Will Self

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.

Of the film adaptations that had been made of his work during his lifetime, JG Ballard vouchsafed to me that he liked Jonathan Weiss’s version of The Atrocity Exhibition the best. It was hardly a surprising verdict; the movie, released in 2000, eschews any of the easy certainties of narrative for a furious collage of extreme images – urban wastelands, nuclear explosions, penises rhythmically pumping in and out of vaginas – all to the accompaniment of a voice-over comprising near-verbatim passages from the quasi-novel. And as the book is a furious collage of extreme images, the film is of the highest fidelity imaginable.

Ballard also liked Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Empire of the Sun, although more, one suspects, because of the opportunity he got to be an extra in a party scene that was set in a simulacrum of his parents’ interwar home in Shanghai. So tickled was he by this Möbius-looping of reality and the imagined that Ballard wrote about the episode in another roman-à-clef, The Kindness of Women. When it was announced in the early 1990s that David Cronenberg was to adapt Ballard’s apocalyptic tale of autogeddon, Crash, and moreover set it in Toronto, I was so exercised that I phoned the writer. “You can’t let him do that, Jim,” I protested (or words to that effect). “Crash is one of the great London novels. The city demands that it be set right here!” He was having none of it and gently talked me down: the point of the novel was to describe a global phenomenon, one Ballard termed “the death of affect”. It was quite irrelevant which city the film was set in – the important point was that Cronenberg’s affectless vision and planar cinematography, all lit at operating-theatre strength, strongly resonated with Ballard.

Again, I rather suspect he liked the furore that surrounded its release – the late Alexander Walker having conniptions, screening bans all over the shop – rather more than he did the film. It would be a very absurd counterfactual indeed to try to imagine what Ballard would have made of the latest adaptation to enter the lists – but then, I’ve never worried about appearing ridiculous. For my money, Ben Wheatley’s film of High-Rise, scripted by his partner, Amy Jump, is a superb piece of work but how far it conforms to Ballard’s notoriously minatory vision is another matter.

I suppose I could be credited with an infinitesimal contribution, as Jump came to see me when she was working on the screenplay. She wanted, she said, to speak to someone who had known the writer personally, but whether she managed to get much of use out of me, I have no idea. All I can recall saying is that she and Wheatley had their work cut out, given that the novel has no proper plot to speak of, being, in ­essence, a series of flashbacks from a scene neatly encapsulated by the book’s opening line: “Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.”

Ballard had an impressive strike rate as a prognosticator. His early apocalyptic novels fried, drowned and blew the world apart, anticipating the environmental depredations to come, while his acute apprehension of what he saw as “the marriage of nightmare and reason which has dominated the 20th century” made him sensitive to both the rise of mediatisation and its associated pseudo-events, and also to the peculiar forms that anomie takes in societies that are characterised by material abundance and spiritual poverty.

In Ballard’s novel, the eponymous high-rise is presciently sited where One Canada Square, the iconically dull centrepiece of Canary Wharf, raised its ugly, pyramidal head a decade or so later; and although the notion of a war between social classes occupying higher and lower floors of a giant tower block might, in the mid-1970s, have seemed to be taking flight from the perceived problems of brutalist public housing, Ballard’s tale anticipates the London skyline of today, with its row upon row of “luxury” apartment blocks, inflated into salience by global gusts of flight capital.

It is difficult to locate the site of Wheatley’s and Jump’s high-rise precisely – the film was shot on location in the old Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast but there is a teasing ambiguity in the medium and long shots, with London seemingly ever hovering on the smoggy horizons. Perhaps the boldest decision that the film-makers have made, however, is to set their adaptation not in the near-future of 2016 but in that of 1974. Ballard once said that he was only interested in what will happen in “the next five minutes”; and it is undoubtedly this ­enthusiasm for the inchoate that gives his tales their air of the unexpected. By reverse-engineering an imagined future in which men with handlebar moustaches ply cine cameras while saturnalian suburbanites trash their futuristic pads, Wheatley and Jump have introduced a perverse note of humour to what is otherwise a very grim series of events.

Towards the end of his life, Ballard said to me that he regretted not having been able to write in a more ludic, or even comic vein. I remember remonstrating with him: Millennium People, his penultimate novel, had just been published and I thought it was suffused with the tinder-dry wit that was present in the rest of his oeuvre, but only faintly. Now comes an adaptation of High-Rise that brings that dry wit to the fore. It may not be everyone’s idea of a laugh-out-loud film but, frankly, who cares what ­everyone thinks? I don’t – and nor, quite obviously, did Ballard.

