Will Self

How to describe it? How to articulate the effect provoked in me by these artfully aligned and textured surfaces? The task is worthy of Henry James or Wallace Stevens – some master of the intersection between social velleities and individual desires; but alas, there’s only me, and as usual I’m off my tit-shaped head on caffeine, and so barely equal to the task.

Still, here goes: there is herringbone-patterned woodblock, yes, and it’s on the floor, uh-huh. Then there’s some aluminium trim and after this what looks like slate tiling; the walls are whitewashed brick on two sides; on the third, the brick is bare. And the fourth wall? Well, no Brecht or Beckett could be as creative with a fourth wall, oh no. It appears to have been assembled out of at least four kinds of wood, chopped up and assembled into a colossal Jenga-style barrier. I am awed by this fourth wall – awed. If it weren’t for the cod-Matisse images, I might altogether forget that I’m in a branch of Britain’s largest chain coffee shop.

There were 1,375 of these outlets as of 2011 – and given their viral rate of increase, it seems likely there are at least 1,500 by now. Somehow, beating Starbucks to become market leader seems to have given the Whitbread-owned chain a huge central nervous system stimulus; one you can witness spreading in neuronal sparks to its extremities as you carom down any urban artery throughout the British Isles: leapfrogging over one another to take this corner, or that intersection, are branches of Tesco Express and Costa. Yes, Costa is our subject – and it doesn’t get realer than this. So ubiquitous has Costa become that I feel enchained – my wrists manacled by its ridged paper cups, I hobble along the pavement, while anxiety over potential mocha-spillage fetters my ankles. And what do I see if I look up from this, the halting hobble of late capitalism? Why, the brown gaze of another minatory Costa, its slit-bean-for-an-eye staring at me with a steeliness that would gladden any panopticon-building Benthamite.

Actually, there’s a certain grotesque symmetry to the Costa surge: the first retail Costa was opened a mere 35 years ago in Vauxhall Bridge Road, not far from my house (and hard by the site of the Millbank prison; a panopticon, natch). Now it hardly matters how far I roam, I’m sure to find a Costa there waiting for me. At the university where I teach, on the outskirts of London, there’s a Costa franchise café; it’s not a Costa proper, but instead there’s a sign behind the counter that announces “Proud to Serve Costa Coffee”. A curious pride, I always think – after all, it’s not as if I couldn’t pick up a Costa coffee nearby; there’s a Costa Express vending outlet in the garage halfway between the station and the campus. And at this rate of market-penetration I’ll probably soon be encountering ambulatory Costa sellers – like water-sellers in the Sahel – who will offer to dispense a cup for me from the heated tank on their backs, and then stamp my loyalty card.

I often have lunch in the Costa clone at the university. I munch the Caesar salad with its risible “chicken”, followed by a gluten-free chocolate brownie (have I mentioned that I’m fashionably wheat-intolerant?) washed down with a triple-shot soy mocha. Are they any good, these comestibles? Does it matter? It seems to me that the Costa phenomenon is of a piece with the Googlisation of all modern culture: to drink a Costa coffee is to subject oneself to an algorithm of taste, rather to exercise discrimination in any meaningful way. The sponsorship of a literary prize is of a piece with this: palmed off on the chain by Daddy Whitbread, the Costa prize jury functions in exactly the same way as a search engine: picking out the books that other prize juries have already picked out, so that the bland end up promoting the blander.

This is why the Costa branch described at the capital of this column seemed so delusory to me in its ornament; sited on Brixton High Street, it’s easily the spivviest one I’ve ever supped in. And what’s that about? Brixton is undergoing a phase of retail gentrification, with trestle tables piled high with ackee and pigs’ feet ceding ground to young lifestyle peddlers with asymmetric haircuts. You don’t need to be paranoid to see the invasion of this body-snatching coffee shop as the advance guard of a surgical strike on the area’s authentic personality – a lukewarmotomy, if you will. I make no apology for this execrable pun – after all, that’s the Costa of living nowadays.

I once asked Martin Amis how an interview had gone with a particular journalist and he thought for a moment before shrug-sneering, “Well, y’know, he was a Tim.” When I was a kid we used to stop on the school run to pick up the son of the then MP for King’s Lynn, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler (not so much a wet as utterly saturated, he was the only Tory to defect to the SDP in 1981). Brocklebank-Fowler junior was called Tim, and my sadistic brother and I would tease him: “Timmy-Timmy-Timmy,” while he futilely protested that he was a Timothy.

It’s my contention that the likes of, say, Tim Henman, the tennis player, or Tim Parks, the writer, would have had enjoyed a great deal more success if they’d simply changed their names. There’s a prejudice against people called Tim; true, it’s not on a par with racism, sexism or homophobia but there’s little doubt that your life chances will be constrained should your otherwise risk-averse parents have had the temerity to Tim you. All of which is by way of introducing Tim Martin: the 6’6”, mullet-sporting originator of J D Wetherspoon, an invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-style pub chain that operates 833 outlets throughout the British Isles, together with 17 hotels.

Martin, who retains a 25 per cent share of the publicly listed company, rejoices in the sobriquet “the giant of the British pub industry”. But it doesn’t matter how much wonga the man trousers (pre-tax profits were £66m in the crash year of 2009), he can never escape the fact of his Timness, any more than he can elude its miserable correlate: his pubs are shit, brown dollops of establishments smeared incontinently across our cities. Actually, “shit” is a little strong for Wetherspoon’s – a bit too gamey; they’re more shit-lite.

