The latest Madness of Crowds column:

To the Musée d’Orsay in Paris for an exhibition entitled “Crime et châtiment”, which celebrates (can this be right?) the 190 years of French punition between Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau’s calling for the abolition of the death penalty (1791) and its final abolition (1981). On a chilly June morning, with the wind blowing grit off the quais, now would seem a good time to meditate on the bizarre fate of Saint-Fargeau himself.

Allegedly the casting voter for the regicide of Louis XVI, he was assassinated in January 1793, on the eve of the king’s execution, by a former member of the Garde du Corps. The usual Revolutionary canonisation followed: body laid out in the Place Vendôme, buried in the Panthéon, then a four-act musical celebrating his life staged within a month of his death. A cartoon for JL David’s painting of Saint-Fargeau’s final martyred moments is on show inside the Musée, together with his later Death of Marat. But what’s weighing on me, comme d’habitude, is the madness of the crowd.

It’s only 10.30am and there are hundreds of them swarming around the entrances and grudgingly sorting themselves into long, snaking lines. It looks as if a formidable pan-European moiety awoke with a start in its chain hotels and rushed along here for a little crime et châtiment of its own.

What is it that makes us put ourselves through this torture, this ordeal-by-boredom designed to prove our aesthetic blamelessness? I say “we”, but of course I mean “them”, for my companion and I soon made with our press cards and swanned inside. But hey, c’mon – before you start inveighing against me for this queue-jumping, please observe that I am writing about “Crime et châtiment”, although probably not in the way the Musée d’Orsay’s PR flacks would prefer.

In truth, I’ve come to regard my membership of the NUJ as effectual solely in such situations. Indeed, I even think of it as the National Union of Jumpers, since I’ve bunked into more museums, art galleries and historic sites than I care to remember on the strength of my avowed commitment to fair wages and working conditions for all manner of hacks. Yet think not unkindly of me, for my childhood memories of the terrifying press of vulturine humanity in search of artificial carrion are seared deep. In 1969, in Amsterdam, my parents insisted on dragging me to a huge Rembrandt tercentennial exhibition where the punters were almost tearing chunks out of each other, so keen were they to get inside the Rijksmuseum.

And then again, far from one’s first trip to the Louvre being a breathless dash in the style of Godard’s Bande à part, like me you probably found yourself shuffling in a herd of schoolchildren, wheeled en masse to confront the tiny, glassed-in postage stamp of La Joconde, while wondering: “What’s so great about that?” Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that there’s an inverse correlation between the size of the object on view and the size of the crowds that swarm about it.

There is timed entry to exhibitions these days, so in theory there need be no queuing. But need be doesn’t really enter into it: the museums must increase their throughput, and so the queue is simply relocated inside the exhibition. Nowadays, no signature show is complete without its halting
march and the stop-glimpse-start of the hallowed objects.

Where will it all end? Every time I attend some fashionable Hoxton opening and see the great mob of the rich, the aristocratic and the useless teeming about the entrance to a gallery that cannot possibly contain them, it occurs to me that, were the more proletarian queue for a museum to be bussed in, a Terror of some kind would undoubtedly ensue.

All of this courses through my mind as we stumble through the semi-darkness of “Crime et châtiment”. Ahead of me there’s an object that seems to be the focus of considerable attention, the queue backing up and lumping into a throng. What’s this? Why, it’s Madame Guillotine herself, in all her steely finesse, her gaunt and wooden exactitude. But who sits below? Not cackling, stitching, purling tricoteuses, but a couple of plump security guards, walkie-talkies warbling on their hips. The crowd is cowed, sedated by the gloom and its own animal heat.

We move on – our time will come.

The latest Real Meals column:

The other afternoon I was cycling up the Mall when the Queen emerged from the gates of Buckingham Palace, so plumply erect in her customised Daimler that she resembled nothing so much as a cerise pouffe propped up in an old-fashioned Silver Cross perambulator. There was only a smattering of tourists about, but even so, they spontaneously formed a guard of honour and laid on a scattering of applause.

Imagine being applauded simply for being. The divine right of kings may be a doctrine as obsolete as the blunderbuss, but that applause alone gunned down any optimism I might’ve been feeling about the levelling of society. I think the only thing that could’ve made me feel any better about this brush with despotism would’ve been to discover that Lizzie W was en route to Burger King.

