You’ll be aware by now that of all the frenzied crowds that trouble my uneasy sleep, sporting ones bother me the most. I mean to say, to be crushed to death by a mob that is rampaging because tyranny flies at its backs has a certain justness, but to be stomped on by people driven berserk by a ball game would be a pitiful end. Sporting events by their nature embody the worst excesses of late capitalism: the spectators are mere passive consumers of the commodified prowess of the athletes and the seasonal character of the spectacles mimics the cyclic time that this new peasantry is trapped in, while the masters of money and power forge ahead. No wonder sports fans are so often pissed off: they’re the victims of a massive con.

When I stopped going to sporting events, the crowd at the Arsenal still strongly resembled an LS Lowry painting: rank upon rank of mufflered and capped men, raising their Bovril cups to their chapped lips with the monstrous synchrony of a group mind. Around this time – the early 1970s – I also went to Wimbledon a couple of times. This was a different sort of crowd – blazered and frocked, bourgeois – and the Centre Court also had a sort of hushed intimacy: the net stretched decoratively across the carpet of grass, the tiered seating somehow G Plan.

Nevertheless, here was the same disturbing unanimity, the eyes sliding back and forth like those of automata, the counterpoint of players’ grunts and spectators’ groans suggesting – even to my pubescent mind – participation in some mass act of sexual congress. (I may have been reading Brave New World at the time.)

Still, at least tennis had the virtue of a certain individualism – single combat, armed with catgut, wood and rubber – and I think I went on watching it on TV until at least the middle of that decade. Plonking myself down in front of the set some 35 years later, I was heartened to discover that little seemed to have changed with the Wimbledon crowd: there were a few more handmade signs and some garish tam-o’-shanters that I didn’t recall from the days when Ilie Nastase flipped his wig, but otherwise it was business as usual. (Andy Murray was even drinking what was unmistakably Robinsons Barley Water.) Yes, you guessed it, the Championship bid by the down-home boy from Dunblane had lured me out of my sporting retirement.

True, I wasn’t court-side but the way the BBC chose to cover the Wimbledon crowd was surely indicative of this aspect of the zeitgeist: the distraught relationship between the particular and the many. Murray’s authenticity as a sporting hero derives as much from his intractability when it comes to the usual skill transfer of celebrity as it does from his prowess. As yet, there’s been no smelly water line or pseudo-styled sunglasses – his product placements at least superficially appear to be out of necessity and he even (for which I could’ve kissed him) appeared to pooh-pooh the idea of a knighthood when old buttock-face had him straight round No 10 the day after his win. I suspect that lurking behind this is a deeper level of crowd consciousness, because if modernity teaches us anything, it’s that the seeming omnipotentiality of the notorious – so you’re a cabinet minister: why not chance your arm at ballroom dancing? – rests on a correlative loss of true expertise. If you can be anything, how can your ability at one thing be credible?

Murray is a personification of the most physical possible impact between the anomie of the individual and the madness of the crowd; he is thus a hero twice over. No wonder, as the camera nosed about the arena, we were treated to the disgusting spectacle of Messrs Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and Salmond-with-saltire almost sucking each other off, such was their desire to repose in the crotch of the champion.

Murray, meanwhile, submitted to the bizarre court-side interview – a ritual I cannot remember from the 1970s and one in which the well-known faces in the crowd, picked out by the camera, are integrated into the mass to reinforce the hoary new delusion that they’re just like us, really.

You may have detected a certain soft, emollient tone in this week’s column – but have no fear, readers, remember: Murray the Minted is a sports “ambassador” for none other than RBS. It’s given the feisty wee chap thousands of our pounds to play big pingpong, so mind, we own the fucker. Now, new balls to kick, please!

Standing in the sub-post-office-cum-convenience-store on the Wandsworth Road, I stared down into the Stygian depths of one of its freezer cabinets. Down there might be, for all I knew, the cryogenically preserved remains of Walt Disney – it looked capacious enough. What there were on the upper layers of the ice cap were ready meals of bamboozling cheapness: a “steaklet meal”, comprising meat, chips, beans and onion gravy for £1.69; a Birds Eye chicken burger for 32p (£1.28 for a pack of four). What to choose?

