The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman is here:

Did kidult culture spawn kidult restaurants, or was it perhaps the other way round? Certainly, the concentrated ambience of senile juvenescence that saturates establishments such as the Hard Rock Café, Planet Hollywood and TGI Friday’s makes them a suitable vanguard of the kidult revolution. I blame the Sixties. Between the door of TGI Friday’s – beside which stood a life-size model of the Iron Man (although, on reflection, is it possible for a fictional superhero to be “life-size”?) – and our table, the waiting captain challenged us with the phrase “All right, guys?” no fewer than four times, as if we were being subjected to a kidult interrogation.

Being a kidult myself, I didn’t mind, but Luther, who’s nine years old and a bona fide child, was – in his own words – “weirded out”. And when another servitor leapt out at him and barked, “What’s up, boss!?” he almost burst into tears. In fact, our entire trip to Friday’s was in this Vice Versa spirit, with the kid hating every minute and the adult, if not exactly cherishing the experience, prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt.

We were seated between a quartet of Japanese tourists who proceeded to haggle relentlessly over their bill and a Middle Eastern family consisting of black-bagged mum and a dad who footled with his 3G phone. Coyly, Friday’s avers that the “G” in “TGI” stands for “goodness”, but looking around at the multi-faith clientele babbling under a cloud of hickory-flavoured barbecue sauce, I was certain it could represent either a monotheistic “God” or the entire polymorphously perverse Hindu pantheon.

The decor at TGI is actually a pantheon of Americana – the aforementioned Iron Man, an ET, a drum kit, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and so on. “One of the things that’s annoying me,” Luther observed tartly, “is that it’s super-American.” Then he ordered a jumbo hot dog from the kids’ menu. For the duration of our meal, a succession of pop songs percolated through the gloom – you know the ones: Motown stompers, the Small Faces, the Kinks, even Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”. None of them was intrinsically bad, but they all suffered by association.

I toyed with requesting one of the special house burgers, but while not going so far as one of my friends who observed, of an anorexic family member, “For her, food is essentially pre-shit,” I can’t say the idea of seven ounces of beef slathered with guacamole filled me with anything but thoughts of coprophilia. So I settled for the Caesar salad and a side order of shrimps done in the Friday’s signature Jack Daniel’s marinade. Indeed, were it not for Luther’s gloom, I might have fallen further off the wagon than this and abandoned a decade’s sobriety by ordering one of the “Whiskey Wonders” – possibly a Godfather, which is glossed as: “A simple combination of Scotch and Luxardo amaretto that’s as classic as its movie namesake.”

The previous evening I’d had dinner with my nephew, who told me that his girlfriend was constitutionally unable to vomit. I think I’d found a cure. Friday’s prides itself on its cocktails: there are pages of such nauseating descriptions, and, as I leafed through them, it occurred to me that really these are the alcopops of a pseudo-sophistication, and that when all’s said and puked, there’s no fundamental distinction to be made between James Bond’s ultra-dry Martini and Vicky Pollard’s Bacardi Breezer.

Luther pronounced his jumbo hot dog to be “very jumbo”, which I think was a compliment. My Caesar salad was bone-cold strips of chicken laid out on a pallet of limp lettuce and hideous croutons. But then, is there anything more hideously inutile than a crouton in this whole wide world? The big surprise was the shrimps – which were surprisingly tasty; I wolfed them down.

All in all, I hadn’t minded TGI Friday’s nearly as much as I thought I would. It may have been the presence of my depressed nine-year-old, or it could be that I sensed that this was the beginning of the end for kidult dining – after all, with a rapidly declining birth rate, this curious inversion of mores may be about to implode. In the future, with an enormous ageing population, children’s birthday parties will probably take place in establishments like the Palm Court at the Ritz, with string quartets instead of guitar bands. One can only hope.

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

Sweets and batteries by the tills – isn’t that the way of it? And Good Housekeeping too. I often find myself queuing for the checkout while chewing on a great wad of spearmint gum and experimentally touching the terminals of a nine-volt Duracell battery with the tip of my tongue. Under such a sensory overload, an article about Katie Price’s latest marital schism acquires a giddy surrealism. But then the checkout operative beckons me forward — I replace the magazine and the batteries, then still my jaw, so evading once again the nefarious manipulations of the merchandisers, whose objective is to substitute the instinctive herd behaviour of a bovine consumer for my capricious will.

