Will Self

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.