I once ate three meals in an evening – and how real is that? It was in Portugal, on the Algarve, and I was travelling alone, aged 20. At a beachfront café, I fell in with some German women who were a little older than me. One of them, who was horse-faced in an attractive, three-times-around-the-paddock-cantering-vigorously sort of way, took a shine to me – and took a shine in particular to the way that I demolished my steak and chips. “Mein Gott!” (or some other stereotypical German exclamation) she cried, “You are having the most impressive appetite – this is very sexy in a man!”

So, thinking I was on a promise, I ordered a second portion, then a third, but to no avail: the horse-faced German galloped off into the Portuguese night with another rider, leaving me to toss and groan and belch the night away. I thought about this the other evening when I found myself eating at the same restaurant for the third time in a week. As I’d ordered the same thing on the previous two occasions, I threw risk to the wind and ordered it again. I say “it”, but actually my repetitiveness was more profound.

I ordered three courses on three separate evenings and all of them were the same. It gets better (or conceivably worse). The first time, I was with someone called Laurie; the second, I was with someone else called Laurie. When I realised that I was eating the same thing, in the same restaurant, accompanied by someone with the same name, for the second consecutive evening, I couldn’t forbear from informing the maverick sociologist and presenter of Thinking Allowed on BBC Radio 4 (for it was Laurie Taylor) – but he sort of blanked this information and shortly afterwards he made his excuses and left, without having so much as touched his starter.

I didn’t mind: I had my mackerel pâté with marinated beetroot to look forward to, followed by the bream with heritage tomato salad and olive oil mash (whatever that might be – personally I’ve always found mashing olive oil surpassing difficult).

There were these culinary treats and also my location, as I was eating in one of the restaurants that is realest to me. It’s not a great restaurant – arguably not even a passable one – but that doesn’t bother me, because the important thing about Joe Allen in Covent Garden is that it is pretty much unchanged since it first opened in the late 1970s: it has the same exposed brick walls, the same woodblock floor, the same long mahogany bar, backed by a full-length mirror. In its heyday, Joe Allen was the hot spot for theatreland and you often saw name actors, directors and playwrights eating there, while many of the staff were larval versions of these professionals, hustling for tips while they waited for their big break.

The framed playbills and posters on the walls remain the same – but in the past few years, since the business was sold to Stephen Gee of Carluccio’s infamy, hairline cracks have begun to appear in the ageing establishment’s slap. The clientele are now more likely to be bridge-and-tunnellers in for a show, rather than the showmen and show-women, while the staff no longer have any pretensions to anything other than a decent wage.

Meanwhile, the menu has mutated. I shan’t bother to itemise the changes exhaustively but the most significant alteration is to its signature bacon cheeseburger. Once positively globular – so stuffed was it with beef, pork, cheese and dill pickle – it now crouches on the plate, looking distinctly flat and wooden. As for the chips, these were once thick-cut and deep-fried in beef dripping, but now they arrive in one of those dumb little metal buckets that are all the rage – moreover, they’re indistinguishable from the ones at McDonald’s.

Am I going to move my business elsewhere? Clearly not, as the three visits in the past week would seem to confirm. Why? There are several reasons for this. First, location: Joe Allen is perfectly placed for my far-flung children to rendezvous. Second, ambience: the restaurant has the air of an Edward Hopper painting, complete with solitary Martini drinkers.

Third, history: the Family Self has been eating here since it opened. Indeed, this was the restaurant where we used to meet when my mother was still alive. And this last reason is perhaps the clincher, explaining not only why I keep going but why I feel compelled so often.

Everyone knows that food is the mortar that cements the family unit, and when your family unit is as, um, non-unitary as mine, the mortar needs to be that much more consistent. Eating at Joe Allen connects me vitally with my late mother’s digestive tract, for she was a New Yorker by birth and the restaurant could have been created for her, as it has a branch in London and another on West 46th Street. Yes, this is an old-style New York bistro – and my mother was an old-style American wiseacre, with a nice line in nasty put-downs.

On that basis alone, I’m happy to go on picking up the tab. As to why my menu selections have been quite so unadventurous recently … Well, while the pace of change is accelerating in almost all areas of our national life, I find comfort in stasis to the point of constipation.

