Will Self

These are the coldest collations of the year: shards of glass tossed on the kerbstone, dressed with vomit. Nearby stands a seven-eighths empty bottle of supermarket champagne; while if you follow the straggle of pink streamers you can see beer cans lurking by the wheelie bin, tinnily jostling. The party has well and truly pooped out.

Last year there was comparatively little hoo-ha: the failure of the Mayan prophecies to come up to scratch left the credulous with sod all in the way of an apocalypse – while as for the more civic-minded, there was a mass sense of the anticlimactic: the Eve marked the end of the spectacular year of the Jubilympics, a twelvemonth of unsurpassed gloriousness and achievement, the like of which we’ll never see again in our lives, nor our children and grandchildren in theirs.

Some consolation was to be found in the ennoblements of those who had reeled, writhed, and – in the case of Sir Bradley Wiggins – fainted in coils; but for the most part, as the damp, drear 31 December merged seamlessly into the damp, drear 1 January, there was no sense that the populace were shouting and staggering from any great sense of joy, only going through the motions.

Lying in bed, in the small hours, listening to the occasional yelps of grimly enforced gaiety, I thought back to the New Year’s Eves of the more distant past. You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers – some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party, but it wasn’t always so, believe me. I remember New Year’s Eves before the munificent Mayoralty forced London’s transport workers to stay up all night – in those days, if you chose to revel on the far side of town, you might find yourself with a very long trek before your belated bed.

One year, sometime in the early 1980s, I ended up at a party in Rotherhithe – at that time still a wasteland of redundant docks and warehouses, its “renaissance” but a twinkle in Terry Conran’s hooded eye. And although people gyred and gibbered, there was still – come about 2am – the sense that the world spirit of dissolution had moved on. Together with a couple of mates, I left and took the long bend of the Thames for home. Crossing London Bridge, we passed by Fishmongers Hall and were just tending towards King William Street and the Bank of England, when we heard the massed slapping of marching feet.

Yes, “slapping”, because as the sound drew closer it became conjoined with this vision: around the bend of Gracechurch Street came a formation of Roman legionaries. In the lead was a standard-bearer: above his helmeted head flew the letters SPQR grasped in the talons of a rampant eagle; beside him strode the decanus, his short sword drawn, while behind them came perhaps 20 more men, all with long pila at slope-arms, burnished helmets, tunics, cloaks and dangling, jangling baldricks. We stood, slack-jawed, as the le gionaries slapped downhill on to the Bridge and headed south into the sodium-tinged darkness.

Anyone seeing such a visitation would’ve been shocked and questioning of their sanity. But what saved us from hysterics were the following facts: all of us had seen the same thing – so we knew we weren’t hallucinating (or, at least, if we were hallucinating, it was only part of that collective hallucination ordinarily termed “reality”); and then there were the legionaries themselves, who, far from having the swarthy and squat aspect expected of first-century Roman invaders, were distinctly pale and paunchy. Put simply: it was obvious that these were men dressed up as legionaries, rather than a couple of real contubernia that had somehow managed to march through a tear in the space-time continuum.

Why a group of Roman army fanatics had decided to suit up then tramp through the City was a question that could never be answered – they may have been of our era but their expressions were Caesar-stern, forestalling any inclination we might’ve had to hale them. And why do I offer up this anecdote now? Because once you’ve been part of a triumvirate who have witnessed a troop of legionaries marching through a silent London in the small, cold hours of New Year’s Day, all subsequent celebrations are bound to seem utterly infra dig.

I thought it might be a good idea to depart this year with an explosive fart rather than a whimpering burp, so I arranged to meet a young radical friend of mine at the Spaghetti House in Knightsbridge. The Spaghetti House chain seems on the surface to be an inconsequential thing: there are 12 coiling across London, dishing up pasta, pizza and the trimmings in an ambience of dark wood and off-white Artex – so far, so dull.

Indeed, after recent outings to Prezzo and Zizzi – both larger operations playing variations on the same wheat’n’sauce theme – even bothering with the Spag’ Gaff at all would seem de trop, were it not for the siege. (Apropos of Zizzi, which I wrote about a fortnight ago, the name kept bothering me – I was certain it meant something but could find no reference. Then a friend explained that “zizzi” is French slang for “little penis” and is employed in those parts as an anti-Semitic taunt. Makes perfect sense of all that chilli oil drizzling, no?)

The Spaghetti House siege began on the evening of 28 September 1975 when a Nigerian-born gunman, Franklin Davies, together with two accomplices, attempted to rob the restaurant. At that time there were only three or four Spaghetti Houses, and their managers had assembled at the Knightsbridge branch to pay in their week’s takings, which were in the region of £13,000 – pretty good dobs, really. The job went tits-up from the get-go: one of the waiters escaped and raised the alarm, while the robbers, together with nine staffers, ended up in the basement, where they remained for the next six days, under siege by the Met’s finest.

At the time, the Spaghetti House siege was huge: prime location, exotic cast and a pleasing high-tech element to the operation as fibre-optic surveillance equipment was used for the first time. Davies claimed to be a member of the Black Liberation Army – a splinter group of the Black Panthers – and tried gussying up the blag as a political act. Needless to say, neither the plods nor Roy Jenkins – the then home secretary – were having any of it, and the siege ended not with Davies and his crew boarding the plane to Jamaica they’d demanded, but instead being hustled into a Black Maria.

Fast forward 37 years and the world seems a safer place. Yes, you heard me: every era privileges itself with the cachet of being edgier than the ones before; yet standing in the Spaghetti House vestibule on a cold December evening and reading the front pages of newspapers reporting the siege that had been framed and hung there, what struck me was how much violence there’d been then –nine deaths in Northern Ireland the previous day and the IRA recently peppering the porticos of St James’s gentlemen’s clubs with machine-gun rounds. There were considerably fewer chain Italian restaurants, however, let alone ones that made a selling point out of their staff once being held hostage. I asked the smiley chap who showed me to my table what he made of the siege-as-marketing but he just laughed: it was such a long time ago!

My friend was equally unfazed – he wanted to talk about Slavoj Žižek and the Occupy movement, and savour the piquant zeitgeist rather than munch on the stale bread sticks of yore. It was understandable that the waiters weren’t keen to consider the fate of their forerunners – one grim aspect of the siege had been that Davies refused to feed his captives. This seemed harsh; if you’re taken hostage in a bank raid, it’s reasonable to expect you won’t get much in the way of eats beyond the limp biscuits left behind in a cashier’s drawer. But a restaurant? Surely it wouldn’t have mattered to the gang if the staff had whipped up a pollo e funghi risotto? 

I enjoyed mine, as the callow revolutionist opposite me tucked into a dish of pasta. I don’t know whether it was his onslaught on my middle-aged and middle-class complacency, or the surprisingly tasty nosh, but I found myself warming to the Spaghetti House and in particular to its staff – all of whom, unusually for a Italian restaurant in Britain seemed to be . . . Italian. Anyway, either they were an exceptionally chatty and attentive lot or I was suffering from the rapid onset of Stockholm syndrome. Even when I descended to the gents, the fateful basement looked pretty damn cosy.

We finished our political wrangling with an affogato apiece: a scoop of vanilla ice cream affogato – “drowned” – with a shot of espresso. I like to think Franklin Davies would’ve approved of this culinary miscegenation – although I have no reason for believing so.

Real meals have a way of provoking surreal thoughts in me – but then you knew that, didn’t you?