Good afternoon. I’m glad you were all able to join me here for a brief presentation on some of the key issues that will be affecting us in the medium term. Since our organisation was founded in 2002, we have aimed to provide clients in both the private and the public sectors with real-time analyses of structural capabilities and help them to interface these with logistical support. Since 2007, we have increasingly recognised the importance of sustainability as a key component of our best practice. Previously, “sustainability” was a technical term applied in the environmental sciences to those ecosystems that achieved high levels of diversity and so were able to withstand negative impacts – but that all changed with the full assimilation of environmentalism to what passes for mainstream political debate.

Our sustainability group has dated the precise moment at which environmentalism ceased to be sustainable outside the party-political context to some period between the publication of the Stern review in October 2006 and the installation of a wind turbine on the roof of David Cameron’s Notting Hill home in March 2007. Some have argued (Parris, Procter, Phelps et al, “Sustainability and Metonymy in Post-Millennial Meaning”, British Journal of Ephemera, volume nine, August 2010) that the sustainability of sustainability itself, far from being a vicious circle, is a virtuous one and that some sort of perpetual motion machine could be built using this principle – one that would deliver a sustainable energy supply at minimal cost.

Others disagree, pointing out that simply because district councils have sustainable public transport provision, sustainable vandalism prevention and sustainable dog-waste schemes, it doesn’t mean that sustainability can be sustained, given the reductions in government spending overall. One thing is beyond dispute: “sustainable” is the mot du jour. During a recent PMQs, I heard the Prime Minister employ the term in all its variants – nounal, verbal, adverbial and even conjunctive – no fewer than 375 times, while the so-called leader of the opposition even managed an inspired example of tmesis:

“If the honourable member honestly believes that I give a sustaina-fucking-able-shit, then he’s sustainably mad.” To which the Prime Minister rejoined: “Sustain yourself, dear.” Whereupon the opposition benches erupted, waving order papers and chanting over and over again: “Sus-tain-able! Sus-tain-able!” in a manner strongly reminiscent of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.

When I stood up this afternoon to address you, I myself wondered whether it would be possible to speak on this subject at length without some form of sustenance – which is why I’m taking frequent slugs from this Vimto that’s been liberally admixed with vodka – but the truth is that, once you begin talking about sustainability, it’s possible to go on for a very long time.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to join a field trip last year that journeyed to an isolated plateau in the Venezuelan jungle. Hacking our way up a vertiginous precipice through sustained undergrowth as dense as purple-stemmed broccoli, we came upon a strange, lost world full of jargon and buzzwords that time had forgotten. Here, ongoing situations and consumer demand frolicked in sylvan glades of “minded”.

I was amazed at the diversity of these lexical throwbacks and unsheathed my digital recorder, determined to capture them for posterity. But, then, disaster struck! A jejune member of our party uttered the S-word and, before we knew it, sustainability was crawling about the place in such profusion that the entire semantic system was undermined and became . . . unsustainable.

In conclusion, then, when we look forward to 2012 and consider what sort of strategies may be sustainable, given emergent trends, we need to bear in mind that sustainable can mean any – or all – of the following: maintainable, supportable, viable, self-supporting, justifiable, defensible, expedient, deniable, larger (as in the expression “sustainable profits”), smaller (as in the expression “sustainable rates of emissions”) and the same (as in “sustainable growth”). So long as we remain absolutely clear about this, I feel certain that a way of bullshitting that we’ve all come to revere will remain, in the medium term, sustainable. Thank you, Jeremy.

In February 1542, Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, was executed under the terms of speedily concocted legislation that made it a capital offence not only for the Queen to have committed adultery, but also for her “handlers” to have concealed that she had had sexual liaisons before her marriage. Henceforth it would be treasonable to keep from the king information concerning any “will, act or condition of lightness of body in her which for the time being shall be queen of this realm”. The penalty for said light bodies and those who didn’t rat on them was to be the same: death.

Half a millennium later, another Kate is getting hitched to an English monarch (albeit one in embryonic form); and while physical death probably wouldn’t be Ms Middleton’s penalty if it were discovered that she had spent her student days at swingers’ clubs swigging back liquid Ecstasy while taking on all comers, she would certainly endure the modern equivalent: death by media. This Kate’s head would be digitally severed from her body and pasted on to a billion tabloids, and the sanctity of public opinion would be withdrawn from her – a latter-day excommunication.

Sadly, we can be reasonably sure this ain’t gonna happen. Ms Middleton’s old linen has been thoroughly mediatised already, while MI5 will have gone over all her known associates with the proverbial pubic lice comb. Unlike poor Katherine Howard (or, indeed, her groom’s late mother), no one is saying that the soon-to-be Princess of Wales should be virgo intacta, and yet the phrase “a past but no history”, has been used approvingly of her.

