“Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn./At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them . . .” But did we, I ask, did we really remember them on 11 November? I mean to say, my great-uncle Stanley Self fell on Flanders field, but obviously I never knew him – indeed, I did not discover his existence until years after the death of that generation, and the subsequent one, when I obtained a copy of my paternal family’s census form for 1911 and found Stanley on it. The last British soldier to have served in the First War died a lustrum ago – and he was extremely long-lived; soon enough even the people who knew the men who fought will all be gone. Which returns us to the rather troubling question: what is it we’re remembering on Remembrance Day?

For families that have lost loved ones in more recent conflicts the commemoration cannot but continue to have an enormous emotional impact, yet I wonder – because that’s what I am paid to do, no matter how unpopular it may make me – can anyone make an equation between those 888,246 lost lives and the 5,120 lost since 1945? Or, to draw out the inequity a little further, between the Great War dead and the 453 British lives lost in Afghanistan since 2001? I mean, British casualties in the first three hours of the Somme alone were pushing 20,000; in effect, it took only four minutes and 22 seconds for as many men to die as did during 13 years of the more recent conflict.

The more than four million visitors who have filled the precincts of the Tower of London since the beginning of August have been deeply moved by the great crowd of ceramic poppies planted in its dry moat – but moved by what, exactly? I chanced upon the display the other day, and if I was moved by anything at all it was intense claustrophobia as I struggled to escape the rubbernecking, sad-snapping hordes. Does this make me a bad person? I don’t think so. There’s been a vogue for these massed multiple artworks for some years now – Antony Gormley kicked it off with his Field series, featuring hundreds of little ceramic homunculi, crafted in different locations by different crowds. Then Ai Weiwei bedizened the floor of the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern with his millions of porcelain sunflower seeds that, it transpired, had been fashioned in the conditions so beloved by Chinese manufactories. For my money (and undoubtedly some of my money has been expended on these displays), all of these artworks act at a subliminal level, attracting huge numbers of people who are moved to contemplate an analogue of their own numerousness.

The First War is neither here nor there; what matters with these very public exhibitions of “remembrance” is precisely that they be public: to be seen to be mourning the fallen is the loyalty oath of the contemporary British state, and if you take it you’re helping to ensure that no matter what your personal cavil may be about this or that “illegal” war, overall you’re still prepared to back our government’s use of lethal force in the prosecution of its foreign policy. Can I be alone in seeing more than mere coincidence in the decision to put British boots back on Iraqi ground in the same week as Remembrance Day? What better way can there be of ensuring our tacit compliance than planting in our minds this equivalence between the existential threat posed by Germany in 1914 and the existential threat posed to . . . Well, posed to what? For all the blether we hear from our political class, a small crowd of actual military men have stepped forward in the past few weeks, and in no uncertain terms have said that our best possible response to Islamic State would be to do precisely nothing.

Really, it is British politicians’ fantasy of commanding a world-bestriding superpower that is under threat – oh, and there’s the troubling consideration that it was their own botched actions that have made Iraq a de facto failed state; under such circumstances, what better way can there be to deflect any public recollection of this cosmic and murderous cock-up than engaging in a new war?

And so it goes on: each ritual remembrance of wars past paradoxically serving to create a very contemporary amnesia. There have been calls from Boris Johnson and David Cameron to keep the ceramic poppies blooming a while longer before they’re flogged off to raise money for ex-servicemen and women’s charities, but what sort of a state is it that doesn’t make adequate provision for those wounded, or the dependants of those killed in its service, out of the public purse?

Surely only the same sort of state whose military adventuring has helped since 2001 to create another enormous crowd of poppies? Not ceramic ones, these, but Papaver somniferum, production of which reached “a sobering record high” last year, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. That’s a big crowd of heroin coming out of Afghanistan, another de facto failed state. Perhaps our political class should indulge in some, too? After all, the drug was first synthesised in our very own imperial capital and was named “heroin” because it made its users feel . . . heroic, and surely that’s what we want our leaders to be in time of war.

“You’ll find it a little weird to begin with,” said the man in the bubble tea kiosk, “but you’ll soon get used to it.” This turned out to be a grotesque understatement, coupled with a patent untruth, the instant my first slurp of bubble tea shot up the special wide-bore straw and filled my mouth with globules. The kiosk man had already told me these were made out of tapioca flour, which was just as well, because without this pappy foreknowledge I would have spat them straight out. Drinking bubble tea didn’t feel “a little weird”. It felt as I’d imagine performing cunnilingus on an android equipped with latex genitals might feel like: the tiny clitorises slipped between my lips and oozed between the gaps in my teeth while my tongue swam in sweetly mucosal gloop.

I’ve been seeing these bubble tea joints opening up around London over the past couple of years – then I spotted one in Manchester. I daresay Little Muckling-in-the-Marsh will have an outlet before long and Nigel Farage will stop by when he’s campaigning in next year’s election and make a rousing speech saying that bubble tea entrepreneurs have nothing to fear from a Ukip government. If only they did.

Actually, bubble tea and Farage have several things in common. They’re both strange mutations of quintessentially English institutions; respectively, a nice cup of tea and a saloon bar bore. Yes, yes, I know that bubble tea originates in Taiwan, that “bubble” is derived from boba, which means “large” in Chinese, but the fact of the matter is that my gloop of non-dairy creamer, Assam tea and sugar did taste like a particularly sickly cup of tea, although admittedly one full of latex clitorises. As for Farage, do you really need me to elaborate?