Supermarkets are the abattoirs of capitalism and we are but so many cattle, driven along brightly lit aisle after aisle until our credit is electrocuted. True, some people hold out and shop locally, discussing the cut of a meat or the bloom of a peach for hours on end with homely, red-cheeked butchers and flaxen-fringed costers – but who are these folk, for I do not know them. Then again, some shop online – although not enough. The story of Ocado, floated recently on the stock exchange for a staggering amount, despite being barely profitable, could stand as an extreme instance of merchandising itself: send products (refrigerated Mercedes vans) scooting up and down the aisles (residential streets) for long enough, and people are bound to buy them.

But by far the majority of us cows graze at the Big Five supermarkets, and this means that, for a significant portion of our lives, we are in a peculiarly divided state of mind, for, at the precise moment when we most compellingly feel ourselves to be exercising a choice, we are in fact being comprehensively manipulated. The sweets and batteries are by the till, but fresh fruit and veg are by the entrance so as to give the entire retail barn that wholesome natural vibe. When I shop at my local supermarket, I often feel as if I’m walking into an Alpine meadow – which is why I frequently find myself buying a new dirndl, a fondue set and a CD of yodelling, all the better to seduce Heidi with.

Actually, with fantasies like that, I’d do well to keep my Von Trapp shut, but in my experience fantasy is the only way to protect yourself against this walk-through brainwash. You may set out intending just to get some chives and a support stocking, but inevitably you end up with the Yugoslavian Riesling, the 24-inch flat-screen TV and … well, chocolate isn’t really a purchase per se, now, is it? It’s more like self-love wrapped in gold foil.

The most disturbing aspect of supermarket madness is that it’s all scientifically determined: from the second the electric doors shush open, every thought you have has been graphically plotted. When I studied economics at university, the theory that most appalled me was the notion of revealed preference, which proposes that consumer preferences are transitive – from one bundle of goods to another – dependent on price and revealed by acts of choice.

Once an individual’s pattern of consumption has been determined, a so-called “indifference curve” can be plotted, which demonstrates how his or her demand will fluctuate between equally preferred bundles of goods. I’ve no doubt that supermarkets situate “gondolas” and shelves so as to maximise sales by the positioning of “bundles” of goods that they know consumers will perceive as more desirable.

This is why the supermarkets have got bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, we have got stupider and more powerless. In perhaps a millennium or two, humanity will have evolved fully into Homo shoppingtrolleyus, a lumbering beast on castors, with four stomachs, one loyalty card and a bar code across its forehead. Until then, we are doomed to being compelled to buy value packs of Quavers against our will.

Or are we? Why not do as I do? Enter the supermarket as if plunging into a Zen trance, allow yourself to experience the giddy whirl of choice as if it were a revolving mandala – then piss off without buying anything. Or else, undertake long treks to remote supermarkets in order to buy one item. A couple of years ago in Chicago, I walked nine miles from the Loop to the Near North Side to get a pair of socks at Wal-Mart. Sure, it was a crazy thing to do – but it was my own madness, not the crowd’s.

The latest Real Meals column is here:

You can’t get realer when it comes to meals than chowing down with the Statesman’s own laureate of the low life, Nick Lezard.

I’ve known Nick for years (ever since, in fact, he compared my prose to that of the classical emeticist Tertullian), and together we’ve eaten some memorable meals, including that Highland police-evading delicacy poulet au hashish, but in recent years – as his column amply confirms – Nick has fallen on hard times. True, he never exactly lived high on the hog, but now he barely scrapes by low on the streaky. It would have been unfair to subject Nick to the snail sorbets and caviar casseroles served up at London’s top tables – let alone stick him with the bill – so I suggested that we rendezvous at the Stockpot near Leicester Square.

The Stockpot is one of a mini-chain of three restaurants offering plain, wholesome British cuisine (with a few Italian fripperies) at scandalously low prices. You can have a three-course meal for two at the Stockpot, with wine, for well under 40 quid. Unbelievable, no? I mean, in most West End restaurants you can barely get a maître d’ to sneer at you for that kind of money.

I’m not altogether certain what the genesis of the Stockpot was, but all three outlets have a powerful ambience of having been there since time out of mind. Granted, the Stockpot is a metropolitan phenomenon, but I like to think that every British city still has its equivalent: somewhere that dishes up liver and bacon, bubble and squeak, fish and chips – all the binary conjunctions that once made up the bedrock of the British diet before the creation of chicken tikka masala.

