My wife, who has had cause to spend some time in hospital over the past year, observes that if patients were told on admission that they would have to pay for their own food, they would have a fit – with a commensurate drain on the already straitened resources of the NHS. And yet, almost invariably, the first thing that a visitor is instructed to do by their prone one is to go down to the lobby and get a sandwich from Marks & Spencer, because the food divvied up gratis is such muck.

I’m not sure how the powers that be at M&S feel about this association: serious illness/M&S chicken sandwich. My hunch is that they’re pleased. How else to explain the selection of snacks they’re offering on behalf of Macmillan Cancer Support, which enables the buyer to chomp and donate at the same time? I recently took the unusual step of going to a hospital for lunch – I’d like to say that I was meeting Andrew Lansley there to have a frank exchange of views on his NHS reforms, but the truth was more sickening, if quite as prosaic: I had this column to write.

Under the current dispensation mandated by free-market ideology, large hospitals have become one-stop shops for anything from having a heart bypass to purchasing a pair of Pretty Polly sheer tights. Strolling from the cashpoint to AMT Coffee, via a boutique with the teasingly downbeat name Stock Shop, I think I could have been forgiven if I’d forgotten, for example, that I’d come in with acute coronary thrombosis and spunked off all my money on a carb binge.

Standing in the M&S café, I thought about the associations that the St Michael brand has for me. In my childhood, the stores had a genteel cachet, summed up in our family lore by my father’s Uncle Martin, who had taken early retirement from the colonial service to live out his days in a villa in Cheltenham. I remember the celebrated luncheon at which Uncle Martin, the faint nimbus of a psychic sola topi still shimmering about his snowy brows, fixed us all with gimlet eye before saying – apropos what he was masticating – “We buy all our chickens at Marks & Spencer . . .” Ever afterwards, drawling out “Marks & Spencer” in the manner of the ex-district commissioner would reduce my mother to giggles, for, like many immigrants to England, she had an eye for the fatuity and infinite divisibility of its class mores.

So it was a no-brainer: I selected the chicken salad sandwich and went to the counter to ask what the seasonal soup was. “Butter and nut squash,” said the more recent immigrant behind it, whose name badge read Kurshid. It was a charming malapropism and I hoped he’d never lose it.

While Kurshid microwaved the beige gloop, I selected a slice of Bakewell tart: the sight of flaked almonds always makes me think of the smell attributed to prussic acid by detectives in Agatha Christie novels. Kurshid made me a latte and I retreated to a nook. Above me, circular lampshades glowed red between naked neon tubes; on the walls, pseudo-Warhol prints showed sections of fruit juxtaposed with St Michael tomato soup cans; outside the floor-length windows, the hospital façade was pinioned together by steel struts and tensioned cables that resembled a monstrous, orthopaedic brace.

I tried the gloop – it was OK. I bit down on the chicken sandwich – it could be borne. I sipped the latte – ah, well, I thought, so it goes. On the hospital’s concourse, medical and auxiliary staff mingled with patients and visitors. The hospital staff wore loose tunics and baggy trousers of the same colour – either blue, green, white or butter-and-nut-squash – while the civilians were just a little more informal. Kurshid and the other M&S staff wore fetching black ensembles.

At the next table, a middle-aged woman with tired eyes spoke in the low tones of bereavement. I wanted to lean across, pinch her cheek in a Michael Winner-ish way and say, “C’mon, darling, cheer up!” Then I noticed the lanyard around her neck that bore the words: “Aspire – equality and diversity staff networks”, and clocked the dog collar which cinched that neck. “For Christ’s sake!” I screamed internally. “This is what your life has come to: fantasising over an M&S sandwich about goosing a woman priest!”

I reached for the Bakewell tart, sniffed it judiciously and, hoping with the fervent calculation of the parasuicidal that the hospital had a poisons unit, took an enormous bite.

There was an unfortunate episode this morning as I was on my way back from the school run. Walking from the bus stop, I passed a sullen-looking young woman with straight black hair, wearing blue jeans and khaki jacket and a very slightly recherché nose ring – you know the kind: quite thick, such as you might see attached to a dog’s collar. In a moment of madness, I unfastened the lead from my dog’s collar and, in a move that surprised me with its poise, fluidity and sheer dash, attached it to the ring in the young woman’s nose. Then I gave it the merest of tugs and said, “C’mon, love.”

Frantic, she cast around for assistance – but this is sarf London and no one was paying any, so, sensibly, she shrugged her shoulders and trotted on behind me as I led her to the nearby cashpoint, where I told her to withdraw £100 of her own money. This she did. We next strolled companionably to the local park; here I let her off the lead with this avuncular advice: “Take that ring out of your hooter and go spend this on something that doesn’t make you look like livestock . . .”