For Burger King is to McDonald’s as the monarchy is to republicanism; it’s as hard to imagine Betsy 2 noshing on a Big Mac as it is Georges Danton chomping on a Whopper. McDonald’s is the Federation – Burger King is the Klingon Empire; McDonald’s is a postmodern conspiracy to replace the noble and just with hydrolysed corn syrup and styrofoam, while Burger King has the ivied sanctity of a millennium-old Cistercian monastery.

How can it be, this profound contrast between what, on the face of it, are two very similar multinational hamburger chains? It isn’t that either business works so very hard to differentiate itself: the corporate colours are red and yellow; the staff could be wearing uniforms of different ranks in the same army; and as for the menu, well, Burger King may not have embraced the ciabatta of modernity, but let’s face it – a burger is a burger.

And yet, if you ever wanted an object lesson in the Freudian concept of the uncanny, it is Burger King, for while everything is familiar, it is also disturbingly different. Compared with the breezy rationalism of McDonald’s, to patronise BK is to enter the Hall of the Mountain King. Is it the fake-porphyry columns, the dark melamine tables, or the upholstery like dried ox-blood? Or is it perhaps the dreaded Whopper? I took my classic with cheese upstairs, along with a Garden Salad the size of a garden, and a Coke.

I sat there ogling some pigeon-repelling barbs coated with pigeon shit on the ledge outside the window, and tried to get the edge of the Whopper into my mouth. Two things occurred to me while this was going on: first, that it would be useful if I could disarticulate my jaw like an anaconda; second, that perhaps the point of these stacked foodstuffs is to induce a gag reflex in the consumer, convincing her that she’s already overeaten before taking the first bite. Then – and bear in mind that I was still trying to eat the thing – I made the mistake of looking in front of me.

It would be a crass piece of stereotyping to say that the man who was sitting ten paces away with his back to me was a fat American tourist. No, he was a morbidly obese redneck, in regulation plaid shirt and baseball cap, who, as I finally succeeded in plunging my envenomed incisors into the Whopper, clapped a hand to the portion of his buttock that was semi-extruded through the back of his chair, and yelped. I immediately ceased whopping. When I bit down on the burger once more, the man yelped again.

And so it went on, until I finally accepted that there was indeed sympathetic magic in progress, so rose, walked across the chequerboard of grey tiles, and discovered that the poor fellow had voided himself of what looked like about a litre of salad cream.

In our family, Burger King is held to be the healthy option. After all, no one’s made a film called Double Whopper Me. Or if they have, it’s only being screened in porn cinemas in Amsterdam. Yet if this was healthy eating, why did it make me feel so bad? I managed about half my burger and a few fries (which, to be fair, are better than McDonald’s). I broke a tine of my plastic fork trying to pierce the lid of the salad, then almost lost my reason trying to tear open the sachet of ichor-style “dressing”. The taste? Don’t get me started.

I didn’t begin to feel my blood pressure fall until I was half a mile off and pedalling at speed; then came the encounter with Her Maj. Like I said, I would’ve been cheered by the notion she was heading for Burger King, although whether from egalitarian or regicidal motives I would be hard-pressed to say.

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

I seldom work in libraries, for all the obvious reasons: you can’t smoke, eat or drink, while the proximity of many lithe young bodies in tense repose inevitably tends one’s thoughts to the sexual. And then there are the books. Of course, when I was a young man, the books didn’t bother me so much, while the sexualisation of libraries was more extreme. Back then, I laboured under the healthy delusion that, although I could not be as well read as Coleridge (who was said to be the last man to have read everything), I might yet read all that truly mattered.

Now, just as the possibility of joyous congress among the stacks retreats on hushed puppies, so the idea of all those unread books has become a screaming torment. Even the most innocuous of local libraries feels to me like Borges’s library of Babel, with its infinite number of texts.

As for the British Library, where I do occasionally undertake some research, the very atmosphere seems charged with an awareness of the great mound of the unread that we all squat atop, as flies might write dissertations upon a dungheap.