I often used to eat at the branch (now closed) on Basil Street, behind Harrods, which was much frequented by cabbies, and there was nothing more comforting than watching these cockney knights of the open road spoon down their jelly and custard while inveighing against wobbly modernity.

I pressured Nick towards the liver and bacon with onion gravy and veg – a snip at £6.50; while I had chicken kiev with rice and veg – a relatively expensive £7.90. I say “pressured” because I wanted to know what the liver and bacon was like, without having to eat it myself. But then I’m like that in relation to a lot of experiences, both sensual and aesthetic. I also want to know what the foam night at Space is like, but I have no intention of going. Jules Verne picked up on this tendency over a century ago, when he remarked of Phileas Fogg that he was the kind of Englishman who sends his manservant to see the sights for him.

Passepartout also had the whitebait to start with, at my insistence. He enjoyed both heartily. “Um, um,” he ummed, “this is really quite good – you should try some.” And I did, just to please him. My soup wasn’t too bad either, giving the lie to that school of thought which says you can spend all day making soup only to end up with something that tastes marginally worse than what you get out of a can.

However, with the chicken kiev, I hit the culinary rumble strip and juddered to a halt. Like The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, chicken kiev was an integral part of the early 1970s. They were disaster movies; it was disaster cuisine – a great lowering lump of crap chicken, filled with garlic butter and herbs before being coated in breadcrumbs and fried. Chicken kiev felt anachronistic at its inception. Forty years on, I felt as if I were in a 1970s episode of Doctor Who in which cavaliers duelled with cyborgs.

Nick was faring no better with his liver and bacon; it had begun promisingly – the meat was tender and tasty – but soon ploughed into the escape lane filled with onion gravy. We tried to stimulate our jaded palates by putting these plates aside and ordering peach-and-apple pie with custard (£2.95), and chocolate sponge pudding with chocolate custard (£3.20), but it was too late – we were stuffed. The only thing we had any appetite for was the bill, which came in at £40, allowing a generous 20 per cent tip for the waitress.

I say “we” had an appetite for the bill, but in the spirit of this column I must tell it like it is: I’d gone out without enough cash, and obviously the Stockpot hasn’t heard of plastic – yet. So, Nick was obliged to pay the greater part of the bill. No wonder he’s down and out.

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

Arnold Bennett – a bestselling novelist in his day – was said to have carried a mint-condition £10 note in his wallet wherever he went. If he chanced to see someone reading one of his books in public, he was going to give this lucky individual (it was a considerable sum in the 1900s) the tenner. Needless to say, the money was still in his possession when he died.

I’m not certain what this apocryphal anecdote says about the nature of bestsellers, time, literacy and so forth, but what I do know is that, were the Swedish thriller writer Stieg Larsson to return from the grave and wander through modern Britain, he’d need a sack of banknotes on his back in order to honour all his readers. To date, the three books of Larsson’s Millennium trilogy have sold three million copies in the UK. Assuming an RPC (readers per copy) of 1.5, it means one in ten of the literate population has read at least one of these books.

I find this deranging – just as I find the mass consumption of assorted John Grisham legal thrillers, Harry Potter junior wizardry and Twilight teen vampirics equally bizarre. No doubt all books that become bestsellers have intrinsic qualities that make them attractive, but it seems to me that, beyond a certain point when the sales become exponential, other more irrational factors come into play.

In part, bestsellers must partake of the general hysteria of any craze, from the Rubik’s Cube to Sudoku and back again. With books, however, the underlying dynamic seems to me much crazier. Books are involving – even the worst of them – and they call upon the reader to project herself imaginatively into other psyches and situations. Books take a long time to read: a Larsson, weighing in at over 500 pages, is a good ten hours plus for the average reader. It’s one thing to engage in a craze for something akin to masturbation – repetitive, staple sensuality – and quite another to give your entire conscious mind over to a lot of tedious Swedes cutting each other to pieces.

To be fair, I’ve only read half of the first Millennium thriller and everyone tells me that they get better. Even so, I was shocked by quite how greyish and pulpy the prose was, with nary an involving metaphor nor even an amusing juxtaposition of two words. Instead, clichéd description is followed by actual cliché, and always there is a devilish amount of detail about clothes, about office routines, about laptops – about Swedish social services ferchrissakes. This could be because of the translation, but I doubt it.

