At Paddington Station, where one occasionally finds a stray bear with a label around its neck reading: “Please introduce me to a life of prostitution and drug addiction,” the train departures board operates at a laggardly pace. By which I mean to say that the platform number for the train to West Drayton will mostly only be displayed five minutes before departure. As the platform is usually number 13 or 14, this necessitates a brisk walk of 500 yards in order to make the train. Even I, a sprightly pentagenarian, find it something of a push – but anyone less able, let alone disabled, would be scuppered.

True, the West Drayton service is not the most popular of trains except during the evening rush hour. We midday voyagers to the outer ’burbs are pasty-munching, tea-sipping slowcoaches – spindrifts or even snags in the great current of urban life – and so we resent being so chivvied. But I’ve seen veritable stampedes when the platform is announced for a peak-time intercity express. If you happen to be standing in the wrong place at that moment, you might end up as a smear of jam in front of Delice de France.

As a thought experiment, it’s worth forming a mental picture of a British station at its busiest, then multiplying the human density by a factor of between 10 and 100. Such a scene – albeit more brightly coloured – would have met your eye had you been standing in Allahabad station on 11 February when a belated platform announcement (or possibly a collapsing handrail; accounts of the disaster understandably differ) triggered a stampede that led to 36 deaths and scores of injuries. That this took place during the climax of the Kumbh Mela, the largest human gathering on earth, makes it seem – how can I put this without being psychopathically insensitive? – relatively insignificant.

If 30 million people assemble on the sandy floodplain at the confluence of two rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, and a third, mythical one, the Saraswati, with the avowed intention of bathing in muddy waters into which the pitcher (or kumbh) of the Gods has dripped immortality-conferring nectar, a death toll in the hundreds would still seem a result. Deaths, lost children and parents are the inevitable sequelae attendant upon such a pathological party. Numerous Bollywood films have been made about these Kumbh Mela tragedies – the conjunction of so many people in one place presents unrivalled opportunities for plot-generating coincidences.

There is – as I’ve had cause to remark before – one type of human folly conspicuously absent from Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the 1841 book from which this column takes its name, and that is religion. Mackay doubtless itched to include the entire panoply of religiose nuttiness in his volume, from Catholic flagellation, to Muslim meteorite circumambulation, to Hindu widow-toasting, but lest the lens of comparative anthropology aim backwards into the equally wacky practices of Protestantism, he gave the entire field a swerve. The modern form of such an avoidance would be founded on a desire not to offend, which in turn would rest on a mushy pediment of cultural relativism: as all religions at all times have seemed valid to their adherents, who am I to judge between their forms of worship, no matter how excessive they may seem?

Stomping, snorting, naked and ash-smeared Naga “sky-born” sadhus charging in the dawn half-light across the riverbank to fling themselves into the chilly waters of the Ganges bear an obvious affinity to Justin Welby standing in a well-heated narthex objecting to gay marriage. True, they are physically many and he is just the one; but the Archbishop represents an entire crowd of benighted homophobes, while the Naga sadhus have dissolved their egos into the collective being of moksha, or enlightenment.

As you can see from the above, my cultural relativism takes a rather more robust form: Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that the miniature is the archetypal form of all artworks, for, when you considered the matter closely, all representation consists in a diminution. Even Michelangelo’s vast frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are miniatures, as their subject matter is the end of all cosmological time. By the same token, even the greatest of religious gatherings is a vicarage tea party when set beside the ubiquity of human belief in the immaterial. I’m not sure about train travel, either.

As I write, the traffic is still backed up from the Wandsworth Road – I can hear an occasional frustrated honk from a trapped van man, or the stifled yawp of an emergency services vehicle threading its way through the metallic mesh. I’ve only been out this morning to walk the dog: a turd-bagging totter around the block, but even here, several hundred yards away from the actual road closure, there are sheepishly bemused drivers diverted away from the flock.

Yesterday morning I was sitting on the top deck of the 88 bus: the traffic was slower than usual heading down the South Lambeth Road and as we reached Vauxhall Cross there began to be the unmistakable signs of an accident having just happened: fire engines shouldering cars over to the kerb and even firemen, on foot, running. By the time we were chugging over Vauxhall Bridge I’d overheard a man a few seats ahead of us say that a helicopter had crashed into the crane on top of the new cylindrical tower that, for the past few months, has been being extruded from the embankment – another architectural abomination to sully the London skyline.

