My wife told me recently that “panini” is a malapropism, being the plural rather than the singular. Think about it: every time you ask for “a panini”, you are in fact requesting several of these inoffensively phallic snacks, or speaking complete nonsense – depending on which way you want to look at it. Either way, you’re giving Italian-speaking café workers an opportunity to snigger at you behind their polythene-gloved hands as they take sundried tomatoes from one Tupperware container, mozzarella from the next, pastrami from a third, and incorporate them into the eponymous white roll.

Not that anyone could be that sad – even though Italian amour propre can be staggering, especially when it comes to the English, whose style every self-respecting Italian intellectual seeks shamelessly to emulate. I well recall meeting my Italian ex-publisher for the first time. We’d arranged to rendezvous at a pub in Kensington, and as I came cycling down the road I saw a man wearing brown corduroy trousers, a tweed jacket, a Viyella shirt and brogues. I pulled up beside him and said: “You must be my Italian publisher,” at which salutation he jumped about a foot in the air, yelping: “But ‘ow deed you know?” I can’t remember if on that occasion Carlo Brugnatelli and I ate panini – but I doubt it, as we were at a gastropub and the ethos of such establishments couldn’t be further from this foodstuff: gastropubs disguise continental European mores in the tweedy fug of the saloon bar, while panini are basically just ham-and-cheese sandwiches by Emporio Armani.

No wonder they’ve taken over the country. There’s this whiff of pseudo-sophistication about them; but more than that, they’re firm, warm and portable, and by some weird sleight-of-mind they allow otherwise health-conscious Brits to ignore that they’re eating a huge chunk of white bread. Not that warmth is intrinsic to the panino; in Italy they’re just as frequently served cold, becoming by the absence of heat and pressure merely a regional variant on the pan-European baguette. Indeed, the Italian colloquialism for a toasted panino is quite simply “toast”, yet another example of Italians’ devotion to lo stile degli inglesi.

Listen, far be it from me to promote any culinary nationalism. Quite self-evidently, as it is to all aspects of culture, so it is even more so to cuisine. Were it not for the Italian POWs who stayed behind after the Second World War and opened ice-cream parlours, cafés and chip shops, entire swaths of Caledonia would be uninhabitable due to the ghastliness of the indigenous diet. (The same is true for the rest of the Union, too.)

No less a thinker than Michael Gove has called for greater emphasis on the narrative history of these islands, and appointed no less a historian than Simon Shawarma-Kebab to smear wholesome dripping on the national Hovis. Shawarma-Kebab would do well to begin with snacking; after all, it was a noble Englishman – the Earl of Sandwich – who invented the sandwich. True, I find it impossible to imagine His Lordship’s eureka moment without recalling Woody Allen’s inspired riff on the subject: “1745: After four years of frenzied labour, he is convinced he is on the threshold of success. He exhibits before his peers two slices of turkey with a slice of bread in the middle. His work is rejected by all but David Hume, who senses the imminence of something great . . .”

But there’s nothing risible about the modern British sandwich, which has done everything in its power to keep abreast with the times by incorporating ingredients, from tandoori chicken to hummus to salt beef, into all manner of breads – seeded, sourdough, pumper-fucking-nickel.

And yet . . . and yet . . . It’ll take more than Gove’s planet-sized percipience to prevent the sense of presque vu we all still have, even when biting into a marinaded fugu with julep and endive on manna. For, somewhere not far from the tip of our collective tongue is a recollection of that national humiliation – the soggy beige triangle of unwonderful loaf, seamed with bilious cheese and garnished with wilted lettuce and E coli. We long to escape the cold misery of the sandwich, just as our valiant forefathers longed to escape Colditz. And so it is, that when we find ourselves at the lunch counter, we cast aside all thoughts of patriotism and call for panini. Lots of them.

Arguably a crowd comprising 59 men (and, perhaps, the odd – very odd – woman), between them carrying 109 guns, is about as mad as it gets, especially when they’re all milling about the elegant terraced houses of Chelsea. I’m not too interested in dissecting the minutiae of the five-hour “siege” that ended up with the 32-year-old barrister Mark Saunders receiving five fatal shots from four police marksmen – but what must be countered is the ludicrous ruling of the jury at the coroner’s inquest, held on 7 October this year. Ludicrous, because there is no way that 59 armed officers could be construed as acting in “reasonable self-defence” under such circumstances. Saunders was an alcoholic. The shotgun he was waving around has an effective lethal range of 50 yards at most, and he was up in his flat – the marksmen were down on the ground. Besides being able to take cover, they were all wearing body armour.

