Will Self

The sweet pork with savoury rice (or potatoes) at £3.40 doesn’t seem so bad to me, especially when it’s perfectly tasty and comes piping hot on a damp, autumn day. I could’ve had spaghetti bolognese for the same price or spicy chicken and special rice for 10p less. I could even have gone for the more Dickensian lamb’s liver, mash, steamed cabbage and onion gravy – a snip at £3. And there were several healthy options, including a cheese or ham salad with a jacket potato and coleslaw, weighing in at £3.16.

The combination of low prices and the slightly quirky price points – there are other dishes costing such non-commercial amounts as £2.09 and even £3.01 – should alert you to where we are this week, namely a works canteen.

Time was, I suppose, when the great majority of the British workforce had access to a subsidised works canteen of some kind – it was part of the great postwar settlement, together with such nostrums as full employment and a welfare system. Nowadays, we have no need of such frivolities – we have Starbucks and Bupa and sub-sub-subcontractors, for such is the way of progress. True, Go Ahead London is a private business but as Colin Opher, general manager of Stockwell bus garage, assures me, as we sit in the tiled canteen, there’s still some of the old London Transport ethos.

When it comes to food, at any rate. The canteen is open from 7am to 10pm every day (with last orders at 9.30pm), serving a full hot menu to drivers, mechanics and other staff. You can mosey in in the morning and Theresa, the canteen manager, and her staff will plunk down grilled kipper fillets and brown toast in front of you for a mere £1.75, the menu card noting that this healthy fare comprises 418 calories.

Colin tells me that the canteen is fullest on Fridays, the day after staff receive their weekly payslips. There may no longer be any physical pay day, but there is still the anticipation of the weekly wage going into the account; this engenders collectivism in the workforce.

My impression of the bus garage – which I walk past every day – is that it’s a happy enough place. In the late 1940s, the West Indian immigrants who arrived on the SS Empire Windrush were quartered up the road from here, deep underground in a giant air-raid shelter. A half-century on, Colin has drivers on his books who are second- and even third-generation African-Caribbean employees. He tells me that the African and African-Caribbean staff get on well together – unusual for this neck of the woods – and there are also sizeable Portuguese and British Asian contingents. The staff dispersed around the canteen seem relaxed, their high-vis jackets lending fauvist intensity to the light-green tiling on the walls. There’s a game of dominoes clacking on at one table; at another, newspapers are being read intently. A couple of huge fruit machines wink in the corner.

It helps that the canteen is well lit by high windows. They’re difficult to replace, Colin tells me, as they’re the original Crittall ones. That’s the downside of having a Grade II-listed garage that, in 1951, when it was built, had the largest pre-stressed concrete roof in Europe.

On sunny days, the drivers cluster by the main gates, smoking and drinking mugs of tea, while the mechanics have created a sort of “peace garden” that runs along the flank of the building, complete with its own makeshift shelter. I don’t want to overstate what a happy, extended family inhabits Stockwell bus garage, but if the truism that the heart of any home is its kitchen holds good, the sight of Theresa and her colleagues dishing up jerk chicken – Friday is jerk chicken day – must be perennially warming.

Time was when most bus garages had their own canteen, but now only seven or so of the bigger garages in London do. Drivers who have waiting periods at Euston usually eat at the University College Hospital canteen, which is also open to the public, while those waiting at the stand by Clapham Junction have recourse to Asda.

As I chase grains of rice about my plate, Colin casts an eye around to see if Lena, his oldest driver, is in. She’s been with the company since 1978 and, at 71, shows no sign of retiring. Even before the recent legislation, there was no mandatory retirement policy at London General. So long as they pass their medicals, Colin says, the last thing the company wants is to lose its older employees – it’s a job that benefits from the application of wisdom. Still, if drivers want to stay on the road, they’d better give the “London General Special” a swerve – a full English breakfast of artery-busting proportions – and pay attention to Theresa’s laminated card by the till: “KICK THE SUGAR”.

This week, I thought I’d run, piecemeal, through some of the smaller follies I’ve encountered in the past seven days, such as the cab rank outside Clapham Junction station – or rather, the attitude of one cabby towards it. The rank is situated in the middle of a busy road with no safe pedestrian access; when I remarked on this, having managed to get wife, child and dog into a cab without them being crushed, the cabby said, “It’s always been like that.” As if this justified any ridiculousness: you could imagine him in all ages and places – say, squinting at rebellious slaves crucified along the Appian Way – and, when you remarked on the barbarism, shaking his head and saying, “It’s always been like that.” This kind of madness has a name – conservatism.

But there are equally deranging purviews that are bang up to date. Dining with elderly friends – all bar one in their 90s – at a fancy bar-cum-restaurant, I suggested to the waitress that she turn off the muzak, because it was making things difficult for those with hearing aids. She was utterly discombobulated. “But . . .” she managed to squeeze out, “we can’t have no music – this is a restaurant.” When I last checked, food-for-sale and tables-to-eat-it-on defined a restaurant, not Phil Collins warbling, “I can hear it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord . . .”

