The latest Madness of Crowds column looks at, er, the dynamics of crowd behaviour:

“It’s been a fantastic three months for those of us gripped by the dynamics of crowds. First, we had student demonstrations here in Britain spiralling out of control; then, we saw Tunisians link arms to push out their corrupt regime; finally, millions took to the streets of Egyptian cities, pitting their sheer weight of numbers against the sclerotic – but still vicious – government of Hosni Mubarak.

“Perhaps the most celebrated analyst of the crowd was the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, whose 1960 magnum opus, Crowds and Power, aimed to do for modern mass movements what Frazer’s Golden Bough did for “primitive” ritual. To Canetti, both socialism and capitalism were political systems defined by “the modern frenzy of increase”, in which production led to ever bigger crowds of goods and consumers.

“This sense of industrialised society as a crowd, at root, directs Canetti to his definition of power as the coincidence of the desires of the ruler(s) and the ruled.

“By this view, it’s easy to understand the presence of crowds of people on the streets as symptomatic of a disjunction between the two: only when the crowd has been reabsorbed into the social fabric has synchronous equilibrium been achieved. In Canetti’s jargon, the crowd in Tahrir Square was ‘stagnating’, whereas the crowds of the quiescent Cairene unemployed before the revolt could be characterised as ‘rhythmic’.

“Canetti showed a nice understanding of how masses of people make their own political weather when he caustically observed that ‘fire unites a theatre more than a play can’ – but his vision was underscored by the apocalyptic mood music of mutually assured destruction. ‘Rulers tremble today,’ he wrote, not ‘because they are rulers but as the equals of everyone else . . . Either everyone will survive or no one.’

“Fifty years on, and with examples of people power toppling regimes from Iran to Russia and Ukraine and – almost – back again, we’ve come to believe that there is an inherent ‘goodness’ to the crowd. At least, this is what we believe in the west, where, apart from kettled teens jiggling to dubstep and lobbing firecrackers, the mob has become a purely recreational event. Our crowds hold up lighters and sway in stadiums; their mobs do away with tyrants, replacing rulers we were happy to do business with, one hopes, others we’re even happier to do business with.

“One man who experienced an epiphany while holding up a lighter at a stadium-rock gig was the inappropriately named Professor Keith Still. This mathematician was moved to invent the science – if it is one – of ‘crowd dynamics’, a discipline he teaches at Bucks New University and on a course at the UK Cabinet Office Emergency Planning College.

“A few weeks ago, I heard Still speaking on the radio about his work for the Saudi Arabian government, ensuring that the millions of pilgrims descending on Mecca for the Haj don’t crush each other to death. I was struck by the technicality of Still’s exposition and so, when crowds took to the streets across the Middle East, it seemed to me that he was the person to consult, rather than some woolly-minded foreign-policy expert.

“I sent Professor Still a suitably humble email: ‘I appreciate that your methodology is not able to tell us whether or not crowd power will oust Mubarak but, nonetheless, it does occur to me that there is some kind of metric at work in the interaction between largely unarmed demonstrators, passive troops and active police – I wondered if you had any comment?’ As quickly as a stampeding mob came back the prof’s reply: ‘We have a range of models for assessing risk to the crowd and this is the sort of application we use for training purposes. I’m not sure I could comment further, other than that the type of work I do is related to understanding crowd behaviour and anticipating action/ reaction in this kind of situation.’ He then referred me to his website.

“Rather than being chagrined, I was gratified. There’s a fabulous section on Still’s site that details incidents of ‘crowd crazing’, when businesses hype up crowds for sales and openings. One fatal ‘crazing’ happened in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 2004, when 20,000 people turned up for the opening of a new Ikea. I dare say Still’s crowd dynamics might have prevented this – but only Canetti could have explained it.”