I was minded, this week, to celebrate cheapness, given the recent furore concerning the Chancellor’s pricy gourmet burger. Let me apply a refreshingly hot and lemon-scented hand towel to your forgetful forehead: Boy George – for it was he – invited Fleet Street’s finest snappers in to portray him chowing down on a blokeish burger as a prelude to delivering his swingeing budgetary cuts. You can readily grasp the (un)reasoning: when the proles see me eating their kind of food, they won’t feel quite so bad about having to visit those perfectly nice food banks. Unfortunately for Boyo, other sleuths of the Fourth Estate soon tracked down the origin of the burger: a branch of Byron some miles off (see Real Meals passim for a dissection of this bling ring of a chain), and compared its hefty price tag with the way more economical – geddit – patties closer to hand.

So it was that my gaze alighted on the “2 Flame Grilled Cheese Burgers” produced under the Yankee branding by Glendale Foods of Salford. These burgers weighed in at £1.49 for the pair – comparatively pricy, when you can get a hamburger at McDonald’s for £1.10. Still, nobody but an Old Pauline would sneer at a 74.5p burger, so I tossed the dosh and headed home to the microwave.

Food and solecisms go hand in oven glove when it comes to British politicians; one recalls Peter Mandelson’s guacamole-for-mushy-peas incident, and the “plot” hatched by Blair and Brown over polenta at Granita in Islington – a divvying up of the bill that resulted, over the subsequent decade-and-a-half in an expansion of the fuck-you-mine’s-a-focaccia class, and closely correlated rise in obesity among social class four. With Labour politicians the gaffes usually consist in their turning out to be just as echt bourgeois as those they face across the fruit and veg aisle of the Commons; while for Tories the problems usually come when they try to put on proletarian airs – remember Billy Hague’s disastrous baseball cap/theme-park outing? No amount of vapid pronouncing on international affairs will ever rid him of its peaked shadow on his shiny pate.

At home I assembled a top panel of burger tasters (my two younger sons), and set about irradiating the Yankees – and it was only then that I realised it was the Fourth of July! How suitable, I thought, to be eating a confection of beef – beef fat; water; rusk; seasoning – comprising barley flour, salt, dextrose, diphosphates, preservative, sodium metabisulphite, flavouring and pepper extract; soya protein isolate, onions and more salt (there’s a whopping 1.9g per portion), on this, the 237th anniversary of the Declaration of American Independence. But these were only the ingredients of the beef burger! If I were to itemise all the care and chemicals that went into the bun, cheese and relish we’d still be here come the 238th anniversary – unless one or both of us had been taken out by a Predator drone in the meantime.

Anyway, I warmed to the microwaved cheese burger, but my boys recoiled violently. The older one cried out, “No!” when I placed one before him, then fled the kitchen. The younger tarried, gawping, then took to his heels as well. It was left to me to bite down on the Yankee with all my republican fervour. True, the bun, cheese and relish were grim – but no grimmer than most burgers. It was with the meat that the Yankee distinguished itself. The box warned of possible remaining fragments of bone – if only! Anything to give this drek some texture would’ve been a blessing – as it was, the “beef” had the consistency of . . . well . . . the consistency I imagine George Osborne’s cheeks would have if you were to slice them from his self-satisfied face – or arse – and prepare them in the same way.

Which brings me, fairly neatly, to the moral of this week’s column: so long as you aren’t vaguely bovine and wandering around in fields linked to the Glendale Foods supply chain, you can save your face, or your arse – but never both, George, never both.

You can fool all of the people for some of the time, then some more of the time, and then – even with the benefit of hindsight – they’ll have been fooled for so long that it will constitute, de facto, all of the time. This, at any rate, seems to be what’s happened with 3D movies, which any objective person will tell you are shit: the image of, for example, a skull on the screen bearing a closer relationship to the anamorphic one in Holbein’s The Ambassadors than anything death-like rendered convincingly lifelike.

I thought it was me, but having this week canvassed an extensive empirical sample (the kids, Mrs Self, Mohandra and Meena in the corner shop), I’ve discovered that I’m not alone. “Everything looks dark and fuzzy”; “The figures sort of fall out of the screen”; “They look like decomposing ghosts” – these are some of my interview subjects’ comments, and that was before I even got on to the vexed business of those glasses. True, the first 3D movie I saw worked – if by working is meant that it did really appear as if figures and objects were protruding from the screen into the auditorium. The spectacle had a certain colourful novelty, although no more so than looking through a kaleidoscope, which still fills me with as much joy as it did when I was three. On the other hand, the sensation this intrusiveness provoked in me was nausea, pure and simple.