As in other, similar cases, the coroner had already debarred members of the jury from delivering a verdict of “unlawful killing”, so we cannot blame them for not checking the madness of this particular crowd. But they did criticise the way senior officers had handled the “siege” and, with due contrition, the Metropolitan Police subsequently conceded that there were “lessons” to be learned. But it seems the one lesson which cannot be learned is that it’s unacceptable in a democratic and open society to have any group of people, let alone armed police officers, who are in effect above the law.

Saunders was gunned down in 2008 and this year we had the revolting snuff newscast of Raoul Moat but, overall, the British police are fairly parsimonious when it comes to wasting citizenry: there have been 29 fatal shootings by police since 2000, of which 13 were by the Met. Nevertheless, no officer has ever been prosecuted for unlawful killing and I have had it from sources close to the apex at the Met that no officer can ever be. On one occasion – when there was a flagrant failure to give due warning before a man wielding a chair leg was gunned down – spokespersons for the firearms officers made it abundantly clear that they would down tools if any of their colleagues was charged. What a peculiar Mexican stand-off! The very police officers charged with the greatest responsibility on our streets, acting like a juvenile gang – it doesn’t exactly instil confidence.

Ah, say the lovers of Laura Norder, but what would you have done? Well, I don’t know exactly what operational errors the senior officers at the Met are conceding, but the very presence of the armed mob would seem to be one, as was how Saunders was killed while a “trained negotiator” was talking to him. Such is the modern way that this horror show was broadcast for all to witness: the poor, disturbed man waving his shotgun about while we hear a woman saying: “You need to pick up the phone, Mark. You need to pick up the phone.” Seconds later, the fatal shots were fired.
Trained negotiator she may have been, but she sounded as sympathetic as a raddled barmaid calling last orders. Is this snobbery?

I rather suspect it is: vocal snobbery. If I’m ever in a dangerous stand-off, I want someone plummy and faintly amusing to talk me down – think Joanna Lumley, Simon Callow, or the chap who used to do the voice-overs for Mr Kipling. Perhaps if any of these exceedingly calming voices had been deployed, Saunders might still be alive.

In the wake of the Jean Charles de Menezes killing, the Met went through the hoops backwards in an effort to exonerate not only the actual shooters, but also the entire chain of command involved in this colossal and tragic cock-up. After writing certain trenchant remarks in the press, having been given an off-the-record briefing by the late, lamented Liberal mayoral candidate Brian Paddick, I was summoned to Scotland Yard for a chat with the then headmaster, Ian Blair.

There was tea and biscuits and he came on soft, for all the world like a sociology lecturer at a former polytechnic. I got the message: it’s fantastically bloody hard, policing this city, and we’d be grateful if you weren’t so mean to us.

Wassums. Still, should the current commissioner wish to have a chat with me about Saunders’s killing, my door is open. Just don’t rush round.

A weird, piratically themed Cornish pasty takeaway outlet has mounted a sustained assault on English railway terminuses and high streets. Casting my eye over the mock-treasure map of store locations on the West Cornwall Pasty Company’s website, I counted 40 of them between the Tamar and the North York Moors. I’d been creepingly aware of the pasting being dished out by the pasties – their black-and-yellow livery has been ousting the tricolour of Delice de France and other such baguette bars for some time, and a year or so ago I even found myself buying one of the buttock-shaped savouries.

I say “buttock-shaped” because someone has to make the obvious point: Cornish pasties are the most arsiform food known to humankind, even crinkled along the rim as if they were an engorged perineum. In my experience, while the British have a great love of double entendres, there are still statements of the obvious (usually those connected with the nether regions) that we refuse to make.

Alain de Botton is another example; he’s a perfectly amiable chap – if a little thin-crusted when it comes to criticism – and a good enough philosopher-lite (think a pinch of sage, but lots of onion), but I cannot be alone in finding myself unable to hear his name spoken without registering it as “Alain de Bum-Bum”. If I were he, I’d go the whole way and simply change my name to Alain de Bum-Bum. Surely everyone would be impressed by my post-Freudian honesty?