“I feel it in my fingers/I feel it in my toes/Love is all around me/And so the feeling grows . . .” So have crooned a succession of pop stars, from the Troggs, who first coined the expression, to Bill Nighy and Wet Wet Wet. But from where I’m sitting a more plausible candidate for omni­presence would be cancer. Let’s make the substitution and see how it sounds: “I feel it in my fingers/I feel it in my toes/Cancer is all around me/And so the feeling grows . . .” Ye-es, much better, I’m sure you’ll agree.

“Both of my parents died of cancer; my wife is receiving radiotherapy for breast cancer; the sister of one of my closest friends is in a hospice dying of lung cancer; I was on the phone recently to another friend whose breast cancer – treated a decade ago with a mastectomy and chemotherapy – has recurred and metastasised into her bones; another good friend is suffering from throat cancer; indeed, cancer is so much all around me that two people I know well are being treated for leukaemia in the same ward of the same hospital.”

Read the rest of Self’s New Statesman piece here.

This time last year, I was in Berlin. One evening, strolling towards Unter den Linden after a concert at the Philharmonie by the Tiergarten, I decided to take a short cut by walking through the Holocaust Memorial.

A lot of print and hot air has been expended on the whys and wherefores of Peter Eisenman’s 4.7-acre “sculpture”, which consists of a grid of 2,711 concrete slabs or “stelae”, implanted in a shallowly sloping depression in the ground. According to Eisenman’s proposal, the memorial is designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere and, let me tell you, alone, late at night in the snowy midwinter, trudging down the long defiles with the slabs rising up above me to twice head height, I felt this and more: an intense oppression and a sense of the man-made as inherently minatory, if not genocidal, began to bear down on me.

This feeling of unutterable desolation was broken only when, mounting up the far side of the memorial, I saw some cheery lights that, as I drew closer, resolved themselves into the neon-lit façade of a Greek restaurant with a name as deliciously inappropriate as Pericles’s Taverna.

I’d like to report that I entered the taverna without demur and replaced the nightmare of history with some stuffed vine leaves – but I’d already eaten. However, the experience did get me thinking on the connections between ordinary eateries and mass murder. A half-Swiss friend tells me that, in his father’s home village in some God-awful backwoods canton, the local Schnitzeleria serves a dish called Chicken Himmler. When my friend asked why, the unashamed answer came back: because Himmler once ate here and this is what he had.

But you don’t have to go that far. In London, there’s a trio of noodle bars with the arresting name of New Culture Revolution. I’ve often passed the one in Notting Hill Gate and wondered what would persuade people to eat in such an establishment. I mean, surely it would be difficult to suck down your ma la niu rou mein without, at least, a stray troubling thought? Possibly the killing that inaugurated the Cultural Revolution would come to mind: in August 1966, the deputy head teacher of a school in Beijing where the children of Mao Zedong and other officials had been educated was kicked and beaten to death by her own female pupils.

This intergenerational frenzy launched a convulsion in Chinese society that resulted in the violent deaths of an estimated three million people . But then, wasn’t it Mao who observed that the revolution was “not a dinner party”? Perhaps I shouldn’t be so squeamish about the sight of dumb-ass trustafarians and baby Cameroons tucking in to dumplings under the banner of a tyrant’s zeal because, after all, I once ate at the New Culture Revolution on King’s Road – and the dumplings were pretty damn tasty.

Still, I couldn’t forbear from writing to David Lau, New Culture Revolution’s senior cadre, and asking about his chain’s nomenclature. Here is his reply:

Dear Will Self,

Our name originates from our style of cooking. This style is from the north of China, which has a colder climate, and where people use wheat flour rather than rice. We cook noodle and dumpling dishes just as people in that region do. Furthermore, we do not use flavour-enhancing additives such as monosodium glutamate. We make our own noodles and dumplings. When we founded the first restaurant, this was an innovation – a revolution – and this made us think of the memorable name.

Culinary art is part of humanity’s culture. If we can be of any assistance on Chinese cuisine in general, please let us know and we will try to help.

