Ask not what your country can do for you – instead, go to yet another chain Italian restaurant and order some farinaceous foodstuff that will make your stomach swell up like that of a cow that’s gorged on clover; not, you understand, that I believe you to be fashionably wheat intolerant – it’s just there’s so much wheat intolerance in the air, it’s difficult not to pick up on it. So, ask rather what you can do for your country and the answer is clear, in order to promote growth-through-increased consumption: go to Ask, which seems to have a preposterous 135 outlets nationally, from Ashby de-la-Zouch to Truro and back again.

How did that happen? How did this Triffid-like horde of identical eateries rustle up on us, all – presumably – with the same green-and-cream colour schemes, all with the same sense of being conservatories writ large and foodie (hence the ducts snaking across the ceilings from their let-it-all-flop-out kitchen areas), all with white laminated-MDF tables, all with varnished wooden floors and wooden chairs, all with bars behind which there’s a map of the Italian boot fetishised out of wine bottles thrust into plaster, and all with plump, slightly buck-toothed waiters, who, as you push through the glass doors ask, “How’re you today?” their intonation rising into that meaningless interrogative swoop so beloved of the Antipodeans.

Yes, how did it happen – because, frankly, until I walked through the doors of Ask, I had never put to myself a single question about the chain, this empire of bruschetta being as alien to me as a walking plant, while also, paradoxically, blindingly obvious?

I mean, were Ask not to exist, it would be necessary to invent it; and if not with this name, then one called “Hint” or “Allude” or “Quail”. I say this, but when I inquired of Andreas, my waiter, why Ask was so called, he explained that it was an acronym of the names of the three founders. “English, were they?” I essayed, and he conceded that they almost certainly were. At that point I realised the futility of naming an Italian restaurant chain Perché, and gave up on the whole business of human interaction.

I was eating alone. At the next table, an older woman in a wool appliqué top discussed something with a younger woman with her hair in an Alice band. The older woman’s info-tool was an iPad, the younger one’s was a spiral-bound notebook. Andreas returned with my San Pellegrino and green olives. I sipped and nibbled moodily while consulting the menu. (Ridiculous expression, really, implying as it does that I paid the menu a fat fee in order to justify my own pathetic act of professional closure . . . except that when I stop to think about it, that’s precisely what I was doing.) I wanted to have the agnello brasato (shoulder of lamb with tomato sauce on risotto), or the pappardelle, which came with chunks of Tuscan sausage, but it wasn’t that sort of a day – it was a ruminant day, a green day, a mean’n’moody methane day, so instead I ordered the risotto verde and a rocket salad.

Waiting for it to arrive, I looked up at the tight formation of unshaded light bulbs dangling from the ceiling high overhead. I looked to the kitchen area and saw a white coat withdraw a pizza from the wood-burning oven. I thought of Sylvia Plath and how back in the days of British Gas, its advertising slogan was “Don’t you just love being in control?”. A reference to the “cookability” of gas stoves, not their suitability for those who become felo de se. My salad and my risotto arrived. The former looked like a half-digested meal, the latter like a fully digested one that had been thrown up. But then that’s risotto for you, isn’t it? I mean, if you order a risotto you cannot complain that it looks like puke, because that’s part of the contract: “I want some food that seems to be vomit” translates into catering lingua franca as, “Bring me risotto.”

Andreas came back and asked me how my food was, and I told him it was bland and he looked nonplussed, so I expanded: “Y’know tasteless, dull, uninteresting, obvious . . .” but that didn’t seem to help and his face crinkled up with pained incomprehension.

“Listen,” I snapped, “I don’t mind my bland risotto, in fact, I positively wanted such insipid fare.” At last this seemed to satisfy him and he went away. The bill was 20-odd quid, plus service – as you asked.

Compulsive hoarding is pretty out there, no? I mean what kind of a weirdo saves all that cardboard and bubble wrap, ties it up with string and wedges it in on top of crappy old wing chairs and fake-veneer TV cabinets stacked high with bundles of old newspapers and books, then tops the whole teetering pile off with 30-or-so cat litter trays (full), leaving the felines themselves – perhaps 40 of them – to smarm along the alleys carved through this dreck (for this is but one room of an entire semi so engorged), shitting and pissing wherever?

A complete weirdo – that’s who. And these people, together with their odd pathology, are of increasing interest to the general population, as is evidenced by the arrival on these shores of the British version of Hoarders, a US documentary series about compulsive hoarders that has already been running over there for four seasons and is currently embarking on its fifth. Not that this is Brit TV’s first foray under the sinks of the seriously possessive – there was a stand-alone docco, Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder on Channel 4 back in 2011 – and it may be because I’m taken by the phenomenon (a hoarder of programmes about compulsive hoarders) that it seems to me that I’ve snapped on the set on a number of other occasions only to find the camera’s lens nosing along a skirting board behind which are stuffed sheaths of old discount coupons.