Anyway, there I was, in the stinky shaft of Clapham Junction Station, eating a chicken balti pasty, and inevitably my thoughts went first to bums and then to the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life. As I say, I’ve nothing against Alain de Botton at all, but the thought of becoming unable to eat a Cornish pasty without thinking of him was . . . insufferable. To try to distract myself, I struck up a conversation with the “captain” manning the pasty bar. Was he French? No, he said, he was Polish. This was promising. Maybe with a little positive reinforcement – I took another bite of the balti-flavoured buttock – I could come to associate pasties with seafaring Polish émigrés: Joseph Conrad, perhaps.

Because the truth is that the West Cornish Pasty Company makes a pretty mean pasty, and I find myself eating more and more of them. My seafaring pal told me that the most popular pasty after the traditional was a chicken and mushroom: “It has a really creamy sauce.” I didn’t find this helpful at all, because whenever I bite into an Alain de Botton I half suspect a really creamy sauce to come oozing out.

Conrad – as I couldn’t help but think of him – also confirmed that the pasties were indeed made by hand in Cornwall, then frozen and transported around the country. The West Cornwall Pasty Company does seem a pretty enlightened outfit: it tries to source the bulk of its ingredients in Cornwall and has even encouraged the harvesting of Cornish wheat and onions (not by any means traditional crops) in order to bolster its slow-food credentials. Sadly this enlightenment doesn’t extend to human resources, because its pasty bar staff are paid a scant few pence over the minimum wage, just like any other fast-food peons.

Still, I suppose this association between low-paid work and pasties is a tradition in its own right. If I narrowed my eyes a little I saw, instead of the shaft of Clapham Junction, the shaft of a Cornish tin mine. True, it should’ve been Conrad rather than me chowing down on the pasty, but really the only thing within sight that contradicted this minatory vision was the pasty shack itself, which was bedecked with surfboards and sub-Alfred Wallis, pseudo-naive-St Ives daubs.

I had chosen the chicken balti in a mood of transgression – a real Cornish pasty can only be filled with uncooked ingredients, and it seemed unlikely the West Cornwall lot had managed to invent a self-currying pastry. Not that the trad pasty need only be filled with steak, potato, onion and swede – back in the day, those clever miners even had pies with both savoury and sweet compartments. I pondered the notion of this dualistic pasty while Conrad dealt with a teenager who wanted a £1.40 waxed paper cup of potato wedges. Pondered this, and also the chain’s naff pirate theme. But then it dawned on me, what did pirates like? Rum, sodomy and the lash, of course – hence the bum-munching.

I listened to Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference while at stool the other day. This was purely serendipitous: a function of the dispensation of my digestion, the location of the lavatory and my wife’s bizarre interest in such things (conference speeches, that is, not my digestion). Not to gross you out or anything, but had I not been so engaged, I doubt I would have managed to concentrate for more than a few seconds – for whatever else Miliband Jr may be, he’s a worthy successor to Tony Blair, that air-guitarist of political rhetoric.

I kept hearing the “new generation” trope come floating up the staircase, and I managed to gather that what the heir to Keir Hardie was saying was that he and whoever joined him would be in the vanguard of this new generation – a bizarre flying picket of progressivism, seizing the centre ground of British politics.

Good luck to them, I say, for capturing this contested territory makes advancing across the no-man’s-land of the Somme in 1916 look like a cakewalk. The sheer press of suited bodies! The murderous enfilades of blandness! If Babyface Ed manages to survive, he’ll be the last man standing on a heap of corpses – the rest of the combatants having bored one another to death. Not, I hasten to add, that you could have guessed any of this, had you stood at the lectern in Manchester and looked out over the assembled delegates. True, not all of their faces were transfigured with joy but, by golly, they were rapt.

How can one account for the madness of this particular crowd? In Swift’s Laputa, persons of quality were attended at all times by “flappers”, whose task it was to provide “external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing” using bladders tied to sticks. Unless the Laputans were so flailed, they were constantly in danger of slipping into reveries about cosmic matters. But delegates to the party conferences seem to manage to speak and listen with no such external aid.