But that was Imax 3D, which everyone agrees does the job more effectively than ordinary cinema 3D. In a standard multiplex screen I find that unless I can get a seat dead centre, the 3D images just look fuzzily double-exposed and give me a headache to look at – and it makes no difference if I wear the glasses or not. Trawling the web, I find scads of such kvetches and yet the numbers of 3D films being released, and the audiences attending them, keep on growing. Oft times, sitting with one whelp or the other and watching hordes of computer-generated humanoids flow over some impossiblist landscape like silverfish over a draining board, it occurs to me that we, “the aud” (which is how Variety refers to us the audience), may ourselves merely be a species of cloned and fundamentally illusory consumers.

The take-up of 3D certainly supports that chilling notion, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. Rather, what’s at work here are our old adversaries Ad Man and his more prosaic sidekick, Mark Exec. The investment in 3D technology has been enormous – there’s not simply the equipment needed to shoot the movies, there’s also all those hugely expensive 3D projectors that have been installed in cinemas from São Paulo to Scunthorpe. Indeed, it’s these latter, which have entailed extensive and well-nigh irreversible structural alterations, that may mean 3D – like RBS – is simply TBTF.

And when something is too big to fail, as we taxpayers know to our cost, the money has to be found to ensure that we go on spending our money, so that the whole psychic Ponzi scheme misery-go-round keeps spinning.

It’s often said that advertising cannot create a demand for a wholly new product: it only transfers consumers’ attention to another brand of the same one. But 3D isn’t a new product – it’s only 2D repackaged. And as for the comforting, individualistic self-suasion, that says: ooh, y’know I never buy anything simply because I’ve seen it advertised . . . this is arrant nonsense. When it comes to Ad Man and Mark Exec, history is made by the great mass of the deindividuated. They take their lead from the ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu, in whose The Art of War this hypothetical is posed: “You are fighting on the three fronts. On one you’re winning, on the second you’re holding your own, and on the third you’re losing – to which front should you send your reinforcements?”

The answer is: the winning front, because there the commitment of marginal numbers will have the greatest possible effect. Besides, once that battle has been won, all these forces can be recommitted to the other fronts. As I say, efficient capitalists have this strategy tattooed on their cerebellums – while we, life-size clay warriors that we are, simply sit in the stalls waiting to be buried by drifting popcorn as we watch the costly double exposures cavort on the silvery screen. “Eat shit,” we laugh, “100 billion flies can’t be wrong!” forgetting that on this matter – if no other – Freud was entirely right: there is no such thing as a joke.

“Yesterday’s anti-colonialists are trying to humanise the generalised colonialism of power. They become its watchdogs in the cleverest way: by barking at all the after-effects of present inhumanity.” So wrote the situationist Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life, his manifesto for an insurrection of the felt, the experienced and the real against the collective, the mediated and the fake. Vaneigem’s book was published in 1967 but it reads as fresh as ever: it is a bracing indictment of a society that inculcates alienation not through the whip across people’s backs (or at least not those anywhere too nearby) but by marketing the whip for £19.99, together with a range of pastel-coloured accessories.

All this weighed on me as I sank down on a crowd-control barrier that’s been installed beside a bus stop at the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall. The barrier consists of the familiar, vertically pivoted steel members, each of which resembles a hydrofoil or an aileron, depending on whether you view the people they are intended to deflect as particles or waves (which in turn depends on whether you view the metaphoric ship of state as sailing the seas or the skies). Currently not in use, the barriers lie alongside the kerb – to extend the marine metaphor – like steely, dark grey whales about to be flensed.

On the pavement, directly between the barrier and the window of one of those charming boutiques selling souvenir tea towels decorated with red phone boxes and tit-helmeted “bobbies”, a curious gate has materialised – a crown-shaped pergola of thick, yellow-painted poles. In conjunction with the barriers that now seal off Downing Street and the ones that act as bagatelle bafflers (funnelling ball-bearing legislators into the Palace of Westminster, while deflecting tourists, malcontents and al-Qaeda franchisees away), the new ones complete the act of enclosure: the government quarter has become a right, tight little Kremlin.

I called a flak at Westminster City Council to ask about the new barriers. Nice young chap – Nick Thompson, I think he was called. Anyway, he’ll go far, because he puppyishly said he’d look into the matter, then called me back a couple of days later to tell me that my memory was playing tricks and that the barriers had always been there. I assured him that this was not the case (while restraining myself from pointing out that Oceania hadn’t always been at war with Eurasia, either). He conceded that the new barriers might have been installed for the state opening of parliament or possibly Elizabeth Windsor’s birthday and that he’d make a few more calls.