Kind regards,

David Lau

Only a churl would press a restaurateur further after such a gracious reply. But I am a churl, so I went on badgering poor Mr Lau. He held firm, even when I pointed out that analogous restaurant names might be New Final Solution (a bratwurst and beer joint in Harpenden) or New Terror (a borscht and vodka bar near Chorleywood). I’m inclined to take him at his word, as I recall the sign my late mother once saw in a café window: “Come in and eat – before we both starve.”

There are many waymarkers along the winding trail of a man’s life, but few can be quite so dismal, so minatory, so like unto a psychic gibbet from which a rotting corpse twists in the mephitic breezes from the nearby abyss, as logging on to the Clarks website to look for a comfortable pair of walking shoes.

“How did it come to this?” I asked myself as I examined critically the Storm Walls, the Rangle Mixes and the Fall Proofs (need I mention that each of these shoe models is also appended “GTX”? How ineffably sad is that? It’s as if middle-aged men were boy-racing towards the grave in sensible footwear) before settling on a pair of the hideously named but achingly suitable Rockie Los (GTX).

I – I! – who for years had near furled my feet in order to feed them into suede winkle-pickers; I – I! – who had once fallen asleep in an overheated Vienna hotel room wearing patent leather Chelsea boots of such exemplary snugness that when I awoke I’d contracted a vicious fungal infection that tormented me for the next decade. I! – well, you get the point: I used to be a hipster, but now I can see the hip-replacement approaching at a brisk limp.

But before I clicked the “Add to Order” button I did something still sadder than buying a pair of Clarks shoes: I read the reviews that other Rockie Lo purchasers had posted on the site. Who does such a thing? Who has either the time or the inclination to write a shoe review? Is there some lost cohort of the Trollopian clerisy, who spend the mildewed years of their reclusion tapping out these clap-happy analyses: “Probably the most comfortable pair of shoes I have ever had, well made and keep your feet dry in very wet conditions. I wear them for work and needed smart and durable shoes, they fully meet my requirements. Highly recommended”? Or so contended Stephen from Barrow-in-Furness, who I pictured wearing a mildewed cassock as he crouched over his laptop.

Still more deranging was the small button at the foot of this screed labelled “Inappropriate? – Report this”. I mean, to write a shoe review at all is perverse, but to write an inappropriate shoe review, that way madness lies – and besides, what could such a thing be like? “Your Malone Class grey leather shoe is almost unspeakably arousing . . . No sooner had I opened the box and seen my new pair lying there, soixante-neuf, tongue to upper, than I reached for the tube of lube and eased my trousers off my potbelly . . .” Or possibly: “Your Talon Mid men’s sport boots are a must for any fedayee who seriously wishes to take the jihad to the infidel, the heels are large enough to conceal several ounces of Semtex or other explosives, while the Velcro fastening means that the shoes can be speedily removed in the event of an abortive mission . . .”

I wondered quite how vigilant the webmasters at Clarks were; how long could I get away with posting inappropriate shoe reviews before the cyber-police arrived and hauled me away like some still weirder version of Julian Assange? I idly considered marking out a portion of each day to doing just this – and why stop at inappropriate shoe reviews? I could also comment outrageously on oven gloves, children’s toys, medical supplies; anything, indeed, that caught my fancy. But then it occurred to me: there’s a big crowd of nutters who are doing just that.

While the abuses, bullying and all-round lunacy of social networking are well attested to, to my mind the more homely realm of shoe reviewing is just as bonkers. In the sphere of political comment, the web replaces the nuanced analyses of those who have thought long and hard with the jaundiced ejaculations of saloon-bar bores who don’t even have the balls to show their face.

In the world of books, the typographic bile of illiterates who’ve yet to learn to spell or punctuate achieves equal billing with the opinions of William Empson. Just as with the madness of calling the PM “Dave”, so the posting of comments on the web represents a reaction against the loathed “cult of the professional”, setting up in its stead an equally deranged “cult of the amateur”.