Scientists examining a chicken nugget have discovered DNA from over a hundred individuals mixed into a fowl mush. It makes you think, doesn’t it? I mean, I always used to say to my kids when they ordered nuggets, “You realise that’s made of crushed-up chicken eyelids and testicles,” but I still imagined these were the parts of at most two or three bodies. And while no one with eyes (lidded or otherwise) could fail to see how disgusting the battery farming industry is, this new intelligence gives it a truly diabolic cast: what we’re participating in here is a sort of chicken holocaust.

I mean, I like Sadiq Khan well enough – I even voted for him to become London mayor; and I applaud his decision to attend a Holocaust memorial event on his first day in office. But c’mon, now, Sadiq, that holocaust took place some time ago, while you can walk past any takeaway, anywhere in Britain, and see a teenager put a hundred chickens in his mouth at once! How much better it is when they stick to their staple food – one that has sustained generations of European and American children, and that, one hopes, will do so for many more years to come. I refer, of course, to the cheese sandwich.

A few weeks ago I was having supper at a pizza joint with my friend Cressida, when she remarked, apropos of my ordering a Caesar salad: “Well, it makes a change from eating a cheese sandwich, which is basically what our kids have at every meal, and we ourselves do for a high proportion of them.” Then she began to itemise some of the meals that are “basically a cheese sandwich”. Lasagne, spaghetti Bolognese with Parmesan cheese, a tricolore salad with a piece of nice, crusty bread? All of these, basically, are cheese sandwiches reconfigured – as is almost all Italian cuisine, the pizza being only the most egrcheesgious example.

“But what about a lovely serving of cassata, or an ice-cream treat?” I hear you moan. To which my only reply is: add a wafer, and in all but name you have a cheese sandwich right there on the plate in front of you. After all, what’s ice cream? Only cheese-in-waiting. Cheesy crackers, cheese footballs, the Swiss raclette – the French onion soup served with a chunk of baguette – the humble ploughman’s lunch, or the businessman’s haughty oysters mornay; all, let’s face it, are basically cheese sandwiches. I’m not arguing that this food monoculture is a bad thing – on the contrary, with whole flocks of chickens being immured in nugget-hecatombs, it’s comforting to realise there are still some things in the world that are fairly undifferentiated. True, a cheese sandwich can be a baroque creation, with choice ingredients piled high on a seeded bun: a meat pattie, lettuce, tomato, a wedge of cheese and a dill pick— Oh! silly me, that’s a cheeseburger.

But alternatively a cheese sandwich can be beautifully simple. Consider the lonely Anatolian shepherd, a figure out of antiquity with his woollen cloak and untreated hypotension. See him withdraw a hard disc of unleavened bread from the folds of his cloak; see him withdraw a lump of hard cheese from some other folds of his cloak. See him combine them – and reflect that what you are witnessing is a way of making a cheese sandwich that has remained unchanged for millennia, perhaps since the very first Anatolian grabbed a lactating ewe and rubbed its udder against some emmer wheat, so commencing the whole strange business we call civilisation.

About ten thousand years later, this phenomenon has bodied forth into the world we see about us: a society in which fortunes can be won or lost on the turn of a cheese toastie. One multimillionaire who owes his fortune in large part to an ability to dream up felicitous combinations of basic wheat and dairy products is Jamie Oliver. On his website, he discusses making a cheese sandwich with such oracular eloquence that, reading him, I felt I had a direct connection to some great prophet or otherwise holy man.

“A toasted cheese sandwich is a beautiful thing,” he writes, at once drawing our attention to the sheer wondrousness of God’s creation, “but I’m not messing about here – this is the ultimate one and it’s going to blow your mind.” Whoa! There it is – suddenly you’re in the presence of Ecclesiastes, half expecting Jamie to assert that, of the making of many cheese sandwiches, there is no end (which indeed is the case, especially if you’re taking young folk camping).

Instead, the man who has done more for Britain’s children than anyone since Lord Shaftesbury admonishes us in more exultant tones: “But there is a particular sequence of events that needs to happen in order to achieve the most ridiculously tasty, chomp-worthy sandwich.” In other words, the road of wisdom leads to the palace of excess, because: “Follow this recipe, and it will always make you feel good. It is also especially useful when you’re suffering from a light hangover. This is when the condiments – dolloped on to a side plate like a painter’s palette – really come into their own.”

Stirring stuff, which is why I’m getting up a subscription to replace Eros with a life-size nude statue of Jamie Oliver pointing a fondue fork towards the East End.

