Arriving at London City Airport a month ago, I was the first off the plane – and there’s always some satisfaction to be gained from that. For a start, you avoid the awkward game of Twister that ensues as cramped people lever themselves from their seats, un-gum underwear from clefts and pits, scrape carry-on bags they’re unable to carry from the overhead lockers and then hover leadenly in the aisle. If you’re at the very front you get to hear the gangway being cranked into position, then witness the strange moment as the cabin door is opened and the steward greets the ground crew with a bog-ordinary salutation that wipes away any remaining wonderment you may have felt contemplating the marvel of international jet travel.

If you’re first off the plane and the arrivals areas are devoid of people, you get a strange sense of being the first man ever to have arrived on earth. As I strode along the flexible and resonating floors, my eye was drawn to odd scraps of carpet affixed to vertical surfaces, a signature feature of airport interior design the world over. There was no one in the corridors and the man from Border Force, despite his homeland security-style uniform, seemed a mere will-o’-the-wisp – this was a frontier drawn in water on shifting sands. The baggage hall was empty as well and my footfalls echoed in the main concourse. None of this surprised me: I was still the man who fell to earth and, besides, there remains something so claustrophobically steampunk about the immediate purlieu of City Airport that you can be forgiven for being hopelessly spaced out.

I stood on the empty Docklands Light Railway platform looking at the great caramelised hunk of the Tate & Lyle factory in Silvertown, then boarded the dinky monorail and sat up front as it switchbacked its way past the winking battle star of Canary Wharf before plunging down the rabbit hole and into the Bank burrow. All was as usual – the same peeling posters, the same sough of virally loaded warm air in the tunnels. The only oddity was the absence of the city’s inhabitants and, now I came to think of it, as my flight had banked and turned 5,000 feet over my house, then flown downriver over the glassy pinnacles and slate spires, I’d been struck by the clear view I had of streets unobstructed by traffic – yet it was only nine o’clock on a weekday evening.

It wasn’t until, on my way back from the Tube, I was passing the pub at the end of my road that I realised the nature of the disaster. Peering in through the plate-glass windows, I saw them: the zombies thronging in their white shirts around a hurting, viridian television screen. Squinting, I could just make out the score – yes, England were losing again and the entire population of London was paralysed as it awaited the knockout kick. The realisation that the apocalypse was Uruguay rather than anthrax had me laughing like a drain.

I remembered the last time I’d enjoyed a football match that corralled the crowds indoors. Seeking respite from the frenzy that gripped the nation during England’s semi-final in the 1996 European Championship, I left the pub in Marylebone where I was drinking and headed for Hampstead Heath. The tension was too great: anticipating a historic re-enactment of the 1966 World Cup victory that did more to define English nationhood than the Blitz, the cockney multitudes had gathered around their laughably bulbous televisions. The match, played at the old Wembley Stadium, had gone to extra time and as I drove my laughably bulbous car along the deserted roads I could feel the tension rippling in the red-brick façades of the semis.

I parked and walked to the top of Parliament Hill. Standing there, with the city spread out before me, I heard an odd susur­rus that rose in pitch and grew in intensity until it turned into a dreadful groan. There was a long hiatus, followed by a breathy roar. A rotund man then came puffing up the path from Gospel Oak; he reached the bench where I reposed and dropped down on it, saying, “I couldn’t stand it any more. It’s gone to penalties. I had to get away! I bought meself this fucking Havana to celebrate wiv …” – he opened his fist to reveal a crushed stogy – “but now I dunno … I just dunno.”

Cruelly, I abided while there came another groan from the city below, followed after a while by a second cheer. Then I observed: “Actually, you can hear the game from up here.” We waited. There was a third groan and I said, “See, that was the Germans scoring.” It was followed by a third cheer: “And that was us.” A fourth groan was succeeded by a fourth cheer. Then there was a fifth groan and after that … nothing: not simply the absence of a cheer but its complete inversion, as the mishit ball flew wide of nationhood’s net. The rotund man ground out his never-lit cigar on the ground, turned tail and, close to tears, stomped off down the hill.

I sat on the bench for a while longer, wishing England could be knocked out of a major football championship every day. That way I’d always be at the front of the queue.