This is my way of telling him not to bother. Over the past 20 years – and, in particular, in the 12 years since the attacks of 9/11 – Westminster has become the political equivalent of Battersea Dogs Home, so loud is the barking of the former anti-colonialists. The years-long sleepover of Brian Haw and his confrères; the Tamils’ fortnight-long occupation; the student protesters’ saturnalias – anyone with a sentimental attachment to British democracy could be forgiven for thinking that these represent the vigorous contesting of public space. But the truth is that as parliamentary democracy in this country comes increasingly to resemble a dumb show (without even the virtue of the players remaining silent), so the physical manifestations of that impotence are erected with greater and greater frequency.

As I sat on the barrier, there was a crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square, milling about beneath a gantry from which hung four giant TV screens. They seemed to be watching some sporting event or other and doubtless the mayoralty was involved, working for London by walling-off the here and now with the then-and-elsewhere. Except that central London is no longer a place at all but merely a commodity to be flogged to tourists who issue their own receipts in the form of digital images that they’ll never, ever look at again.

Under such circumstances, it’s ridiculous to view the barriers as expressing anything as crass as the rulers’ fear of the subjected. Rather, we should see them for what they are: turnstiles that regulate the flow of bargain hunters through this pound shop of ideals; one that never ceases in its efforts to stimulate consumer demand by hanging out the red, white and blue banner that’s blazoned: “Closing-down sale, all stock must go!”

In the 1970s, when the world was just as evil and scuzzy as it is today but my gastrointestinal tract had a certain innocence – and even freshness – there was a pizza joint in Hampstead with the predictable name (at least to the ears of our current era) of Pizzaland. I remember nothing much about Pizzaland’s food but the decor has lodged in my memory – “lodge” being wholly apposite, because it consisted of banquettes topped off with little pitched roofs like lychgates, a lot of wooden fretwork, and a series of murals depicting skiing scenes that looked as if they’d been painted using an Old English sheepdog dipped in Artex.

Why it was that this Neapolitan foodstuff had come to be associated with the Tyrol is beyond me. I thought no more about Pizzaland from that day until this; there was no need, as in the intervening years more and more pizza joints have come slaloming into my consciousness. Then, casting around for another chain restaurant to add to the mighty skein of Real Meals, I alighted on Bella Italia. Bella Italia has only 80 outlets – which makes it a mere charm bracelet when dangled beside the mighty hawsers of Domino’s and Pizza Express et al – but these are spread throughout Britain, a legacy of the fact that in the 1990s it was a much greater thing: an amalgamation of Pizza Piazza, Prima Pasta, Bella Pasta and – yes, you guessed it – Pizzaland that boasted 200 restaurants countrywide.

Now, only the rebranded Bella Italias remain, a mere rump of the former imperium. Yet these Bella Italias have – dare I mix my coinages? – a certain je ne sais quoi. They are, to put it bluntly, such incredible fucking clichés, what with ristorante plastered across their façades and their sepia-scumbled interiors cluttered up with more pseudo-Italianate cod-rustic gubbins than you can shake a breadstick at. The branch we ate in boasted a framed poster for La Dolce Vita, wallmounted spice racks and jars, pot plants and raffia baskets and a trompe l’oeil map of the bootylicious peninsula that compressed so many layers of illusion into a single surface that it made my poor old head spin.

To elaborate: the “map” was painted to resemble a parchment hung on the wall but the wall was further embellished with the effect of plaster having fallen away to expose brickwork, which was itself painted. And rather than being in some Tuscan hilltop town, the whole assemblage was in the middle of an English city. Still, the extent to which this can be called fakery is debatable; indeed, sitting quite happily in Bella Italia (in brutta Bretagna), two things occurred to me: first, that while the country may appear to be chockfull with a Babel of polyglot eateries, there remains this historic stratum of trattorias; and second, that just as the Tudorbethan style of English suburbia was so ubiquitous that it deserves to be viewed as an authentic architectural period, so there is nothing remotely inauthentic about the likes of Bella Italia.

