At the time of Diana Spencer’s funeral in 1997, I remember writing this: “When the corpse of a 36-year-old woman is dragged around town on a cart you have to acknowledge something strange is going on . . .” My concern was to consider the death-drag as an example of how London acted as a stage set upon which collective fantasies of intimacy with power were being played out. Sixteen years on, the sentence requires only minor adaptation to establish the necessary degree of anthropological estrangement from the funeral of Margaret Thatcher.

With Spencer’s funeral, the cortège travelled in a complete revolution – Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey, via Trafalgar Square, before heading north for her island interment at Althorp. This death-drag allowed for her corpse symbolically to visit sites of pleasure (the Royal Parks) and power (the Palace of Westminster), while its circular form symbolised her feminine mystique. With Thatcher the death-drag was linear – even phallic – a straightforward spear-chuck from the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in the bowels of parliament to St Paul’s.

Thus Thatcher’s corpse took the journey made by living English monarchs when, upon accession, they were required to meet with the aldermen of the City of London and renew its charter. It was decanted into St Clement Danes, before being hauled on by a fresh team of warriors. I say “warriors” advisedly: the key thing about Thatcher’s death-drag was that while it connected temporal power (parliament), with Mammon (the City), and this connection was sanctified by men wearing dresses (the high priests), the set-dressing projected an image of a fallen warrior queen (think Boudicca). Thatcher was said to have sanctioned this route, which allowed her body to draw sustenance for the afterlife from the bronze imago of Churchill and the stone one of Nelson. The crowds who turned out to line the route of the death-drag were – compared with those who witnessed the Spencer charade – sparse. But in both cases the numbers were far lower than the intense pre-mediatisation of the event would’ve led one to expect. In part this has to be a function of the positive feedback loop embodied in mass behaviour: a crowd increasingly stays away the more it is told that greater numbers are anticipated. But the failure of people to turn up for Thatcher’s funeral also betokens – or so I like to think – a certain credulousness about the event itself. Intuitively, people grasped that Thatcher’s interment had very little to do with Thatcher or her “legacy”, and everything to do with the parlous state of representative democracy.

Those who did line the route and who applauded – and even cheered – the removal of the boxed corpse from the Temple of the Sky God (an astonishingly infra dig performance for such ardent Churchillians, many of whom, surely, would’ve been aware of the universal hush that attended his death-drag), were as deluded as those who turned their backs on the procession. Their madness was to take the spectacle at face value; in Freudian terms, they saw only its manifest content and were blind to its latent meaning. I would go further – but then I always do – Thatcherites and anti-Thatcherites were co-opted into a fantasy of historical agency, in which their support or lack of it was integral to the sanctifying of the state’s monopoly on violence.

Thatcher’s mystique – contra that of Diana – rested entirely on her deployment, when in office, of internal repression – directed against NUM picket lines, the IRA, poll tax rioters etc – and external violence – primarily enacted in the form of the murders of 323 Argentine sailors (mostly young conscripts). The military honours accorded Thatcher were the recognition by the current holders of the monopoly – the coalition government – of her perceived effectiveness in maintaining this, and their ardent desire that the crowd should see them, by association, as similarly effective monopolists. All so-called opposition MPs who colluded in the death-drag were complicit in this mass-hypnosis.

The truth is, of course, that Thatcher died a long time ago. She died when she left office. Then, when the Alzheimer’s began to cobweb her synapses, she died again. This triple-death of Thatcher underscores the dialectic that now achieves a new synthesis. The death-drag passed off without too much trouble, overseen by men (and the odd woman) armed with fully automatic rifles capable of firing 600 rounds a minute.

I’ve always found George Gordon (Lord Byron) to be the most proximate of those literary and historical figures whose towering eminence and temporal removal should, by rights, place them at a distance. Nowhere does he seem closer to us than in his letters; take this example, penned on 30 August 1811 to his half-sister and half-lover, Augusta Leigh:

Newstead Abbey
My Dear Augusta, – I don’t know what
Scrope Davies meant by telling you I liked
children, I abominate the sight of them so
much that I have always had the greatest
respect for the character of Herod, But, as
my house here is large enough for us all,
and there is a coaching inn in the vicinity,
where, in a backroom – well appointed,
with woodblock floors and gaily painted
walls – they serve fried potatoes, beef
patties clasped in buns, and sweet
carbonated sherbert drinks, I daresay
we shall be able to abandon your whelps
sufficiently so that we might discover the
leisure in which to fashion more . . .