In his history Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (the work that lends its title to this column), Charles Mackay disdains the matter of fashion, regarding it as such a transparently crazy and bewilderingly evanescent phenomenon, that to discuss this or that rage for apparel would be quite de trop.

I’ve broadly followed my master on this, though in the past I have discussed such oddities as the mass delusion among young men that the world really wants to see the waistband (and quite a lot of the material) of their underpants. I had some incorrect hypotheses about the origins of this lunacy, and was put right by a savvy reader who informed me that the fashion – if it can be so called – originated in the penitential gulag of the United States, where young African-American men are deprived of their belts and shoelaces, and so hobbled by denim.

I could, of course, go to town on the madness of the great crowd of legislators, law-enforcement agencies and bigots of all stripes who conspire to keep a million black men in jail (so indirectly forcing us to look at all those underpants), but I have something far more important I wish to discuss: shirt tails. Yes, you heard me right: taking my role as the Prince of the Picayune seriously, I wish to dedicate the next 600-odd words to these lappets of cloth, and specifically to their tucking-in (or not).

Time was when no shirt tail went untucked, just as no good deed was undone. I grew up in an innocent era, long before Jimmy Savile invented paedophilia, when we all listened to the Home Service for entertainment, while for a treat we smeared Marmite on our ration cards and licked it off.

Before we scampered shivering on to the rugby pitch, Mr Murgatroyd would check that we hadn’t “cheated” and worn our underpants, by sliding his hand under the waistband of our shorts and having a bit of a rummage around.

As I say, it was an innocent era, and none of us begrudged him copping a feel, but what bothered me then – and bothers me to this day – is that I can’t remember whether I tucked my shirt into my shorts in those days or not.

True, the untucking of rugby shirts was an informality that probably got under way in the Swinging Sixties, along with similar dishabille on Hawaiian beaches, but at some point in the past ten (or possibly even twenty) years, people stopped tucking in their workaday shirts and blouses as well. Now the fashion – if we can dignify it with such a name – appears ubiquitous, such that as one walks the clone high streets and shopping esplanades of Britain, one sees legions of these sloppy dressers shambling towards you.

“So many,” as Eliot might well have said, “who would’ve thought life would’ve untucked so many?” And included among them is me, because although I, too, cannot remember when it started, I haven’t done any serious tucking in for what seems like a long cotton time.

But why has this come about? An obvious explanation is that it’s due to the hellishness of the modern trouser, with its tight and flat waist. Back in the pleated day, when my father wore grey flannel bags that could easily do joint service as temporary accommodation for a platoon of the Home Guard, there was plenty of room for shirt tails as big as elephants’ ears, but nowadays even modest flaps, when tucked, ruck up to form an uncomfortable bulge.

A complementary reason – for men at least – is that the widespread adoption of boxer shorts has also cut down on the crotch space available. A third factor may be an odd sort of sartorial-cultural transmission: with more people of Indian subcontinental extraction about, dressed in shalwar kameez, the rest of us may be unconsciously aping them. I concede that this seems a little far-fetched – but you’ll agree that it relates the practice to some sort of style.

Otherwise, we can only view the untucking as evidence of a mass infantilism – which is how I am inclined to feel when I see these kidults coming towards me with their shirt tails a-wavering. I can barely restrain myself from saying to each and every one of them: “Come here and I’ll tuck your shirt in for you.” It’s only the memory of giving evidence at Mr Murgatroyd’s trial that restrains me – this, and the flapping fact that I, too, am but a small linen wave in the great, heaving ocean of the untucked.

But at least in my case there’s an excuse: my father (he of the big bags) had great difficulty in maintaining any semblance of being comme il faut and absolutely no modesty at all. Suffering as he did from the social necessity of tucking his shirt into his trousers; he would then tighten them with a belt lashed around the waistband. Unfortunately, so antiquated were his strides that they weren’t equipped with belt-loops, and so the whole assemblage would begin to unravel after a few . . . strides. Unperturbed, the Old Man would simply ungird himself in plain sight, exposing acres of bilious yellow flannel underwear, retuck, and gird up once more. It was a maddening spectacle, not just embarrassing – but then it did prepare me for the general shapelessness of things to come.