Cheered by these insights, we turned our attention to the menu – and then turned it away again, because there was nothing there to hold our attention, just the usual spread of pizza, pasta, fish and meat dishes. As I pondered the drinks list, my eye was caught by the “Appletini”, a cocktail composed of Martini Bianco and apple juice “topped” with lemonade, and I cast my mind back to the darkest and most desperate periods of my own alcoholism, trying to decide whether even then, I would’ve considered putting anything that sounded quite this vile in my hurting mouth.

I ordered a salmon salad, the boy spaghetti and meatballs. Long since having ceased to be a denizen of the mad realm ruled over by King Alcohol, I ordered a sparkling mineral water – yet (and hopefully never) to have become one, the boy called for an Appletini (sans the Martini and apple juice). The food was bearable but the saving grace – as so often in such establishments – was the staff, who were courteous, considerate and responsive to our picky requests (me for no onion or garlic, he for his meatballs not to be “too spicy”). A few years ago, Bella Italia got into trouble for skimming off its waiters’ tips but that unpleasantness is over now. Still, these folk won’t have been on more than minimum wage plus a cut of the overall tip kitty, and despite such slim pickings they maintained their good cheer; either that – or this was just another illusion to add to all the rest, and they were actually nipping out the back every few minutes for a beaker full of the warm south.

“Caesar! We who are about to die salute you!” So, it is said, the gladiators of old addressed the Roman emperors before they went about the entertaining business of mutual butchering. It was drizzling and outside the grey-dun hulk of the Colosseum there was a small gaggle of modern Romans dressed up not as gladiators but as tacky-looking legionaries. I wanted to accost them and say: “You can do better than this: hanging around in this Gibbonian drag, hustling the odd euro by having your picture taken with marauding phalanxes of orthodontically challenged Benelux schoolkids.” Then I wanted to climb up on a shattered column, strike a pose and orate: “Give me your poor and huddled masses of legionary impersonators! Come with me to London, where there are plenty of creative opportunities for enterprising folk prepared to spray-paint themselves silver and stand on a cardboard box all day!”

Of course I did nothing of the sort, because I was a tourist and tourists are money; and the Colosseum is a great big begging box. Underneath the stands, where once the Roman mob disported itself, there were instead long lines of money inching forward to the ticket windows.

Frankly, I hadn’t been feeling that good to begin with: on the early-morning flight out of Gatwick, I’d come down with one of those blitzkrieg colds that precision-bomb a sluice gate in your mucous membranes. Luckily there were two free seats next to me, so I lay down sideways and slept deeply, awaking only occasionally to the sound of snot dripdrip-dripping on to the carpet below. I would have felt worse about this if it hadn’t been a low-cost airline. If you don’t want to spend a two-hour flight from Rome to Gatwick with your feet dabbling in my effluvia, then fly the fucking flag.

Now, standing in the thick of the crowd with a brace of my offspring and their mother, I was assailed by nausea – there were so many queues and so many queuing styles in this pan-European crowd mash-up. Stolid Scandinavians and thrifty Germans waited patiently in their restrained, fawn-coloured leisurewear; lisping and excitable Spaniards in transparent rain capes fluttered around like exotic birds; contraflows of captious and stentorian Brits threatened anarchy; while one tight little testudo of denim-clad Americans simply barged its way through.

In a gap between the seething bodies, we spotted a sign reading “Tour didactica” above a ticket window with only a handful of people in front of it and so were able to pay five euros a head extra to skip the Hydra-headed queue. Still, inside the arena things weren’t that much better. For just short of 1,800 years – until the construction of the Crystal Palace – the Colosseum was the largest manmade enclosed space in the world. But on this drizzly bad Friday, it felt as packed-out as the stateroom in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. It didn’t help that there was a mandated route around this colossal heap of ancient masonry, so that all the tributary queues from beneath the stands now flowed into one mighty gyre: along the periphery, up the stairs, through the exhibition on Constantine, then down again and finally out into the street where the bogus legionaries were still brandishing for tips.

You might have thought that anyone as crowd-phobic as I am would have called it a day at that point – but when in Rome, I always like to visit the Pantheon and have a coffee at the nearby Sant’Eustachio café (where I once partook of the elusive “God shot”, the espresso that convinces even hardened sceptics of the existence of a transcendent barista). True, the crowds are, if anything, denser and more polyglot in the Pantheon but here there is no signage, no admission fee and inside, under what is still – after nearly two millennia – the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, the tightly packed human herd positively lows with devotion as it swirls about the curved walls.

