Will Self

After the unprecedented disorders of early August – a rending of the fabric of civility on a par with the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths – it behoves even this column, concerned as it is with the plebeians’ daily bread, to name and shame the guilty parties. By this, I mean that small, core group of bodies who know no shame . . . But first, a digression, a wander across the grassy verge, under the tendrils of the willow that waves beside the boating pond – see! There strains the fat man on his pedalo, while, over there, the anorexic vies with her whippet. And lo! Does not the cacophonous coo-burble of the filthy pigeons scrapping for scraps lead you into that drowsy, questioning reverie yet again: why is it that you never see a juvenile pigeon or, for that matter, a hoodied crow?

This week, it’s park life. If you’re anything like me – two legs, gastrointestinal tract and mouth – I dare say you eat quite a bit in park cafés. I know, I know, the well-organised among us take the cooler, the rug, the folding chairs, the antique Victrola grinding out Chaliapin singing “The Song of the Volga Boatmen”, the ox tongue in aspic . . . but for those of us bobbing in the mainstream, the park is usually an extempore decision.

For years, I’ve had children, dogs or both to justify my park life – but I don’t think an excuse is needed. What is inexcusable is the hefty mark-up that park cafés charge for their provender. It’s as if, by wandering across that grassy verge, you had incurred a sort of al fresco premium, when most park cafés offer no better prospect than the aforementioned pedalo, whippet and willow, together with the dubious delights of fresh dog excrement – its bouquet, not as a dish. My local park, Battersea in sarf London, offers four establishments: a kiosk selling panini, tea, cakes and sandwiches, sited beside the ornamental ponds and pergola that are all that remain of the old funfair; another kiosk – offering the same menu – by the car park; a more plebeian trailer by the playground, which, when open, shovels out fat, white chips, hot dogs and other guilty pleasures; and then there’s La Gondola.

We usually go for the first option. In summer, the flowerbeds and fountains make it easier to bear the £15 price tag for a couple of toasted sandwiches, a brace of Cokes and a cup of Earl Grey. In winter, we gravitate towards the playground trailer, seeking grease to line our shivering stomachs – but what we never, ever do is eat at La Gondola. Housed in an echt modernist hatbox beside the boating lake, La Gondola would seem to be the best eatery in the park – its trestle tables provide great views of the Victorian rockeries on the far side of the lake, while its menu is extensive, running all the way from full English to full Italian, with an outside barbecue in summer offering grilled chicken, sausages and burgers.

As you draw closer to La Gondola, however, you notice the signs plastered all over the place: “This area is exclusively for customers of the café. Anyone found with food and drink not bought from the restaurant will be asked to leave”; “Please note: we don’t fill up empty bottles of water”. And so on, in a mournful tirade of officiousness. Then you spot the prices. Park cafés are pricey, that we expect, but £6.90 for a burger, chips and a scrag of salad? And £18.50 for a jug of Pimm’s? And £4.30 for a child’s portion of risotto? Time was when I would take La Gondola in my stride, figuring this was just the way the world turned – but then I began to say: “Nyet!”

Passing by there the other day, I thought, hmm, I wouldn’t mind giving La Gondola a shitbagging . . . but, being a conscientious soul, I went in to have a word with the proprietor first. Rafaela, who has held the lease for eight years, agreed with me: the prices were extortionate – but what could she do? The landlords were charging her £14,400 per annum to rent the hatbox premises and this was likely to rise to 18 large ones next year.

And who was this Rachman whose greed was forcing me to pay £1.60 for a can of Coke? Step forward, Wandsworth Council, which, not content with planning to evict people from their flats because they’re related to someone nicked during the recent émeutes – the sort of collective punishment associated with a Nazi occupation – also sees fit to try to turn an outrageous profit out of what should be a public service.

In his superb memoir Jackdaw Cake, the late Norman Lewis told the story of his upbringing in uttermost north London in the 1920s. His parents were a wacky pair who professed spiritualism and held seances at which ectoplasm was teased out of Lewis père’s mouth and made to assume phantasmagorical shapes. More bizarre was the way that, during the interwar period, Enfield advanced across Middlesex in a flying column of cul-de-sacs, armed with telegraph poles, creosoted fences and pebble-dash facades. I grew up in a not-dissimilar suburb, East Finchley, and remember finding Lewis’s account almost supernatural – as, even as an adult, I found it hard to believe that the suburbs hadn’t been there since time out of mind, so immemorially dull did they seem.

In the space of less than a century, Enfield has gone from greenfield site to brownfield riot territory. When I heard the news, I pictured Women’s Institute members setting fire to privet hedges and chucking Molotov cocktails at leylandii. However, I soon got a grip: the ebb and flow of gentrification in our cities means that no district escapes the undertow of deprivation, whether material or – gulp! – spiritual.

The kind of deprivation that animated these riots seems to have been highly relative: our disaffected youth may now lack after-school clubs, courtesy of the 70 per cent cuts in such services, but they still have BlackBerrys to co-ordinate these acquisitive thrusts against the soft underbelly of late capitalism. These were the riotous goings-on not so much of the alienated (although I have no doubt that they are) as the early adopters.