The bubble tea kiosk also offered a range of other beverages made with things such as coconut water and açaí berries; indeed, the whole phenomenon seems part and parcel of a general thirst for macerated and churned-up beverages – slushies, slurpies and slurries (all right, I made the last one up) – that has afflicted our nation. The bubble tea shops are usually brightly coloured, their windows tangled with coils of plastic tubing through which garish fluids pulse; the overall impression is of an alternative future imagined circa 1985, which makes sense because bubble tea did indeed originate during that decade of inspired innovation, Duran Duran and pie-crust collar blouses. Really, then, bubble tea isn’t a steaming drink but a steam punk one.

I walked towards the station taking gentle pulls on the wide-bore straw but it didn’t matter how gentle they were: up came the beastly boba tapioca balls. I didn’t know what to do with the things – suck, chew or swallow them straight down – and it was this indecisiveness that upset me most of all. The last thing you want from a cup of tea is to pause for thought. Or, rather, let me qualify that: the last thing you want from a cup of tea is to have cause to think about it. A cup of tea should be replete with itself alone, it should be a single and undifferentiated quale of “cup-of-tea-ness” entirely divorced from any of its component parts. When I have a cup of tea, I don’t want to think about tea bags, or milk, or sugar. I just want to sip the thing judiciously and ponder why it is that perfectly decent English people can imagine for one second that it would be a good idea to elect a man who looks like a large, shiny ball of tapioca flour (or possibly a large, shiny clitoris) to parliament.

This brings me, logically enough, to the vexed issue of the tea bag being left in. You know what I’m talking about: back in the day, if you bought a cup of tea to take away, the bag was put in first, the boiling water was poured on to it, the bag was removed after a while and milk and sugar was then added to taste (“’Ow many sugars, love?”). Some time in that innovative decade, or possibly during the still more creative one that followed, this sacred order of things was irrevocably altered. Writing The Zürau Aphorisms, Kafka foreshadowed this development, as he did other great disasters for humankind: “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers . . . Finally it can be calculated in advance and it becomes part of the ceremony.”

The new tea-making ceremony involves the bag going in first, followed by the milk; next the hot water is added; then the server offers you the choice that’s no real choice at all: “Shall I leave the bag in, love?” At this point, his world torn to shreds before his very eyes, the tea drinker splutters: “B-but you put the m-milk in first. Don’t you appreciate that tea is an infusion and it’s necessary for the water to be just off the boil when it meets the leaves? If you put the milk in first, it lowers the temperature so the tea can never brew properly. It doesn’t matter if you leave the bag in after that. It won’t make any appreciable difference!” Whereupon the server, being of the Cockney persuasion, says, “You ’aving a bubble, mate?”

Plymouth should, I think, be twinned with Hull: both are oddly remote-feeling cities for our right, tight little island. Hull, unlike Plymouth, at least has a motorway connection, but the Devonian capital must have felt like ultima Thule last winter when the mainline rail connection was severed in the storms. The cab driver who took me from the reconnected station to my hotel descanted on the depredations of wartime bombing, and how the brutalist/modernist and now postmodernist rebuilding of Plymouth has never compensated for the dreadful damage caused by wartime bombing. I must say I’m beginning to find this excuse – which can be heard in South­ampton and Coventry et al as well – a little grating; I mean, it’s been nearly 70 years since VE Day, surely time enough to effect civic beautifying.

Mind you, the only extended stay I’ve ever had in Plymouth was in the mid-1970s and mostly spent underwater. A friend of my brother’s, Bob Farrell, was a marine archaeologist who at that time was diving on a wreck in Plymouth harbour. Out of the goodness of his large heart he enrolled me, aged 15, in the fortnight-long British Sub-Aqua Club course at Fort Bovisand. All the other diving trainees were in their twenties or older, but I manned up, and despite it being April, spent many frigid hours squatting on the seabed laboriously completing emergency drills with my appointed buddy. (You have to be able to remove all of your kit and replace it while sharing a single scuba apparatus.) One day we drove to a leisure centre and passed the afternoon sitting on the bottom of a particularly deep swimming pool – but beyond this I can remember very little of the locale.

Still: remoteness, Francis Drake bowling on the Hoe, me diving in the harbour – you get the picture; Plymouth is for me ever associated with a certain outwardly bound derring-do. The cabbie dropped me at the Duke of Cornwall, an imposing late-Victorian edifice with the top-heavy lines of an Atlantic steamer redesigned by a disciple of Augustus Pugin. Despite being under the auspices of a large chain, the hotel didn’t seem to have had much by way of a refurb’ since at least the mid-1980s: unseasonable palms lurked in the tiled vestibule, and the original bell board was still on the wall by the lift, complete with buttons for signalling to the Writing Room and the Manager’s Sitting Room. As I checked in I sensed the deep, looming vacuity of the establishment: an ambience somewhere between the Overlook Hotel and Last Year at Marienbad. And as I sat in the cavernous and entirely empty dining room, delicately abstracting flesh-flakes from my perfectly poached cod, my only desire was that I could stay longer. Much longer.

