarding his palatial residence in Connaught Square. Recall, the Iron Duke was so called because he had to have iron shutters on his carriage to shield him from the stone-throwing mob, but Blair’s protection goes way further. Not that it can ever be 100 per cent effective, which was why the promotional tour for his last magister opus, A Journey, was cancelled in 2010: the police and security services didn’t believe they could prevent the most popular British politician of the past 30 years from being assassinated by his own former electorate during this particular leg of his … journey.

So why have I stopped hating him? In part because of some of the arguments McTernan makes – or rather, because of their outline, not their substance. Yes, yes, Blair has indeed beaten his sword into a ploughshare, as McTernan observes: 70 per cent of his work is done pro bono – he may be making shitloads of money by “consulting” for dodgy central Asian dictators and by bullshitting rapacious global corporates, yet it’s easy to see that it isn’t making him in the least bit happy. Indeed, my suspicion is that Blair piles up dosh simply as a by-product of his frantic dashing around the world, while that dashing is itself a symptom of his deep-seated unease. He can’t sit still, because to do so would be to confront the reality – and the enormity – of what he has been responsible for: the deaths of untold numbers, deaths that may – or may not – be offset by the lives his actions have saved.

I expect you already get what I’m driving at here: I believe he has a conscience, no psychopath, he. And anyone with a conscience, no matter how vestigial, would be pretty worried given such a moral inventory. No wonder poor old Tone scampered into the arms of the Catholic Church as soon as he left office – he’s always “done” God, and now he’s probably praying fervently that someone can intercede to God before He does for him. You can see what all the agonising has done to Blair merely by scrutinising his appearance: the smile has become a rictus, the hair is electrified by anxiety, the flesh is deeply scourged with worry. It’s no joke being unable to pop out for a pack of fags without getting surrounded by a baying mob, hungry for your blood.

And if we accord Blair a conscience, we have come close to apprehending him not as a totemic figure, or some sort of metonym for ill-judged western military intervention in the Middle East, but as a living, breathing person. To wish ill of anyone, no matter how culpable, is quite obviously wrong – to do so is to ally yourself with the maddened crowd, rather than the judicious individual. At the same time, even maintaining resentment against Blair is a futile activity – rather like drinking a cup of poison and expecting your hate-figure to die. Poor Tone’s cup of poison runneth over, but I see no sign of him taking a sip; for him, there is definitely a distinction to be drawn between the Roman way and the way to Rome.

Is picking your nose and eating the dividend a form of cannibalism? How about sucking blood or chewing scabs? Do nail clippings count, or the occasional piece of dead skin? I only ask because there’s a strong case for arguing that eating yourself is the realest form of meal there can possibly be – after all, is not the body constantly consuming itself through apoptosis? Cannibalism, I concede, generally gets a bad press; although, that being noted, my first exposure to this universal but taboo mode of dining was through the Observer Magazine and I thought it sounded rather piquant.

Back in the 1970s the Observer serialised Piers Paul Read’s Alive, an account of a plane crash in the Andes. The Uruguayan national rugby team, their friends and family were on the plane – 45 people in all – and only 16 survived. When after a few days rescuers didn’t arrive, the survivors realised they would have to eat their dead companions if they, too, weren’t to perish. This they duly did, and as I recall, Read’s account of their cuisine was generally sympathetic: the rugger-buggers began at the buttocks, finding them the least “human” portion, and described the taste and texture (as has become commonplace in such stories) as being something like pork.

“Long pork” is apparently how certain anthropophagi describe their favourite food; I should have thought “pulled pork” would be more apt, as this is one dish that requires vigour to bring it to the cooking pot. There’s a lot of pulling in Robinson Crusoe, which some savants think is the first English novel. It may be that the emphasis placed on cannibalism is non-accidental: our noble castaway saves the indigene he dubs Friday from those who might eat him, but the civilisation he joins is predicated on slavery, a form of human consumption pulled on by an insatiable, imperialist sweet tooth. I’ve never eaten human flesh, apart from a few calluses nibbled in provincial station waiting rooms late at night when the buffet’s shut, but I’m not sure I object to it quite as strenuously as I probably should. In recent years there have been a number of cases of cannibalism in which the internet has played a conspicuous role: would-be anthropophagi advertise on the web for their dinner, and the dinner duly appears at their studio flat in Dortmund or Dorking and obligingly lays its head in the oven.

What the virtual dimension adds to the horror is beyond me – would it be any better if cannibals put cards up in newsagents’ windows, as presumably they were previously compelled to do? Somehow I doubt it. My hunch is we wouldn’t have all this people-eating if it weren’t for the rest of our loathsome foodie culture; once gourmets have sampled fugu fish, or live frogs, or locusts in honey, their jaded palate starts crying out for even more outrageous fare. Snacking on the hairy calf of someone you’ve entrapped online is only the next logical step. The way things are going there will be a dedicated website soon enough – I’d call it “Just Eat People!” assuming the domain name hasn’t been snaffled up already.

The Monty Python team was ahead of the game back in the Alive decade. There was a ditty in the book they published that went: “Much to his mum and dad’s dismay/Horace ate himself one day . . .” and then ana­tomised this consumption of anatomy, until the predictable ending: “And there he lay: a boy no more,/Just a stomach on the floor . . .” I don’t want to stuff this stanza with too much by way of semantics, but it does occur to me that if we keep on the way we are going with our colossal greed, all that will be left of human civilisation is a planetary stomach on the floor of the cosmos.