It struck me, listening to the conference delegates “debating” on Newsnight, that at least one explanation for their ability to withstand the sort of Largactil verbiage dished out by Big Nurse Miliband, Dr Cameron and Clegg, the anaesthetist, is that the younger among them have known no other discourse than this bollocks about “service providers” and “stakeholders”. And when it comes to the fatuities of “choice”, these poor lambkins have had no choice. Such youngsters no longer know whether they believe in anything before being afforded the opportunity to ask a selected sample of people like themselves what they believe in. There are no politically engaged young people any more – just focus groups of one.

Which is why, I suppose, the party conferences are an even more attractive gig than ever before: hemmed in on all sides by the zombies of apathy, the ever-diminishing numbers of activists fight a rearguard action as they back towards the electric doors of this or that conference centre. If the condition of modern man and woman is to find oneself hopelessly atomised, then the only safety remains in the crowd.

The crowd in Manchester seemed to have spent a lot of the week looking at a stage set with a curious simulacrum of a television studio – or even a bourgeois living room. This, then, was the condition of democratic socialism: staring at a brightly lit L-plan of leatherette sofas, upon which were poised increasingly exiguous ministers – fading . . . fading . . . fading away into the long shadows of the political wilderness. Because, for many conference delegates, strangers to the factory floor, or the wakes week, or any other form of group endeavour, this was the closest they’d ever been to collectivism. And what a fine madness it was to look upon the Eds and Davids and Frodos (sorry, I meant “Andy Burnham”) while imagining that, as they were so clearly sitting in a living room, you must be sitting there with them.

For that is the final and inescapable madness of the conference: that these people are your friends, your family, even. Ah, well. I suppose the Labour Party can at least comfort itself with this narcissism of small differences – that no matter how bored, bamboozled and benighted it may be, the Tories are always worse.

Now, back to the toilet.

Will Self’s latest novel, Walking to Hollywood, is published by Bloomsbury (£17.99)

From time to time, I succumb to one of the great delusions of the modern world: namely that a gadget or device will allow me to do something I’ve been doing for years faster and more efficiently, thereby gifting me more of the kind of time I so desperately need: down time. This is how mobile phones, netbooks and now e-books have all entered my life. Each time, I discover that said gizmo does nothing for me and then swear that I’ll never make the same mistake again, but I can’t help it – it’s like a coup de foudre; I see an advert or hear the twittery spiel of some deranged early adopter and off I fly into computer-generated fantasies of techno-adequacy.

The netbook was a case in point. I adore all small things as a matter of course, being at root infantile (but then aren’t we all? Surely the relentless evolution of all gizmos into a sole “white pebble” morphology is proof positive that we yearn to dabble for ever in the rock pools of juvenescence?), and while I already had a very small laptop, I convinced myself that by shrinking the thing an inch all round it would instantly become that much more handy. I would take it with me wherever I went and whip it out in public – a Promethean flasher! – then efficiently answer those pesky emails and swiftly type those columns on, um, the madness of gadgets.

To be fair to me, I did agonise over the purchase for a good month – after all, I have form – but inevitably I succumbed, only to discover, what? That the netbook not only remained zipped up, but also that, rather than finding it so small that I carried it with me all the time, it was, in fact, so insignificant that I could hardly be bothered to take it with me at all. I supposed that the netbook had done me a favour, that I would never succumb to the gadget gaga again, but then someone gave my wife a Kindle and I was off again.

Before I’d even started to play with the thing, I was fantasising about how it would massively enhance my flagging mental powers. With 2,500 searchable volumes at my fingertips, I would become effortlessly erudite; moreover, there’d be no more agonising over which book to take on a 90-minute train journey; not “either Rosemary Conley’s Complete Hip and Thigh Diet or À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” – but both! Then, I discovered that there were myriad classics that could be downloaded from the Kindle Store for absolutely free. At last, I would get to grips with Middlemarch, Moby Dick and The Man Without Qualities (for some reason it’s the Ms I’ve missed out on), just dipping in whenever I had a few spare minutes.