Oh, OK, I admit it – that was a fantasy, but it’s one I’ve had so often in the past decade or so that it might as well be real. The mass mania for piercings finally seems to be on the wane – yet there are still plenty of people wandering the streets looking as if they’re pigs, or cows, or even – so many bits of metal are there shoved into their flesh – bulls nearing the end of a corrida. Particularly unsettling is the sight of a grandmotherly woman with a ring in the end of her blue-veined nose, or silvery loops through a pendulous and exposed midriff.

Still, mustn’t be ageist – or sexist; young men look just as grotesque with a face full of ironmongery. It’s a tough call as to which is more upsetting: seeing lovely young flesh so traduced, or sagging old skin so traumatised. I don’t deny that there’s an après moi component to my disapproval – when I was young I had a couple of non-essential holes put in me. The latter was done by a hippie armed with a cork, a burnt needle and a can of lighter fuel for anaesthetic purposes. Needless to say, the piercing became awesomely infected – a golf-ball-sized lump of pus that remained cinched in its silvery loop, such a dedicated follower of fashion was I. Moreover, I accept some blame for the craze. In the early 1980s I wrote the text for one of a series of books called Modern Primitives; these featured photographs of unusual piercings and pseudo-ethnic tattooing. I can’t remember what I said about this body decoration at the time – doubtless some bullshit about individuality – but I know what I want to say now: in the annals of the west’s obsession with primitivism – from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, through Henry Moore, to I’m a Celebrity . . . – nothing gets closer to being asinine than the notion that, by bashing metal through your cartilage, you connect with a more authentic mode of being.

Not, I hasten to add, that I imagine a lot of the conformist-inked or fully metalled see themselves in this light – they’re just doing their thing, man, and who am I to rust their clinking-clanking parade? It is, after all, a free world. That’s true – sort of – but there does seem to be a more than averagely large disjunction between this mode of self-presentation and the mainstream when compared with that of other subcultures.

Or, rather: if a nose ring, why not a penis sheath, or a lip plug – and while you’re at it, why not have your urethra cut out and flayed with a stoneknife in the manner of particularly austere Centralian Aboriginal tribes? To affect the widowy weeds of the Goths or the waxed sagittal crests of the punks is one thing – but the modern primitivism implied by excessive piercing and tattooing stands out because of its sheer irreversibility.

I know that’s why I got tattooed in my teens. I thought to myself: a hole in the ear will heal up, but a tattoo will never be eradicated and so I will never be able to scuttle backwards into the bourgeoisie. How wrong I was! Now, I’m a homeowner, a taxpayer and all the rest – probably because rather than in spite of the anarchist black flags inscribed on my forearm.Still, nothing encapsulates the madness of modernity better than an ill-advised bit of self-mutilation, representing as it does the deranging collision between impulse, permanence – and narcissism. Squeal, piggy, squeal!

Y’know, me don’ see dat David Starkey much down ‘ere on me manor, seen, tho’ wevver it am because he be chi-chi man or foo-foo racist man me don’t know. All I do know is dat he could be ‘avin bare good wittles if’n he laak tekkim ve trubs an’ dat.

I could go on, but you get the point. Round my way, Jamaican patois and cockney have interpenetrated to create a complete argot that’s pretty much incomprehensible to the casual RP speaker, although if you bother to take the time – and are unprejudiced – you’ll discover that it’s rich not only in coinages and neologisms but also in metaphoric figures, colouring and imagism of all sorts.

It would be wrong to describe this new English dialect as “Jafaican”. There’s nothing fake about it – it’s spoken unselfconsciously by both black and white young people who have grown up surrounded by its two parent tongues. I’m not sure if Starkey has taken the time to read Stephen Pinker’s magisterial The Language Instinct but, if he did he’d discover the unpalatable – to him, at least – fact that a close analysis of African-American demotic has shown it to be far more grammatically complex than standard English. I suspect that the same is true of the common tongue spoken on the streets of sarf London – all of which is by way of my saying that, far from believing white Britons have become too black, I suspect we aren’t yet black enough.

It’s anomalous that, while white Britons have taken south Asian cuisine to their woolly bosom, West Indian food hardly ever features on high streets or in the culinary columns of newspapers – apart, that is, from jerk (or seasoned) chicken and Jamaican patties, which are increasingly sold alongside pies and pasties in fish-and-chip shops – though the mass-market items are more often than not as bland as their British co-specifics.