A desire that was only sharpened when I saw the brass plaque that had been put up on the patch of wall on the other side of the lift; this told me that Ernest Shackleton had stayed at the Duke of Cornwall on 7 August 1914, the night before he sailed in his ship, the Endurance, bound for his final expedition: an attempt to reach the South Pole from the Weddell Sea that ended up with him and his men stranded in pack ice for months. As I’ve had cause to remark before, there’s nothing I like more, when the evenings draw in and the wind gusts hard, than to lie in bed – preferably in an overheated old pile like the Duke of Cornwall – and read about the British officer class getting their bollocks frozen off in Antarctica. That Schadenfreude having been acknowledged, Shackleton is by far the most sympathetic of the frozen-stiff-upper-lips: he never lost a man (and treated his men well), and while he may’ve been driven, it wasn’t by the same imperialist demons as that loathsome narcissist, Captain Robert Falcon Scott.

I went to my bed up the great and yawning staircase, admiring the thick pile of the runner, which was patterned with three ostrich feathers argent, the ducal crest. My room was snug; the electric kettle boiled and I settled down to my hoosh of tea and courtesy Jammie Dodgers (three-pack, naturally). It was difficult to imagine somewhere more powerfully somnolent, and as I undressed I gaily anticipated unconsciousness as heavy and blubbery as an elephant seal descending on my febrile head.

Then, hanging my jacket up, I was arrested by a bizarre sort of ledge that had been implanted in the bottom of the corner cupboard. I suppose it was intended as a shelf for shoes, but the way it had been neatly covered in the same red Axminster as the rest of the room struck me as hilarious – our human interiors are like that, aren’t they, always enacting a transformation of the utile into the decorative, or the cosy. Or at any rate, trying to enact it: the more I looked at the triangular carpeted shelf, the more absurd it seemed. And then the talking began in the room above.

There were several loud and excitable speakers, and it sounded like a language spoken somewhere far to the east of Plymouth; not Hull, but possibly Afghanistan. I wondered why exactly a loya jirga was being held in the Duke of Cornwall Hotel at midnight on a Tuesday evening in late October – but not for long: the silence had been deafening, and I was happy to slip into sleep serenaded in Pashto – or possibly Dari; it seemed entirely in keeping with my remote situation.

The Gadarene swine fallacy states that simply because a group of individuals are maintaining a formation, it doesn’t mean that they’re on the right course. You can see the logic of this: Jesus casts out the demons, they enter the swine, and the swine all charge along in a swinish pack and tumble straight into a lake. Only an ideally placed observer – Matthew, say, or possibly Mark or Luke – is able to see that the demoniacal swine are heading for disaster, while the poor little possessed positivist piggies keep on keeping on until their squeals turn into splutters and they sink beneath the lacustrine scum, all the time frantically maintaining the wisdom of their chosen course.

Once you’re aware of the Gadarene swine fallacy you see evidence of it everywhere you look: both main political parties currently exhibit it flagrantly, as they struggle to keep their MPs and voters in formation, while those of us who believe politics to be a matter of conscience as well as electability veer away to the right and the left. But I don’t want to waste your time on yet another dissection of the British body politic – it’s a swinish business, after all, for are we writers and readers of political commentary not equally intent on maintaining formation rather than the right course? Do we not cleave to the culture of criticality because it is all we have? Industrial action, direct action, peace camps, occupations, marching, shouting and the shaking of fists have all been seen to be powerless against the tight nexus of power that rules over us: they have been exposed as mere formations rather than right courses, yet our response has been to retreat into a virtual formation rather than fundamentally reorient our conception of political process.

I have absolutely no idea what goes through the mind of someone who seriously believes texting a word to a campaigning organisation, or a small donation to a charitable one, will “make a difference”. Of course, it does indeed make a difference – although not, perhaps, in the manner that they expect, because really the change is wholly registered in their own psyche, not in the persons of those they might wish to aid. Yes, yes, we all fall victim to the allure of web commerce – but we don’t feel good about it: we know we buy stuff we don’t need simply because of the frictionless process involved, and we also know an ideally placed observer can observe us, heading towards the great lake full of loan sharks that wait patiently to gobble up the indebted. But texting the word “GREEN” to an environmental campaign, or “NO” to one opposing female genital mutilation, seems like a no-brainer: it takes no effort whatsoever, and who knows, it may well help.

However, Ex nihilo nihil fit – change, on the other trotter, is only ever effected by doing something. I try to maintain an open mind on the impact of bidirectional digital media on our culture and society, but sometimes, slumped on the Tube, staring blankly at some ad urging me to text “PANTS” to a campaign aimed at ameliorating the working conditions in Bangladeshi sweatshops I sort of … despair. How can it be, I muse, that all these people actually believe, even for a split second, they can improve the lives of people with whom they simply aren’t prepared to engage properly? I don’t altogether blame the texters – they are, oft-times, doing all they can – but there’s an inherent cynicism in the way charities and pressure groups have recourse to this pseudo-activism.

No doubt some of you will dissent from this – perhaps a few of you will even be roused sufficiently to add a comment to this piece when it appears online. Please don’t bother: I shan’t be paying any attention to your opinion and I doubt anyone else will either, because nothing comes of nothing, and when weighed in the balance, the online expression of opinion doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. (And how could it? Say what you will about a hill of beans – or even text “BEANS” – it at least has a saucy, glistening materiality.) Ugly militias, high on cultish ideology and trumpeting through the African bush to abduct children, aren’t likely to be influenced much by clicktivism, but just as making an ill-advised online purchase still gives us a little jolt of adrenalin, so, presumably, unleashing a few keystrokes in the direction of Joseph Kony or Boko Haram gives their begetters an infinitesimal rush.

