“At what mute, inglorious juncture in the history of British cuisine did the ‘all-day breakfast’ make its appearance? I can’t recall it being scrawled on a yellow cardboard sunburst in Magic Marker until the early 1990s – which makes sense, dating it to the same era as 24-hour rolling news and the export of western values through the cross hairs of a USAF bombardier.

“This is not to suggest that Saddam could have been ousted during the first Gulf war by laser-guided egg, bacon, sausage, baked beans, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, chips and toast – but the all-day breakfast coincided with a devastating new onslaught by irony on Britain’s social structure. Certainly, as the British middle classes loft-converted their way out of the recession of the early 1990s, they began eating all-day breakfasts (or ‘fry-ups’, as these are known to graduates), while washing them down with copious amounts of ‘builder’s tea’. Before this jumbling of mores, a café was a caff, and its clientele was decidedly proletarian.

“Lunching with the writer Nick Papadimitriou at the Max Café on the Wandsworth Road, we mulled over caff food as we dabbled our chips in the shocking fauvism of our oval platters. Nick observed that the meal was a Proustian madeleine, a sense datum linking one unerringly to the past. But which past specifically, I wanted to know? Nineteen seventy-four, Nick snapped – it’s always associated in my mind with leaving Emerson, Lake and Palmer concerts feeling incredibly hungry. But why, I pressed him, were you famished after prog-rock gigs? He grimaced: because they went on and on and on – especially Greg Lake’s bass solos.”

Read the rest of the latest Real Meals column here at the New Statesman.

“Conspiracy theories are articles of faith for the masses in an age of unbelief. You will have had the same experience as me on numerous painful occasions: a perfectly ordinary exchange with someone about current political events suddenly veers off-piste and disappears down a crevasse yawning with credulousness. ‘Everyone knows,’ your interlocutor asserts, ‘that Princess Di was assassinated by MI5 to stop her having a Muslim baby … that the September 11 attacks were mounted by the Bush government to provide a pretext for their Iraq oil-grabbing venture … that global warming is a fiction devised by the scientific establishment in order to stop us enjoying our city breaks … ‘

“It’s altogether pointless trying to winch these people out of their crevasse with a thin cable of reason, because they’ve already made the brave leap into believing something for which there is no real empirical basis whatsoever. Indeed, if you do challenge them along these lines, they simply turn on you with words to the effect that you cannot prove your version of these events, while they, at least, are maintaining a healthy scepticism – the implication being that you’re merely another dupe.

“What got me thinking about the collective insanity of the conspiratorial laity – besides running into it almost every day – was the experience of a young friend of mine who is studying philosophy at a perfectly respectable university. She was given by her tutor the assignment of watching on YouTube a ‘documentary’ called Loose Change. This, for those of you fortunate enough not to have seen it, is a series of ‘facts’ and ‘observations’ that, taken together, are intended to support one of the ‘arguments’ above; namely, that it wasn’t a group of Islamist jihadists who engineered the destruction of the twin towers and the attack on the Pentagon, but elements within the federal government itself who conspired to take the lives of thousands of their own citizens.

“When my young friend taxed her tutor with the ridiculousness of this thesis, she was told that watching Loose Change was integral to her study of Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

“That the September 11 attacks should have generated so much conspiratorial guff is woefully predictable. Loose Change is only a wilder and more explicit version of the thesis bruited by Michael Moore’s asinine Fahrenheit 9/11. In that feature-length exercise in infantile tendentiousness, Moore made great play of the connections between the Bin Laden and Bush families, hinting that these were causally implicated in the attacks. The truth is that it would be surprising if the Bin Ladens – whose vast construction company is by appointment to the House of Saud – didn’t hobnob with the Bushes.”

Read the rest of the latest Madness of Crowds column here.

“One of the realest meals there is in the so-called developed world is a hotel breakfast. I say this for a simple reason: no one – unless they are close to expiring – refuses it. You may stagger back to your chipboard hutch, which fronts on to some godawful bypass, at 1.30am, swearing never again to drink with colleagues/clients/long-lost siblings, but the card lying on the bed still gets you salivating.”