Even so, snob that I am, as I chomped my way through Larsson’s cardboard prose, it began to seem curiously flavoursome. This was probably because of what it lacks. Don’t get me wrong: I’m no fan of literary fiction that lays down egregious simile after precious metaphor like speed bumps on a suburban street. “Slow Down,” it proclaims, “and Admire My Style!” Bestseller prose has the virtue of being solid paper engineering – not this fancy découpage.

But more importantly, I was aware of a commonality of felt experience. I was a Larsson reader in a way that I could never be a Jamesian or a Conradian; moreover, as the plot ratcheted me forward with the inexorability of a funicular grinding up a Stockholm hillside, it occurred to me that the readability of bestsellers may have an occult origin; by which I mean not some hocus-pocus, but a mysterious attribute of the collective human mind. A decade or so ago, quite serious research was published on the concept of “morphic resonance”, which appeared to demonstrate that texts are more easily absorbed if they have been learned by other people; that if 2,000 Japanese schoolchildren memorise The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, then 2,000 Hungarian kids will commit this poem to memory with greater facility than, say, Sweeney Agonistes.

Morphic resonance would certainly account for what it feels like to read bestsellers. When I read The Da Vinci Code (worldwide sales in excess of 80 million), it seemed as if my eyes were being dragged forcibly along the lines of text, such was the speed with which my mind sucked in the – admittedly facile – meaning of Dan Brown’s prose.

In the last analysis, the truth of the matter – and this is something that Bennett understood only too well – is that nothing succeeds like success. How mad is that?

The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

My nephew Jack and I are heading south after an unsuccessful attempt to reach the remote Hebridean island of St Kilda. Facing the implacability of a force-nine gale, Angus the skipper demurred. Mind you, when we arrived at the quayside in Stornoway, I’d felt like demurring as well; it wasn’t so much the prospect of 40 miles of heaving North Atlantic as the spectacle of hungry gulls mobbing the back of Angus’s pick-up. “They got a whole load of sausage rolls earlier on,” he admitted.

Now we’re midway through a long day of transport food. Jack gave the full Scottish on the Ullapool ferry a swerve but, for want of anything else to do, I tucked away egg, bacon, black pudding and toast, then sat burping Buddhistically as the ship lurched and groaned. There was nothing to eat on the coach to Inverness – probably just as well, because a sick bag was looped round every armrest and the atmosphere was charged with static electricity and the fumes of stale puke. Jack managed to cram a wrap of some sort down his neck at the Costa in Inverness; I had the driest ham sandwich of my life as the train jogged through the Grampians and down to Edinburgh.

So, we’re standing in Waverley Station, waiting for the 5pm East Coast service to King’s Cross to pull in. Jack has been unable to resist 12 Millie’s Cookies mini bites for £3.95 – and I’m with him on that one: I doubt I’d be able to resist a Millie’s cookie in front of a firing squad, eschewing the blindfold for their toothsome chewiness. “Look,” I instruct him, “when we board, we need to get seats right by the buffet so we’re in pole position for the dining car. If we go in for a sitting after an hour or so, we should be able to hang out there for the remainder of the journey, thus blagging ourselves a first-class seat.”

It’s little tips like these that I see as the very essence of the avuncular, but when I present myself guilelessly to the steward, she’s having none of it.
“If you’re in second class,” she says unprompted, “you’ve to eat and then return to your seats immediately.”

“You mean right away?” I query Bertie Woosterishly.

“Immediately.”

Even so, a railway supper is always worth having; it doesn’t matter that the decor is Noughties-utilitarian, nor that the view is of the cooling towers of Eggborough Power Station. The mere fact of a waiter staggering towards you with a steaming platter conjures up the romance of the Stamboul train – or, at least, the Brighton Belle of my childhood, when we ate kippers under plush shades and my father excoriated Lord Beeching again and again and again.

Leek and potato soup, £4. A spicy roast breast of chicken with preserved lemon and served on a bed of basmati rice, £16. Not even the miserable vers libre of menu language can frustrate the punctuation of those rounded-off prices. Nonetheless, I had the leek and potato soup; Jack had the ratatouille tart. I had cod; Jack had a steak. I had the pear and hazelnut pastry; Jack crammed down a chocolate fudge cake – even though the Millie’s mini bites were eating him from within. When the un-Spartan boy protested at all this noshing, I snapped at him: “Keep at it! But masticate each mouthful at least 40 times – I’m not going back to second class.”