Which leads me, in my on-course formation of one, to the conclusion that I am wrong. Something does indeed come of nothing; and that something can be summed up by recalling Thomas Hobbes’s attitude towards charity: clicktivism, one might say, exists solely in order to relieve the inactive of the burden of their conscience – it is, in political terms, the equivalent of texting the word “RUN”, and expecting this act alone to make you fit. I don’t suppose this view, like so many of my others, will make me popular, but then what was Jesus’s fate after he cast out the demons and sent the swine packing? The Gadarenes asked him, quietly but firmly, to click off.

It’s pretty weird round my way at the moment: a sirocco of flight capital is blowing through, conjuring vast “luxury apartment” developments into being the way djinns are embodied by Arabian dust storms. The youngest and I went out for a little wander the other day and we were both intimidated by the tower cranes building themselves overhead. Each new parametrically designed and glassy moneymaker comes complete with an inbuilt restaurant – Riverlight, where a studio flat will cost you a modest £800,000, features a Korean joint, while St George Wharf, hard by Vauxhall Bridge, boasts the delightfully named Steax and the City. We eschewed this, rather than chewing on a steax (whatever that may be), but the problem of where to have lunch remained until the boy recalled that there was a branch of Dirty Burger on the far side of the railway viaduct.

I hadn’t heard of Dirty Burger before – hardly surprising, as there are only five of them: four in London and one outlier in Chicago (or perhaps it’s the other way round). When I got home I was informed by my spouse – who is rather more sophis­ticated than I am – that its name derives from so-called “dirty food”; a newish culinary concept that valorises grease, sugar, carbohydrates and all things bad for you. I suppose there was an inevitability about this particular détournement; such is the fecundity of late capitalism, which is ever seeking out shiny new things to turn into dirty old money.

I can understand the logic of opening a branch of Dirty Burger in Shoreditch, Whitechapel, even Kentish Town – but Vauxhall? Although the world spirit of gentrification is busily taking up residence here the fact remains that, as of now, the place is still what is scientifically termed a shithole. Vauxhall Cross isn’t just dirty – it’s positively filthy; the railway viaduct is encrusted in centuries of soot and grime, the bus interchange looms greyish in a permanently hovering cloud of exhaust fumes; on the ledges of the grotty old buildings alongside it, the anti-pigeon barbs are so encrusted with pigeon shit that they resemble stalactites and stalagmites. At any hour of the day or night you can happen upon street drinkers tumbling out of or into the homeless hostel, their beards and hair matted with vomit and White Lightning, while towards dawn sadomasochistic revellers reeking of amyl nitrate debouch from the Hoist, a nightclub of legendary unsavouriness.

Dirty Burger’s interior decoration shtick looked positively bizarre in such a context: sited underneath the arches adjacent to the Hoist, its grubby little nook is panelled with corrugated iron sheets, while the floor, the tables and counters appear to have been built with old railway sleepers. On Rodeo Drive or the rue Saint-Honoré, such postmodern referencing of the lives of the immiserated and securely absent might be amusing, but when you’re sitting in a little “terrace area”, contrived out of the spit-stained paving and assailed by the diesel flatulence of passing lorries, that joke – to quote the balladeer who brought us Vauxhall and I – isn’t funny any more. The men doing the flipping at Dirty Burger seemed lacking in the appropriate ironic detachment – they were just trying to make a living in the soiled old city like millions of others.

The boy had the Dirty Bacon Cheeseburger, fries and a chocolate milkshake; I had a tea, and watched him inhale about a week’s worth of calories in a handful of seconds. I asked him how his burger had been and he said the curious thing was, it wasn’t only the meat and cheese that were greasy, so was the bun. I meditated on this as grit pinged from the roadway into my smarting eyes.

I imagined a planning meeting at Dirty Burger’s HQ: clean-cut young women and men sat round an immaculate conference table, eyeing me suspiciously as I strode back and forth in my crinkle-cut suit. I jabbed a button on a laptop and the PowerPoint displayed an image of an indistinct, massy object. “Now pay attention,” I said. “This is a pseudobezoar, a solid bolus of food that’s been engendered in the gastrointestinal tract of an ordinary London office worker by feeding her a detritus of old coffee stirrers, lint and deep-fat-fryer waste.” I jabbed the button again and the image was replaced by a second one; now the massy object was in a greasy bun. “I give you the pseudobezoar­burger,” I announced, “the first commercially produced comestible to incorporate regurgitation into the cooking process.” A lean young man sat forward: “When you say ‘give you’ do you mean that literally?”

I laughed shortly, “Of course not – the pseudobezoarburger will retail at £7 …” The vision faded, and I was back at Vauxhall Cross looking at a bill for £15.75; it was a lot of filthy lucre for a dirty burger, especially given that – according to the garish decal pasted on the grubby phone box nearby – I could get a perfectly clean one at Burger King for £3.79, and for £1.99 I could re-up to a full meal deal. But then I suppose that’s the sort of cheapskate bum I am: always on the lookout for a cheap, safe bun.

I arrived in Wakefield at what I assumed to be Westgate Station. It had been a null journey, the train leadenly clunking over the flatlands in the faint autumnal sunshine. The franchise on this route seems to have been acquired by East Coast, but the carriage I was in had that absurd Grand Central livery: the blown-up photos of Marilyn Monroe, the chessboards painted on to the tables. Really, the last thing you want when you’re heading for West Yorkshire is to be reminded of the existence of Manhattan. Not, I hasten to add, because there is anything wrong with Wakefield – it’s just that the Grand Central decor is decentring: it makes you wonder where the hell you are.