Before we’d gained the north bank of the Thames, and despite the fog, my wife – who was sitting beside me – had visual confirmation: she could see the broken jib of the crane. It was about 8.15am and the crash had happened only a few minutes before. Back at home a couple of hours later, I had a phone call from the man who mends my typewriters – he lives in a suburb of north-west London and had seen the crash reported on the news. Was I, he wanted to know, all right? My wife was a little dismissive of his solicitude, seeing it as a slightly wacky example of ambulance-chasing by proxy, but with my fine attunement to – and sympathy with – the madness of crowds, I was rather touched by his concern.

True, this was the first time that anyone in London had ever been killed by a helicopter falling out of the sky on top of them, but the singularity of the event only made it more paradigmatic. In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year.

True, the mediatisation of certain kinds of spectacular events – the attack on the Twin Towers being the most obvious example – ensures they remain high in the anxiety hit parade, but I think there’s more to it than that. Human agency also makes us antsier: the idea that an individual or group of individuals is out there acting with malevolent intent is, we feel intuitively, a threat we should be able to assess and act upon – whereas there can be no anticipation of acts of God (or gods), unless, that is, we have a shamanic capacity for prognostication. It perhaps seems unfair but even human error of the kind that was probably involved in the helicopter crash, is, I would argue, grouped by our psyches under the heading of the potentially avoidable.

It may be crazy but in a deep recess of the group mind we imagine that we ought to reason along these lines: hmm, looks foggy out this morning, I think I’ll give Wandsworth Road a swerve – they’ll have switched off the warning lights on top of that crane and an unwitting helicopter pilot might crash into it . . . That this is a vanishingly small likelihood is neither here nor there, because the perceptual equipment required to swim safely through the urban mill race includes the expectation of other humans’ cock-ups as standard – along with airbags and safety belts.

All of this also helps explain why it is that public-safety campaigns need to be quite so relentless: they’re in competition. The wildcard helicopter crash gets free blanket coverage, but the 4,000 annual car fatalities have to pay for their bus-shelter space. And with spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality – threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we’ve begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena. The traffic – like a river – either flows, or it is damned; and when it’s damned, it backs up: a great logjam of frustration, anger and anxiety from out of which will come a host of misfortune. I’m not going to risk fording it – I think I’ll stop at home for the rest of the day.

‘‘Which,” I asked the nice young man in Le Pain Quotidien, “is the most daily of your breads – by which I mean the most popular?” To his credit he wasn’t fazed: “The baguette,” he replied, “absolutely – we sell many more of the baguette than any of the others.” This seemed a shame to me, because the other loaves had a pleasingly rustic air about them – great cartwheels of golden pain ancien, reposing on equally golden wooden shelves, the whole reminding me not so much of a boulangerie in La France profonde, as of a BBC television adaptation of a Marcel Pagnol novel.

Because that’s the shtick with LPQ: a cod-rustic vibe cultivated with cold-hearted commercialism. There are 175 of these fakeries in 17 countries – and 22 in London. If you’re reading this out in the sticks and thinking: Well, that’s just the sort of bollocks those dumb metropolitan pseuds fall for … then I concur. But should a branch of LPQ open up on your clone high street, it’s high time to slather a heel of stale Hovis with dripping and head up t’cobbled hill or down t’decommissioned pit.

I lacked such foresight and so found myself being ushered into the woody interior. I eschewed la table communale and sat next to a couple of ad-man types. Once the waiter had taken my order for a smoked chicken salad (which came, he assured me, with complimentary bread), and a fresh lime and mint drink – I had plenty of time to examine the decor. Walter Benjamin said of art nouveau that it “represented the last attempt at a sortie on the part of art imprisoned by technical advance within her ivory tower”. For the late, great Frankfurter, such a sortie “mobilised all the reserve forces of interiority”, forces that “found their expression in the mediumistic language of line, in the flower as the symbol of the naked, vegetable Nature that confronted the technologically armed environment”.

Frankly, if Benjamin could’ve seen the branch of LPQ I was sitting in, he would have found it more terrifying than the Gestapo: on the ceiling, duff track lighting was boxed in by rag-rolled boards, while above this frottage squatted metal ventilation ducts. Meanwhile, nailed to the lemonscumbled wall was a collection of Arts & Crafts windows – frames and all – their flowery stained-glass motifs winking complicity at the bourgeois diners.