So, I took Stephen of Barrow’s comments with a pinch of salt and hied me to my nearest branch of Clarks, where I was ably assisted by that professional anachronism: a salesman. Rockie on.

Within a Budding Grove, with its hint at the similitude of erectile clitoral tissue and burgeoning plant life, is the somewhat suggestive translation of Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs given by CK Scott Moncrieff. The more literal “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” is not without its sexual problematic – but, anyway, I invariably think of first one rendition and then the other every morning as I walk up St John’s Road from Clapham Junction, because tripping towards me comes a loose procession of young women, hurrying towards the station. Young women neatly groomed; young women in charming dishabille, frowsty from their beds; young women homely; and young women caught in that brief and startling window of beauteous opportunity that makes it inevitable that the human race will continue to propagate.

As they click-clack past Phones 4u, the pawnbroker and the Santander bank, their resemblance to Marcel’s covey of adolescent girls bowling along the promenade at Balbec is, at best, tenuous (especially given that the fabulously flirty Albertine was, in fact, based on Proust’s stolid Belgian chauffeur, Albert). But they still have that vivifying effect on me – their dash, their absorption into the hamster wheel of the working day that is yet figurative of the wheel of life itself! Their tense unconsciousness! And never am I more à l’ombre of the Clapham girls than when one of them breaks step and dives sideways into Greggs, the bakery. Fresh baking and jeune women – you don’t have to believe in the capacity of tea-soaked cake to summon involuntary memories to understand what a powerful gestalt this forms.

Branching out I like to think that I’m not alone in this – and, as there are 1,400 branches of Greggs throughout the country, it’s a fair bet that I’m not. Standing in the queue this morning, meditating on whether to opt for the £1.99 or the £2.25 breakfast deal (the distinction is about 500ml of tea and orange juice), it occurred to me that there was something rather special about the considerable niche Greggs has carved in the national unconscious. After all, Greggs is more ubiquitous than McDonald’s, it serves around a million breakfast customers each day, and yet its public profile is as flat as a Scotch pancake.

It’s the body snatcher of British fast food. Started on Tyneside in the late 1930s, the chain has expanded by snaffling up other bakeries – in Glasgow, Thurston in Leeds, Broomfields in London, Bakers Oven all over – and “rebranding” them with its own non-look: blue melamine fascias, wood-effect laminated floors, er … that’s it.

Greggs has become the archetype of what a certain kind of baker is: not a retail baker per se (and although “baking” is done on the premises, I suspect that this is only heating up pre-prepared dough), but rather a dispenser of farinaceous snack food – sandwiches, filled rolls, sausage rolls and so on – within a bakery ambience. I doubt that most people go to Greggs to buy bread, despite the stooks of French sticks and the baskets of bloomers. Rather, the bread is synonymous with nutritious, maternal bounteousness; that’s why the working girls, the labouring lads, the morbidly obese on incapacity benefit – all of us – roll in to get our fill. Most mornings, all I buy at Greggs is a 40p gingerbread man for my own little man (I’m a firm believer in the idea that education can only be undertaken with a high blood-sugar level) but, today, I had a sausage roll. I was expecting some ghastly, flaccid thing, but the pastry was puffy and the meat not too, um, worrying.

I also bought the local delicacy on offer, a piece of so-called London cheesecake. This was pretty strange, being not cake at all but rather a square of puff pastry not dissimilar to the casing of my sausage roll, while so far as I could tell there wasn’t any cheese incorporated into this sweetmeat, which instead was garnished with some sort of coconut or mallow shavings. Sounds disgusting, I know – but I ate it while writing this and, after dipping a morsel of the cheesecake into a spoonful of my tea, then letting it dissolve on my tongue, I found myself being mysteriously transported about an hour back in time – to Clapham Junction.

