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.