Standing on a patch of induced greenery, I stared first at the vast and glassy curvilinear buttocks of Dublin Airport’s newish Terminal Two, then at the shiny cars being shat out from between them along the approach road. I turned and saw the entire sweep of Dublin Bay open out before me: I could see the Wicklow Mountains to the south; the city centre with its hugger-mugger of recent building; the Brobdingnagian bodkin spearing up from O’Connell Street and the triangular roofs of the assemblage of office blocks that Dubliners – with typically irritating self-deprecation – have named “Canary Dwarf”. To the north was the massy brow of Howth Head and before it the long promenade of Dollymount Strand. Out in the bay, the Bull breakwater lanced through the waves. All was in order, all was legible: I had achieved my objective … or had I? I stubbed out my cigarette, turned on my heel and headed for the terminal. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus remarks, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”; and here was I, lapsing yet again into the troubling reverie of international air travel.

I had gone to Dublin with the express intention of understanding a city that to me has always seemed incoherent – and even a little minatory. As I wrote about Manchester a few weeks ago: I never feel I have the measure of a city until I’ve walked across it and felt its heft with my feet. I’ve travelled to Dublin enough over the years, beginning in the early 1980s, when, if my memory serves me, there was as much horse-drawn as motor-propelled traffic on the roads, and the alleyways off the main thoroughfares seemed preternaturally gloomy after dusk. The problem is if you ask Dubliners to take you for a walk around their manor, they invariably concentrate on the Georgian squares, St Stephen’s Green and the immediate purlieu of Trinity College, but pretty as all of this stuff is, it’s no more indicative of the city’s realities than a walking tour of Bloomsbury would be of London’s. To forestall such clichés I arranged for my friend the writer Carlo Gébler to meet me at the airport: we would walk from there out to the Bull and take up our stance where Dedalus, in his earlier Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man incarnation, sees the so-called “heron girl”, and so experiences the earthy epiphany that gives him the impetus to “fly by the nets” of Church, language and nationalism.

There was only one problem with this high-flown promenade: Carlo, not being the most experienced of urban promenaders, had brought a road map rather than a topographic one. Soon enough we were floundering around in a scrubby realm of playing fields, waste ground and cemeteries as we tried to follow the course of a brook across the M1 motorway and towards the coast. We ended up describing a wide and fruitless gyre, before finishing up on the arterial grimness of Swords Road. Neither of us minded – we hadn’t seen one another for nine months and there was plenty to discuss. Besides, this was natal territory for Carlo, whose Bohemian forefathers arrived in Dublin shortly after Dedalus flew the coop, and he was able to point out specific streets that figured in the family history.

All this personalisation helped, but what was more informative still were the feet-that-are-facts on the ground. When Nabokov gave his celebrated lectures at Cornell University in the 1950s he would draw a map on the board to begin with – the “two ways” of Marcel’s Combray, or the floor plan of Mansfield Park – as a prelude to discussing them. I tried the same thing for the students I taught Joyce’s Portrait to last year: sketching out the locations of Clontarf chapel, the wooden bridge, the Bull and the island of dunes that has formed in the past 200 years to its north, so that they can imaginatively place themselves in Stephen’s footsteps. It may not have worked for them but it has for me; in Portrait, Stephen encounters a bevy of beefy seminarians as he crosses the wooden bridge, their muscular-Christian footfalls shaking the entire structure. Carlo and I were pushed to the parapet by tearaways automotively goosing one another. The Bull had become, he told me, a favoured spot for such antics.

We sat out at the end of the breakwater for a while, appreciating the salty zephyrs licking our cheeks. It’s said that another big bodkin, this one topped by a statue of Our Lady of the Sea, was deliberately implanted on the Bull as a faithful rejoinder to the paganism of the epiphany Joyce’s protagonist experiences here – but that seems a little far-fetched to me. True, as we made our way that evening into central Dublin there was plenty of evidence of the festivities to come: on Monday it would be Bloomsday, and folk were gearing up for all the mummery associated with this bewildering bouleversement, whereby one of Hibernia’s most recusant sons has been wilfully co-opted as a national bard.

But really, Joyce himself – in his life and his work – deployed the most effective possible tactic when it comes to comprehending Dublin: he left.