The closest I’ve got, in experiential terms, to eating someone was when my friend Michael and I ordered the pig’s head at St John, the restaurant helmed by Fergus Henderson that advertises itself as the home of “nose-to-tail eating”. Michael was brought up in a kosher household so you might have thought he’d forswear shortish swine on that basis alone. As for me, I had no principled objection to eating something with a face, but I’d never considered chowing down on the face itself. The pig’s head arrived and it had the glistening, lifelike appearance and crisped eyes you associate with government ministers being interviewed on the television news.

Rather like the poor rugby players marooned in the Andes, we began with the cheeks, reasoning that these were the least pig-like feature; but the meat was so beautifully cooked that soon enough we were hacking away at the head with gusto. The Rubicon was crossed when I found myself chewing on a corner of the snout that included a nostril. Eating really doesn’t get much more corporeal than that.

Among traditional peoples there are all sorts of beliefs about what happens when you ingest human meat: you possess the strength of the opponent you have just vanquished in battle (or, more troublingly, his weakness). Well, ever since I ate the pig of restricted height I’ve been more of a swine than ever – for real.

I usually become sexually aroused in libraries – no, really, I do. Moreover, I’m fairly certain I am not alone, and that plenty of others respond to the cloistral atmosphere, the tickle of dust in their nostrils and the murmurous voices in the same way. I think there are various reasons for the library/lust phenomenon: studious people just are sexier than jocks, and the idea of actually making love in the stacks is such a beautiful inversion of the intended use of these niches: instead of filling them with dead words, surely they should writhe with living bodies?

I haven’t always felt this way – I don’t remember getting the horn when I used to go to East Finchley Library with my mother; however, this may have been because I was prepubescent. What I recall is the cold suburban light falling through an oculus; the astringency of the polish used for the floors; and the photograph that hung in the vestibule of Dame Henrietta Barnett herding sheep, circa 1905, across the fields that were about to become Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Throughout university I couldn’t approach a library without my penis becoming a dowsing rod that sought out potential (but sadly never actual) sexual prospects – and this continued until about five years ago, when, slowly at first, but eventually completely, my biblio-libido departed. Up until last week I thought nothing of it – or, rather, I simply put it down to the creeping normalcy of older age. But when I found myself strolling along the interminable main corridor of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, passing one soigné Parisian swot after another and feeling not a scintilla of excitement, I realised something was afoot.

I’d been afoot myself: strolling towards the Seine through the 13e arrondissement, and thinking about nothing much in particular besides the woeful way French architects have with postmodernism: if the London skyline now resembles a desk littered with crappy “executive” toys, then the byways of Paris are like the boutiques from which they were bought: the buildings presenting as crazy agglomerations of detailing detached from any overall plan. The Bibliothèque itself is too big to fit into this anti-aesthetic: with its four signature towers comprised of stacks, the building it most closely resembles is Battersea Power Station, but instead of the humongous turbine hall there’s a sunken garden full of Scots firs, silver birches and oaks.

These trees have provoked much Scha­denfreude on the part of the citizenry and at the expense of the relevant fonctionnaires. The on dit is that due to the lack of light and the inadequate soil, the firs – which were brought in from the Forêt de Bord-Louviers in Normandy and winched down into the pit – grew too tall and spindly, so supportive cradles of steel hawsers have had to be erected around them. Oh, and there’s the rabbits: scores of them, an infestation that no one has been able to account for. In another echo of Battersea (which has raptors of its own), the same benighted fonctionnaires have brought in a number of hawks to deal with the pesky things.

WG Sebald, writing in the lugubrious persona of his eponymous hero Jacques Austerlitz, described at length the minatory atmosphere of the Bibliothèque, which he put down to both the imprisoned anorexic firs and the fact that the library was built on a site where, during the Occupation, a regular “market” was held by the SS at which German officers could purchase the booty confiscated from Parisian Jews who’d been deported to concentration camps. In the past I, too, have felt something of this negative vibe, and hypothesised that it’s the strange giant “bleachers” – wooden seating-cum-stairways ranged around the sunken garden – which, by making all visitors feel like collaborative voyeurs, have condensed this bad atmosphere. Even so, I still used to become aroused when I visited the Bibliothèque.

But not any more – and I think I know why. The French are some way ahead of us when it comes to digitising the contents of their national library; almost all the books are now available online as scanned facsi­miles. The library was only opened in late 1996, but it is already, in effect . . . dead. Scholars certainly don’t need to attend in person in order to use its contents, and the evidence of this is in the long corridors, which are beginning to fill up with street people who have come in from the cold, and who are tacitly tolerated by the staff.

The Skyscraper Index is the whimsical theory that the tallest building in a city usually is completed just before a recession. I would like to propose a variation on it: the biggest building for any given media technology is completed just before that technology becomes redundant. Our own newish British Library was also completed in 1996 and it, too, will become largely redundant over the next few years.

I may be sexually omnivorous, but even I don’t get much in the way of jollies from contemplating such moribund institutional bodies. I paced up and down for a while, taking squints into the sunken garden in the faint hope that a glimpse of some rabbits doing their thing might stimulate me, but sadly there was no action. Luckily, I had my Kindle with me, so I was able to sit down with a smelly man on a bench and together we read some of the more ecru parts of Fifty Shades of Grey.