Just as zeitgeisty are obese people on mobility scooters wearing tracksuits. The quintessential sight of modern Britain, it should be put on postcards together with jolly policemen carrying Heckler & Koch rifles, Olympic stadiums with built-in obsolescence and looters trying on clothes.

I was having difficulty getting the organisers of a literary festival to book me a hotel room I could smoke in. The saga went on for some time, until I spluttered over the phone: “Why can’t you just call round the local hotels and find me one?” There was a silence, then my interlocutor said, “Well, you see, we don’t actually book the hotel rooms. It’s done by another company.” A vision of interlocking private enterprises as complex as a medieval mosaic sprang to my mind: once it would’ve been another department that was responsible, but now it’s the Hidden Hand of the Market that’s afflicted with paralysis.

In Boots, the poor pedant in front of me at the till engaged in a lengthy debate with the shop assistant: “Don’t you see,” she was complaining as I tuned in, “on this 25 per cent off voucher it says that it’s valid with transactions over £40, and these two items I’m buying cost £46 altogether.” The shop assistant shook her head wearily. “No,” she rejoined, “the voucher is only valid if one of the items you’re buying costs more than £40.” “But,” said the customer, “that’s not what ‘transaction’ means – a transaction is a single act of purchasing, no matter how many individual items are involved, that’s the dictionary definition.” I wandered to another till – when someone appeals to the dictionary in Boots, hysteria is surely in the offing.

Mind you, at least you could, in principle, consult a dictionary in Boots, because it has bright strip-lighting. Not so in the corporate hotels that litter the arterial byways of our land. I stayed in three last week and in not one of them was the bedside reading lamp worthy of the name. At one, I managed to contrive enough illumination by removing the shade, but mostly I had to adopt rather disturbing – and lewd – postures in order decipher print. Perhaps no one reads in hotel rooms any more, in which case you should find a talking book of the Bible in the bedside table, shouted out by Brian Blessed.

And so, finally, to Gloucester, from where I had to take a minicab to Cheltenham. “Montpellier Gardens,” I said to the driver. “Hmm,” he hmmed, puzzled, “I’m not altogether sure of that location.” I observed that it was probably near the town hall, and he said, “You’re probably right,” I said I had hoped he had a more reliable mental map of the environs than me, given that he was the local, and he said petulantly: “But it’s not local, is it, it’s Cheltenham.” I pointed out that this was hardly Ulan Bator, and besides he had a satnav to assist him. “Ah, but you see,” he said, his tone suggesting that this was the clincher, “they’re always putting up new estates and that in Cheltenham.” Such intense parochialism was at once deranging – and quite comforting. I sat back to enjoy the ride along the A road into the unknown.

Strada is the cool pizza chain: it’s the nouveau riche to Pizza Express’s liberal bourgeois, the Campari to Domino’s Carlsberg and the Fellini to Pizza Hut’s Mike Myers. Thoughts of Fellini are never far from my mind when at Strada and they were especially present the other day, when, during an unseasonably hot lunchtime, I ate at a branch that had open windows facing on to an exhausted runnel of a street backed up with traffic. I found it difficult to sit there, contemplating the furled, white napery and the green place mats, without thinking of the opening sequence of his neorealist masterpiece La strada (1954), in which Gelsomina is hustled home from the beach by her sisters and sold to the travelling strongman Zampanò for 10,000 lire – it’s bestial, sure, but cheap, too.

My god-daughter Beatrice was speaking, quite reasonably, of her wheat allergy to the waiter, asking if they did gluten-free pasta or pizza bases. At the end of the restaurant, the flames of the pizza oven played merrily on a ceiling-high, transparent wine cooler. All should’ve been right with the world and it would’ve been, were it not for this dreadful miasma that I could sense gushing from some internal vent, fogging up my mind.

There are 70-odd Stradas in Britain, with most of them – doh! – in London. The government wishes us to consume our way out of recession but that’s not going to happen so long as the majority of a restaurant chain’s outlets are bounded by the M25. What’s needed is some Duce-style visionary sending pizzerias and burger joints to those latter-day equivalents of Abyssinia: the Midlands and (gulp!) the north. Only when every clone high street has every eatery – Subway biting down on Pret, Pret munching EAT, EAT stuffing itself with McDonald’s – will the good times return.

No, the amiable waiter said, they didn’t have gluten-free flour and if they did, they wouldn’t be able to guarantee that it wasn’t contaminated, because, you see, they make their own pasta and pizza dough and flour tends to gust about the kitchen in clouds that are at once insubstantial and grittily tangible – OK, I concede that the last bit was me, but the waiter was turning his inability to provide something into a selling point. Genius.

Beatrice ordered the risotto funghi and I chose the stufato di pesce. We had side salads – rocket and Parmesan, and mixed. With a Coke for me, still water for Bea and 10 per cent service included, the bill came to well under £30. We were ordering from the £6.95 prix fixe lunch menu – but then, isn’t that the shape of things to come? Western civilisation is at the prix fixe stage of decline – long gone are à la carte days of yore. Soon enough, we’ll be in the past-its-sell-by-date discounted dump bin of history. Bea was sitting on a banquette that had been covered with the kind of greyish, slightly shiny fabric that Communist Party apparatchiks wore during the Brezhnev era – like I say, Strada is cool.

