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.