Christians would doubtless maintain that it’s because the Pantheon has long since been dedicated as a Catholic church that, upon entering, the masses become so meek and mild. The Colosseum, by contrast, still bears the taint of sadistic voyeurism, a psychic charge that infects even the meekest tourist. And you know what, shuffling from one oily icon to the next, I was inclined to agree – but then, in the interests of stemming my own viral tide, I hadn’t just had the one God shot at Sant’Eustachio but three in one.

I once had lunch with the late Malcolm McLaren. It was during his short-lived run for the London mayoralty and I confess I can remember none of the following: a) where we ate; b) what we ate; I’d like to be able to say that both these amnesias were because of the strange and unearthly fascination exerted on me by the discourse of this famed bowdleriser of the Situationist International’s détournement, but sad to relate I cannot recall; c) a single word that he said. This must’ve been in the early years of the last decade – at any rate, not that long ago. By contrast, I can recall, note-and-letter-perfect, “Buffalo Gals”, the proto-hiphop ditty McLaren released in 1982, including his serially offending yelps of “Two buffalo gals go around the outside/’Round the outside, ’round the outside …” Such is the queer pretzel-shaped path that time’s arrow describes.

Last week, undertaking a neo-situationist dérive across Paris with my colleague Joel Anderson, the buffalo gals came back to haunt me. We began in the northern banlieue of Épinay-sur-Seine, underneath the soaring concrete arches of the bridge that carries the A15 over this loop of the river. In front of us, on the claggy bank, was a Roma bidonville that would’ve gladdened the heart of any exploitative pop entrepreneur: tumbledown shacks, mounds of trash and actual half-naked brown babies playing in puddles of dirty water. We asked a hawk-nosed man wheeling a bike where his people were from, but he replied in perfect French that he didn’t speak French.

With the giant novelty cruet of the Eiffel Tower in the distance to guide us – our destination was hard by Les Invalides – we headed first west through Argenteuil, then south-east through Gennevilliers. Crossing the bridge into Clichy and smelling the distinctive pissflorescence of Paris proper, I raised the question of lunch with Joel and asked him to name his favoured French chain restaurant. He didn’t hesitate. “Definitely the Buffalo Grill,” he said. “I remember flying into Charles de Gaulle all the time and seeing its signature giant horns pronging up into the sky.”

A quick auxiliary brain search revealed that we were no more that a dosie-do away from a branch. After a morning wandering ’round the outside of Paris, lunch takes on a buffalo stance in the Place du Maréchal-Juin, so my partner and I hip-hopped there with out any more ado. There is, of course, a species of détournement involved in eating in a joint like this when almost any street in central Paris still boasts a family-run bistro offering a perfectly reasonable €15 or €20 prix-fixe menu. Sadly, there were no giant horns ’round the outside of this Buffalo Grill but there was a scarlet canopy with the enlarged head of Wild Bill Hickok (or possibly Buffalo Bill) picked out of it in white.

Once we were seated, Joel called my attention to the oxblood-coloured faux-leather wall coverings, framed pictures of old French cowboy comics and, lurking on a nearby ledge, a wooden bust of Wild Bill Hickok (or possibly Buffalo Bill), who appeared to be earwigging the conversation of some rather voluble Senegalese.

Unwilling to eat actual buffalo in the eponymous establishment (bison was on the menu but it would have been like choking down a slug on a lettuce leaf in the Slug and Lettuce), I opted instead for an inoffensive bit of grilled chicken and some frites. Joel had some salmon he claimed was perfectly tasty – my chicken was as tough as an insufficiently chewed moccasin, but still: what was I expecting? Along with a big bottle avec gaz the bill came to €29.60 (service compris), and we strode out into rue de Courcelles if not exactly replete, at any rate no longer famished.

Then the trouble began. A simple mental transposition was all that was required for grills to become girls, and girls to metamorphose into gals. On we tramped – turning into the Champs-Élysées and then the gourmandising Avenue Winston Churchill – but for me the gold-leafed magnificence of the Grand and Petit Palais were nought but a blur, and even the reappearance of the Seine failed to register. All I could think of – if you can call it cogitating – was: “Round-the-outside-’round-the-outside-’round-the-outside …” Over and over again, a demented, humped and woolly buffalo of an earworm that rampaged around my head. If I ever join Malcolm up in heaven, I’ll make sure I pay more attention to what he says over lunch. Of course, if we’re in the big fire there’ll be no chitchat as we get cosmically overcooked.