Which is a shame, because Caribbean food is a rich synthesis of African, Asian, European and Chinese influences, with a distinctive local twist. From ackee and salt fish through curry goat to fried plantain, the dishes are toothsome, piquant and wholesome – especially if you add in the distinctively heavy dumplings known as “foo-foo” (not to be confused with Starkey). My suspicion is that, as it was to the imperial mission, so it is to the post-imperial noshing: at an unconscious level, the majority population enacts a “martial races” policy on its gustatory habits. The Asians, colonised to serve as the small shopkeepers of the imperium, have retained that role for their former overlords. African-Caribbean people, by contrast, were outright enslaved and, once manumitted, brought in to run the public services – transport, health and so on – rather than the takeaways.

One of my favourite British chefs is Fergus Henderson, whose St John restaurant in London has been offering “nose-to-tail eating” to upmarket diners for years. If you want nose-to-tail eating of a different, but equally palatable sort, at a fraction of the price, I recommend my local Jamaican gaff, Twice as Nice on the Wandsworth Road. When you order the cow’s foot here, you get a complete cow’s foot, hoof and all. When – as I did at lunchtime today – you essay the oxtail, be prepared to find out quite how many little bones there are in a bovine tail.

The food is graphic at Twice as Nice and the prices comprehensible – my oxtail came with salad, rice and beans. With a can of Ting (“real Jamaican grapefruit”), my lunch cost £5.70 – but that’s only because I opted to sit in, listen to the reggae lilting from the boom box and earwig the young folk goofing out at the nearby counter: “She say she ‘av five chillun, man, an’ look at ‘er – she am sma-all, innit.” When the Vietnamese woman who flogs pirated DVDs from café to café came moseying in, it occurred to me that, were I out on a date, I could round it off with the latest cinema release – all for under a tenner. Given that this would be a date with myself alone, the chances of some sort of sexual activity would be better than evens.

I’d rather dine alone at Twice as Nice than break foo-foo with Starkey, TV’s Mr Twice-as-Nasty. Still, even if he doesn’t wish to darken the establishment’s doors for a sit-down meal, I strongly suggest that he dash in for one of its excellent patties: the pastry is light and fluffy and the fillings are delicious. As he strolls through the milling crowds along the Wandsworth Road, munching the thing, he might even be struck blind – colour blind, that is.

There is a deep, almost primordial satisfaction to be gained from eating at a hatch. By this, I don’t mean being served from a hatch – the sine qua non of institutional existence is the shuffling queue to be slopped upon. Prisons, factories, barracks – all are the same in this lack of respect for the individual. No, eating at a hatch somehow reverses this relationship: the hatch is freely approached and leaned on, while the servitor, rather than being just another robot in the production line of life, is consorted with as an equal.

Perhaps the best sort of hatch-eating experience, assuming that you’re human, is had at those mobile cafés scattered along the byways of the land. British high streets may have lost in the clone wars and motorway arteries may be clogged by fast-food joints, yet turn a touch athwart the stream of life and there they are: little trailers blazoned with Union flags and cheery signs, wreathed in the bluey-grey smoke of frying. You approach the hatch, inhale the odours of burnt pig, engage the proprietor in cheery banter, drink deep of sweet tea, watch the shreds of black plastic bag caught on the barbed-wire fence riffle in the stiff wind that blows across the turnip field – the whole sitch is so goddamn Orwellian that if there were a clergyman’s daughter to hand, you’d probably ravish her on the soft verge.

In Leverburgh on the Isle of Harris the other day, I espied something called the Butty Bus and approached it with a spring in my step. True, this was an upmarket wayside-eating experience, confirmed by the wholesome stench of home-made lentil soup. There was this – and there was also the handsome yet slightly haunted-looking man in khaki overalls who sat at a dinky counter.

Recognising me, he introduced himself: “I’m John Maher. I was the drummer in the Buzzcocks.”

“Aha,” I replied, not missing a rim-shot. “In that case, you must have been at the seminal Sex Pistols gig at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1976?”

“Indeed,” he conceded. “It was our first outing together as a band.”

Maher, it transpired, had decamped to the Hebrides years before and now idles his days away building flat-four VW engines from scratch for echt Dormobile enthusiasts. I know, I know … This seems not so much too good to be true as too true to be good. I’m sure that you, like me, are certain that the butty buses and burger hatches of the kingdom by the sea are clogged up with superannuated punk rockers: the Ruts dunk Eccles cakes at a Formica counter near Stoke-on-Trent; Captain Sensible chews a cheeseburger on the seafront at Weston-super-Mare; the ghost of Joe Strummer picks fragments of prawn-cocktail-flavour crisps from his beard in the web-foot country of Lincolnshire …

Heading south to my familiar munching grounds in the Scots rust belt, I found myself walking through penetrating smir down Dalziel Drive in Motherwell. On one side of the road, billboards advertised “prestigious four-and-five-bedroom residences” and the houses pictured were bathed in implausible sunshine. On the other, there was a perfect trailer with “Hot Food” painted on its side. I knew which I found more gemütlich, so I hustled up to the hatch and stood there in the shelter of its raised shutter, sipping my milky-sweet tea, while mein host fried me a bacon-and-black-pudding butty.