When Gutenberg tore the first sheet off his press, at most 100 titles began to appear annually. As literacy and print expanded, this was retained, but après Coleridge came the dry and rustling deluge as the numbers of books increased exponentially. By 1950, a quarter of a million were published every year, while today a book is published somewhere in the world every 20 seconds (that’s 1,576,800 per annum, in case you were wondering). Meanwhile, literacy in the so-called developed world steadily cedes mental territory to the pixellated onslaught.

In such a culture, is it not possible to argue that the relentless production of books is itself a form of insanity? That collectively we are like someone who acquires ever more titles purely in order to convince herself – or her friends – that she is on the point of reading them? After all, the vast majority of these books are not only unread but also unreadable. Deranged diet plans, miserable misery memoirs and novels with less novelty than a coprolite doubtless abound, but by far the biggest slice of the papery pie comprises doctoral dissertations that have received ISBNs purely so their authors can keep on reading other books and decoct them into books of their own.

And all this while the axe of public spending cuts whistles around the head of local library services, so that young and disadvantaged people who might actually want reading matter cannot find the wherewithal – mad, no? Still, some kind of sane perspective can be achieved by reflecting on this: Google’s servers process a petabyte (one quadrillion bytes) of data every hour. Fifty petabytes is roughly equal to the entire written works of humankind up until now. Last year was also the first that the British publishing industry suffered a net decrease in sales, although not production.

The above leads me to suspect that we indeed may have passed that numinous – but for all that, real – point known as “peak book”. Might this mean that the ever-expanding and ever-deranging gap between what is written and what is read may be beginning to narrow at last? Don’t be ridiculous! The web has put paid to that – all those petabytes, all those pages! If the consciousness of unread books was bad enough, what about the consciousness of unread web pages?

It all puts me in mind of the Cha’an meditation illness: an incontinent recall of Buddhist texts that is the symptom of a Zen pupil’s overstrained psyche, and which can only be rectified by his master hitting him on the head with a stick. Otherwise, the texts proliferate across his visual field, while the meaning of every word is instantly grasped by him. At first, there are just texts the pupil knows, but soon enough these are joined by others he has only heard of – yet these, too, are comprehended in their entirety.

There is worse to come, as flying from all angles wing still more texts that the pupil is compelled to include in his screaming wits – texts he has never heard of at all, texts he didn’t know could exist, texts written by alien civilisations, texts doodled on the Etch a Sketch of God by archangels peaking on acid! No stick is big enough to beat this pupil – Humanity. So the maddening and delusory library expands, while the real and useful one is shut down.

The latest Real Meals column:

“We’re, like, regulars, aren’t we?” I said to the attractively goofy young fellow who takes the role of maître d’ in the new gastropub across the road from our house. He surveyed us slackly and replied: “Well, we want the place to be for locals, too.”

There was not a soupçon of irony in his tone: he meant it. He meant that our local corner pub … should be for locals. Actually, we weren’t the only locals in – our next-door neighbours were there, too – but there’s no escaping that, since its refurb and the arrival of a much-feted Australian chef, the Canton Arms’s clientele is no longer representative of the local population. Not a black or a brown face in the gaff – to put it bluntly – and instead of cockney glottals stopping at the bar, there’s the wicker and whinny of Sloaney ponies and their financial servicers.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not about to launch into an elegy for the decline of the Great British Pub; I’ve never been any more pubbable than I am clubbable. Back in the days when I drank, I also liked to smoke dope – and without becoming an habitué of a local on the Herengracht, there’s no way I could satisfy this joint taste. When I think about it, I was always in the avant-garde of pubbing (as I am with so much else) because, if I went at all, it was with a view to food.

The King’s Arms in Oxford – which, during my time, had a vast array of real ales and a fully functioning Trotskyite groupuscule, headed up by Terry Eagleton – was, for me, little more than a licensed canteen. I don’t recall the food being outrageously good or bad, just the usual “hearty fare”: cottage pies with a thatch of flaky pastry, battered plaice rigid enough to batter someone with, sheaves of chips, a grapeshot of peas. In a way, pub food benefits from its bibulous context: if it’s good, it seems exceptionally so by virtue of having been cultured in this yeasty realm, and if it’s bad, well, anaesthetic is close by.