Anyway, on this trip I had no intention of being where I was. Travel for work is like that. Sometimes you find out about the locale, you sally out from the hotel having asked the locals where there’s a good place to eat, or you visit some artisanal undertaking, ancient structure or beauty spot. If you’re going to be there for a while you might try to pick up the local lingo, take part in a game or pastime peculiar to the region, and congratulate yourself as you begin to find your way around. But other times you make a decision: it’s too much effort orienting yourself in space as well as time, you’re too tired and harassed to care about the cheese-rolling festival, all you want to do is get the job done and go home.

The station seemed to be largely wrapped in plastic sheeting and the approach road swarmed with bollards. A friendly man saw me doing what people do when they have decided not to be where they actually are – footling with Google Maps on my iPhone – and took me in hand. It transpired I’d arrived not at Westgate Station, but at Kirkgate; luckily, though, Pete was heading the same way as me and he became my Virgil, guiding me through the hellish circles of pound shops, payday loan businesses and balti houses clustered along the arterial road. We headed up Kirkgate, which seamlessly elided into Ings Road and the sought-after Westgate, then past the cathedral. Pete had been living in Stroud for the past 25 years, but he was about to move to Wakefield. “For work?” I asked, and he replied, laughing, “No, for a woman.”

Pete said that although the town centre was pretty run-down there was a new shopping mall, the Trinity Walk, and that’s where all the moneyed folk were, consuming pizzas and enlarging their pectorals. I made a mental note to give it the swerve. He dropped me at my hotel, the York House on Drury Lane, just down from the Theatre Royal. I could see immediately that York House was an odd establishment – aspirational, certainly, what with its electronic locks, halting lift and motion-sensing corridor lighting, but, for all that, the spirit of the old provincial railway hotel smarmed along the brown-painted wainscots. My room featured a quarter-acre of tufted, puke-coloured carpeting and a large four-poster bed without canopy or curtains. In lieu of a bedside lamp, there was a standard one, comprising a fasces of aluminium rods topped off by diodes. Cosy. On the wall was a large photograph of Paris by night. Disorientating.

Later that evening the people I was working with began talking about the area – try as I might to steer the conversation on to less topographical matters. They spoke of the decline of the coal industry, and how it was that while Wakefield was graced with two railway stations, nearby Ossett had none. Then they spoke of how Ossett had grown rich by recycling the leavings from the wool industry to make material known as mungo and shoddy, the latter giving rise to the slang term. I tried to suppress this knowledge, just as I blanked the location of the Hepworth Gallery and the intelligence that it had been designed by David Chipperfield with a view to creating a “sculptural experience”. I wanted to scream at these friendly folk: “Shut up! I’m not here!”

Still later the same evening I ate alone at a Chinese buffet restaurant in the Trinity Walk shopping centre. It was empty except for me, the staff and a portly couple who returned again and again to the chocolate fountain, where they slathered mini-donuts in sickly brown goo. Rain spittled the plate-glass windows; through them I saw more plate-glass windows, and behind these a man was oscillating on a fitness machine.

I paid my bill and strolled back through town. Blue light flooded from a nightclub called Qudos; I could see a single young woman in a red cocktail dress jerking to the drum machine. I looked in an estate agent’s window. A nicely spraunced-up, two-up, two-down terraced house was going for £80,000 – chump change down south.

I began to fantasise about my new life in Wakefield: suppers at the Chinese buffet, canoodling at Qudos, weekend bicycle rides on the shoddy trail to Ossett. I was sitting smoking on the balcony of York House when a legless man in a wheelchair joined me. He said something incomprehensible, I grunted a reply. It was as if I’d always been there – or, should I say, here.

How many times do you have to tread in vomit before it puts you off your dinner? This wasn’t, in my case and that of my companions, an academic question: as we walked from my son’s flat in Haggerston, east London, towards the City, we must have passed puddles of sick running into double figures – in some parts of Shoreditch the puke lay so extensively on the pavement that the chunks of food glistering in its bile seemed like some duodenal wrack, left behind when the Great Vomit Wave of ’14 finally retreated. Still, what did we expect at 11.30pm on a Saturday night? This part of London, having reached a critical mass of hipsters, has now started to draw in revellers from Essex, who debouche at Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street Stations, drink, dance and kebab up, then leave their viscid spoor behind them as they beat a retreat.

Not that they were routed by 11.30pm – the streets were teeming with lads in neatly pressed white shirts and lasses tottering about on high heels like soused foals. My own lad was sniffy about the influx, but I admonished him: “It serves you right. Here you are, occupying an ex-council flat that was built for these people’s grandparents; they’re simply fighting back against the neoliberal curse of gentrification with the only weapons they have, puke and beats.” Puke & Beats might, alternatively, have been a suitable name for the restaurant we were aiming for: the Duck & Waffle, which nestles on the 40th floor of the old Heron Tower in the heart of the Great Metonym.

You may not be familiar with the old Heron Tower if you don’t spend much time in the City. It is another of these logo-cum-icon buildings that have begun to clutter up central London the way that crumbs bedizen damask. I dunno, perhaps one day a godlike waiter will scrape them all away before presenting the roofless wanker bankers with a menu of their just deserts, but until then we might as well enjoy the view of toy town. Which was why I’d booked our table for midnight: I wanted to see the jeunesse dorée whooping it up. I may be something of a downtown guy, but I’m not so long in the tooth that I can’t enjoy gazing upon uptown girls, and girls don’t get much upper than the ones noshing in Britain’s highest restaurant.