The clever thing is that he doesn’t style most of them “Wetherspoon’s” but retains their original names – the Dog & Duck, the Duke of York, whatever – so that it isn’t until you’ve sidled up to the bar, clocked the plethora of guest beers – Diamond Geezer, Comfortably Numb etc – written up on blackboards in faux chalk-strokes, and registered the corporate vibe that you realise you are in fact in another soulless bloody Wetherspoon’s. As to why Martin should’ve dubbed his pub chain thus, the answer lies in his back story: a troubled youth who was an inmate of no fewer than 11 institutions (a sort of chain education, if you will), Martin did some school-time in New Zealand, where one ineffectual disciplinarian of a teacher was dumb enough to tell the young mulleteer that he would never succeed in business. What was this pitiful pedagogue’s name? Why, Wetherspoon of course.

I see a sort of nominative determinism at work here: Tim’s pubs are shit not only because he’s called Tim but also because they’re named after an object of resentment. And you know what they say about resentment: it’s like drinking a cup of poison and expecting the other person to die. Sadly, it isn’t Wetherspoon who’s dying (he probably expired years ago) – but us. It doesn’t matter that Martin was quick off the mark when it came to introducing no-smoking areas, nor that he’s been a staunch supporter of micro-breweries – nothing can counteract the excremental quality of these establishments.

The boy and I checked out the one nearest to us, which happens to be in Victoria Station. It also happens to rejoice in the actual Wetherspoon’s name, but while you might’ve expected it to live up to its flagship status, we found a poky joint crammed with tables. The standard chain-pub fare was on offer: burgers, sub-curries, toasties, pasta and pies. His bacon cheeseburger wasn’t tasty enough to be horse: the cheese hadn’t even melted and the bacon had been fried rather than grilled, so the whole comestible – when at last it arrived – was both frigid and congealed. My battered cod was at the nadir for this dish: the casing hard, the interior mush. At least it was hot – unlike the chips, which were like cardboard but not as tasty.

I suppose some might say: well, what do you expect? This is a busy location. To which I would rejoin: I don’t care, there’s a grim cynicism involved in flogging such drek; it demeans the customer and the worker. Looking around me at the other oblong platters on the tables, I saw that many of them had been barely touched. I did eat my food and so left with an unpleasant film inside my mouth. Still, tomorrow morning my palate will be cleansed – but he’ll always be a Tim.

At Paddington Station, where one occasionally finds a stray bear with a label around its neck reading: “Please introduce me to a life of prostitution and drug addiction,” the train departures board operates at a laggardly pace. By which I mean to say that the platform number for the train to West Drayton will mostly only be displayed five minutes before departure. As the platform is usually number 13 or 14, this necessitates a brisk walk of 500 yards in order to make the train. Even I, a sprightly pentagenarian, find it something of a push – but anyone less able, let alone disabled, would be scuppered.

True, the West Drayton service is not the most popular of trains except during the evening rush hour. We midday voyagers to the outer ’burbs are pasty-munching, tea-sipping slowcoaches – spindrifts or even snags in the great current of urban life – and so we resent being so chivvied. But I’ve seen veritable stampedes when the platform is announced for a peak-time intercity express. If you happen to be standing in the wrong place at that moment, you might end up as a smear of jam in front of Delice de France.

As a thought experiment, it’s worth forming a mental picture of a British station at its busiest, then multiplying the human density by a factor of between 10 and 100. Such a scene – albeit more brightly coloured – would have met your eye had you been standing in Allahabad station on 11 February when a belated platform announcement (or possibly a collapsing handrail; accounts of the disaster understandably differ) triggered a stampede that led to 36 deaths and scores of injuries. That this took place during the climax of the Kumbh Mela, the largest human gathering on earth, makes it seem – how can I put this without being psychopathically insensitive? – relatively insignificant.

If 30 million people assemble on the sandy floodplain at the confluence of two rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, and a third, mythical one, the Saraswati, with the avowed intention of bathing in muddy waters into which the pitcher (or kumbh) of the Gods has dripped immortality-conferring nectar, a death toll in the hundreds would still seem a result. Deaths, lost children and parents are the inevitable sequelae attendant upon such a pathological party. Numerous Bollywood films have been made about these Kumbh Mela tragedies – the conjunction of so many people in one place presents unrivalled opportunities for plot-generating coincidences.

There is – as I’ve had cause to remark before – one type of human folly conspicuously absent from Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the 1841 book from which this column takes its name, and that is religion. Mackay doubtless itched to include the entire panoply of religiose nuttiness in his volume, from Catholic flagellation, to Muslim meteorite circumambulation, to Hindu widow-toasting, but lest the lens of comparative anthropology aim backwards into the equally wacky practices of Protestantism, he gave the entire field a swerve. The modern form of such an avoidance would be founded on a desire not to offend, which in turn would rest on a mushy pediment of cultural relativism: as all religions at all times have seemed valid to their adherents, who am I to judge between their forms of worship, no matter how excessive they may seem?

Stomping, snorting, naked and ash-smeared Naga “sky-born” sadhus charging in the dawn half-light across the riverbank to fling themselves into the chilly waters of the Ganges bear an obvious affinity to Justin Welby standing in a well-heated narthex objecting to gay marriage. True, they are physically many and he is just the one; but the Archbishop represents an entire crowd of benighted homophobes, while the Naga sadhus have dissolved their egos into the collective being of moksha, or enlightenment.

As you can see from the above, my cultural relativism takes a rather more robust form: Claude Lévi-Strauss observed that the miniature is the archetypal form of all artworks, for, when you considered the matter closely, all representation consists in a diminution. Even Michelangelo’s vast frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are miniatures, as their subject matter is the end of all cosmological time. By the same token, even the greatest of religious gatherings is a vicarage tea party when set beside the ubiquity of human belief in the immaterial. I’m not sure about train travel, either.