One thing Ed “Claymation” Miliband won’t do in his search for a “narrative” to unite the Labour party under his leadership will be to espouse the least little hint of republicanism. On the contrary, if he’s still the top Gromit come 29 April, you can be absolutely certain he’ll be sitting in the Abbey with the rest of the paltry and the compromised (latter-day versions of “the great and the good”), all grinning and gooey-eyed as Will and Kate make their vows.

The palace – in association with the coalition – has of course already cornered the narrative market with its X Factor fairytale of how the daughter of a flight attendant and a flight despatcher nabbed her regal helicopter pilot. On this reading, the nuptials represent just another chapter in the long democratisation of the monarchical principle; a story of ordinary sceptr’d folk that began in a meadow at Runnymede and will end … well, never, for while the Windsors may aspire to the condition of salty earth, they can never achieve it, being ineffably, um, royal.

In the current era of crazed quantification, the monarchy’s detractors and its supporters tend to frame their arguments financially. So, no analysis of the wedding is complete without the figures being trotted out: the Queen’s £300m personal fortune, the £10m and more to be spent by her, Chucky and – preposterously – their new commoner in-laws; the policing bill to be footed by the taxpayer; and the estimated £6bn to be lost by the British economy because, with the extra bank holiday, millions of subjects will cop an 11-day foreign holiday (and how patriotic is that?).

But while this may seem to be the very meat of the matter, the truth is that it’s a useless garnish of persiflage, for the true lifeblood of the monarchy is, was and always will be the madness of the crowd, not the capacity of the citizenry for rational calculations of cost-benefit. The statistics have remained remarkably consistent over the years: broadly speaking, two-thirds of the British public support the monarchy, while a third oppose it. Under such circumstances you don’t need to be a focus groupie of old New Labour to grasp that republicanism of any kind is electoral folly. But is it, really? Because when you ask people why they support the monarchy, their answers reveal a great deal of this column’s favourite symptom: cognitive dissonance.

Almost everybody believes that while they themselves understand that the royals, as people, are deeply flawed, if not entirely useless, they nonetheless cleave to the notion that there exists a heartland out there of boneheaded proles who need an organic Duchy Original political principle to keep them in line. The political class, this unreasoning goes, cannot possibly expect to command the full assent, let alone the respect, of the masses, so the best that can be hoped for is a kind of adoration-by-proxy. That Tories should cling to this patronising drivel is understandable – it’s encrypted in their DNA – but that supporters of what was once a proudly socialistic party should endorse it as well is frankly deranging.

And so the long tables will be laid with paper napkins and the little Union flags will flutter and the whole tawdry spectacle of willed ignorance will continue. Oscar Wilde asserted that the English were a nation of hypocrites, but nothing exemplifies the genius of their hypocrisy more (besides looping in the Scots, the Welsh and even the Irish to the charade) than this capacity to mouth “democracy” while bending a collective knee to all the baubles of autocracy.

Of course, were Miliband to propose a republic as part of his grand policy review, an entire swath of vexed constitutional questions would be thrown sharply into relief, from devolution to the European Human Rights Directive to reform of the second chamber. But that would be far too genuinely progressive; that would imply that a key aspect of democracy is that sovereignty truly resides in the will of the people, rather than the will of the elite.

And we wouldn’t want that – oh, no.

And so the monarchy will endure, crouching like a jewelled toad on the blanched body politic, and from time to time it will spawn in a disgusting fashion: the well-oiled pornography of primogeniture, gloated over by a voyeuristic multitude.

“John Lanchester’s Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (Allen Lane, £20) did for the financial crisis what Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time once did for theoretical physics. This is a book that manages to demystify a subject that has become increasingly wreathed in the arcana of spurious quantitative analysis and preposterous predictive formulae.

“The outrageously self-serving and divisive behaviour of those in the financial sector depends for its field of operations on the bewilderment of the masses, making it impossible for the general reader to understand exactly what’s been going on.