There are these advantages, and there’s also the enduring myth of ye olde English coaching inne, a mythic hostelry that lurks in the psyche of every Mondeo Man as he pulls off the motorway and into the turning circuit of a Harvester. Ye olde inne allows for an atavistic presumption of largesse and the blurring of social boundaries that makes it possible for the grimmest little pisshole in the grottiest little town to still importune customers brazenly with its own hearty fare.

By the same token, it’s the great cultural hinterland of the pub – both imagined and real – that has made it such an attractive target for this, the latest putsch in the permanent bourgeois revolution. Gastropubs first made their appearance in the early 1990s. They had pseudo-earthy names like The Cow or The Sow and were run by Wykehamists with cod-demotic names such as Tom or Bill. They offered nouvelle British cuisine, heavy on the puy lentils and smoked eel. Indeed, I once went into one of these establishments and ordered a pint of puy lentils, and it duly arrived on the bar with a smoked eel for a swizzle stick.

Gastropubs enable the most febrile BBC hack to feel as a horny-handed son of the soil. They are only a logical extension of the manifest inauthenticity first picked up on by Richard Eyre’s and Ian McEwan’s Ploughman’s Lunch in 1983, wherein the cynical adman explains to the uppity BBC hack that said pub grub is in fact a neologism, rather than a rarebit from time out of mind. After all, if the ploughman’s lunch was a marketing concept, what can we say about foie gras sandwiches, just one of the bar snacks available at my local?

But to be fair to the Canton Arms, it’s by no means the most chichi gastropub I’ve been in. That accolade belongs to Ford’s Filling Station, a self-styled “American gastropub” on Culver Boulevard in Los Angeles, whose “executive chef” is none other than Ben Ford, Harrison’s son from his first marriage. Say what you will about the Cows, the Eagles and the Oxen, but none of them would risk the drivel on Ford’s menu that sets out his “culinary philosophy”.

Which brings us back, full circle, to the Canton Arms, where – or so it used to be said – it was possible to buy a strap (local argot for a handgun) over your pork scratchings. It’s a curious fact that not one of the shots fired here, at the epicentre of London’s black-on-black gun crime, has ever been heard of around the world – but the gastropub has, oh yes.

The latest Madness of Crowds column:

Peter Ackroyd, in his masterly biography of London, animadverts that the entire city is essentially a performance space, one in which the notorious actors fret and strut, while the London mob roils and moils through the streets, providing at once the extras and the audience for an organic production that is ever evolving down the ages. But if this is the case – and I think his analysis has considerable appeal – then what can we say of the audiences in more conventional theatres?

For me, the theatre audience is the main problem with theatre. Sure, a lot of plays are flatly crap, but only the audience for an averagely farcical West End production will force me to leave at the interval, disgustedly shredding my programme. Actors are, as we all know, a pretty mad crowd – but at least there are small chinks in the seriousness with which they take their avocation. Audiences, by contrast, are slaves of a high-minded method to rival Stanislavsky’s. Watching them mill about in the lobbies and bars, talking arse while they scoop ice creams and sup G&Ts, it often occurs to me that when all these individuals got up that morning, they were already resolutely in character as middle-class members of a theatre audience.

If the proletarian mob galvanised political change with its posturing on the barricades, then the theatre audience is its bourgeois counterpart, which, merely by sitting still, extinguishes the revolutionary fire with a well-fed collective derrière. This wasn’t always the case. Back in the days when the Globe wasn’t a laborious fake, the theatre was indeed coextensive with the street theatre – through the Restoration and up until the heyday of Drury Lane, a trip to the theatre remained a vital part of playing a dynamic social role. But since the Victorian era, the main motivation of the professionals playing the audience has been complacency, pure and simple.

Agitprop, guerrilla theatre, the theatre of the absurd, theatre in the round, the square, the open-fucking-air – so moribund is the British theatre audience that nothing has managed to make it corpse; it remains steely, impervious to distraction. Indeed, arguably the more outrageous the play, the more naked and bemerded the cast, and the more it assaults the audience’s cherished ideals, the more content that audience becomes. As the actors on stage prance about waggling their genitals and lobbing handfuls of excrement, so those in the royal circle titter indulgently and rustle their programmes, for it is by this fact alone – their incapacity to be genuinely shocked – that they can also remain manifestly unmoved.