Wherefrom comes this urge to expose such traumatic interiors? After all, hoarding can be nothing new – it’s easy to imagine a Cyclops’s cavern stuffed to the roof with sheep bones, cheese rinds and the remains of hapless Argonauts. The splurge of reality obesity shows that the explanation is simple: schadenfreude. We look upon those poor wobblers being shaken to their core by life coaches and think to ourselves, I may be a little on the tubby side but – Jesus! – I’m not that bad. Actually, my suspicion is that the compulsive hoarder craziness is an even more craven attempt to affect such a catharsis. As the crack team of cleaners goes into the bungalow, black bags and bug spray at the ready, we sit on the sofa watching and, for a few dreamy minutes, can forget all about the landfill-in-waiting that surrounds us.

Every morning of my serene existence I open the door to my writing room and think, I can’t stand this! It’s an avalanche crushing me! The box files full of papers, the shelves piled with books (the floor piled with books), the desk stacked with unanswered correspondence, the desk lamps corralled by tchotchkes – old toys, plastic figurines, broken watches, stones I’ve picked up as mementoes of the places I’ve been and yet forgotten, foreign coins, pine cones – the space below the desk humped with boxes full of camping gear all coiled in dust-furred computer cabling . . . Aaaargh! I want to scream, because there’s no point in turning away from it, for there are scores of books not simply unread but which I will never read. Just as in the pantry there are bay leaves I will never put in a casserole, and in the shed there are trowels that neither I – nor anyone else – will ever delve with.

Yes, I know there are those who exhibit a different pathology: their homes are pristine, their socks are colour-coded, the second they acquire something superfluous they organise a tabletop sale. But the rest of us are charged with some sort of unearthly static electricity that makes paper clips, hairpins, half-used Sellotape rolls (especially the ones where you cannot detach the tape even after hours of flicking at it under operating-theatre-strength lighting), local newspapers, tins of baked beans missing their labels, jump leads, hair rollers, half-used tubes of athlete’s foot cream, half-popped packs of headache pills, broken folding chairs, Jiffy bags, VHS tapes, etcetera, etcetera, et-bloody-cetera cling to us with terrifying inertia.

If you stand on the banks of the Thames east of Gravesend, roughly where Pip met Magwitch and Boris wants to build an airport, you can watch as giant container ships loaded with discarded electrical goods set out on the ebb tide for China, where all these washing machines, computers and consoles will be recycled into useful appliances for their upwardly mobile rural poor. Some might take heart at this – not I. I see the earth as a compulsive hoarder, spinning through the endless night of space, snaffling up meteorites as she goes.

The transvaginal probe is a long, dildo-shaped instrument used to detect foetal heartbeats – or, at least, that’s what an unholy alliance in the US of state legislators, anti-abortion campaigners and their medical henchmen see as its purpose. Increasing numbers of states are demanding that women seeking abortions be subjected to the probe, so that they can hear the beating heart of the “person” they are about to murder. One doctor interviewed on BBC’s Newsnight – standing in front of the examination couch, probe in his hand – explained that the procedure had no medical utility and was simply a way of traumatising these women.

In his seminal text Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay gave the whole garment-rending subject of religious nuttiness a swerve – and, as a rule, this column has followed his lead. However, once in a while, something comes along like the transvaginal probe that’s so abusively crazy that it demands to be written about.

In the same Newsnight segment, we were treated to a coffee morning of so-called Christians who explained that, for them, the abortions in the US were on a par with genocide: “It is a Holocaust,” one harridan in pastel roll-neck inveighed. (It’s strange how they’re always wearing pastel roll-necks.)

I’ve no idea what Mackay would’ve made of the transvaginal probe but I suspect the general idea of forcing things up women’s vaginas, or subjecting their genitals to abusive “examination”, wouldn’t have been wholly strange to him. The anti-prostitution drive towards the end of the 19th century led to exactly this sort of carry-on, as young, working-class women were plucked from the streets and violated in the cause of hygiene. In order to convince these self-appointed authorities that you weren’t a streetwalker, it was necessary that you be proved to be a virgo intacta. Ritualised sexual assault in the form of “force-feeding” also formed a key part of the patriarchal establishment’s repression of the suffragettes.

And so it goes on: the “virginity tests”, carried out by Hosni Mubarak’s secret police during the Tahrir Square revolution last year, were merely the latest instance of sexual assault being deployed as a political weapon. In the west, we have the arrogance to think that we left this sort of thing behind a long time ago; so we inveigh against the genital mutilation (clitoridectomy, infibulations) of benighted Africans in much the same way as Mrs Jellyby passionately cared for the heathen while neglecting the starvelings in her own home. But once you begin looking, it becomes clear that a barely submerged culture of systematic misogyny continues unabated.