“By restoring discussion of political economy to plain – and often very witty – prose, Lanchester has produced a very radical text. Whoops! empowers individuals. This book isn’t a programme of action – it’s something more valuable: a means for all of us to think constructively about our political and economic choices, or our lack of them.”

My aunt Phoebe – bless her – is obsessed by sell-by dates. I say “bless her”, but really it is infuriating to watch her reverently examine the label on some perfectly edible packet of broccoli or bacon, and then ruthlessly consign it to the pedal bin. In vain do I remonstrate with her, pointing out that there are now two dates on each label – the “display until” and “use by” – and that while her Cheddar or chives may have passed the former they remain safely within the bounds of the latter. “Ooh,” she’ll say, shaking her snowy head. “You say that, but best be on the safe side . . .” Ker-chung!

What makes Phoebe’s behaviour all the more deranging is that she grew up on a farm in the 1930s, drinking unpasteurised milk fresh from the cow and eating meat that was hung until it was as high as a . . . well, you all know what rotten meat smells like. I say to Phoebe: “Revered Aunt, surely with your upbringing you’re well placed to make your own judgement about what’s fit for human consumption, and don’t need to be a passive tool of this shamefully wasteful system?”

And then I go on to explain how the entire food labelling protocol has evolved, not so much to guarantee the health of the consumer, but rather to maintain the stock control of the retailer. I point out that the “display by” label is there to ensure that perishable products are repeatedly moved to the front of the shelf, or rack, or the top of the gondola, so as to minimise costly wastage.

The correct way of regarding sell-by dates, therefore, is as a form of temporal marginal preference enacted by the business upon the individual. In order to maximise my turnover, the supermarket thinks to itself, I will choose him rather than her, because he has troubled to look at the display-by label and acted accordingly. William Burroughs observed of heroin that it was a unique kind of product, because rather than it being sold to people, people were sold to it. But Burroughs was being disingenuous, and his characterisation was only of an extreme – and quasi-outlawed – form of late-capitalist consumerism.

In truth, under conditions of optimal distribution, all people are sold to all products at both ends of the supply chain. Food producers are compelled to accept the enormous discounts imposed by the retailers’ de facto price cartels, while food consumers are driven to carry about sugar snap peas or sugar for a few days before discarding them. The entire point of the process is not to sustain the people, but to facilitate the viral spread of the products.

“Don’t patronise me, young man!” my aunt will invariably say once I reach this point in my analysis. “You forget that I grew up during the Great Depression – and I know a thing or two about getting by on very little.” When she reacts like this, I’ve pretty much achieved what I was after: middle-aged men invariably bait older people so that we can fraudulently earn the ascription “young”. But while Aunt Phoebe may have witnessed the terrible consequences of speculative fever (and what is this particular madness, if not the human correlate of an asset bubble?), it hasn’t stopped her falling victim to all the delusions perpetrated by 21st-century retailing.

So what, I hear you chide, should I do in order to avoid becoming the passive tool of some Parmesan? Are you saying I should wilfully ignore sell-by dates? Or that I should buy only stuff I find in the cut-price bin? To which my reply is: neither. On the contrary, what we should all do is only buy the stuff that’s at the back of the shelf, the rack, or the bottom of the gondola. This simple act, if undertaken by the masses, will completely banjax the system – in a matter of days the supermarkets’ stock-control systems will break down and they’ll be chock-full of rotting food.

The “ker-chung!” of a cosmic pedal bin will awake us zombies from our merchandising fugue. No longer will we totter along the aisles, brainlessly checking sell-by dates. Within a matter of weeks, wholesale breakdown will have happened and the hegemony of the products will have collapsed. I like to think that I’ll be at Aunt Phoebe’s shoulder on that magnificent day when, once more, she finds herself standing in a street market, contemplating a rotten mangel-wurzel and jingling a few heavy copper coins in her palsied hand.