Will Self

The latest Real Meals column considers The India Club on the Strand

As I have the gall to pontificate fortnightly on the places where people actually eat, it seems only meet that I should occasionally fess up to my habitual gnawing spots. Not, as regular readers of this column appreciate, that I’m one of those foodinistas who never chew fast’n’low. I even enjoy an occasional trip to McDonald’s late in the evening, when the sebaceous whiff of the departed teens has merged with the odours of the chip fat, the meat and the polystyrene.

I like to sit there in the artificial twilight, picking my teeth with the fries, wolfing a simple cheeseburger and washing it all down with glugs of a coffee-style drink; comforted, certainly, by the rock-bottom prices but also savouring that particularly poignant solitude that comes from eating solo in a public place. Yes, that’s my buzz – I admit it; far from looking upon mealtimes as social affairs, I gain the greatest of pleasure from masticating alone. Indeed, when I first saw Buñuel’s Le fantôme de la liberté, I found the scene in which the guests at a bourgeois house sit around a table on commodes discussing defecation politely while shitting, then retire to small locked cubicles in order to eat, anything but surreal.

I suppose my ideally real meal would be consumed in one of those small family-run bistros you can still find in central Paris, with a few tables covered with check cloths, a prix fixe and some specials chalked on a board – the sort of gaff you imagine Inspector Maigret dining in when he’s fed up with sending for beer and sandwiches from the Brasserie Dauphine. I always liked the atmosphere of Simenon’s novels because of their concentration on the sensuality of the quotidian: a solitary appreciation of the texture of food, the play of tobacco smoke and the taste of wine.

Still, needs must, and since I live in dirty old London my equivalent is another anachronism – the India Club Restaurant on the Strand at Aldwych. I used to eat here as a penurious recent graduate in the 1980s. Back then I was amazed by the timeless quality of the place: the chequerboard of grotty lino leading up a flight of stairs, then another flight and into a dining room redolent of the 1950s: plain bentwood chairs, plainer melamine-topped tables, grot-brown floor, yellowy distempered walls, and on those walls affectingly naive portraits of Indian notables. Gandhi, in dhoti and granny specs, his hands held thus far apart as if to indicate the size of the great celibate’s . . . what? and captioned “On His Historic March to Dandi”. By the door there’s an even murkier daub of a gentleman with a patriarchal beard, who, the restaurant’s current patron, Yagdar Marker, told me, is none other than Dadabhai Naoroji, Britain’s first Asian MP and one of the founders of India’s Congress Party.

As I say, when I first went to the Indian Club it seemed beautifully old-fashioned – and not like an Indian restaurant in 1950s Britain, for there were hardly any of those, but like one in 1950s India. At that time, the place was frequented by Fleet Street hacks who referred to the food as “Gandhi’s revenge”. This is unfair, but no one is going to claim the Indian Club is a gourmet outfit. It offers up today exactly what it always has: serviceable Madras cuisine, heavy on the ghee.

Just as I like to eat alone, I hold to Wittgenstein’s dictum that it doesn’t matter what you eat, so long as it’s always the same thing. At the Indian Club I have the rasam, a tamarind, tomato and chilli pepper soup; the mixed bhajis – some are mild peppers, others are fiendish chillis; the tandoori chicken, some dal and some chapatis. All of this is washed down with masala tea.

I was eating this meal in the early 1980s and when, after a 20-year hiatus, I started going to the India Club again, I resumed eating it. In the meantime nothing here had changed! The world outside had horribly mutated but in this sepia burrow it was still India in the 1950s. Mr Marker dolefully informed me that when he took over in 1997 he was obliged to refurbish the hotel upstairs by Health & Safety, but he remained as dedicated to preserving the vintage ambience of the restaurant as I was to imbibing it.

So, if you’re in town and desire a break from the frenetic present, stop by. Some might say the Indian Club is a delusory place, but for me the real maya lies outside. I’m sure Dadabhai Naoroji would agree.

The latest Madness of Crowds column considers the halo effect of Dyson products:

A large part of mass human behaviour is dictated by our gullibility; by which I mean not just a simple compound of ignorance, obedience to authority and conformity to one’s peers but a more fundamental – and, in many ways, quite charming – will to be fooled. The etymology of the verb “to gull” is ascribed by the Oxford English Dictionary to the Old Norse gulr, meaning “pale” or “yellow”. Until recently, I found this derivation rather dubious because a far more plausible provenance is the simpleton sea fowl. Gulls are oppressively social: they take flight in great flapping clouds of conformity and their cries – at once plaintive, raucous and infuriating – sound to me like those of children disabused of a cherished belief.

Consumerism, the popularity of Jeremy Clarkson, fascism, advertising, all manner of speculative manias from tulips to property – to explain phenomena as irrational and diverse as these, it is not enough to suppose human beings to be easily swayed. Rather, we must be congenitally in the swing of things and only awaiting the slightest push to soar still higher. An example from my own life will tease this out.

A few months ago, the vacuum cleaner gave out and I went to buy a new one. Being design-conscious bourgeoisie, we’ve always favoured Dysons but the man at the local appliance shop said, “Oh, no, you don’t want one of them – we call ’em ‘2CVs’ in the trade ’cause you always see them fallen apart by the side of the road. They’re dear, too.”

I took this intelligence home and suggested we break brand loyalty but my wife snapped at me, “No, think again: we’ve had that Dyson for seven years. It’s amortised at less than £50 a year and it’s a good machine.” So, in the space of a few minutes, I went from rejecting something to ordering another one on the internet, simply because of my innate gullibility. Then again, I was at the British Library a week or so ago and found myself marvelling at the efficiency of the Dyson Airblade hand-dryers that have been installed in the toilets.