The last time I addressed you from my bully-beef pulpit I was going to write about my all-consuming yen for a Fray Bentos individual steak and kidney pie, but as there wasn’t one to hand to mouth, I related the electronic cigarette incident at Pizza Express instead. This week, I can report that I have attempted to secure one of the meatylicious treats – and once again failed.

Mr Vairavar, who keeps the convenience store immediately beneath my flat, did have a Fray Bentos minced beef and onion pie on his shelves (and very attractively priced it was, too, at £1.99) but I knew that it wouldn’t hit the suety spot. I had already undertaken a smallish tour of supermarkets in the environs, and although I hadn’t secured the elusive pudding I still found plenty of food for thought.

In Tesco, I was struck by the presence of a paella ready-meal in the chiller cabinet. All convenience foods rely not on a specific ingredient, but rather on its absence: time has been left out, usually in favour of some artificial flavouring. I think of paella as a dish to be prepared over hours, possibly an entire day. Cooked in the warm south, beneath the canopy of a leafy bower and before an azure sea – coaxed into full and piquant fruition by some adipose and moustachioed duenna, while almond-eyed kiddies dangle from her skirts and the menfolk sit around drinking harsh Rioja, smoking black tobacco and spitting.

Mind you, human ingenuity has been diminishing the temporal component of our cuisine for a long time now: in the Middle Ages salt was the preferred preservative, but by the 1900s tinned meat was being despatched from Fray Bentos in Uruguay and making the long voyage to dock in the British duodenum.

Also on Tesco’s shelves was an extensive selection of pasta sauces. All the usual suspects were there, including Loyd Grossman’s and several variations on the Dolmio theme. It had been a bad week for the Dolmio brand, what with Mars Food, which owns it, feeling it was incumbent on it to place a label on these sauces (and its other products) warning punters that they aren’t “everyday” foods but should be eaten only “occasionally” – say, once a week.

I stood in the aisle, my dreams macerated at my feet. Not eat a Dolmio pasta sauce every day of the week (and even twice daily)? What kind of freshly preserved, heavily sugared and salted hell was this? I have clung on for years to a vision of the good life, summed up for me by Dolmio pasta sauce adverts of the early 1990s, in which a tumultuously happy extended Neapolitan family chows down at a long table laid out under the spreading boughs of an olive tree: old crones and rosy-cheeked bambini, voluptuous girls and their blushing beaus, the entire assembly benignly surveyed by a greying paterfamilias, a role I reserved (don’t laugh) for myself.

True, I can count the number of times that I have eaten Dolmio pasta sauces on the fingers of one leprous hand, but as with most commodity fetishism – contra Marx – it’s the thought that counts. So, I bought a jar of Dolmio sauce and bore it home as a sort of edible time capsule; if it isn’t an “everyday” food, I reasoned, I could wait for the Apocalypse to crack off the lid.

I considered buying a jar of Loyd Grossman sauce as well. I’ve no idea if it’s any good but I met Grossman once, in his capacity as chairman of English Heritage’s blue plaque committee. He’d invited me to unveil the plaque for the short story writer HH Munro (whose nom de plume was Saki), which was to be sited on a property on Mortimer Street, London, now tenanted by a firm of accountants.

A scaffold had been put up outside so that the plaque could be mounted, but Loyd and I still had to crawl over one of the partners’ desks in order to reach it. I found him to be a warm and genuine man with no side at all – only a bottom, with which I was nose-to-tail during the desk-clambering. So, that’s the problem I have with his pasta sauces: instead of associating them with joyful consanguinity, I think of systematic pederasty. (Not, I hasten to add, because of Loyd Grossman’s bottom but because Saki had these proclivities and, according to his biographer, whom I met the same day, the writer kept a scrupulous menu of his conquests, including details of their, um, portion size.)

The next stop was Lidl – always a bizarre experience. The last branch of Lidl I’d visited was situated exactly on the death strip of the old Berlin Wall and surrounded by silver birches that looked to be precisely 25 years old. It was sheer foolishness to expect this outlet to have one of the elusive Fray Bentos individual steak and kidney puddings – its stock is discounted stuff that it has picked up cheap.

Fun fact: founded in 1930, Lidl was originally called Schwarz Foods but being referred to as “Schwarzmarkt” would have been a bit of a liability, especially once war was declared, and so the name was changed. There were no black-market puddings here but almost an entire aisle stacked with serrano hams! I would have bought one of these time-infused meats . . . but I had my Dolmio end-of-the-world to look forward to.