Having witnessed a fair few riots in my time – some of them, such as the poll-tax riots of 1990, beautifully blocked out and scripted – I have no problem in seeing them as street theatrics. So, if the medium is the BlackBerry and the CCTV system, then the message is as much ennui as anomie. The hoodie-clad kicker-in of plate-glass windows may have had Garbo-like incognito but he was still playing for the cameras. In short stories and several novels – including his last, Kingdom Come – JG Ballard hypothesised that willed and destructive mayhem might become the only therapy for the mass psychopathology of consumerist society; a malaise that he characterised as – in two words – utter boredom.

The dominant trait of the crowd is to reduce its myriad individuals to a single, dysfunctional persona. The crowd is stupider than the averaging of its component minds. In a culture in which every consensual sexual act and narcotised state is, in effect, permitted, Ballard would argue that violence becomes the only remaining form of stimulation. I agree with this unreservedly – yet what struck me still more forcibly was the folly of the crowd of politicians and police who attempted to shame them into conformity with the law.

Back from sashaying across Tuscan hillsides, the have-mores returned to call time on the have-less. Having encouraged an economic system that devalues all social capital in favour of pelf, while ramping up the consequent financial inequalities, the so-called political class professes itself astonished by the childish greed that is sanctified by their hallowed free market. Yes, the looters may only be “relatively” deprived – but then, the politicians are only relatively corrupt, the police are only relatively on the take (and relatively prone to shooting unarmed men) and the media is only relatively likely to invade privacy by whatever means possible. Relative to each other, all four estates are absolutely morally bankrupt.

That brings us full circle: back to Enfield. Spiritualism was a quasi-religion that scintillated in the dying embers of Christian faith in the afterlife. Following the hecatomb of the First World War, the bereaved sought to contact their deceased loved ones through mediums such as Lewis’s father. Just as the distraught relatives saw the faces of their fathers, sons and lovers in the fake ectoplasm he extruded, so our finest theorists read the statistical vital signs, desperate for that quickening economic pulse. Spiritualism is no crazier than attempting to resurrect a dead economy by stimulating “demand” among the (relatively) impoverished. Theresa May calls them rioters. I see them as overenthusiastic but misguided shoppers.

“Mac-Dooonald’s, Mac-Dooonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken anna Pizza Hut! Mac-Dooonald’s, Mac-Dooonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken anna Pizza Hut!” Were Iona and Peter Opie revising their landmark study The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), this affecting little ditty would undoubtedly make an appearance. True, I’m not certain that it’s still current but it was when my older moiety of children was at primary school.

What is it with Pizza Hut? Like the poor, it seems always to have been with us – I recall a Pizza Hut in Hampstead when I was of school age, which had chalet-style woodwork and alpine murals that looked as if they had been painted using that time-honoured method of dipping a young bull in Artex, then allowing it to run amok. However, in recent years, Pizza Hut seems to have sunk into the great, cheesy substratum of British fast food, with little brand salience.

This hardly seems fair for a pizza outlet with a noble history stretching back as far as … well, as far as the Opies’ The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, beginning as it did in an actual hut, in Wichita, Kansas, in the late 1950s. There are now more than 11,000 Pizza Huts worldwide, enough to constitute a Pizza Town, 700 of which are in the British Isles and yet, apart from the ad campaign following England’s 1996 defeat by Germany in the European Championships, which featured the unsuccessful penalty taker Gareth Southgate with his head in a paper bag, Pizza Hut has loomed low in our cultural consciousness.

On a spanking hot evening in central London, there was nothing too appealing about the entrance to this culinary Mordor: dark-red decor of interlinked rings, dark-red carpets, a faint whiff of what might have been urine and a musty slot of a dining area. The original Pizza Huts were known as “red roofs”, because of their wide gables that angled up to a boxy top but, as a waitress directed us to go down to the basement, it transpired that this was a sort of Pizza Tardis – and an air-conditioned one, to boot!

Down here in the bowels of the earth, there were at least a hundred more covers, some in a sort of mezzanine, ranged around a central arena, off of which lurked a salad bar and an “ice cream factory”. Seated and provided with a menu by an attentive if frenzied waiter, we took a look around at this brave new world of tourists and the obese. The mother-and-daughter combo at the table next to ours, tucking into a large Meat Feast pizza that came in its own skillet, probably weighed in excess of 150kg and they were soon matched on our other side by a father and son of approximately the same weight – even though the boy was only ten or so. I began to suspect that the ubiquitous decorative scheme of interlinked rings was some sort of allusion to gastric bands.

Yes, yes, it’s a snob thing, isn’t it? I mean, we’re all middle class now, so we all go to Pizza Express – the Hut is only for foreigners and the lumpy proletariat. Pizza Hut pizzas feature pineapple, ferchrissakes! And entire chicken breasts! You dob up a couple of shitters and get unlimited fizzy drinks! I nearly had an apoplexy, on the basis that such an old-school restaurant demanded an equally anachronistic stroke. My 13-year-old, who often appears to have the same delirious sense of entitlement as the Prime Minister, looked about him in frank disbelief. The one thing he was looking forward to was the Cheesy Bites, a grotesque circlet of cheese-stuffed dough balls that rims the pizza base – but this was only available with the large pizza and he relapsed into sullen torpor.