A fine smir of testosterone wavered about the bobbing heads of the jogging boys – or at least, that’s as I remember it. Oh! Where are the changing rooms of yesteryear? Where are the gracile bodies, the downy pelts, the helium squeaks of larynxes tossed hither and thither by the hormonal flux? We come to consciousness of our sexuality among the naked forms of our peers – and no doubt once this painful awareness has finally ebbed away we’ll find ourselves once more: bare, forked things, laid out in a row on the mortuary slab. I found the crowd in the boys’ changing room a torment: it didn’t help that, like so many pubescents, I yearned to excel at sports but was at best adequate. Nor was it helpful that I was a late developer – boys like Bullock and Gordon had a full pubis of hair while my assemblage still resembled an unfurling bracken frond; as for Nattawallah, at the age of 13 he had a handlebar moustache, the ends of which he could actually twirl.

The peculiar nature of our taboos is such that we seldom – if ever – get to experience the primal state of human being, which is surely to be one among a crowd of naked apes. True, there is that nominatively determined performance artist, Spencer Tunick, who assembles large nude groups in public places, but the very contrivance of these fleshy sculptures always makes their elements seem rather … clothed.

Then there are occasional nude bicycle rides through large cities. I’ve no idea who organises these streaking streaks of streakers, but it’s certainly exhilarating to find yourself standing, say, in Shaftesbury Avenue, central London, watching as all those breasts and scrotums stream past. But I for one have never felt inclined to saddle up, any more than I’ve seriously considered visiting a nudist colony – what would be the point? As countless nudists have testified: the initial surrealism of queuing for sausage and two veg with your sausage and two veg on display is soon enough rendered quotidian: British nudists are heavily robed by their innate modesty – even when you can stare straight up their jacksies.

No, if you want to be in a naked throng, the changing room remains the best bet; but what a change there’s been there since boyhood. There was no great nudity taboo in my family home – my father had no inhibitions at all, wandering about the house buck naked and gaily saluting anyone who happened to walk in on him while he was – in the Rabelaisian formulation – performing his necessary offices. My mother didn’t have quite the same abandon, confining herself to standing in her underwear in front of a mirror while chanting “fat and old”. No wonder while I was growing up I was preternaturally modest, a veritable Alyosha Karamazov, who couldn’t bear so much as the utterance of the word “bare”.

However, with age comes acceptance: nowadays I, too, stalk the house with my knackers clacking; I, too, leave the bathroom door unlocked (in fact, there is no lock anyway); I, too, meditate in front of the mirror upon the strange inscriptions that time has carved on my wanting flesh.

And in the changing room I delight in being a scrawny, piebald, moulting man among men. Ideally, I’d like to be such among women as well, but given the perverse endurance of our taboos, this isn’t a possibility. Now that I no longer have to teeter from one foot to the other while attempting to shield my groin area from the sportive Actaeons, what amazes me about the experience is that there’s no correlation between a man’s outward characteristics and his inner awareness. I swim thrice weekly at the Marshall Street Baths hard by Carnaby Street in London and I daresay a fair few of my fellow swimmers are familiar with what Father Ted described as “the rough and tumble of homosexual activity”. Be that as it may, gay or straight, fat or thin, smooth or hairy, old or young, fair or a veritable impasto of epidermal corruption – it makes no difference: it seems entirely arbitrary as to whether a given man struts brazenly across the tiles, or cowers in the corners. Some disport themselves in the showers as if they were walruses snorting on a wave-dashed ice floe, others ablute in their swimming costumes, pulling out the front so as to funnel a jet on to their nylon-coddled genitals. Weird.

My female informants tell me that on their side of the splash bath the same lack of a rubric applies: beautiful young women, who wouldn’t look out of place cruising through the chlorine in a giant seashell, with only chiffon wisps to mask breasts and mons veneris, are beset by shyness – yet great-aged wattled creatures stomp about carefree. I find this heartening: we may think we live in a society obsessed by body form, but perhaps the commodification only really gets put on along with the clothes that reduce us to a set of economic and cultural variables. It may be that if we want to lose our nagging sense of ugliness and inferiority the best course is to get naked in a crowd: dress to kill – strip to live.