Naturally, this passage occurred to me as I stood on the woodblock floor of a gaily painted branch of Byron, a burger chain that is expanding with mushroom alacrity to rival other posh kiddie-nosh purveyors such as GBK (Gourmet Burger Kitchen) and Haché. It seemed to me self-evident that Byron – which now has 31 outlets, the bulk of them in London’s bourgeois ghettos, but with outliers in Cambridge, Oxford and the Bluewater shopping mall – must have been named after the scandalous peer, but when I taxed the waiter, he denied it and gave me some cockamamie tale about the name being derived from a Middle English expression meaning “from the cow shed”. As soon as I was home I reached for the OED and discovered neither an adjectival form of “byre”, nor anything in between.

True, Byron the burger joint bears little formal resemblance to either the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and She Walks in Beauty, or to those lapidary works themselves, being pretty much a standard example of the stripped-down functionalism school of contemporary restaurant design: the aforementioned woodblock floors, some padded vinyl, paintstriped walls in cassata colours, metal-legged stacking chairs, exposed ventilation ducts, and so on and so forth … You could dish up anything in these surroundings to early 21st-century iPeople and they’d fork it down. I’ve seen long lines snaking from the doors of Byrons all over town, and boxed my own ears with frustration at the evidence of such mass credulousness.

Because there’s nothing that great about Byron’s burgers – they’ve simply hit on another way of flogging the same old dead cow. This gastro-fast-food-mash-up isn’t new: burger joints of the tony type – such as the Great American Disaster and the original Hard Rock Café – sprung up alongside the ubiquitous Wimpy Bars in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

No, what has been well done will be well done again, and there’s nothing new under the bun. But while I may have come to Byron to scoff byronically rather than scoff, um, Byronically (if you’ll forgive this neologism), I ended up being rather charmed. Why? Well, because of the human rather than the bovine element. I’m sure that when the herd are in, the staff are just as fraught as any minimum-wage-and-tips McJobbers, but we – the whelps and I – were dining in the late afternoon, and the gaff was fairly empty. So, maximum attentiveness from the cheery young servitors: they were highly responsive to my tedious intolerances, ensuring that the garlic-tainted dressing for my lamb skinny burger came in a separate dish, and when Da Boyz’ burgers were wrongly caparisoned in bacon, they swiftly exchanged them.

It made all the difference. Despite the implicit tension of being served takeaway food at sit-down prices, I began to relax into our booth and wasn’t even riled when, as the witching hour approached, they applied the dimmer switch so that the ambience “ … mellow’d to that tender light/Which heaven to gaudy day denies”. I’ve no idea why restaurants feel it necessary to do this. I suppose for the clear-eyed and youthful it induces a cosy intimacy, but for those of us already grimly anticipating the ultimate dying of the light it seems like an unnecessary trailer. I’d probably feel differently if I was “a mind at peace with all below”, but at least I’m a generous tipper.

As the medieval astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Square strikes the hour, a crowd of tourists duck and crane to capture its face in the viewfinders of their digital cameras and on the screens of their mobile phones. The crowd is so large that those in front go down on their knees in order to afford those behind them a clearer shot.

Should the massed photographers choose, they could come back on the hour, every hour, until they get the shot they desire; or, alternatively, they could buy a professionally taken photograph in a nearby shop, or even download a perfect image from the internet. But no: they must have their own work of art, in this age of mechanical reproduction, and so they clutter up the cobbles. Skirting the edge of throng, I observe snidely to my Czech companion, “One of them is undoubtedly taking the best ever photograph of the clock” and she snorts snidely in turn.

When I was a child, in the 1970s, we already thought Peak Photograph had been attained – if, by this, it is taken to mean a state of affairs in which the amount of imagery produced was in excess of our capacity to experience it meaningfully. I’m not talking here about John Berger’s decontextualisation-through-reproduction of artworks, but of a far more profound loss of engagement: the world itself was being emulsified by so many exposures, and so losing whatever haptic quality it once possessed. Instead of touching tree bark, or crumbling earth between our fingers, this sense was being gratified by the toggles, lenses and grips of cameras; while our once wondrous viewing of exotica had already become synonymous with tedium – a social ritual that lives on in its computer-programmed form as the slide show.

That was in the Instamatic age: the modish cartridge film system that allowed for easy aiming, snapping and reloading. But then each new photographic technology has seemed to privilege facility rather more than fidelity. The box Brownie was the Instamatic of the 1900s, bringing within reach of ordinary people a capability that previously only belonged to the exalted: that of representation. In his fine book The Discovery of France, Graham Robb notes that in the albums of the late-19th-century French peasantry there are no photographs of children; it was pointless to expend so much time and money on an individual that might – given the death rate – prove more evanescent than its depiction.