As we came down Bishopsgate, a three-quarter moon, like some celestial egg, was being nicely coddled on the shoulder of the Salesforce Tower – and I chose to regard it as a good omen. (In May of this year the Heron Tower was renamed thus, and I feel I owe it to Salesforce.com, the building’s largest tenant, to give this lovely ascription a proper shout-out.) But then, once the velveteen rope had been unhooked and we’d entered the lift, the smooth thrust up the sheer glassy peak brought my own bile surging up my oesophagus. I looked wildly about me at the greenish faces of my companions, and behind them the widening, darkling, twinkling plain of London; for a few seconds vertigo seized me and I thought I might heave, but then we reached the 40th floor, the lift doors opened and we shuffled back out into …

… a branch of Pizza Express. Not literally, but the corridor leading to the bar area of the Duck & Waffle had the regulation Moroccan tiling floor and rough-adzed wood panelling of any mid-market British chain restaurant. In the bar area there were the same pots of vegetation you’d see at ground level – true, the celestial music was deafening disco, but if I ignored the view everything seemed acceptably dull. Friendly staff sat us first at a table next to the floor-length windows, but it was directly under a speaker so we moved to a booth in the middle of the restaurant. And there we sat, shouting at each other from time to time over the bleep and judder of Edwin Starr.

My companions had the crispy pig’s ear to start, and even though they weren’t on the all-night menu the maître d’ managed to dredge up a half-dozen oysters for me. The others drank a £50 bottle of Côtes du Rhône (this must be where the profits lie), while I supped tonic water. Our signature dishes, when they finally arrived, were perfectly yummy – I’ve no idea who came up with the idea of putting a poached duck’s egg and a leg of roast duck on top of a waffle and sousing the whole gallimaufry with maple syrup, but she or he was some kind of twisted genius: this is perfect comfort food for those who’re feeling vertiginous as they contemplate the giddy extent of the ever-inflating London property bubble.

At the other tables around us, beautifully groomed young women with hair, nail and nipple extensions (I made the last one up) shrilled to one another. As I relaxed and blotted up the atmos’ with my waffling brain, I marvelled at the serendipity of it all: I’d worried that the lofty Duck & Waffle wouldn’t provide a real enough meal to qualify for this down-home column, but then I hadn’t reckoned on the warped genius of late capitalism, which can spot a gap in the market the way pigeons shit on ledges – or people puke on pavements, for that matter.

London, Friday 20 June 2014 – it was the evening just before the shortest night of the year, so what could have been more fitting than to walk the 16 or so miles from my house in Stockwell to the high point of the North Downs near Woldingham? I wanted this view at dawn – I wanted to see the city with the startled provincial eyes of a waking Wordsworth, rather than from the gritty perspective of a cockney wordsmith; but I also wanted the experience of getting there: the sole-shuffle over tarmac and paving as the city fell into slumber around me. I entertained the notion that because I’d be journeying from the insomniac centre to the always stuporous suburbs, I’d be acting as a 21st-century knocker-up, bringing with me the dawn of the longest day in the neoliberal calendar.

For companions, I had the writers Nick Papadimitriou and Matthew Beaumont; the former’s book Scarp is a sort of prose eulogy for another outer-London massif; while the latter’s Night Walking, a cultural history of the human subject cast adrift in the urban darkness, will be published by Verso early next year. Heading up Stockwell Road then wending our way through Brixton, we were still paddling in the urban millrace: the Portuguese smack addicts outside the bookie’s; the Afro-Caribbean devotees of plantain; the evening footballers whooping it up on the greensward of Brockwell Park – we were at one with them all as we strode, the litre flask of espresso in my backpack banging against the kidneys the coffee was soon to flush through. From the top of the park we had an excellent prospect of central London, with its new skyline of hypertrophied desktop-toys. It was dusk as we left the park; dusk, too, when we gained Tulse Hill Station and Nick bought a plastic-encapsulated polypropylene sandwich from Tesco’s.

Yet by the time we’d reached the top of Knight’s Hill, and Matthew and Nick – I thought this distinctly infra dig – were taking snaps of the Crystal Palace radio mast, night had definitively fallen. It seemed fitting: we were walking through the lofty suburbia immortalised by Patrick Keiller in his 1983 short film Norwood, a twisted fable of death, disappearance and unclipped privet in the time of Thatcher. Norwood is filmed in black and white – and we inhabited a similarly leached environment, with the lights of Croydon beginning to twinkle below us and to the south.

Descending through the darkness from Upper Norwood we passed through a cluster of pubs and takeaways around Norwood Junction that were patronised entirely by shaven-headed men wearing England football shirts and by their blowsy womenfolk. The fascistic jollity that gusted from the open doors was . . . bracing, but then we’d left white-town and entered black-town: African groceries lined the road, men in colourful dishdashes dashed from their cars to their front doors, and we passed a pub that had been transformed into an African-themed nightclub, complete with fake ele­phant tusks bracketing the doorway and a sign announcing that “Fine African Wines” were being served inside.