A man came along the aisle with a large plastic bag and when he passed us, I saw the slogan “Cleaning your East Coast train” on his back. What is this modern mania for ceaseless rubbish removal, if not the flip side of excessive packaging? Do we hope to unwrap, discard and clear up our way out of recession? These and other observations I shared with Jack as we thrummed towards Peterborough. He looked at me the way I used to look at his grandfather over kippers on the Brighton Belle.

Still, I knew we’d passed that faint but nonetheless significant line: all it took was a judiciously deployed Clydesdale Bank £10 note and the hefty steward was in our metaphorical pocket – there was no way she’d chuck us out now, even though it wasn’t really legal tender. So, a three-course dinner with drinks and coffee, plus hefty tip: £65.55. It was a fraction of the price differential between second and first class.

True, the cod was thrashing around in the leek and potato soup like an ocean-going yacht in a force nine, but sometimes you’ve got to suffer for your luxuries.

The latest Madness of Crowds column:

I hope you have noticed my forbearance throughout the recent football tourney, resisting the urge to prate upon the follies of fandom, let alone the poisonous catalysis that ensues when they are admixed with patriotism. But now, with fair Albion lain out upon the veldt, the Boerfarter’s jackboot on her heaving breast, the time has come for me to put my own boot in.

On the day after the catastrophic defeat, Richard Littlejohn “wrote” in the Daily Mail: “If the Few had defended as badly as England, we’d all be speaking German now.” Someone in television once told me that he’d been present at a meeting where a reality show was pitched called Daily Mail Island, the conceit being that contestants were marooned on an island where the only news they had of the outside world came to them via the Daily Mail. Needless to say, the pitch failed when one of the commissioning execs observed that such a land mass already existed – and it was called “Britain”.

But even on Daily Mail Island, the equation between la gloire of football and national self-regard is delusory. The sage Montaigne once wrote words to the effect that it was unwise to trust a man who took games too seriously, for it meant that he didn’t take life seriously enough. But I’m perfectly willing to concede that there are millions of men and women who take both football and life seriously indeed.

Therein lies the madness, because it must be utterly bizarre to be one moment living in a world in which your entire sense of wellbeing is concentrated upon how well 11 super-fit adolescents (and I say “adolescents” advisedly, for recall: these are “men” who almost mutinied over their access to their PlayStations) are kicking about an inflated leather bag, and the next to accept that this previously all-consuming passion is not important at all.

In psychiatric circles – which encompass me rather more than is healthy – the maintenance of two such utterly inconsistent belief systems would be termed something catchy like “acute mental diplopia”, but in my part of the country we just call it Dagenham (two stops short of Barking). In fairness to all you England fans out there, I do perceive some political logic in your passionate advocacy; harder to comprehend is the gut-churning empathy experienced by the supporters of English Premier League teams.

I suppose I am a bit of a dinosaur – and a triceratops at that – but when I last went to see Arsenal play, I felt as if I’d inadvertently slid into a parallel world. It didn’t help that my companion, a season ticket holder, is an eminent psychoanalyst who has written numerous papers on acute mental diplopia. Like Papa Sigmund whacked on cocaine, he was his own case history, for within seconds of kick-off, he transmogrified from a calm, urbane man into a screaming loony.

“Youuuu fuuuuucking f-f-f-f-fuckers!” He strafed the Gunners with his own fricative fusillade; and so it continued, volley after expletive volley, until at half-time I taxed him: “How can you feel such a close affinity with this polyglot team, drawn from the ends of the earth by the lodestone of gelt?”

“Aha,” he explained, “you don’t get it – it’s not about partisanship at all, it’s about catharsis. These young players are mythological heroes for middle-aged, middle-class men such as me. We rant and we rave, we bellow and exult; then, when the hurly-burly is done, we can return to the dull accommodation of our strip-lit lives.”

“You don’t really believe that bullshit, do you?” I asked him. “Surely you of all people understand that to flip from hysterical identification to passive indifference is tantamount to psychosis?”