I appreciate that they often claim to have been transported by this Enron or that Jerusalem. “Oh, it was marvellous,” they bleat. “It really made you think.” And perhaps it did make them think … of booking another ticket so as to have another opportunity to play their own favourite part. True, in recent years, the sluggish audience, like some ageing matinee idol, has attempted some new tricks. During the boom years, infused by more than the usual planeloads of Americans and invigorated by new money, the audience began to applaud spontaneously at the end of acts – and even scenes!

There was also a precipitate increase in the amount of hilarity. Heretofore laughter was frequent and disproportionate, yet almost always had a sufficient cause; now the tittering is continuous from when the curtain rises until it descends. The audience will guffaw at just about anything from Tybalt’s death to Krapp’s penultimate tape – and how mad is that? But the maddest thing of all remains the audience’s inability just to walk away from it. After all, when the play is over, the Equity-minimum actors reach for the baby wipes and annihilate their subterfuge, but the paying audience simply heads out the double doors while stalwartly maintaining it.

It maintains it in cars, it maintains it on public transport – but, by far the most aggressively, it maintains it in restaurants and bars, where it feels liberated to loudly ad-lib lines of staggering banality, such as: “I’ll have the calves’ liver.” While the deranged mob may have been repressed, there remains this other craziness: being compelled against your will to be the audience of an audience.

This week’s Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

Circa 1969 the only restaurants in Britain were Chinese ones – or at least, that’s the way I remember it. They had placid aquaria in their front windows and strange, liquidly bubbling music was piped through their dimly lit interiors; the piquant aromas of chicken and sweetcorn soup, Peking duck and sweet-and-sour pork balls rolled across the dusty-red carpets, while the staff padded to and fro with the soundless self-effacement of sorcerers’ apprentices. To us kids, Chinese restaurants were all the fun of the fair as we faffed about with chopsticks and contemplated the unbearable lightness of being a prawn cracker; but most exciting of all, the arrival of the food was preceded by the lighting of a candle inside a tabletop heater. What was this? As a child, I assumed it was of a piece with shrines and gongs and burning paper money at funerals – another figure in the strange chinoiserie of suburban London.

Of course, once we had read Timothy Mo’s brilliant novel Sour Sweet, we all understood what a performance the standard British Chinese had been all along: the cuisine a dockside fusion designed for the barbarians’ uncouth palates, and the obsequiousness actually wary indifference. But where are the Chinese restaurants of yesteryear? I search for them high and low, on provincial bypasses and in the armpit of brutalist shopping centres – and still I cannot find them.

I don’t mean that there are no longer Chinese restaurants; it’s just that they no longer tend to an archetype. Just as the quintessential “Indian” seems to have died out some time in the mid-1990s, so the “Chinese” went extinct a decade before that. Perhaps both depended for their genre status on first- and second-generation immigrants operating in a more monochrome society.

Nowadays, at the hipper end of the spectrum, there are eateries with names like New Culture Revolution, which are all blond-wood benches and rubber floors – Scandinavian echt dangling in a basket of rice noodles. In fact, New Culture Revolution is the name of a small chain of Chinese restaurants – or “noodle and dumpling bars”, as they style themselves. Whenever I pass by one, I wonder if its owners – who I assume aren’t Chinese – are quite aware of how crass this ascription is, playing as it does upon mass internecine murder. It is on a par, surely, with calling a salt-beef joint Yo-ho-Shoa!, or a borscht and vodka set-up Gulag-it-Down.

I will never eat at New Culture Revolution, but I’ll eat at just about any other Chinese restaurant I can. I cherish Chinese food above all others, and find it comforting to the point of making me weep – as if I were thrusting my head between the great warm dumplings of an ancestral mother spirit. This Oedipal passion dates back to one afternoon around 1977 when I went up to the West End with a gaggle of friends and we ended up eating at Poon’s Wind-Dried Duck Company in Soho.