Some psychogeographer or other has stencilled a phone junction box on our road with this apposite slogan: “Have You Ever Walked Down This Road Before?” To which the answer always is: “Yes, thousands of times, because it’s the way to the Tube station.” In fact, the walk to this Tube station is almost exactly the same distance as the walk to East Finchley Tube station that I made from my natal home, twice daily, throughout my childhood; so, embarking on it, I feel myself to be a Start-rite kid yet again – and for ever. Then, when you round the junction box, you see on its other side this slogan: “Do You Know What’s Around the Corner?” To which my answer – both existentially and geographically – is all too often: I haven’t a clue.

I’m obsessed by locale rather than location this week, because I’ve rented a tiny “work flat” up the road from my house, and the mere act of walking to and from this mini-gaff, and sitting in it for a few hours a day, has made me apprehend the neighbourhood in a new way. I’ve lived in the same inner-south London terraced house for twenty years now, and every morning at around eleven, I see from my study window a generously proportioned woman making the bed in the flat opposite. I’ve never spoken to this woman – never even seen her in the street, to my knowledge – and yet I’ve shared this important ritual of her quotidian life with her for two decades. This, for me, is the very essence of the urban: the ceaseless mash-up between the intimate and the anonymous.

Equally essential to city life is going down the same street again and again, wearing a groove in the Yorkstone paving. The flat the plump woman plumps her pillows in is part of a low-rise but brutalist estate that stretches for about half a kilometre, and which at the further end includes the small block containing my mini-gaff-nouveau. This makes me feel a little strange – as if the rest of my body has finally been compelled to follow my eyes, out from my window, in through the adipose duvet-smoother’s, then out through her back door and along the winding lane that bisects the estate lengthwise. Perhaps it’s little other than the shock of the new (either that or getting old), but I’ve fallen in love with the little estate. I particularly like the way the blocks are arranged along the S-shaped lane to form either 3D crenulations or 2D castellation; you have the sense, as you walk through the defile, that the architect of this modest 1960s public housing development really believed everyone should have the opportunity to live in a built environment that fused the domestic with the dramatic.

Why might this be the rose-tinted-window-glass perspective of a valetudinarian? Well, older readers will have noticed how, with each successive decade, buildings they formerly believed to be naught but expensively piled-up excrement have begun to acquire the lineaments of classicism. We’re all little Betjemans, really, merely waiting our turn to found our equivalents of the Victorian Society, so that we can save another batch of much-loved eyesores.

For my generation it’s the system-built point blocks, slabs and low-rises of the 1960s and 1970s, but no doubt in another twenty years there’ll be a Postmodernist Society fanatically dedicated to preserving Terry Farrell’s legacy. Outside my mini-gaff-nouveau there’s a waste chute that takes the form of a single stalk of concrete beams – the bulge in the middle being the trap door you deposit your rubbish bags in. There is something about this form – at once utterly fabricated and yet sinuously organic – that sets my sclerotic heart aflutter.

Inhabiting any new locale involves adopting new perspectives, and relocating a few hundred metres up the road makes the adjustment particularly uncanny (in the strict, Freudian sense of something that’s very close to being homelike but doesn’t win the cigar).

From my fresh purlieu I can see a lot of the stale old landmarks: but of course they seem slightly strange; just as all my local trips – to the corner shop, the café or the post office – have had to be recalibrated. A friend of mine who was abandoned by her mother during childhood told me it wasn’t the desertion that had traumatised her most, but the discovery, after over a year had elapsed, that her errant parent was in fact living only a couple of hundred yards up the road.

I know what’s freaking me out most, though: sitting typing in my new office the other evening, I became aware – as they say in the military – of eyes-on; and, looking through the window, I saw a man standing on the exterior walkway of the flats opposite. He was slightly above me, and thus at a similar distance and in exactly the same position as I used to be in relation to the well-upholstered mattress-turner. For a frozen moment, I considered my fate: had I become potential subject matter for another scribe? In the future would an article be published (or, more likely, downloaded directly to interested brains), in which this nameless man descanted on the strange melange of intimacy and anonymity with which he has been regarding me, day in and day out, for twenty years?