He had, he said, been stationed here for six years, servicing the requirements of the hard hats who had demolished Motherwell High School and were now transmogrifying an ebullient education system into an asset bubble. Six years in a six-foot-long trailer equipped with tiny shelves of Irn-Bru — it sounds like a torment, but the young man, who bore a family resemblance to Johnny Vegas, seemed quite content.

We chatted while spirited-looking girls wearing leopard-print macs and carrying zebra-striped bags tripped along the pavement towards Our Lady School. The bill came to £2.30 – I felt like tipping but suspected this might be considered a little outrageous. A hard hat pitched up for a burger. I said my goodbyes and trudged on.

The grim slab of the school appeared between sodden leaves. Twenty feet up, clamped to its weeping concrete wall, was a glass cubicle, within which was housed the eidolon of its namesake. Idly, I considered whether I should steal a ladder from the building site and climb up to see if she, too, was serving food.

I was sitting on the Tube with my six-year-old son. I’d bought him a bag of crisps and he was munching them while I read some boring periodical. Then: “Dad, Dad …” He pulled at my elbow. “Shush!” I admonished him. “I’m reading.” Then again: “Dad, Dad …” He pointed towards the only other person in our carriage: a young man of Asian appearance wearing a shalwar kameez, a prayer cap, sporting a wispy beard and with a small rucksack on his back. I realised what my kid was driving at – but shushed him again. Once we were off the train, I asked: “What? What is it?” He stared back at me with the triumphant expression of the junior spy: “That man,” he said authoritatively, “was a suicide bomber.”

This happened a couple of months after the 7/7 attacks in London, and while as a general rule recounting the precociousness of one’s children is the dernier cringe, I think it worthwhile setting down here as an example of how far this malevolent syllogism had sunk, by then, into the collective consciousness: the suicide bombers were Muslims, that man was a Muslim, QED, that man was a terrorist. It doesn’t matter how elegantly this fallacious “reasoning” is gussied up, or how it is tied in the rhetorical ribbons of politicians, policymakers and the leaders of the other two big monotheisms, the conclusion always remains the same: an entire group of people is damned by association with the crimes of a handful of individuals.

To understand just how crazy this is we have only to observe that we do not treat all men as if they were wise simply because Socrates was a man – the men who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks are dead, so are those who killed London commuters on 7 July 2005, so they cannot be punished any further by pulverising peasants in Afghanistan, let alone by shunning British Muslims who live and work in this country.

This morning, I was musing on the tenth anniversary of that grotesque spectacular, which, even before the dust had settled on the streets of Manhattan, was already being employed as a handy historical way-marker – musing and organising a car rental in a small Scottish city. The man doing the paperwork was a British Asian Muslim – not that you’d have been able to tell if you couldn’t see him: his accent was as broad as any urban Scot’s. I asked him if he minded if I asked him a personal question, and he said he didn’t, so I said: “Did you experience any problems, personally, after 9/11?”

It was as if I’d released a valve – for out it gushed. He had been studying in Glasgow at the time, and his friends were so worried for him that they formed a scrum around him and conducted him home like that. Even so, he was spat at in the street. This continued for four or five months after 9/11: verbal abuse, spitting, people automatically moving when he got on public transport: “I had no problem getting a seat on the bus for ages …” he quipped ruefully. What he found most difficult was that the shouters were by no means the usual suspects but “educated-looking people, y’know, all suited and booted”. He told me that when his sister-in-law asked two police officers to stop a group of men following her and taunting her, they merely shrugged their shoulders.

With the first anniversary it all started again, and so it continued, year after year, like a bizarre addendum to Ramadan, as if it were the lot of every English or Scottish Muslim to suffer collective punishment. The man in the car-hire place spoke not as if personally aggrieved – because he understood there was nothing personal about these assaults.

There are many state-sanctioned ways of honouring those killed during the 9/11 attacks, but I have a novel suggestion: why not, on the tenth anniversary, express some sympathy towards the living victims. If you see a young man in shalwar kameez and with a wispy beard sitting on a train or a bus – go and sit next to him, strike up a conversation even. Individuate him just as you yourself would wish to be individuated. This is the sane thing to do.