This was an altogether different experience from the pork balls of the previous decade. Poon’s was a bustling establishment crashing and banging up four storeys of a narrow terraced property on Lisle Street. The food was at once plainer and more tangy than the usual Anglo-Cantonese fare, and the waiters were bracing in their open contempt for their clientele. So began a lifetime of regular eating in Chinatown, during which I have patronised just four restaurants: I shifted my business from Poon’s to the cheaper Man Lee Hong some time around 1981, and then to China China on Gerrard Street. I stayed put there for two decades until, around three years ago, I rounded the corner to discover that it had transmogrified into an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Oh, woe! What is it with the all-you-can-eat buffet? The marginal unit of preference between healthy plenitude and disgusting gluttony should be evident to anyone who has reached their majority, so all such establishments can possibly represent is a society gorged with its own contempt for impoverishment. That the Chinese should operate them here is ironic, given that their homeland has suffered from terrible famines within living memory.

Still, I was reading this week that “peak food” could soon be reached, so we may live to see all-you-can-fight-to-the-death-for buffets. As for me, I switched to the Canton 30 yards away in Newport Place, and there I remain.

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

At a Sunday lunch in the ‘burbs of north London, the kids run amok around a play fort in the garden that resembles a pocket Alamo; meanwhile, us grown-ups dissect chicken, then use our teeth to suture it to our stomach linings. In the febrile atmosphere of the power vacuum enveloping us – the infinitesimal gap between Gordon and Dave – all seems at once momentous and trivial, as if every question one asks were a request that Bertrand Russell pass the salt. The subject of Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent comes up, and our hostess – who, while by no means stupid, has fewer political bones in her body than the chicken – ventures: “But if we were to get rid of it, what if Iran gets the bomb?”

Mrs S patiently explains that, were this eventuality to arise, it might be reasonably accorded Israel’s responsibility – as it is their avowed desire – to unleash mega-death on the bearded fanatics of Qom (and a few million innocent bystanders). But I’m gone already, dived deep under the incorruptible Atlantic, down into the depths, where the Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarine describes its quadrangular course across the ocean floor. I consider the crew, who have no contact with the outside world for three months at a time; I meditate upon the captain of this supercharged giant black dildo who, acting on the orders of Gordon – or David – would unleash missiles armed with multiple nuclear payloads.

For that’s the sop to the submariners’ consciences: they may push the button, but they will never know the point of impact, except in the eventuality that Gordon – or David – is himself carbonised, in which case the captain must read the personal letter from the prime minister of the day, which reposes in the safe, and which will authorise him to fire at his own will. What will the captain do, I ponder, if David succeeds to the premiership? Will he leave off his boxing of the seas to return to HM Naval Base Clyde, at Faslane and pick up a new letter, or is he instructed to take it on trust?

Either way, this rusted link in the chain of command encapsulates all the corrosive psychosis of that most insane of collective delusions, the national security doctrine known as Mutually Assured Destruction, or by its entirely apt acronym – Mad. While it may be true that in the cold-war stand-off between the US and the USSR, Mad prevented the annihilation of both empires (and, following the diversification and ramping up of weapon systems, the collateral destruction of the entire world) by making a nuclear first strike suicidal, there’s no reason whatsoever for Britain being Mad, any more than there is for Sweden, or Senegal.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that by taking Polaris from the States, and thence Trident (both systems having been developed in the US and the technology leased to us), successive British governments have also taken a job lot of mass paranoia. After all, while Gordon or David may delude himself that he’s entirely independent when it comes to vaporising Moscow – or Tehran – the fact of the matter is that no such action could ever be taken without Barack’s say-so.

I often observe the effects this extreme double-bind has on the British national psyche. I see it in the vain posturing of our politicians on the international stage; I see it in the state-sanctioned death cult of our armed forces; and I see it most poignantly in comfortable suburban homes where, when replete with Sunday lunch, someone idly considers the necessity of wiping millions of people off the face of the earth as a reasonable exercise of self-defence.

But that was then – and this is now. With the Bullingdon boy in No 10, and the camp Yorkshire slaphead in the Foreign Office, I quite appreciate the pressing need to extract the country from the maw of bankruptcy. Still, there is such a thing as killing two birds with a single stony inaction: scrapping Trident would save a shed-load of money, while also puncturing once and for all the fantasy that Britain remains a world power.

It would be the political equivalent of the entire country downing a bracing draft of Largactil, and starting to recover from the post-traumatic stress disorder of the 20th century. As any good therapist could tell Dave, confronting reality is the first step towards positive mental health – but then positive mental health isn’t why Dave went into politics, is it?