A little under a year ago I wrote in this place about an encounter I’d had with Barry Sheerman MP and a Virgin Trains snack box on a train travelling from Manchester to London. At the time, what most bothered me about the snack box was its weird appearance: the cardboard printed with photo-real wickerwork so as to give the impression it was a sturdy hamper full of wholesome victuals ideal for a leisurely picnic lunch, rather than the flimsy packet of salty and sugary titbits Richard Branson was “giving” me for my real-life meal.

I swore at the end of my column that I would keep the hideous snack box for ever to remind me never to eat such toxic pap, but when I was tidying up my office the other day and came upon it looking just as vile – with its fake leather luggage tags that read, respectively, “Virgin Trains” and “Follow a Different Train of Thought” – I did indeed follow a different train of thought: “I happen to be going up to Manchester in a couple of days. Why don’t I take the snack box with me and, when I get there, eat it?”

Yes, yes, I know – eating the contents of a Virgin Trains snack box at my age looks like giving in to a dreadful taedium vitae, but I liked the idea of negating the entire Sheerman/Branson/snack box cluster-fuck by performing this odd little ritual; perhaps, I unreasoned, if I eat it mindfully enough I’ll succeed in flipping us all into a parallel universe where Richard Branson doesn’t exist, and where the business empire that occupies the same niches as his is branded “Promiscuous”.

OK, this is a live-action exercise – I have the snack box in front of me as I look down on the Shudehill transport interchange in central Manchester, and I’m now going to fiddle with its “leather” handles and open the damn thing.

Inside are the following:

1. One 330ml bottle of Wenlock spring water, “bottled at source for Virgin Trains”.

2. One 20g bag of Ten Acre “hand cooked crisps”.

3. One Squash Stix – a sachet of orange concentrate to be mixed, I assume, with 200ml of the Wenlock Edge.

4. One 22g bag of Cathedral City Baked Bites (mini biscuits baked with “real Cheddar”).

5. One 20g bag of yoghurt and raisin mix by the Dormen.

6. And, finally, one 22g bag of Cadbury Mini Fingers (“For the Good Times, Wherever!”).

OK, I confess: even as I was typing this list, I managed to chomp my way through the crisps and I now feel nauseous. Not that the crisps are especially revolting – it’s just that the little screed on the back of the Ten Acre bag makes distinctly queasy reading:

“Maybe you’re sitting on a train right now looking at the back of this packet, or maybe you’re relaxing on the sofa enjoying a good read . . .”

Really? Surely, if I were enjoying a good read it could only be these actual words I was reading – a reflexivity as bewildering as the whole snack box exercise itself.

Ah, well, better press on with the next course. I, for one, have never understood the thinking behind crackers infused with cheese during the baking process. Isn’t the whole point of having crackers wedded to cheese to perform the ceremony yourself, just as you marry horses to carts and eggs to bacon?

Besides, I’ve never tasted a “cheesy” cracker that was any good at all, and these Baked Bites are no exception: glazed little pucks of yuckiness I regret saving, and certainly cannot savour. I shall have to rid myself of the aftertaste with a swig of the Stix.

Yech! The Styx might well be more refreshing and even less lethal-tasting. A E Housman maintained that “On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble”; and now that I’ve got this Wenlock Edge inside me, my belly feels like a big bowl of wrong.

I’ll press on to the dessert course and hope that out of sweetness will come forth the strength necessary to complete this gruelling trial. The yoghurt and raisin mix from the Dormen consists of raisins cowled with some sort of dairy goo. They aren’t particularly offensive; indeed, arguably the Dormen is being a responsible victualler in this age of obesity by handing out only 20g of these powerfully moreish sweetmeats at a time. I’ve been known to eat kilos of the bloody things when I’m at the cinema, which leaves me feeling sullied and my fingers tacky.

An appropriate condition, you might say, in which to tackle the Cadbury’s Mini Fingers. The claim “For the Good Times, Wherever!” suggests that a brace of these niblets would make a suitable final meal for an inmate on death row about to be wrongfully executed.

I don’t know whether Cadbury’s is using more substandard chocolate and cocoa mass than the Dormen, but the Fingers are the first thing from the snack box that has both looked and tasted not quite right. Nor does the “Brain Teaser Time”, a set of simple puzzles printed on the inside of the snack box, appeal to me.

Overall, the entire experience was at once desultory and . . . fascinating. Although I’m now suffering from dyspepsia and lassitude, most of the snacks were as fresh as the day they were manufactured – rather like Richard Branson.