The writer Chris Hall, that redoubtable Ballardian observer of the craziness of the modern inscape, recently sent me a link to an Evening Standard item on the redecoration of the Brixton branch of McDonald’s. It may well be that others of these low-esteemed eateries have been similarly tricked out; but if it’s Brixton alone, either the higher-ups in the chain’s chain are complete and utter bastards, or they’re unbelievably shrewd.

Anyway, the form this makeover takes is that the tables, the walls, the chairs and the very lampshades have all been bedizened with pseudo graffiti tags. Yes, yes, you’ve read me right: they’ve made the fast-food joint look as if it’s been subjected to a high-speed attack, in which a maddened crowd of hip-hopping taggers has invaded, armed only with spray cans and a collective identity crisis.

Chris appended the weblink with a cri from his own bitter coeur: “What next to complete the mise en scène – plastic dog turds on the floor? Or, er, their own-branded litter? In which case they could cut their own costs at the same time by sacking the cleaners . . .” But when I watched the online video clip I found out that Brixtonians themselves felt rather differently. True, there was one interviewee who said the new livery was a slur on the inhabitants, because it implies they’re all delinquent (or, worse still, the sort of idiots who think that a little bit of delinquency adds relish to a burger), but most of those the Standard spoke to used words such as “colourful” and “fun” to describe the patronising paint job.

What can we take away from this takeaway? Are we to assume that the denizens of Brixton are so sheepy that they don’t even realise when they’re being led by the nose? Or are they being ironic? Or could it be that they’re expressing a sincerely held opinion? Assessing the subtle inclination of such velleities interests me: in part because, a few years ago, I got involved in a similar situation – one that also altered the old, raddled and much-loved face of Brixton: I was approached by an arts organisation that was pitching for a commission to produce a piece of street art for Electric Avenue.

The piece was to occupy two large windows of the branch of Boots on the corner of Electric Avenue, which suffered damage in April 1999 when David Copeland, the infamous “London Nail Bomber”, planted one of his evil devices nearby. It’s perhaps a comment on Boots as much as Brixton that the windows remained boarded up for nigh on a decade.

Anyway, my idea for the piece was that I would hang out on the Electric Avenue around the market stalls, earwigging the conversations of traders and shoppers, and then edit this raw found dialogue into a series of phrases. These would be incorporated into a sort of electronic signboard, which would randomly light up one or other snippet of Brixton-speak to create a never-ending and ever-changing dialogue. I confess that I thought it a pretty nifty idea – and I was even a little bit proud to think a mind-child of mine would be taking such a prominent role in the vibrant street life of an area I have known and loved for many years (I live less than a mile away). So – I did my hanging out, gathered my snippets and I submitted these to the then Brixton town manager, a woman of impressive size but gentle mien.

When we next met, the town manager seemed a little worried. “The thing is,” she said, “some of the people on the planning committee feel that some of the phrases you’ve collected aren’t really representative of Brixton’s inhabitants.” Obviously, I demurred, reminding her that, far from being unrepresentative, the words had been uttered by real, live Brixtonians. But she remained adamant: the references to thieving, begging and drug-dealing would have to go. I confess that I slightly took my eye off the street-art ball at this point, so narked was I by the madness of censoring reality in this way. And there was more strangeness to come: I waited and waited for my piece to be installed on Electric Avenue, but then when it did happen it was a bit like the Stonehenge scene in This Is Spinal Tap: it looked like my electronic signboard as I’d conceived it – it behaved like my electronic signboard as well – but it was much, much smaller. In point of fact: it was tiny.

And it still is tiny – and still is there, at the end of Electric Avenue, in amongst all the hugger-mugger of the market, with its shoppers, its traders . . . and its beggars, petty thieves and minor drug dealers. If you happen to stop for a snack at the graffiti-decorated McDonald’s, why not make it a simulation double-header and check out my piece as well?

Brixton is currently at number one on the gentrification hit list, with local colour of all shades being annulled by the beige infill of hipsterdom. If things carry on this way, soon the only graffiti you’ll see in the area will be in McDonald’s, and instead of hearing racy dialogue, you’ll have to read it. I suppose this constitutes progress . . . and I look forward to Brixton’s risqué reputation being fully expunged when, in the not-too-distant future, reconstructions of the 1981 riots will be staged for tourists.