The couple at the next table were Italian. I could tell because he, while looking perfectly tough, was wearing a pink Ralph Lauren shirt and she had white-blonde hair, cut to resemble vinyl. I explained to my god-daughter that funghi tasted lovely, although to my knowledge they had no food value whatsoever, even though the long filaments of their rhizomes can extend through the soil for kilometres, probing for heavy metal contaminants to suck into their fleshy heads. “Wow,” she said, “they really are growths, aren’t they?” “Oh, yes,” I observed. “If they were grouped on the menu with athlete’s foot, they’d get far fewer takers.”

I had to eat my hearty fish stew with my napkin tucked into my collar, lest I flick pasta grains and tomato sauce all over my shirt. It’s like that nowadays – life has to be approached with new stratagems devised to counter embarrassment, both for me and others.

I called for the bill. I once heard two waitresses discussing the most offensive things patrons can do. One contended that it was hailing them with a finger click; the other that it was scribbling on an imaginary airborne bill. Long ago, I devised my own method, which involves thrusting both my arms in the air at odd angles while adopting a transfixed gurn. When I’d paid, I looked up and Beatrice had gone – either that or the miasma had grown thicker. Strada is the Dante to Pizza Express’s Boccaccio and, in my middle years, I have found myself in a dark wood.

Often, when I’m sitting on the bus or on a bench in the local park, a young woman will approach me and reach her hand out tentatively towards my crotch while making cooing noises, or saying such things as “Ooh, aren’t you cuuute!” I hasten to add, it isn’t always young women who do this to me – sometimes, it’s older women or small girls and every so often men of various ages will reach for my groin, too. This has been going on for about four years, and while it isn’t as intense as it was to begin with, it still happens with sufficient frequency that I find it . . . well, fucking annoying.

It isn’t my fur that these love-struck fools wish to stroke but that of my small Jack Russell, Maglorian, who is such a lapdog that I cannot sit down for more than a few seconds without him whining for me to hoick him up on to my denim plateau. This has been going on for his entire life but I’m still dreamy – and possibly vain – enough to be disconcerted every time. After all, I can remember times, albeit long gone, when young women, even the occasional man, did reach for my crotch while making cooing noises. True, they didn’t tend to do it in public but it happened nonetheless.

There’s this discombobulating factor and then there’s the wannabe fondlers’ wanton invasion of my personal space. Why is it that the presence of a small dog licenses such freedom? I understand the feelings that people can have for a dog. I’m quite fond of Maglorian: he’s pretty and well made and has some emotional intelligence, although his ability to reason falls well short of a Casio pocket calculator, circa 1973.

However, Maglorian is my dog and I have invested a lot of time in walking him, feeding him, picking up his excreta and taking him to overpriced veterinary surgeries. I feel very little inclination to go up to strangers in public and pet their small dogs, any more than I would their children.

It is to this connection – between the child and the small dog – that I believe the “Ooh, aren’t you cuuute!” madness owes its genesis. Confused by his tininess, many as-yet-childless young women think that Maglorian is a puppy. So saturated are they with hormones goading them towards infants that his species is immaterial; they must cuddle him. When Maglorian was a puppy, his ability to inflame maternal passion was stupefying. I remember leaving him outside a shop at the Covent Garden piazza and coming back a few minutes later to find a baying crowd of women, five-deep, all looking like attack dogs prepared to rip the first of their number’s throat out should she break ranks and go for that precious cuddle.

So it’s not just unawares that I come upon this pathology; I can spot it from a long way off. The puckering of a downy top lip, the widening of a dewy eye, the heaving of a yearning-for-maternity bosom – these are the initial symptoms, followed by more disturbing sequelae: the spasmodic, tic-like touching, gurning and what neurologists term “palilalia”, the repetition of meaningless words and phrases. “Ooh, aren’t you cuuute! You’re adooorable – aren’t you adooorable? Are you a him?” (Duh, your hand is three inches from his penis.) “Can I say hello to you?” (You can talk to him until the cows come home, but of one thing I can assure you: he will never answer – because he’s a dog.)

Often I feel like giving these broody souls a shock of reality by saying: “I know you think he’s adorable and you’d like to nurture him as you would a baby, but consider what would be involved in having a canine infant. You’d have to be impregnated by a small and snappy dog – not much fun. I concede, a two-month gestation period would be preferable to the usual nine-going-on-ten, but think of those claws scratching away inside you. Are you enough of a Spartan girl to withstand it?

“Then there’s the delivery – should it be at the local hospital or the animal shelter? And explaining to all your friends why it is that your newborn doesn’t need a bath but a shave; if, that is, there’s just the one, because dog babies usually come in multiples – they’re called litters. It may be this collective noun that has resulted in so many of them ending up in the canine equivalent of care.”

Yet there wouldn’t be any point, because, just as their malady renders me invisible to them, so it makes them incapable of understanding a word I say. Perhaps I should try an ultrasonic whistle.