Some may feel that my concentration on the sexual hinterland of the royal bride is a little prurient, but let’s get this perfectly straight: this royal wedding, like all other royal weddings that involve the line of succession, is all about sex and nothing else. I say sex but what I really mean is procreation – I say procreation but what I really mean is breeding, although not “breeding” in the sense used by old-fashioned snobs, but breeding as practised selectively by members of the Kennel Club, or, indeed, adherents of a satanic cult that uses a so-called “broodmare” in its rituals.

It is difficult in the early 21st century to account for the stands along the Mall, the bunting here, there and every-bloody-where, the memorabilia, the unmemorable blether, and all the other manifestations of hysterical approbation that float around these nuptials in a great cloud of unknowing. Most Britons are pretty clear-sighted folk: they know there’s nothing special about members of the royal family in and of themselves; they also understand that, in constitutional terms, the monarchy is a kind of feint, designed to distract us from our gerrymandered electoral dictatorship.

William Windsor seems to be a fairly decent young man, especially considering his upbringing; and while Kate Middleton is ostensibly blameworthy – having chosen to get mixed up with this farrago – she, too, is young and probably wouldn’t take much deprogramming. Still, I’ve known crack dealers with a more aristocratic bearing than this heir to the throne, and I’ve consorted with prostitutes who were almost certainly wittier and smarter – and who indisputably have far better dress sense – than our future queen. I’m sure that so have most of you. How then do we account for this marriage madness?

The answer is that, just as with that founding father of serial monogamy, the reginacidal Henry, the British crowd is driven mad by the quest for an heir. And so, at a subconscious level, this perverse exercise in humans being treated as if they were miniature Schnauzers grips a good part of the nation.

To themselves, and to anchorwomen from the American TV networks whose visages closely resemble cling film stretched over cold chicken, the royalists will stolidly proclaim the virtues of the couple: their exemplary capability for public service, charity, forbearance, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, they will be unable to view the ceremony except through retinas and camera lenses smeared with royal sperm.

Freud viewed the hysteria of his female patients in fin-de-siècle Vienna as the result of suppressed sexual desire – in his memorable coinage, such phantasmagorical symptoms resulted from a failure to achieve “full genitality”. The British body politic is similarly afflicted by delusional thinking. Due to a repressive convention that makes the statement “I want a republic” as unutterable for front-bench politicians as “I want to get laid” would have been for Freud’s patients a century ago, the entire nation has become unable to achieve what we might term “full constitutionality”. And so the people fall prey to voyeurism and other perversions, seeking their jollies in the consummation of the royal couple’s union. Following the days of Pearly Spencer and her genuinely adulterous hubbie, the whole miserable syndrome seemed to be fading away. We had the Prince of Biscuits to thank for this, as his egregious exploits helped expose the grotesque chauvinism that lurks beneath all that satin, silk and tulle. I used to deride Chucky as “Prince of Tampons”, but I now think there’s something rather affecting about his leaked sex talk, and his blatant refusal to do only who was expected of him – by the public, if not the court.

Now his son is riding to the rescue and the whole storybook phantasia is under way once more: the queen-to-be is a clotheshorse to be serviced, the institution of monarchy is a honey trap for tourists, and so we carry on sending our armed forces – of which the prince is an exemplary officer – off to impose our ways on the Mad Mullah de nos jours.

With lunacy like this abroad in the land, now is not the time to be cutting down funding for mental health services, is it?

I’ve been trekking round the country with No 1 daughter in order to vet universities. I suppose this is only the fitting precursor to the kind of consumer-rational choice that will power tertiary educational provision – and its concomitant improvement – in years to come, but by golly it seems strange. In my day you simply went to university – or, rather, you didn’t, because only about three people matriculated each year.

I very much liked the look of Birmingham University – unpretentious, unstuffy, good solid campus, splendid bijou art gallery and an excellent line-up of fast-food stalls in the main quad; one was serving ostrich burgers, there was a Thai noodle bar, and at another a fellow was offering North African falafels and tabbouleh. I opted for this, and it was easily the best meal I’ve had so far this year – for an outlay of £4.50. When I got home I waxed enthusiastic and Mrs S said: ‘Oh, yes, the entire street-food thing is huge now, it’s a real alternative culinary culture – very vibrant, full of innovation.’

Miss Borrower liked Brum fine – but seemed more taken by Leeds. I, of course, embarrass her by the very fact of my existence, even though I managed to make things still more cringeworthy by querying the student ambassador who was showing us round three times, after she’d told us that we were standing on top of a basement zone containing three nightclubs, the largest of which had a capacity of 5,000.