Now we have the complete inversion of this, and from our standpoint the short trip to the developer’s seems an insufferable trek, yet it’s been a scant decade-and-a-half since this was the way. Our attitude to photographic images has also transmogrified; instead of being a form of recording, they have become incorporated into our visual field: we are all cameras now, with our shutters open, passive, recording not thinking.

It won’t be too long before all those oval-framed sepia scraps have finally mouldered away and there will be no rummaging through shoeboxes in junk shops for painfully posed photographs of the 1923 works outing to Pontypridd. But up there in the cloud, the crowd will continue to multiply without end. So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.

What should we do about this triumph of trompe-l’oeil; the blotting-out of the real by a blizzard of its selves? Well, to begin with, let’s stop skirting the crowd photographing the astronomical clock. Plunge right in! Interpose yourself between the lenses and their object! It doesn’t matter any more! Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity. Amateur photographers may be disregarded – most professional ones outright shunned. After all, while it may be true that a large number of monkeys typing concertedly could probably come up with this column in year or two, any of you reading it could probably take most of the photographs in this magazine, given a couple of hours.

As we walked on through the narrow, winding streets of Prague, I explained all of this to my companion and she laughed bitterly but didn’t demur. It could’ve been because she was steeped in that peculiarly Czech sense of the visual world as a shadowplay (one that has given rise to an unrivalled culture of theatrical puppetry); or perhaps it was simply because she herself was an unhappy pro snapper.

How to describe it? How to articulate the effect provoked in me by these artfully aligned and textured surfaces? The task is worthy of Henry James or Wallace Stevens – some master of the intersection between social velleities and individual desires; but alas, there’s only me, and as usual I’m off my tit-shaped head on caffeine, and so barely equal to the task.

Still, here goes: there is herringbone-patterned woodblock, yes, and it’s on the floor, uh-huh. Then there’s some aluminium trim and after this what looks like slate tiling; the walls are whitewashed brick on two sides; on the third, the brick is bare. And the fourth wall? Well, no Brecht or Beckett could be as creative with a fourth wall, oh no. It appears to have been assembled out of at least four kinds of wood, chopped up and assembled into a colossal Jenga-style barrier. I am awed by this fourth wall – awed. If it weren’t for the cod-Matisse images, I might altogether forget that I’m in a branch of Britain’s largest chain coffee shop.

There were 1,375 of these outlets as of 2011 – and given their viral rate of increase, it seems likely there are at least 1,500 by now. Somehow, beating Starbucks to become market leader seems to have given the Whitbread-owned chain a huge central nervous system stimulus; one you can witness spreading in neuronal sparks to its extremities as you carom down any urban artery throughout the British Isles: leapfrogging over one another to take this corner, or that intersection, are branches of Tesco Express and Costa. Yes, Costa is our subject – and it doesn’t get realer than this. So ubiquitous has Costa become that I feel enchained – my wrists manacled by its ridged paper cups, I hobble along the pavement, while anxiety over potential mocha-spillage fetters my ankles. And what do I see if I look up from this, the halting hobble of late capitalism? Why, the brown gaze of another minatory Costa, its slit-bean-for-an-eye staring at me with a steeliness that would gladden any panopticon-building Benthamite.

Actually, there’s a certain grotesque symmetry to the Costa surge: the first retail Costa was opened a mere 35 years ago in Vauxhall Bridge Road, not far from my house (and hard by the site of the Millbank prison; a panopticon, natch). Now it hardly matters how far I roam, I’m sure to find a Costa there waiting for me. At the university where I teach, on the outskirts of London, there’s a Costa franchise café; it’s not a Costa proper, but instead there’s a sign behind the counter that announces “Proud to Serve Costa Coffee”. A curious pride, I always think – after all, it’s not as if I couldn’t pick up a Costa coffee nearby; there’s a Costa Express vending outlet in the garage halfway between the station and the campus. And at this rate of market-penetration I’ll probably soon be encountering ambulatory Costa sellers – like water-sellers in the Sahel – who will offer to dispense a cup for me from the heated tank on their backs, and then stamp my loyalty card.

I often have lunch in the Costa clone at the university. I munch the Caesar salad with its risible “chicken”, followed by a gluten-free chocolate brownie (have I mentioned that I’m fashionably wheat-intolerant?) washed down with a triple-shot soy mocha. Are they any good, these comestibles? Does it matter? It seems to me that the Costa phenomenon is of a piece with the Googlisation of all modern culture: to drink a Costa coffee is to subject oneself to an algorithm of taste, rather to exercise discrimination in any meaningful way. The sponsorship of a literary prize is of a piece with this: palmed off on the chain by Daddy Whitbread, the Costa prize jury functions in exactly the same way as a search engine: picking out the books that other prize juries have already picked out, so that the bland end up promoting the blander.