“Maybe.” He bit into his gourmet sausage roll and small flakes of pastry speared my tender cheeks. “But what’s the alternative? Think back to when, everywhere you went, you saw men and women in No 7 England shirts with ‘BECKHAM’ blazoned across their shoulders. What a fine madness it would have been if all those fat Beckhams, short Beckhams, infant Beckhams and ancient Beckhams really had believed themselves to be England’s striker. No asylum in the land would’ve been big enough – they’d have required some kind of special colony.”
“Daily Mail Island.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, nothing.”

The latest Real Meals column is here:

I often have a kebab, though not as often as I might. In my part of the world – and along countless other urban arterial roads the length and breadth of the land – you can proceed from one samey shopping parade to the next, your forward movement registered only by the thinning and thickening of the stylised doner kebabs depicted on the signs vertically mounted above fast-food joints. What is it about the kebab? And more to the point – if you’ll forgive the pun – what is it about the Turkish community, which has percolated into this country with scarcely a perturbation of the body politic?

True, from time to time, there is talk of Cyprus, or Armenia, or a multimillion-pound heroin bust – but, on the whole, all we see of the Turks among us are these lumps of compressed, ground meat greasily adhering to shopfronts. Moreover, the subtle occupation of the takeaway niche formerly occupied by fish-and-chip shops is equally unregarded. After all, a Turkish establishment will offer fish, chips, pies and kebabs – so what’s not to like?

As I say, I often have a kebab; I had one in Bexhill-on-Sea the other evening, on spying a likely establishment en route to the station. My train was due in about 15 minutes, so I had to make a decision: should I have the doner kebab (a nasty gustatory experience, its pinky-grey strips of meat visibly fizzing with bacteria) or the shish (often surprisingly good, the meat charcoal-grilled and succulent). I stress: the kebab choice is never to do with a marginal unit of cost – at most there’s a quid’s difference between the two – but a marginal unit of time.

There’s something about choosing the shish that brings out the artiste in the average kebab-joint operative. Yes, he will assure you that it will only take a few minutes but, once he’s begun barbecuing, he becomes subject to some strange atavism. Once more, he is a sheep herder, high on the Anatolian plateau. In his mind’s eye, he crouches, eyes narrowed, to spear the precious lamb chunks on his wickedly sharpened dagger. The winds howl all around, the wolves join in, the dogs yowl, the sheep “mmmaa-aaa-aaa” in dread anticipation. Outside, the yoof of Bexhill-on-Sea may be swigging Bacardi Breezers and talking arse, but inside the kebab shop it’s a mystic communion between man and fire of Zoroastrian significance. Or so I thought, as the minutes ticked away and I cursed myself for not having risked the doner: “Um, I really do have a train to catch,” I remonstrated with the Turk as he fiddled with his meaty spillikins. “I know, I know,” he shot back, “but you can’t have these underdone.” No, indeed – an underdone shish kebab would be as bad as . . . well, as bad as a doner kebab.

Needless to say, I made the train and sat in the plastic, aseptic interior as it toggled its way through Collington, Cooden Beach and Pevensey and Westham. I unwrapped the hot buttock of the kebab from its outerwear of off-white paper, and then its underwear of grey-greasy paper. Naturally, the kebab man had asked if I wanted salad – and I had consented to this. Of course, he had offered sauce – and to this, I had also agreed.

A kebab stuffed to the seams should only be attempted with an armoury of cutlery and a full roll of quilted kitchen roll to hand – but I had neither. Within seconds, the tabletop was bedizened with chunks of tomato, onion and meat, with dollops of sauce and juice.

It was a very good kebab – and I was in hog-eat-sheep heaven. Chomping on, I meditated on the bizarre fact that oblong countries invariably have bad human rights records – Turkey, of course, but also Israel/Palestine (with the nasty sub-oblongs of Gaza and the West Bank), to say nothing of Egypt, Nepal and Saudi Arabia. There must be something about the rectilinear that does it to the collective unconscious of a nation, making its inhabitants feel as if they’re all in jail together, and so they divide up into sadistic guards and cowering inmates . . .

The kebab was finished. It had taken me so long to get through £3.95 of food that the train was trundling through the outer suburbs of London. I looked down from the embanked line on the rivers of halogen light and the knots of the inebriated gathered outside late-night takeaways. It was with something like a thrill that I picked out the first, tapering oblong of a stylised doner kebab on a lit-up sign. Ah! It would be good to smell the greasy kebabs of home.