Throughout the 20th century, what were, in effect, state-sanctioned sterilisations of powerless women continued in the west – that they were hidden from view was a function of the way mental asylums and prisons operated as hidden gulags where the state enforced its power over the reproductive rights of women and, by extension, their genitals. The ongoing “debate” about single, working-class mothers who claim benefit is only the perpetuation of this attitude under a guise of social concern. That it has become unexceptional even for the liberal to censure these women is another indication of how this age-old hysteria can camouflage itself as socially acceptable.

Less socially acceptable – but a finger-flick away – is the spectacle of young women inserting transvaginal probes to provide a pornographic spectacle for web voyeurs. That the sight of women pseudo-pleasuring themselves with these cruel instruments should be a staple of the male imagination says a lot about how far we haven’t come towards a healthier notion of eroticism. Possibly we have the hidden hand of the market to blame for this lustful frenzy: in the realm of the collective jerk-off, it seems to maintain a ceaseless blur.

Do I blame Christianity per se for fostering this grotesque state of affairs? No: there are many good Christians who must find the transvaginal probe as disgusting as any feminist secularist. Rowan Williams has a couple of months to go before he sets down his mitre and it would be nice if he took the time to pronounce anathema on the madness and prurience of some of his co-religionists.

In keeping with the convergence of downtown Los Angeles – as depicted in Blade Runner (1982) – and Britain’s metropolitan regions, there is an increasing number of noodle bars throughout the realm. I speak here of London, because that’s where I live – but I’ve noodled about in cities as diverse as Sheffield, Bristol and Cardiff. The basic noodle bar format is refreshingly bare bones: strip lighting, melamine-topped tables, wipe-dirty floor and a clientele with its faces over bowls of broth.

I love a noodle bar and often dive over the Euston Road from King’s Cross as soon as I arrive back in town so as to suck up stringiness in the Chop Chop Noodle Bar. Mmm, I exhale, as a mixed seafood noodle soup is set before me, it’s great to be back in the City of Angels – albeit ones with dirty faces and wonky teeth. It could just be me but there’s something very primal about the broth served in these establishments – left long enough, it might generate a new life form. It also has a certain detergent note and a residual flavour verging on the excretory. As I say: this could just be me, because the most significant meal I’ve ever had in a noodle bar came after an adventurous man called Bruno took me down the London sewers.

Arguably a description of a walk through the sewers doesn’t belong in a restaurant column – it’s difficult to picture A A Gill or John Lanchester wading through streams of sewage, although fun to try. But I take the hard-line view that anyone who’s preoccupied by what goes in one end should be prepared to take a serious look at what comes out the other. I met Bruno at the junction of Brixton Water Lane and Dulwich Road and without any ado he produced a pair of wellingtons and some rubber gloves and took out a heavy steel key, with which he opened a manhole cover. Down we went, under the incurious eyes of a shopkeeper.

Steel ladders wreathed in an ancient coralline encrustation of toilet paper were pinioned to the glistening black walls and rushing along the bottom of the culvert was a thick cascade of speedy broth. Still, I could detect no actual turds bumping against my wellingtons, nor could I hear any rodentine cheeping, and as we sloshed our way Bruno pointed out that the concentration of excreta was probably fairly low: after all, the greatest part of what goes down our plugholes consists of water mixed with soap: the waste of all that furious laving, of dishes, of bodies, of clothes. However, the detergent edge to the mephitic atmosphere made it seem more rather than less disgusting and, as we waded on, I gagged and for the first time in my life pitied Harry Lime.

We walked for about 2km. Bruno, an anthropologist by training who plied a cycle rickshaw for cash-in-hand, was the perfect Virgil for this harrowing of the urban Hades – he seemed to find his way unerringly through the colonic irrigation and when we came upon a canyon into which our tunnel’s contents debouched with a roar, I was tempted to suggest that we simply went on over the shitty rapids, latter-day versions of the unnamed narrator in Poe’s “MS Found in a Bottle”. Instead, Bruno led me back up and unscrewed a manhole cover and we emerged blinking into a perfectly workaday early evening in Clapham North, at the junction of Timber Mill Way and Gauden Road.

This being the city, no one paid us any attention as we slopped across the Clapham Road, past the crowds of happy noshers outside the Bierodrome. I wanted to point out to them the secret world that rushed beneath their feet – but instead I walked down to Brixton with Bruno and we went for some supper at Speedy Noodle.

Speedy Noodle, as its name would suggest, is not somewhere you linger: the staff are uninterested, the ambience strained, the lighting on the vomitous side of bright. I love it. Over our soup, I told Bruno about the New Statesman’s investigative reporter Duncan Campbell, who, in the early 1980s, by accident gained entrance to the network of government tunnels underneath London and spent a long night down there, cycling about on a folding bicycle he’d taken down with him. How times have changed. I observed to Bruno: in those days, there probably weren’t any noodle bars in London, while at bottom security was unbelievably lax. The only constant, it seems, is the sewers.