My salad had some leaves, a few tomatoes, quite a lot of pinkish strips of what appeared to be meat and some croutons. Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that what’s roused me is an overpowering urge to visit violence on its originator. I often buy ready-made Caesar salads from supermarkets, because they come with the croutons in a separate little bag and I can then experience the delight of throwing them straight in the bin. What was worse was that these LPQ croutons were extra-large – an ordinary sized crouton is merely a crunchy impediment, but a big crouton is a piece of stale fucking bread. If I wanted bread I had plenty to hand – and it was complimentary! I turned my attention to the smoked chicken: it had the plastic texture and slightly tangy, chemical sweetness of smoked ham bought in an all-night petrol station.

I was so appalled that I turned to the ad man on my right and asked him to try a piece. He obliged and I tried not to prejudice my tiny focus group by grimacing as he chewed. “It’s not very nice,” he said, after a short length, “it rather reminds me of the sort of ham you get in petrol stations.” I almost kissed him. The waiter reappeared: “Is your food all right?” he asked. “Um, well,” I chose my words judiciously, “no – it’s not really, I mean this food is quite … unpleasant.” The waiter was suitably nonplussed, so I expanded: “This chicken is … grim – where do you get your chickens from? I mean, is this organic? Free range?” The ad man chipped in: “It doesn’t taste organic.”

Perhaps fearing that the Bastille was about to be stormed, the waiter hurriedly offered to replace the dish or refund me – but I wasn’t having any of it: I didn’t want the social conditions obtaining in Le Pain Quotidien to be smoothed over, I lusted for the antagonism that leads to revolution! £15.81 was way too much of my daily bread to pay for this daily bread – there will be blood!

These are the coldest collations of the year: shards of glass tossed on the kerbstone, dressed with vomit. Nearby stands a seven-eighths empty bottle of supermarket champagne; while if you follow the straggle of pink streamers you can see beer cans lurking by the wheelie bin, tinnily jostling. The party has well and truly pooped out.

Last year there was comparatively little hoo-ha: the failure of the Mayan prophecies to come up to scratch left the credulous with sod all in the way of an apocalypse – while as for the more civic-minded, there was a mass sense of the anticlimactic: the Eve marked the end of the spectacular year of the Jubilympics, a twelvemonth of unsurpassed gloriousness and achievement, the like of which we’ll never see again in our lives, nor our children and grandchildren in theirs.

Some consolation was to be found in the ennoblements of those who had reeled, writhed, and – in the case of Sir Bradley Wiggins – fainted in coils; but for the most part, as the damp, drear 31 December merged seamlessly into the damp, drear 1 January, there was no sense that the populace were shouting and staggering from any great sense of joy, only going through the motions.

Lying in bed, in the small hours, listening to the occasional yelps of grimly enforced gaiety, I thought back to the New Year’s Eves of the more distant past. You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers – some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party, but it wasn’t always so, believe me. I remember New Year’s Eves before the munificent Mayoralty forced London’s transport workers to stay up all night – in those days, if you chose to revel on the far side of town, you might find yourself with a very long trek before your belated bed.

One year, sometime in the early 1980s, I ended up at a party in Rotherhithe – at that time still a wasteland of redundant docks and warehouses, its “renaissance” but a twinkle in Terry Conran’s hooded eye. And although people gyred and gibbered, there was still – come about 2am – the sense that the world spirit of dissolution had moved on. Together with a couple of mates, I left and took the long bend of the Thames for home. Crossing London Bridge, we passed by Fishmongers Hall and were just tending towards King William Street and the Bank of England, when we heard the massed slapping of marching feet.

Yes, “slapping”, because as the sound drew closer it became conjoined with this vision: around the bend of Gracechurch Street came a formation of Roman legionaries. In the lead was a standard-bearer: above his helmeted head flew the letters SPQR grasped in the talons of a rampant eagle; beside him strode the decanus, his short sword drawn, while behind them came perhaps 20 more men, all with long pila at slope-arms, burnished helmets, tunics, cloaks and dangling, jangling baldricks. We stood, slack-jawed, as the le gionaries slapped downhill on to the Bridge and headed south into the sodium-tinged darkness.

Anyone seeing such a visitation would’ve been shocked and questioning of their sanity. But what saved us from hysterics were the following facts: all of us had seen the same thing – so we knew we weren’t hallucinating (or, at least, if we were hallucinating, it was only part of that collective hallucination ordinarily termed “reality”); and then there were the legionaries themselves, who, far from having the swarthy and squat aspect expected of first-century Roman invaders, were distinctly pale and paunchy. Put simply: it was obvious that these were men dressed up as legionaries, rather than a couple of real contubernia that had somehow managed to march through a tear in the space-time continuum.