“Because the whole point about the hotel breakfast is that it’s included: you’ve paid your £65.99, so you may as well have it. It’s not only included in the hotel bill, it is also, by extension, inclusive of all the guests. Good morning, Britain! Good morning, all you munchers and crunchers and belchers – wherever you may be. Speaking personally, the novelty of having breakfast served to me in my room has long since palled. I find the whole experience of staying in hotels alone alienating, and the mornings are worst of all: lonely Onan, in his pants, caffeine-jittery and staring at the traffic coursing by the unopenable window like so many steely worry beads on a tarmac string.”

Read the rest of the latest Real Meals column at the New Statesman here.

“A couple of years ago, a locksmith high on junk food pulled out of a McDonald’s drive-thru without looking and wrote off my car. At the time, as I went in a split second from steel-cosseted calm to rain-drenched shock, I wasn’t that pleased; but as time has gone by I’ve realised that he did me a big favour. However, it isn’t the madness of autogeddon that I wish to examine this week but the plague of overfamiliarity that has swept British society.

“Sitting in the police transit van a few minutes after the accident, I was chivvied through my statement by a couple of officers: ‘Calm down, William,’ said the WPC, reading my name from my driving licence. ‘We need to get the facts straight here.’ I was annoyed by the young woman’s tone, but it wasn’t until my shock wore off – a few hours later – that I sat bolt upright and ejaculated: ‘She called me William!’

“The absurdly youthful police officer is a standard-issue accessory of middle-age, but it can only be in the past decade or so that they’ve begun to address valetudinarian members of the public by our first names. I blame ‘Call Me Tony’ Blair for this insane inversion of social mores, as it wasn’t until the kidult air-guitarist acceded to power that such informality became de rigueur. Now everyone calls me Will: people I’ve never met before, writing me formal requests, employ the ghastly salutation, ‘Hi Will’, or even more absurdly, ‘Dear Will Self’ – as if I were a Quaker – and as for those I encounter in the flesh, only in the US or Germany do they use my proper title: Mister Self.”

Read the rest of Mr Self’s Madness of Crowds column at the New Statesman here.

“Wagamama has been serving a bizarre fusion cuisine – part Japanese traditional, part English nursery slop – for nigh on 20 years now. When the first restaurant opened in the early 1990s its exposed kitchens and austere interior design seemed the dernier cri in foodurism. Checking out the T-shirted waiting staff, punching orders into handheld computer terminals, one was convinced that this was exactly the joint where Deckard the blade runner would chow down, were he sent to hunt replicants in London.

“However, nothing is ever so dated as the future – or, as Theodor Adorno put it: ‘The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself.’ And while during the fin de siècle we may have yearned for flying cars and sexy cyberwomen, what the Noughties brought instead was robotic waiting staff and a strange syncretism of occidental consumption and oriental production, which means that there must now be a significant proportion of British yoof who inhabit an entirely Japanese materiality: shopping at Uniqlo and Muji, eating at Wagamama, reading manga comics and fiddling about with Sony netbooks. All while remaining utterly ignorant of Shinto, Buddhism, the films of Akira Kurosawa and the novels of Mishima. Everything has been lost in translation except the profit motive.”

Read the rest of last week’s Real Meals column at the New Statesman here.

“I’ve been putting it off, hopping up and down, tensing first one buttock then the other, waiting until the pain is insupportable . . . but although it’s a dirty job, someone has to let go and ask the question: why is it that so many men piss in the streets nowadays? Time was when the average British male would no more publicly urinate than he would fornicate or defecate – but now the streets round my way run yellow. Indeed, there’s an alley opposite my house that I can see from where I’m typing this column, and if I chance to glance in that direction I’ll often clock some perfectly ordinary-looking chap duck into it, unzip, then splutter.

“I’ve got so fed up with it that on one occasion, when I saw two men taking a dual leak, I went across and asked one of them where he lived. ‘Why d’you wanna know?’ he said. ‘Simple,’ I replied. ‘So I can come round and piss outside your house.’

“Of course, I’m not so ignorant as to imagine that the taboo against al fresco relief was always in place, but I should imagine that apart from wartime it endured for much of the 20th century. Certainly, I can never remember seeing British men do this when I was a child – it was a dirty foreign habit, indulged in by the likes of the French, whose pissoirs were in any case barely decent. Even in the late 1990s a trip to Paris always began with a distinct urinous tang as you stepped forth from the Gare du Nord, whereas now the smell hits you at St Pancras.”

Read the rest of last week’s Madness of Crowds here at the New Statesman.