But by then it was already too late for such quaffing – the streets of the world city were emptying of traffic, and we stopped somewhere in Addiscombe for a coffee and chocolate, Nick and Matthew bench-bound while I stretched out on the pavement, luxuriating in the bivouac of sodium light pitched by a street lamp. A police patrol car schmoozed by. Then, coming down the hill towards Shirley, we were trudging in the middle of the shadowy lane when a BMW thrumming bass came up behind us. Its driver wound down a window and goggled in marijuana bemusement: these odd tramping magi, acting as if we were kings of the road. On the outskirts of Shirley we halted on a bosky traffic island for another pick-us-up, and as we sipped our coffee the moon rose in a cowl of milky, deliquescent mist.

Nick had the better night sight, so he navigated on for us down avenues of beeches. We tripped over smoothed roots, kicking up the grey sandy soil. Dawn winkled us out of the woodland, and we found ourselves blinking by the lychgate of St Leonard’s Church, a little gem that dates back to the 13th century, tucked away on the outskirts of Warlingham. Then came the final slog up the ridge of the North Downs, with the sun not yet risen but the eggshell sky cloudily cracking overhead.

In the field were sluggish bullocks my Jack Russell, Maglorian, was too tired to pester. We sought out the high point, and there it was: the panorama we’d been seeking. I could make out the blocks of flats near to my home and the chimneys of Battersea Power Station. Nick thought he could see his own tower block off of the Finchley Road. Only Matthew’s home, in Kilburn, was lacking the necessary salience.

I stared at London spread out before us, and it seemed as strange to me as any landscape. This might have been an alien planet, or some virtual realm, conjured up in Silicon Valley and downloaded straight to my psyche. It was that much of an in­version of ordinary experience – the night-time promenade out of the city – that all conventional measures of space and time and urbanity had been abandoned: as the sun rose, London was made anew, and so, perhaps, were we.

This article was originally published in the New Statesman

July 2014: it’s breakfast time at the Farmer’s Daughter, a boutique motel in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. The decor is suggestive of some deconstructed Midwestern idyll, what with old farming implements nailed up against one exterior wall, yards of gingham hanging from assorted rails and plenty of rough-hewn yet varnished wood. The establishment is constructed around an exterior courtyard, and as I take my seat, intent on caffeine and carbohydrates, the soft, fume-tangy morning air is pulverised by the reverberating bassline of Massive Attack’s 1995 single “Karmacoma”. It makes me think of the neon-furred nights I endured that year, when, my synapses misfiring in a slop of MDMA, I’d rear up to look blearily at the dawn.

I rear up and head over to reception for the usual useless parlaying: would they please turn the music down? No, they would not, because they cannot comprehend why anyone wouldn’t want to eat their waffles to the accompaniment of loud trip-hop . . . When I reassume my seat, looking frazzled and out of sorts, one of my sons bellows sympathy over the shingly sonic backwash, and I say: “Really, it’s OK. After all, it’s my generation that’s to blame for this bullshit culture.”

And we are, aren’t we, us fiftysomethings? We’re the pierced and tattooed, shorts-wearing, skunk-smoking, OxyContin-popping, neurotic dickheads who’ve presided over the commoditisation of the counterculture; we’re the ones who took the avant-garde and turned it into a successful rearguard action by the flying columns of capitalism’s blitzkrieg; we’re the twats who sat there saying that there was no distinction between high and popular culture, and that adverts should be considered as an art form; we’re the idiots who scrumped the golden apples from the Tree of Jobs until our bellies swelled and we jetted slurry from our dickhead arseholes – slurry we claimed was “cultural criticism”.

So all I can do is sit there and reflect on the great world-girdling mass of mindless attitudinising that passes for “hip” in the third millennium since the death of the great sandal-wearing hippie. In 2005 Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris’s satirical series Nathan Barley aired on British television; in it, they portrayed the nascent scene around Shoreditch and Hoxton in east London as a miserable gallimaufry of web-headed, tiny-bike-riding, moronic poseurs. Watching these programmes again nearly a decade on, I’m struck not only by the uncanny prescience of Brooker and Morris, but, far more disturbingly, by how nothing has changed. Changed, that is, qualitatively – if you walk down Brick Lane nowadays you see the same beards, low-cut T-shirts and fixed-wheel bikes; and if you eavesdrop on conversations you hear the same idiotic twittering about raves and virtual art forms; but quantitatively the picture has been utterly transformed: this quarter of the metropolis is positively haunching with dickheads – but then so is Manchester’s Northern Quarter, or Clifton in Bristol, or the West End of Glasgow. If you venture further afield you will find dickheads the world over – downtown Reykjavik, I discovered to my horror, is a phantasmagoria of frothy-coffee joints and vinyl record shops.

Comrade Stalin once observed that “Quantity has a quality all its own”, and the sheer quantity of dickheads now wandering bemusedly around the world represents, in my view, a big shift in cultural dynamics. In Los Angeles, arguably their Mecca, to be a dickhead is unremarkable; but Portlandia, the US equivalent to Nathan Barley, posits the Oregonian city as a sort of time capsule of all that’s righteously hip. The theme tune is a song featuring the lyric: “The spirit of the Nineties is alive in Portland!” If only that were the only place it was alive – but the truth is that this seisdick shift is global. If you log on to YouTube and key in “Being a Dickhead’s Cool”, you’ll be subjected to two and a half minutes of satiric genius. Reuben Dangoor, who wrote and sings this ditty, doesn’t seem to have done much else with his life, but frankly he doesn’t need to. With lines such as “I remember when the kids at school would call us names/Now we’re taking over their estates” he has so effectively skewered the phenomenon that he can rest eternally on his twisted laurels.