I was going to write about the Fray Bentos individual steak and kidney pudding this week, which isn’t so much a meal as a world entire, but then there was this . . . incident. And so it is I return once more to Pizza Express, and gladly.

I’ve animadverted on this particular purveyor of farinaceous discs in this space several times already, but feel no compunction in returning, doglike, to the colloidal matter which, let’s face it, looks like vomit. Why? Because I’m Homo pizza-expressus if I am anything: not only have I eaten at this chain for as long as I can remember, but I’ve also raised four strapping children on its nosh. The last time I crunched the thin-crusty numbers, I calculated I had paid for several football fields’ worth of Margheritas, Venezianas and American Hots – and although I’m not going to do it again, let me just state for the record: you owe me, Pizza Express – truly you do.

What made the incident so very galling is that after a dip in attendance now that my kids’ palates have grown a tad more sophisticated, I’ve resumed dining there regularly. Why? Its Soho 65 pizza (on a gluten base) satisfies all my pernickety dietary requirements, and the decor – two parts constructivist to one of the Amalfi coast – is easy enough on the eye. True, I never enter a Pizza Express and think, “Wow! What a show-stopper!” But by the same token, I seldom do so and then speedily retreat because it’s an utter shithole.

Take the Pizza Express in Langham Place, just south of Broadcasting House and cheek by jowl with a branch of Byron. I’ve taken to eating there on Mondays, because that’s when I get my fundament greased by Doctor Wong of Wimpole Street. The place is a symphony of pale wood and pale wood-laminate, so, as a dynamic media professional (who requires regular fundament-greasing), I’m right at home there. So at home that I think nothing of puffing away gently and discreetly on my electronic cigarette.

The other lunchtime I was doing just this when the manager appeared and peremptorily informed me: “You’re not allowed to do that here.” I, naturally enough, asked why, and she replied: “It’s company policy.”

Well, surely, a bullish fellow such as me can be forgiven for reacting to this red flag. “Yes,” I snapped back, “it may well be company policy, but it isn’t against the law, and I’m not at all sure it’s legally enforceable – so why is it company policy?”

Anyway, I’ll spare you any more of the back-and-forth; suffice to say I wasn’t very successful in conveying this distinction to the no doubt harassed and underpaid manager who was, after all, only doing her job. The upshot of the incident was that I, considerably aggrieved, did not stop, and she, considerably aggrieved, reported me to some Higher Authority. (I picture a sort of giant Arcimboldo figure, its cheesy features composed of many and varied pizzas.)

I know this, because the next time I popped in I was bearded by another manager. “I need to talk to you,” he said, “because you were abusive to my colleague the last time you were in.” I cavilled at this: “‘Abusive’ is an overstatement. ‘Forthright’ would cover it.”

“The thing is,” he pressed on, “it’s against company policy to use electronic cigarettes . . .”

Again: I’ll save you the repeat-order of dialogue. Once I’d established I wasn’t going to be forcibly exiled from the mozzarella Eden, I engaged more fully with the manager, and he conceded that, no, he had no idea as to the whys and wherefores of this policy.

“All your colleague had to do,” I said, “was give me a reason, and I would’ve complied right away. I’m sure you, in your work, have to do all sorts of stuff that’s ‘company policy’ but which you think is utter bullshit.”

Somewhat hesitantly he concurred, and that is how we left it, after I’d further mollified him by conceding that I could be “a bit of an arsehole at times” (just ask Dr Wong).

And it’s true: I can be. I would estimate that 99 per cent of the time I am completely civil to people in the service industries, and at least 50 per cent of the time I’m a heavy tipper. (Ask Nick Lezard if you don’t believe me: I’ve sat across restaurant tables from him, settling the bill, and watched his mouth gape in disbelief as I bestow on the waiter pretty much Nick’s own weekly wage.)

Yet there are certain things that do drive me completely spark-a-loco. Company policy is one, and the way that baristas nowadays ask you for your name before frothing your coffee, so they can inscribe it on the cardboard cup. Yes, yes, I do understand the practicalities of making several sweet slops at once, yet there is still something so intrusive about it that I always quibble – and the form my quibbling takes is to reply: “Hitler, my name is Hitler.”