But you don’t read the classics like that, do you? Any more than you write the damn things on a small slab of plastic and micro-circuitry. Christopher Hitchens observed that if Casaubon attempted to penetrate Dorothea, it would be like trying to fit an oyster into a parking meter – and mutatis mutandis, the same image holds good for my trying to fit Middlemarch into my own tense and frigid brain. And while we’re on the subject of parking meters, what deranged, petty functionary imagined that introducing payment by mobile phone would make life easier for anyone, save the compulsive car-user? For those of us who only drive occasionally, the act of parking now involves 10 tedious minutes of data entry.

And while we’re on the subject of driving, satnav has to be the ultimate useless gizmo when it comes to saving time. I’ve lost count of occasions I’ve had to deprogramme a minicab driver and persuade him that just possibly I know a better route across town than his dash-mounted white pebble, as I’ve lived here my entire fucking life. What’s more, it astonishes me that there has been no public agonising over whether glancing back and forth between the world and a schematic representation of it while travelling at speed might be a distraction.

If satnav can’t be used while driving, it becomes distinctly obsolete – like all the other improvements in automobile technology, none of which has increased the average speed through cities by one jot in the past century. That’s the truth about whole swaths of technological advance: as it is to the individual, so it is to society. Superficial advances in areas such as medicine and domestic science provide us with more disposable time – but then we just fill it up fiddling with our iPhones. How mad is that?

Established in 1976 – or so their crest proudly claims – the noble house of Aberdeen Angus Steak Houses seems always to have been among us, yet I cannot recall ever speaking to anyone who admitted to eating in one.

My own definitive experience of the chain is definitely a case of le lèche-vitrine. Heading dreamily up west on a Saturday afternoon in late March of 1990, I emerged from Leicester Square Tube to find myself in the middle of a pitched battle between police and anarchists. It was, indeed, the pivotal moment of the poll-tax riots: the police, having forced the demonstrators back against a building site in Trafalgar Square, were now being attacked by lithe young men hurling scaffolding poles, apparently with all the skill of hoplites.

I watched, awed, as the Met – some on horseback, others forming a loose testudo with their riot shields – retreated up Charing Cross Road. I was struck by the timelessness of the scene; this, I felt, could have been the Peasants’ Revolt, or the Gordon Riots, such was the perfectly achieved choreography of the Law and the Mob. Still more atavistic were the spectators who filled the mouths of the side roads; they were in festive spirits, laughing and pointing when someone managed a particularly accurate pole-throw or truncheon-swipe.

But most remarkable of all was the behaviour of the diners I could see plumped down solidly on the leatherette banquettes of the Steak House on the corner of Cranbourn Street. These hefty American tourists, far from being intimidated by the biggest civil disturbance central London had witnessed in decades, continued unabashed with their bovine noshing. The rich, far from being eaten – as the Class Warriors would have wished – were still eating.

Back in the day there were 30-odd of these establishments, poised to capture unwary tourists as they staggered from London’s mainline terminuses. With their red paint and black leather decor, and their menus of uncompromising naffness – prawn cocktails, steaks, chips, gateaux – the chain had by the late 1980s become a synonym for “clip joint”.

No self-respecting native would ever dream of setting foot in one. But 20 years on, revolutionary socialism has been reduced to a mere rump – and so, for that matter, have the Steak Houses: there are only four left.

When I rang at Friday lunchtime to see if I could book a table at the Cranbourn Street branch for dinner that evening, the woman who answered was mildly incredulous: “We don’t take bookings,” she said, “and to be honest you really don’t need one.”

The small herd of three prime young men I’d assembled to dine with me were equally thrown when I revealed our destination. They muttered about cholesterol, prions and – most important, this – the terrible solecism of natives eating in such a tourist trap.

“It can’t be that bad!” I cried, leading the way. “Besides, I’m paying.” Such arrogance, for just as the Steak Houses barely survived the BSE and foot-and-mouth epidemics, so the bill took a near-fatal chunk out of my bank balance. It was £130 for a single course for four, with no wine to drink, only four Cokes (plus 15 per cent tip on top). True, the bullocks all had fillet steaks, while I had a sirloin, but there was no tricky preparation involved – just beef + fire – and as for side orders: chips and salad, d’oh!

The strange thing was that although we had to wait a ridiculously long time for our steaks, the meat was of a premium quality and perfectly cooked. The bullocks grazed contentedly, while I too happily chewed on someone else’s cud, ruminating that as beef production is such a wasteful and environmentally devastating business, it was probably entirely apt that those other steak-holders, back in 1990, ignored the civil disturbances within feet of their snouts, for wasn’t I doing exactly the same thing 20 years later? Granted, there wasn’t a riot going on, but all meat is by definition murder, and somewhere else in the world someone was suffering the attendant grief.