This is why the Costa branch described at the capital of this column seemed so delusory to me in its ornament; sited on Brixton High Street, it’s easily the spivviest one I’ve ever supped in. And what’s that about? Brixton is undergoing a phase of retail gentrification, with trestle tables piled high with ackee and pigs’ feet ceding ground to young lifestyle peddlers with asymmetric haircuts. You don’t need to be paranoid to see the invasion of this body-snatching coffee shop as the advance guard of a surgical strike on the area’s authentic personality – a lukewarmotomy, if you will. I make no apology for this execrable pun – after all, that’s the Costa of living nowadays.

I once asked Martin Amis how an interview had gone with a particular journalist and he thought for a moment before shrug-sneering, “Well, y’know, he was a Tim.” When I was a kid we used to stop on the school run to pick up the son of the then MP for King’s Lynn, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler (not so much a wet as utterly saturated, he was the only Tory to defect to the SDP in 1981). Brocklebank-Fowler junior was called Tim, and my sadistic brother and I would tease him: “Timmy-Timmy-Timmy,” while he futilely protested that he was a Timothy.

It’s my contention that the likes of, say, Tim Henman, the tennis player, or Tim Parks, the writer, would have had enjoyed a great deal more success if they’d simply changed their names. There’s a prejudice against people called Tim; true, it’s not on a par with racism, sexism or homophobia but there’s little doubt that your life chances will be constrained should your otherwise risk-averse parents have had the temerity to Tim you. All of which is by way of introducing Tim Martin: the 6’6”, mullet-sporting originator of J D Wetherspoon, an invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-style pub chain that operates 833 outlets throughout the British Isles, together with 17 hotels.

Martin, who retains a 25 per cent share of the publicly listed company, rejoices in the sobriquet “the giant of the British pub industry”. But it doesn’t matter how much wonga the man trousers (pre-tax profits were £66m in the crash year of 2009), he can never escape the fact of his Timness, any more than he can elude its miserable correlate: his pubs are shit, brown dollops of establishments smeared incontinently across our cities. Actually, “shit” is a little strong for Wetherspoon’s – a bit too gamey; they’re more shit-lite.

The clever thing is that he doesn’t style most of them “Wetherspoon’s” but retains their original names – the Dog & Duck, the Duke of York, whatever – so that it isn’t until you’ve sidled up to the bar, clocked the plethora of guest beers – Diamond Geezer, Comfortably Numb etc – written up on blackboards in faux chalk-strokes, and registered the corporate vibe that you realise you are in fact in another soulless bloody Wetherspoon’s. As to why Martin should’ve dubbed his pub chain thus, the answer lies in his back story: a troubled youth who was an inmate of no fewer than 11 institutions (a sort of chain education, if you will), Martin did some school-time in New Zealand, where one ineffectual disciplinarian of a teacher was dumb enough to tell the young mulleteer that he would never succeed in business. What was this pitiful pedagogue’s name? Why, Wetherspoon of course.

I see a sort of nominative determinism at work here: Tim’s pubs are shit not only because he’s called Tim but also because they’re named after an object of resentment. And you know what they say about resentment: it’s like drinking a cup of poison and expecting the other person to die. Sadly, it isn’t Wetherspoon who’s dying (he probably expired years ago) – but us. It doesn’t matter that Martin was quick off the mark when it came to introducing no-smoking areas, nor that he’s been a staunch supporter of micro-breweries – nothing can counteract the excremental quality of these establishments.

The boy and I checked out the one nearest to us, which happens to be in Victoria Station. It also happens to rejoice in the actual Wetherspoon’s name, but while you might’ve expected it to live up to its flagship status, we found a poky joint crammed with tables. The standard chain-pub fare was on offer: burgers, sub-curries, toasties, pasta and pies. His bacon cheeseburger wasn’t tasty enough to be horse: the cheese hadn’t even melted and the bacon had been fried rather than grilled, so the whole comestible – when at last it arrived – was both frigid and congealed. My battered cod was at the nadir for this dish: the casing hard, the interior mush. At least it was hot – unlike the chips, which were like cardboard but not as tasty.

I suppose some might say: well, what do you expect? This is a busy location. To which I would rejoin: I don’t care, there’s a grim cynicism involved in flogging such drek; it demeans the customer and the worker. Looking around me at the other oblong platters on the tables, I saw that many of them had been barely touched. I did eat my food and so left with an unpleasant film inside my mouth. Still, tomorrow morning my palate will be cleansed – but he’ll always be a Tim.