Why a group of Roman army fanatics had decided to suit up then tramp through the City was a question that could never be answered – they may have been of our era but their expressions were Caesar-stern, forestalling any inclination we might’ve had to hale them. And why do I offer up this anecdote now? Because once you’ve been part of a triumvirate who have witnessed a troop of legionaries marching through a silent London in the small, cold hours of New Year’s Day, all subsequent celebrations are bound to seem utterly infra dig.

I thought it might be a good idea to depart this year with an explosive fart rather than a whimpering burp, so I arranged to meet a young radical friend of mine at the Spaghetti House in Knightsbridge. The Spaghetti House chain seems on the surface to be an inconsequential thing: there are 12 coiling across London, dishing up pasta, pizza and the trimmings in an ambience of dark wood and off-white Artex – so far, so dull.

Indeed, after recent outings to Prezzo and Zizzi – both larger operations playing variations on the same wheat’n’sauce theme – even bothering with the Spag’ Gaff at all would seem de trop, were it not for the siege. (Apropos of Zizzi, which I wrote about a fortnight ago, the name kept bothering me – I was certain it meant something but could find no reference. Then a friend explained that “zizzi” is French slang for “little penis” and is employed in those parts as an anti-Semitic taunt. Makes perfect sense of all that chilli oil drizzling, no?)

The Spaghetti House siege began on the evening of 28 September 1975 when a Nigerian-born gunman, Franklin Davies, together with two accomplices, attempted to rob the restaurant. At that time there were only three or four Spaghetti Houses, and their managers had assembled at the Knightsbridge branch to pay in their week’s takings, which were in the region of £13,000 – pretty good dobs, really. The job went tits-up from the get-go: one of the waiters escaped and raised the alarm, while the robbers, together with nine staffers, ended up in the basement, where they remained for the next six days, under siege by the Met’s finest.

At the time, the Spaghetti House siege was huge: prime location, exotic cast and a pleasing high-tech element to the operation as fibre-optic surveillance equipment was used for the first time. Davies claimed to be a member of the Black Liberation Army – a splinter group of the Black Panthers – and tried gussying up the blag as a political act. Needless to say, neither the plods nor Roy Jenkins – the then home secretary – were having any of it, and the siege ended not with Davies and his crew boarding the plane to Jamaica they’d demanded, but instead being hustled into a Black Maria.

Fast forward 37 years and the world seems a safer place. Yes, you heard me: every era privileges itself with the cachet of being edgier than the ones before; yet standing in the Spaghetti House vestibule on a cold December evening and reading the front pages of newspapers reporting the siege that had been framed and hung there, what struck me was how much violence there’d been then –nine deaths in Northern Ireland the previous day and the IRA recently peppering the porticos of St James’s gentlemen’s clubs with machine-gun rounds. There were considerably fewer chain Italian restaurants, however, let alone ones that made a selling point out of their staff once being held hostage. I asked the smiley chap who showed me to my table what he made of the siege-as-marketing but he just laughed: it was such a long time ago!

My friend was equally unfazed – he wanted to talk about Slavoj Žižek and the Occupy movement, and savour the piquant zeitgeist rather than munch on the stale bread sticks of yore. It was understandable that the waiters weren’t keen to consider the fate of their forerunners – one grim aspect of the siege had been that Davies refused to feed his captives. This seemed harsh; if you’re taken hostage in a bank raid, it’s reasonable to expect you won’t get much in the way of eats beyond the limp biscuits left behind in a cashier’s drawer. But a restaurant? Surely it wouldn’t have mattered to the gang if the staff had whipped up a pollo e funghi risotto? 

I enjoyed mine, as the callow revolutionist opposite me tucked into a dish of pasta. I don’t know whether it was his onslaught on my middle-aged and middle-class complacency, or the surprisingly tasty nosh, but I found myself warming to the Spaghetti House and in particular to its staff – all of whom, unusually for a Italian restaurant in Britain seemed to be . . . Italian. Anyway, either they were an exceptionally chatty and attentive lot or I was suffering from the rapid onset of Stockholm syndrome. Even when I descended to the gents, the fateful basement looked pretty damn cosy.

We finished our political wrangling with an affogato apiece: a scoop of vanilla ice cream affogato – “drowned” – with a shot of espresso. I like to think Franklin Davies would’ve approved of this culinary miscegenation – although I have no reason for believing so.

Real meals have a way of provoking surreal thoughts in me – but then you knew that, didn’t you?