Possibly the biggest surprise my life has to offer is how compliant 99 per cent of baristas are with this bizarre (and possibly abusive) request, obligingly scrawling the hateful designator without any cavilling whatsoever. I’ve various theories about why this should be so, but on balance my suspicion is that the reason for their compliance is quite simple – it’s company policy.

Yes, it’s official: standing on busy escalators is faster than walking up (or down) them. Research undertaken by my favourite local transport provider, Transport for London, has conclusively proved that if people stand on both sides of the escalator during peak travel times, the numbers carried can increase by as much as a third.

Well, for once that’s a piece of good crowd news in our febrile and fissiparous world, guiding us towards sensible mass behaviour of a type to appal Yevgeny Zamyatin: think We, people, not a Beckettian I. TfL’s aim is to introduce standing-only escalators at some of its busiest and deepest stations in order to cut down on congestion.

The idea that plonking yourself on an escalator like an inert potato is faster than walking obviously seems absurd if you’re a limber fellow like me, who cannot see a long escalator without wanting to sprint up it or trip lightly down, sole after sole barely glancing the groovy tread – but of course the vast number of London Tube passengers are morbidly obese tourists humping ectomorphic wheelie bags, and such is their aversion to exercise that they clutter up the subterranean halls waiting for a tread to stand on.

Moreover, according to the escalator-flow wonks at TfL, passengers also jealously guard their personal space, often not using up all the treads available, but insisting on at least one between them and the next tubby traveller.

So, from now on, using just signage and other info-bumf, TfL will instruct its passengers at a number of the busiest stations in London to stand on both sides of the escalator. According to the aptly named Peter McNaught, operations director at London Underground: “Anyone who wants to walk on the other escalators will be free to do so, but we hope that with record numbers using the Tube, customers will enjoy being part of this experiment to find the most efficient ways of getting around.”

To which the only possible reply is, “Go fuck yourself!” Because I’ve not only been running up and down crowded escalators for years, I also experience some of my wildest and most bacchanalian pleasure from elbowing aside anyone unfortunate enough to get in my way.

As any true Londoner (or city-dweller generally) knows, observing these mass-travel mores is what divides us thrusting rams from the baaing flocks of docile ewes. To take the escalator at a run is a badge of honour for a metropolitan type – it shows he or she is a force to be reckoned with, fully competent when it comes to navigating the urban millrace.

As I’m pounding up or down I like to cry out, “Excuse me!” even as I barge against unsuspecting shoulders, or kick small children into mid-air – this retrospective “warning” being, naturally, a stern admonition, and even a punishment. Yes, yes, I know my behaviour is obnoxious – I understand that on crowded public transport we should all try to rub along (metaphorically) – but as our cities grow more densely populated, and the pace of life grows more frenetic, we all have recourse to strategies that help us to feel the shape of our individuality amid the crush.

So, Mr McNaught, your signage and info-bumf will avail you naught. I intend to go on escalator-yomping for as long as my legs hold out. Other folk imagine that by piping pop into their inner ears, or fixedly playing Candy Crush as they bumble along, they’re somehow mitigating the ugly reality of being just a number, not a name, but to those of us who view the Tube as a psychic assault course, they’re clearly out of the running: mere drones, waiting for some operations director or other to tell them what to say, and think, and, of course, do.

(And apropos Candy Crush, has anyone else noticed the strange similarity between these streams of cascading and intermittently exploding citrus fruits, and the flows of underground passengers on, er, escalators? People are pretty scathing about Candy Crush, but a reasonable case can be made for it being the legitimate art form of mass transit systems for precisely this reason.)

Not only will I continue running on escalators, but I’m going to persist in sprinting on travelators. You can really get up speed on a travelator! And when the wooden passengers fly every which way out of your path, the similarity to a ten-pin bowling alley is most pleasing. I often used to go to Paris just in order to run full pelt along the notorious trottoir roulant rapide installed in the Montparnasse-Bienvenüe Métro station. I like to think my bullish runs alone contributed to some of the injuries that led to its being replaced by a boring old one that runs at 2.9kph.

Every child has experienced the sense of wonder that comes as you watch the once-solidly right-angled risers and treads mysteriously flattening under your flying feet, before disappearing into the steely maw – but if McNaught and his ilk have their way, future generations will be condemned to leaden passivity: standing there, watching the advertisements purl past. That’s the wet-look of capitalism. In Mr McNaught’s happy world all you have to do to progress is stand still.