But, really, while I absolutely accept that da kidz are going to get pissed, stoned and otherwise incapacitated at “uni” (as they so nauseatingly refer to it), there seems no good reason why this should be institutionalised. Surely there’s something deeply counterintuitive about the same establishment that’s aiming to build brain muscle taking such an active part in wasting it. In my day a hot night out was going to see PF Strawson lecture on Kant’s Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten – after having dropped the obligatory tetragrammaton blotter: LSD soaked into small squares of paper with the name of God in Hebrew written all over them. True, there wasn’t much dancing involved, but we certainly grasped the full force of the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy’s celebrated work “The Bounds of Sense”.

I wanted to check out the food on campus at Leeds – Christ knows there was enough of it, from teensy sushi bars to vast cafeterias – but Miss 9K nixed this. Strolling down the hill, we spotted a branch of Browns occupying a cavernous former bank building (or so I judged from the profusion of granite and porphyry). Ah, Browns! When I was at university there were only two or three of these “all-day brasseries” dishing up posh burgers and ribs in an ambience concocted from blond wood, bentwood chairs and spider plants. Now there are 19 of them, with at least six strategically located close to Russell Group universities. Yes, it seems fair to say that since time out of mind (1973) an elite education in this country has been associated with their signature dish of steak, mushroom and Guinness pie.

There’s nothing wrong with that, and despite the somewhat atrophied Sunday meals I had at Browns – on the rare occasions that one or the other of my parents chipped up to see me – I still have fond memories of the chain. Indeed, what’s not to like about such comfort food as meatballs and pasta, or steak? True, nowadays there are such oddities as chorizo and wasabi incorporated into the menu – but then no one ever said globalisation would be without its downside. Browns’ founder, Jeremy Mogford, has long since sold up to the Bass chain, but I like to think the high standards of employee care that he instituted remain integral.

Certainly, the well-spoken young chap who served us in Leeds had nothing but nice things to say about his job, and admitted ruefully that he’d been “in apron” at Browns for over three years. Given the current level of unemployment, he’d be wise to stay there.

It’s a knowledge-based economy, all right, and I fully embrace it. I see no irony in the government lending my kids thousands of pounds so they can gain an arts degree, then end up hefting broad bean and pea risotto around superannuated financial institutions. But then, as I think I mentioned, I have long transcended the bounds of sense.

The other evening (middle-aged speak for “months ago”), sitting having one of my favourite repasts – slow, bland, achingly solitary – at the OK Chinese restaurant on Wandsworth Road, I found myself shamelessly eavesdropping on the conversation of the couple at the next table. They were a father and son in their late 40s and late teens respectively. They had a large-boned assurance and an ease with one another I found instantly attractive – how else to explain my moment of madness?

After all, a native Londoner, I revile above all things the folly of talking to strangers. Anyway, there was this attraction, and there was what they were saying: the son jollily expounding to his dad that, “In the 1500s, or maybe the 1700s – I’m not sure which – there was a huge flood in London, the whole city was under water, something like 25,000 people were drowned.”

The older man demurred: “No, I can’t believe that! I’m sure I’d’ve heard about it . . .” But the son persisted in his contention that the city had been completely deluged at some indeterminate point in the past, with a concomitant huge loss of life. It was at this point that I could no longer forbear, and leapt in with a potted version of the account of the 1524 flood-that-never-was, as told by Charles Mackay in his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

According to Mackay, a mania for prophecy conjoined with several soothsayers predicting a catastrophic high tide on the Thames for 1 February 1524 – the result was a mounting and wholesale panic.

As the appointed day neared, thousands fled their homes and set up encampments on the heights of Hampstead and the North Downs. The prior of St Bartholomew was so alarmed that he had a well-provisioned stockade erected at Harrow-on-the-Hill to which he retired with a few close friends – shades here of Poe’s tale “The Masque of the Red Death”.

As we know, no flood occurred, and the populace trailed home feeling shamefaced in the way we all do after succumbing to asinine groupthink.

I was momentarily bowled over by the notion that this young chap, circa 2011, might be retelling not a piece of bona fide history learned from some sub-Schama at school, but a folktale that was still embedded in the popular unconscious of Londoners and that had, over the centuries, acquired the verdigris of veracity.

We’re all familiar with the phenomenon of the urban myth, which, despite spawning sodden stacks of toilet books in the past few decades, still continues to culture itself using the minds of the credulous as a substrate.

A recent one (middle-aged speak for “some years ago”) took the form of a round-robin email sent on by a friend who’s a senior editor at a national newspaper – and really should have known better. The gist of this scare story was that night-time drivers in sarf London shouldn’t flash their headlights if flashed by another car, because they would then be chased by the flasher and gunned down in cold blood.

I pointed out to my daffy pal that the spread of this delusion exactly coincided with a local upsurge in gun crime; moreover, didn’t she think it strange that the myth was being transmitted between white middle-class professionals via email, when all the shootings were black-on-black and confined to the lumpenproletariat?