I, on the other hand, was rather warming to the chilly environs of the Pizza Tardis. I cruised the salad bar and partook of a weird dressing that looked like the decocted jism of honey bees – and tasted like it, too. I ordered a regular Veggie Supreme and flirtatiously requested extra mushrooms and rocket. When the pizza arrived, combusting-jet-fuel hot, it was devoid of rocket but when I pointed this out to the waiter, he happily toddled over with a big bowl of leaves and flumped them on. I managed half of this – a regular pizza – before giving up. As we rolled back up the stairs, I reflected this: it didn’t matter how déclassé the Hut was; we had been served by a perfect gentleman – Shehzad is his name, although his colleagues describe him as “the bald Asian man” – and that’s surely a sign of real nobility.

Here’s a dinner for two with 1970s sophistication but modern-day products and prices: to start, a couple of prawn cocktails at £2.09 each; to follow, a brace of 8oz fillet steaks weighing in at £12.47. A rustle of salad and a clutch of new potatoes will probably only cost four quid, but instead of a homely salad cream you’ll need to drizzle some Aceto Balsamico di Modena on this and that’ll set you back a cool £14.99.

In lieu of gateaux (a clause I feel I’ve been waiting to type my entire life), a chocolate truffle cake priced at £1.25 a slice, accompanied by a £4.19 tub of Green & Black’s ice cream. Now, none of this would seem anything but £42.33 of reasonableness, were it not that you then went and spunked off £99.99 on a bottle of Dom Perignon Brut, which the shelf tag – sorry, I mean wine list – assured you would be “perfect with everything”.

And what is the name of this establishment, at once oddly timeless and bang up-to-date? Why, Sainsbury’s of course. What could be realer than a meal purveyed by the food retailer that has a whopping 16.5 per cent of the domestic market? However, lugging all this stuff home and cooking it doesn’t qualify – I happen to be almost absurdly proficient in the kitchen, but I know most Britons still, pathetically, think of sous vide as boil-in-a-bag despite the revolutions of modernist cuisine.

Perhaps a better way of judging Sainsbury’s would have been to graze the aisles, crunching a carrot in aisle three, swigging a handful of pic’n’mix over in aisle 13, strolling nonchalantly past the Tupperware while pulling the filaments from a Cheestring and reciting “Cheese me, cheese me not, cheese me . . .”

But while this is certainly a kind of eating many of us are familiar with, there comes a time and a girth when one retreats, gracefully, to the supermarket café to read the Daily Mail (“Happiness is being slimmer than him”) and sip a cappuccino served in a cup the size of a bird bath. I hadn’t visited the café in my local Sainsbury’s for yonks (a very supermarket café kind of term) and remembered it as a frumpy sort of place with modular plastic highchairs bedizened with peas, vinyl pouffes thrown about willy-nilly and a terrific view of the car park. Yes, I went there to scoff – but stayed to . . . scoff.

One of the best things Sainsbury’s has done to its café is eliminate the view – no one in their right mind wants to look at a car park, far better to enjoy an enormous stylised glyph of a cappuccino and a huge slice of cake and a charming prospect of aisles 6 through to 10. The other thing it has done is revamp the menu. Instead of the traditional chips-and-beans fare, the specials were a warm chicken and bacon Caesar salad or an equally toasty serving of chargrilled vegetables with pesto and couscous salad. Neither of these was actually available – this is still Britain after all – but it’s the thought that counts, especially if you’re contemplating a gastric band before teatime. The counter of the new-style café comes complete with mini-muffins and untoasted panini looking sinisterly like insoles. I went for the salmon pie, with some salad and a bowl of Mediterranean tomato soup, while the whelp had a mozzarella and pesto panini.

We sat in blood-coloured easy chairs at a small table and tucked in. Nearby, in an area of equally sanguine seating, a group of youngish men in chain-store suits and Sainsbury’s lapel badges, armed with clipboards, sat discussing the finer points of shelf-stacking. Bit of a busman’s holiday, I mused as I inserted steaming chunks of salmon, puff pastry and, mmm, haddock into my Middle England mouth. Imagine working in Sainsbury’s all day, then during your lunch break chowing down in the windowless café – after a week or two you’d begin to feel pretty, er, claustrophobic.

Still, besides employees I can’t imagine who’d want to eat in the café – surely eating in a supermarket rather defeats the whole point. Then I examined my till receipt a little more closely. With drinks, the aforementioned mini-muffins and a bag of Kettle Chips, our bill came to £14.21, but then my opening Nectar card balance had been 5296 and I’d earned a further 28 points! This gave me a whopping £26.62 to spend in Sainsbury’s, which meant that in real terms I’d made £12.41. Ah, supermarket loyalty – in today’s fickle world it’s the only kind that matters.