It was one of those incomparable early June days you get in the far north: bright sunlight drenched the heathery Orcadian hillsides and the choppy blue waters of the Wide Firth. Driving at speed along the road from Kirkwall to Finstown, I kept taking sidelong glances at the island of Gairsay to the north. Twenty years ago when I lived in Orkney I was friendly with a local builder, Simon, who told me that a single family occupied the old farmhouse on Gairsay: a paterfamilias, a matriarch, and their hardy brood of six or seven offspring. Simon said that the Gairsay islander was so tough that when one of his children fell ill he’d rowed them across five miles of the firth to the doctor’s surgery in Finstown – and this in midwinter. But Orkney is for most of the time a bleak place, where men are men, while skate – on account of the supposed resemblance between theirs and human female genitals – are terrified.

Anyway, I was thinking about all this when I saw the mobile snack bar by the roadside, blazoned across its battered panels the slogan: “Pulled Beef Rolls”. Blimey! I thought to myself – the beef bit is fair enough; after all Orkney is prime Aberdeen Angus farmland, but the pulled part . . . I had not thought to see this particular culinary modifier this far north so soon. Why, if pulling is going to become de rigueur in the northern isles, it can’t be long before we see “pulled skate” advertised – a frightening prospect indeed. One thing you’re unlikely to see on an Orcadian menu is lobster – because this incomparable legacy is crated up and flown to Paris as soon as it’s pulled from the creels.

Besides, when the whole “pulled pork” shtick got going I decided wilfully to ignore it. I’ve chomped my way through the 1980s and 90s, I’ve had my food marinated and drizzled upon, seared and transmogrified into foam; I just don’t need another bog-ordinary dish gussied up by being subjected to some process at once occult and prosaic. The very alliterative character of pulled pork suggested to me something bogus and contrived; after all, what do you do when you’re sold a pig in a poke if not disgustedly pull the cat meat out?

Pulled pork sounded to me like an idiom rather than an actual dish. Yet there it was, spreading like trichinosis; initially pulled pork was advertised on the hand-chalked blackboards in gastropubs, but soon enough it was being yanked down the social scale: pulled pork became available in cafés and from stalls – other meats started to be similarly dragged about; the Orkney pulled beef was only an inevitable consequence of the whole rending, tearing, drawn-out epidemic.

It wasn’t until I was in Manchester a few days later that I finally gave up and tried to find out what this “pulling” actually consisted in. I was with my 16-year-old, eating at an upmarket pizza joint called Dough (Doh!) in the Northern Quarter. He ordered a pulled pork pizza and I asked the waiter what this stuff actually was. The answer came back that it’s a slow-cooking method that allows the meat to become so tender it can be pulled apart. This was all right as far as it went – but it made me worry about the participle. Surely, given it’s in the simple past, the “pulled” in “pulled pork” implies that the action of pulling has already occurred – and indeed this was the case: the pork on the boy’s pizza did seem entirely macerated. But it prompts the question: what is pulled pork to be called before it’s been pulled? Pre-pulled? Pullable?

With barbecued crispy duck – the dish pulled pork most obviously resembles – the shredding of the meat isn’t included in the name of the dish, and this strikes me as far sounder, because the involvement of a participle cannot help but make us think of the gustatory act as a process. So, if there’s to be pulled pork, there must inevitably also be regurgitated pork, excreted pork and putrescing pork.

Back in the Smoke, I continued my researches. The consensus soon emerged that “pulling” was really a bit of a con. The method gained its ascription in the south-eastern United States – down there in the swamps and bayous where men are men, and often have to pull alligators off their pork before they can pull it in turn; tougher cuts of pork such as the shoulder have to be cooked. The slow-roasting or barbecuing method thus evolved as a function of economic constraints.

In this respect, “pulled pork” bears close affinities with both Spudulike and young men wearing their trousers down round their hips so their underwear balloons above their waistbands. Spudulike because this is another example of how a staple food is spuriously valorised in order to increase its mark-up; and visible knickers because pulled pork is also . . . a load of pants hiding in plain view.

Apparently eateries are now passing off any old bony scrapings or pan-sizzled gunk as being “pulled”. But this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone; in our febrile food culture the race to the bottom of the trough is almost always the crazed rout of Gadarene swine. No, despite the arrival of such swill in Orkney, the fact remains that you’re more likely to survive such fads in the farther-flung portions of the world, places where pulling on them is what you do to oars rather than meats.