But to return to the brackish matter in hand. My fellow diners heard me out, and then the dad mused: “Well, come to think of it, I suppose London must’ve flooded at some point – or else they wouldn’t’ve built the Thames Barrier.” I was about to explain to him that while London had been subjected to quite devastating floods – notably in 1953 – the loss of life had been in the low hundreds, and that furthermore the Thames Barrier had been built as an antediluvian measure, rather than après le déluge. But then I thought better of it and put my face back in my duck with ginger and spring onions.

Why? Well, you can’t win ’em all – and besides, I was reminded of how I had shared such moments of baseless conviction with my own late father. Our joint delusion had seemed altogether believable at the time, and we had chatted long into the night outlining the specifics of what, in later years, I came to realise was never, ever going to happen.

Socialism, I believe it was called.

“Do you mind if we perch here?” said the chubby little chappie in the blue suit as he and his porky pal – think layered blond hair, quilted gilet, jeans; think Chiswick, or Chester, or Chorleywood – hovered beside our table. “Yes,” I snapped, “yes, I do mind if you ‘perch’ here, it makes you sound like a brace of homicidal birds from The Birds who’re just waiting to pick us clean; however, you may sit here if you like.” They availed themselves of this opportunity and my friend Alex and I returned to discussing the matter in hand: All Bar One. “I’m slightly ashamed of myself,” he confessed, “but I hate it above all other chain eateries.”

“Me too! Me Too!” I cried. “But why do we hate it so much?” I cast a frenzied look around the high-ceilinged room, with its enormous plate-glass windows fronting the busy street, its expanses of exposed wood, its mega-blackboard neatly pseudo-chalked with the menu, its brass-topped tables and bar, its post-office clientele sousing their cares in Chardonnay, its huge earthenware pots from which suspect fronds groped. On the face of it, what wasn’t there to like?

The All Bar One chain started in 1994 with a single outlet in Sutton, Surrey, and has expanded over the years to where there are now 40 of these hybrid gastropub-cum-wine-bar-cum-bistros, from Edinburgh in the north to Portsmouth in the south. Back then, a brace of birds had the idea of opening a joint that was appealing to lone women who found pubs dark and intimidating – hence the trademark big windows, which afford female wine-bibbers a cloak of lightness, while allowing those passing by to check out the interior. Alex, who over the years has shinned up the moisturised pole to become editor of a major British men’s style magazine, knew all about All Bar One’s feminist credentials, but . . .

“I just can’t help it – maybe it’s a snob thing.”

In my case there was no maybe at all: it’s definitely a snob thing. Moreover, All Bar One was arguably the vanguard for all the banal Slug and Lettuce, Pitcher and Piano uglifications that have smeared their corporate slime across Britain’s high streets.

I stalked off between the high tables equipped with highchairs – an import from US sports bars that has no real function unless there’s a screen somewhere in the mid-distance showing NFL playoffs. That there isn’t at All Bar One is at least one thing to be thankful for. A sign directed me to the “LAVATORIES”, a term I haven’t heard spoken for years, although my late mother used to insist that it was the acme of U, as opposed to the horrifically non-U “toilet”.

This further pretentiousness galled me, and in the lavatory itself someone had left a full pint glass of greenish-amber fluid beside the commode in one of the stalls.

I hoped that this was an ironic comment on the relationship between beer and urine.

Back at our table, Alex had been served with his supper. The menu at All Bar One is capacious: taking in breakfast, specials, fresh from the grill etc, there are scores – if not hundreds – of items. Moreover, each of these items is a sentence in and of itself, complete with entire descriptive clauses, active and passive verbs, adjectives and even adverbs.

This laborious menu prosody documents a cuisine that sounds not so much like a fusion – but a car crash: Sesame tempura chicken fillet served with cucumber salad and a soy & wasabi dipping sauce, or indeed, grilled sea bass fillets with a spiced red lentil, potato and butternut squash ragu served with Asian-style pesto – which is what Alex had opted for, while I risked the tiger prawn linguine with a ginger, lime, saffron & smoked paprika cream.

It was an intimidating list of ingredients that suggested a dish of uncompromisingly strong flavour – not so much piquant as pokey. But I needn’t have worried. It turned out that there was a reason for the highchairs, because both our dishes were utterly, butterly tasteless. Alex’s orangey pulp of a ragu even looked like baby food, and he did it childlike justice by picking at it for a while, then setting his fork down. As for my linguine, a proper menu listing would’ve been: thawed prawns throttled by tasteless pasta. Nevertheless, I ate it all with gusto – after all, there’s a fine line between hatred and love. And if you’re a late bird like me you’re best off settling for anything that looks even vaguely wormlike.