Not I, though. I paid the bill, said goodbye to a pair of the bullocks and, accompanied by the third, headed for home. Herding him down Charing Cross Road, I shared some of my thoughts with this, the prime cut of my loins. “Dad,” he interrupted me, “can we get some Krispy Kreme doughnuts?” And people say the young have lost all interest in politics.

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

Broadstairs, the Isle of Thanet, a frowsty sort of an evening in early August, with shadows forming within shadows down the high street – a run of chip shops, chain stores and charity shops that steepens into a ski jump, which threatens to tip you off the dirty-white crescent of cliff surrounding Viking Bay. The consensus following a wholesome chicken dinner was that we should promenade and observe the morris dancers parading through the town; after all, who but a callow sophisticate could fail to appreciate this ancient rite, with its pagan roots buried deep in the loam of old Albion?

A few morris-dancing community support officers were gathered in the gloaming. They pranced, they twirled, they jingled their bells and they clacked their truncheons under the appreciative eyes of beery onlookers, whose faces were eerily leeched of colour by the up-light from their 3G phones. And then, lo, here was the parade! Side after side of morris dancers, some perfectly traditional in white shirts, straw hats and knee breeches, but others altogether mutant: there were Star Wars morris dancers with masks; there were beribboned morris dancers, their garments reminiscent of the straw robes of New Guinea’s tribal warriors; there were even punk morris dancers who pogo-ed down the road.

In recent years, I’ve been spending more and more time on the south coast and it seems to me that a curious cultural convulsion is gripping this landscape of boredom and bungalows, Tesco car parks and shingle beaches; for, just as the once-discrete towns of Shoreham, Hove, Brighton, Lewes, Eastbourne, Bexhill, Hastings, Folkestone, Dover, Deal, Ramsgate and Margate have become joined together into a continuous, urbanised littoral, so there has been this atavistic upsurge of hey-nonny-no-ing, anti-Catholicism and fertility cults.

In Lewes last autumn, we witnessed the parade of the Sussex bonfire societies, groups of largely middle-aged male and female urbanites, dressed up as anything from Darth Vader to pogoing punks. Accompanied by drummers and didgeridoo players and dragging barrels of burning tar along the road, the various societies have a tribal air to them. The same tribes were out again in May to celebrate the Jack in the Green festival – another weird exercise in new paganism, in which a leafy bloke prances through the old town, followed by the anointing of a tree boll with water, or some such flummery. Then they were at it again in Broadstairs, as Folk Week climaxed in an ejaculation of inauthenticity.

All these festivals, parades and bonfire ceremonials are modern inventions. The Lewes Guy Fawkes carry-on began as recently as the late 19th century, when it was formulated by a local antiquarian. The Jack in the Green ballyhoo was revived only in the early 1980s, while the entire jiggling edifice of morris dancing was only re-erected in the early decades of the 20th century by folklorists such as Cecil Sharp.

So complete was the deracination wrought by industrialisation during the 19th century that the folklorists often had to be a bit creative when it came to “discovering” old songs and traditions, and it is this spirit of fakery that we find in the contemporary face-painters and drum-bangers. Indeed, it’s arguable that it’s precisely because we’re in a period of equally profound cultural loss that the volk are impelled to such pretend continuities. Still, good luck to ’em, I say – it’s a jolly spectacle and they don’t seem to take themselves too seriously. Besides, I don’t imagine that any one of them labours under the delusion that he or she is parading along a folkway grooved into the greensward as deeply as a medieval holloway. To suggest such a thing would be as facetious as imagining that all those wallahs gathered together in the abbey for this coronation or that jubilee believe they’re participating in a ceremonial unchanged since time out of mind, rather than a bit of mummery got up by Walter Scott to boost the flagging popularity of the Hanoverian dynasty.

Oops, I’m being ironic again. But then irony – unlike cod paganism – is the real living tradition of our isles, while all the Viking boat burnings, summer solstice gatherings and assorted saturnalias are nought but another exercise in that very fine human madness: nostalgia for an age that never really existed.