I’m in Orkney again: it’s a micro-society up here off the north coast of Scotland, where the preoccupations are farming, fishing and the sort of intense human interactions that often occur when folk are compelled to rub along together a little too vigorously. True, there is the annual “Ba”, or town football game, wherein a benighted bit of leather is fought the length of Kirkwall’s main street by snorting, roiling gangs of islanders, but overall these sparsely populated islands are not where you would expect to find evidence of the odd delusions that grip humanity en masse.

Except that when I first came here in the early 1990s, Orkney was at the centre of a particularly virulent example of just this. For younger readers, the satanic ritual abuse (SRA) panic of the early 1990s may seem bizarre: over a period of two or three years large numbers of people – mostly here and in the US, although also worldwide – became convinced that there was a network of satanist cults operating among us. In many cases the leaders of these evil organisations were local worthies – priests, doctors, teachers – who put on horned headdresses in order to conduct unspeakable rites. When described by victims, these rites proved remarkably similar: nude dancing in a circle around bonfires, accompanied by ceremonies involving “broodmares”, young girls and women who had been impregnated by the cult leaders and forced to bear babies that were then sacrificed horribly.

The evidence for SRA was threefold: the direct testimony of children who had been abused; the “recovered memories” of adult victims who had been subjected to hypno- or regression therapy; and – in Britain at least – the application of something called the “reflex anal dilatation” test, a method of establishing that a child had been anally penetrated that I don’t need to describe here in detail because it’s all in the name. The SRA panic spoke to deep-seated anxieties that we all possess: the idea that society as it appears to be constituted is in fact a grotesque sham, and that power of a sinister sort is being wielded behind the scenes, is the staple fare of every conspiracy theorist. The specifics of SRA – the child abuse, the devil-worshipping – in my view, articulated very real disjunctions between what we can think of, synthesising Freudian and Jungian terminology, as the latent and the manifest content of the collective unconscious.

In Orkney, social workers took 15 children of the “W” family off the island and into care; nine children from four other families were later removed from their homes. Tests were done, statements taken. The picture emerged of a cult operating on South Ronaldsay that held ceremonies in an abandoned quarry. These allegations got out and became grist to the panicky rumour mill, catalysing with the unsettling tales of adults throughout the land who, on the couch, realised that the parents they had thought of as loving had in fact subjected them to grotesque abuse when they were small.

The idea that we might be the repositories of buried traumatic memories is integral to psychoanalysis – so the SRA panic had a ready-made audience in people primed to accept notions of repression and catharsis. For a while, we were all wandering around wondering whether our own histories of abuse were about to bob up from the murky depths of our psyches; it became quite common to have conversations of the form: “I think I might’ve been abused as a child . . .” as a background explanation for whichever current neurotic behaviour was plaguing us.

The bromides that calmed the whole frenzy down were, when they came, quite prosaic: the reflex anal dilatation test was discredited (most anuses dilate when a speculum is pressed against them); both professionals and abuse victims came forward to nix the idea that such memories were repressed – they recalled every element of their suffering; and in the particular case of Orkney, it was pointed out that certain critical elements of the children’s testimony were impossibilities. South Ronaldsay is a notably exposed island; there really isn’t anywhere you could hold a Walpurgisnacht-style gig without it being noticeable from everywhere else.

A local woman told me that some of the children of the “W” family had indeed been abused physically. But any satanic components of most stories by victims of child abuse in general are very obviously confabulated from horror movies they’ve seen. This tallies with something that the person at the NSPCC responsible for investigating child sex abuse tells me: it is, he says, far more widespread than we fear, but the ritual component is always vanishingly small.

So, with the curse of hindsight, it is now possible to view the whole SRA panic as part of the first tentative steps society was taking towards acknowledgement of two distinct but not unrelated phenomena: widespread sexual abuse being perpetrated on children both in institutional settings and in the home by allegedly responsible adults; and a burgeoning culture of febrile emotional lability, stimulated by cod-psychotherapy and hyperreal depictions of sex and violence in film.

In a world in which the old verities are ever crumbling before our eyes, it’s nice to be able to validate an old adage: there is indeed no smoke without fire.