The rousing chorus of the song – “I love my life as a dickhead/All my friends are dickheads too” – suggests to me why the dickhead is at one with the zeitgeist. By providing even the most woefully untalented with an outlet for their “creativity”, the web has massively enlarged the numbers who style themselves as “artistic”, as well as increased the duration of their futile aspiration. In the kidult dickhead milieu, it’s now quite possible to encounter fortysomethings with weird facial hair, wearing shorts and still resolutely believing that their career is about to take off.

And in a way I suppose they’re right, because the totalising capability of dickheads + web = an assumed equivalence between all remotely creative forms of endeavour. Nowadays someone who sticks old agricultural implements on the wall of a Los Angeles motel regards himself as on a par with Michelangelo; moreover, as all their friends are dickheads, too, no one is about to disabuse them. Hell, on Planet Dickhead just turning up the trip-hop can be a work of unalloyed genius.

Some guy in some 0.1-horse town in the ass-end of America’s great nowhere put up a crowdfunding appeal on the web: “I want to bake an apple pie for my mom but I don’t have the money to do it.” A couple of days later there was $49,000 in his bank account. I like to think he’ll now bake many, many apple pies and deliver them widely throughout the States to the needy – like some Johnny Apple-Pie-Seed, but in all probability he’ll just trouser the cash.

At least part of the appeal of crowdfunding (or so the boosters proclaim) is that it enables ideas to get off the ground, whether for businesses or creative endeavours, that would otherwise lie down and die in the mud. The web seems to make possible the conditions necessary for the cultivation of what James Surowiecki characterised – in his 2004 book of the same name – as the wisdom of crowds.

Surowiecki was initially inspired by Francis Galton’s revealing anecdote about how the aggregated guesses of a crowd at a country fair more accurately identified the weight of a slaughtered ox than the prediction of any one expert. Surowiecki built on this to identify optimal factors for crowd wisdom: 1. Diversity of opinion – it doesn’t matter what information this is based on, the important thing is that it should be private to the individual. 2. Independence – individuals’ opinions should be free from the taint of groupthink. 3. Decentralisation – in forming their opinion, individuals should draw on specific, local knowledge. 4. Aggre­gation – a mechanism exists that can take all these individual judgements and turn them into a collective decision.

The web, at least in theory, enshrines these optimal factors in its very constitution, which is presumably why crowdfunding has become such a Big Thing. You can now crowdfund films or music albums; venture capitalists have organised crowd equity funding for company start-ups, and wanker-bankers have adapted the model to make it possible for both individuals and corporate entities with a bad credit profile to raise loans nonetheless. It has been calculated by a UK-based wonk tank that during one month this year, $60,000 was raised worldwide every single hour through crowdfunding. By anyone’s estimation that’s a lot of apple pie. In the heady realm of US electoral finance, crowdfunding has been entrenched since Barack Obama used it in his campaign to wrest the White House from the would-be successor to the pixie-eared reader of The Little Goat.

My suspicion is that the efficacy of crowdfunding will in fact decline in inverse correlation to its success. Put differently: the more money that’s raised, the less wise will be the crowd that raises it. I call this theory – contra Surowiecki – “The Idiocy of the $49,000 Apple Pie”. Here’s how the web works to produce such dumb collective judgements: 1. Homogeneity of opinion – the apple-pie funders’ opinions are based securely on information common to them all: apple pies are yummy, moms are great and it’s nice to make apple pies for moms. 2. Conformity – simply by spending enough time on the web to become aware that some schmuck has posted such a crowdfunding appeal, these people are exhibiting a worrisome conformism. 3. Centralisation – also termed “googlisation”, this is a function of the way commercially oriented search engines act as positive feedback mechanisms to pump-prime consumer (or donor) demand. 4. Aggregation – this is the only proposition my theory shares with Surowiecki’s; I agree with him that the web can take all these individual judgements and turn them into a collective decision.

The problem is that the myriad individual decisions are resolutely crap ones. Why? Because there is a suppressed premise in all of this. True, apple pie is yummy; most moms are great; moms do indeed deserve to have apple pies made for them by penurious offspring. However, the offspring do not deserve to have their donor pie in effect made for them many times over simply because they have access to the web. To begin with, such $49,000 apple pies will be the outliers of crowdfunding appeals, but in time – due to the underlying dynamics – they will increase in number, until the total crowdfunding pie will be divided up between a few such specious enterprises; then the whole thing will collapse in a puff of pixels.

The confirmation of the beginning of the end of crowdfunding was presented to me just a few days after I read about the $49,000 apple pie in USA Today. I was strolling along the promenade at Venice Beach admiring the weathered skins of the sun-and-marijuana-baked hobos, when a leaflet was thrust into my hand. “Donate one dollar so we can raise a million dollars to make a movie!” the thruster cried – and when I read the leaflet it cried the same thing. This was crowdfunding taken back to the streets, trying to re-create the conditions demanded by Surowiecki’s theory by decoupling it from the web altogether. Naturally, the crowd was far too wise to engage with such arrant bullshitting, and there were many discarded leaflets papering the asphalt. After all, while the wannabe film producers thought they were engaging in a novel and democratised form of financing, the crowd saw their efforts for the timeless phenomenon they were: begging.