“I’d like to be able to say that I’ve no idea how many Pizza Express pizzas I’ve eaten – but that would be a lie. Unlike all those burgers, kebabs, chicken drumsticks, chips and sandwiches, which, when I try to focus on them as individual taste experiences, are subsumed to the great undifferentiated mass of comestibles, the Pizza Express pizza has an eerie precision about it. This could be due to geometry alone: even a mathematical ignoramus such as me can calculate the area of a 12-inch pizza to be 3.14159 (6 x 6) = 113.09724 square inches. And while that seems a preposterous size for a disc of unleavened bread topped with melted cheese and tomato purée, the very fact that no matter which one of the chain’s 370 branches you sit down in, you can guarantee being served with substantially the same 113.09724 square inches, tends my mind ineluctably towards further quantifications.

“Every fortnight between 1997 and 2007, I would take my younger children to have supper with my older children at the Pizza Express in Shepherd’s Bush. But those 250 pizzas are only the baseline around which the rest of my statistical analysis proceeds. I can assert that at least another 250 pizzas were consumed during that period at extempore family meals out and even gatherings when nominally ‘adult’ friends said, ‘Why don’t we just have a pizza?’ in response to the bewildering array of foodstuff choice.

“Then there’s the outliers. I began eating at Pizza Express with some regularity in the mid-1980s and still eat there to this day – that’s another 14 years during which an estimate of a pizza a month is conservative. So, 668 pizzas consumed by me alone, but if I add in the pizzas I’ve bought for my four children during the core period (1,000); the pizzas I bought for the older children between 1994 (when my son was four and my daughter two) and 1997 (150); then the pizzas since the regular Shepherd’s Bush visitations ceased (approximately 75), we have a total of 1,893.”

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

“What is one to make of the shrines that are now regularly erected in the aftermath of fatal car crashes? It may be a failure on my part but I can’t remember these extempore street furnishings being part of the British landscape or urban environment until the late 1970s. Indeed, the first shrines – such as the one in Barnes that sprang up after Marc Bolan’s accident – were an obvious outgrowth of the hero worship their subject inspired in life. It followed that depositing flowers, cards and handwritten poems at the site where he died had a certain logic: these were funerary gifts suitable for a pop star, adulation to sustain him in the netherworld.

“I think it highly likely that this is the sort of cosmology cleaved to by serious fans, whose belief in the quasi- or wholly divine nature of guitar-pickers, and even actors, supports an entire iconography, complete with relics and – after Elvis – resurrections. The religion of fame is a syncretism, of course, between deep-seated animism and whichever monotheism happens to be locally dominant. If a 20th-century boy such as Bolan was accorded a kind of sainthood by virtue of his notoriety, then it also made sense to pray at his shrine for a similarly glittery and platform-soled career.”

To read the rest of the latest Madness of Crowds column, visit the New Statesman.

“I’m not altogether sure Christmas dinner is a meal at all, let alone a real one; rather, it is the focus of all the faith, hope and joy – as well as the transgenerational neuroses and psychic dyspepsia – that we load on to that already heavily freighted barque ‘the family’. Granted, not everybody who eats Christmas dinner does so with their family, but even childless friends who refer to the rest of us – not a little contemptuously – as ‘breeders’ seem to end up pulling crackers and donning paper hats, thereby making up for a lack of infants by infantilising themselves.

“No one really likes Christmas dinner. It squats dumpily in the middle of the festive season, a throwback to an age before all of East Anglia was given over to factory turkey production, and when gorging yourself stupid was a rare event, combining both the attributes of a heartfelt orgasm and spiritual ecstasy. In the pre-Christian era, winter saturnalias involved a social bouleversement, and this endured until the early modern era.

“Nowadays, however, far from the masters serving their servants, we have all become the slaves of an appetite we no longer feel.”

Read the rest of the December 17 Real Meals column at the New Statesman.

“The odds are that, if you’re reading this piece, you don’t play the National Lottery. I say ‘play’ advisedly because, for millions of your fellow citizens, there’s nothing playful about the Lottery at all. Yes, they may say, they’re only having a bit of a flutter, but in the back of their clouded minds, as they stand hunched by the till on a rainy Tuesday morning in Solihull or Swindon, there lurk the phantoms of freedom, effortless sexual conquest, power and possession – all the things that near-limitless money might buy.

“I’ll go further. (Don’t I always?) The odds are way higher that you’re reading these words while standing behind someone in a queue in a newsagent’s in Solihull than they are of that someone winning the jackpot. There’s a 1 in 13,983,816 chance of picking all six winning numbers in any given week’s Lotto draw and, good university-graduate statistician that you undoubtedly are, you know those odds remain the same no matter how many times someone plays, just as it doesn’t matter how many times you flip a coin: the odds of landing on Queenie’s constipated smile will remain absolutely even.”

Read the rest of the latest The Madness of Crowds column at the New Statesman.

“If you’re anything like me, you probably find the global dominance of the Subway sandwich chain bewildering. There are now 32,046 Subway branches in 90 countries, making it the biggest fast-food purveyor the world has ever seen. But for why? The outlets are nothing but tiled slots with an interior design suggestive of a post-apocalyptic New York: the subway map, brownstones and Brooklyn Bridge, seared like the silhouettes of atom bomb victims into the shit-brown decor.

“Many pundits attribute the success of the chain to one simple perception – Subway is the healthy option. In marked contrast to the super-sized food fascism of the beef-farting, chicken-black-hole-of-Calcutta merchants, some joker in Florida actually lost weight on a Subway-only diet. Needless to say, he’s been a poster-boy for the chain ever since, a sort of Horst Wessel of hearty Italian bread. I’m not arguing with the idea that you can eat healthily at Subway, but then you modulate your nutritional requirements just as effectively at any corner sandwich shop.

“No, the secret of Subway’s success rests, in my view, on two things alone: first, there’s the very fact that it is a chain, offering a modular eating experience that can be simply replicated from Bloemfontein to Bangor. Nothing succeeds like ubiquity, and the more Subways there are, the more the sandwiches they serve approach the Platonic ideal. Then there’s the store-baked bread. I’m not sure what the actual mechanics of this are, but most probably the bread arrives in the form of pre-kneaded and portioned dough, and is simply popped in the ovens. No matter: the by-product is that warm, yeasty stench that wafts from the door of every Subway, selling the scurrying punter the idea that here be Mama.”

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