The Airblade, for those not familiar with it, utilises thin, high-speed jets of cool air to dry the hands in seconds. Its manufacturer claims that this makes it more environmentally friendly but, whether this is true, it’s damnably effective at desiccating.

Its modular form and positioning next to the urinals mean that, sooner or later, someone is bound to put it to the ultimate test. When the subject of Dyson products came up at lunch with a group of design professionals a day or so later, I said quite casually, “I pissed into a Dyson Airblade the other day and it completely evaporated all of my urine in mid-air.”

One woman was a little shocked; a man contended that my flow can’t have been that great; another man said there must have been some sort of spume – but the important thing is that none of them doubted my claim for an instant. This, I realised immediately, was yet another example of the well-attested “halo effect”, whereby when an individual is possessed of an egregious characteristic, it renders people insensible to subtler ones.

True, it grieved me a little that my overriding characteristic was to be the sort of man who people instinctively believed would piss into in a hand-dryer but there was a complementary explanation: the halo effect of Dyson products. These design professionals, while disputing the excellence of Dyson’s cyclonic separation system for vacuum cleaners, nonetheless remained convinced that, if there were to be a hand-dryer that could dissipate a stream of urine in mid-air, that hand-dryer would be a Dyson. Put the two halo effects together and a sort of aurora of credibility enveloped the entire pissing-in-the-Airblade scenario.

There was all of this and there was also that other key component of gullibility: people’s need to conform. Meditating on the incident later, I realised that it had been the woman’s outrage that had confirmed the veracity of my story; had she merely dismissed the tale, the others would no doubt also have begun to demur. As it was, this small crowd continued to reinforce one another’s group-think throughout a long lunch. By the time I got home, I, too, had begun to believe that I had pissed in a Dyson Airblade hand-dryer; I was also more susceptible to the OED’s etymology for “gullible”. Pale? Yellow? It made perfect – albeit faintly disgusting – sense.

“I’m more loyal to Caffè Nero than I am to any other institution. I care more for the Sicilian lemon cheesecake it serves than I do for parliamentary democracy and, while I would sooner have my penis surgically removed and sold as a pestle in a branch of Recipease, Jamie Oliver’s delicatessen chain, than rise to toast the Queen, I stand up proudly by the counter in Caffè Nero, near-saluting when the time comes to pay for my triple-shot latte and the aforementioned cake. If you want the clincher: I possess a Caffè Nero loyalty card, a scrap of blue and black card that stands in the same relation to the contemporary left-liberal bourgeoisie as a party membership card did to earlier generations.

“However, in the past few months, a certain scepticism has crept in – this could be the post-Hungarian Revolution moment in my relationship with the chain. It’s become such a shibboleth among the caffeinated classes to babble that Caffè Nero is the only coffee shop worth its cinnamon sprinkles that I began to be suspicious of the orthodoxy.

“This seemed like a good week to put my loyalty to the ultimate test. There’s no doubt in my febrile mind that a coffee and a snack is what passes for a real meal in this day and age and, besides, I had a botched molar extraction last week and have developed something sinisterly dubbed a ‘dry socket’ (alveolar osteitis, if you want some real Latin), a hole through the necrotic gum to the exposed bone that feels to the pained and probing tongue bigger than my mouth – hell, bigger than all 400-plus branches of Caffè Nero put together. Eating, as you can appreciate, seems faintly preposterous under such circumstances.

“So, one grey morning on the clone high street, with the terrier snapping at his leash, I commit the ultimate act of disloyalty by buying a single espresso at Starbucks, then strolling three doors down to Caffè Nero, entering and buying a second espresso.

“For cover, I also select a honey bio-yoghurt, an orange juice, a blueberry muffin and something called a ‘brunch pot’, which sounds like a dubious sexual practice but is, in reality, ‘creamy, half-fat, Greek-style yoghurt with blueberry compote and crunchy muesli with dried cranberries’, or so the label assures me.

“‘Will you have this here?’ asks the charming Slovak girl by the register and I moan: ‘Sure, I think I’m going to stay for ever. I can’t go home.’ Which is all by way of further cover, because there I am, in the oxblood-painted interior of Caffè Nero, eyeballing a weird arrangement of woody stems, decorticated dried tangerine skins and artichokes (what’s that about?) while sipping a Starbucks coffee! Surely such a profanation is tantamount to pissing on the Kaaba or committing B&E at the Vatican, then eating a saintly relic, and yet … and yet … nothing happens. The Starbucks espresso is still hot and it has that distinctively watery, sourly flat taste I always associate with the chain. But what of the Caffè Nero espresso, coddled in its china egg cup? Yes, yes . . . It’s fuller and rounder and definitively better.

“What a relief! My breast swells once more with loyalty, but I rein in my impulse to down the whole shot – I’ve already had my customary four at home before the school run and if I carry on, my thoughts will spill from my buzzed-up bonce like polystyrene pellets from a slashed sag bag. Even so, as I plough through my yoghurts and pop Nurofen with slugs of OJ, I find myself salaciously eyeing the other customers who are, almost to a woman, what I understand – from surreptitious glances at the magazines my local newsagent Mohandra shelves above the NS – to be Milfs and cougars.

“Blimey! Who’d have imagined a mid-morning chain coffee shop to be such a sensual moshpit? Is it just me or is there an actual hormonal haze wreathing the counter? When one of them comes across to pat the terrier, who’s lying on my lap, I nearly leap out of my chair. I can barely read the screed on the board, which is just as well because, when I put on my glasses, the blur resolves into: ‘Super-thick and finished with whipped cream and Belgian chocolate’. As for the sign above the muffins – ‘Don’t squeeze me until I’m yours’ – there ought to be a law against it. Or perhaps a law in support of it, because, I now realise, having come into Caffè Nero to test my loyalty, I’ve instead assayed my fidelity. I should definitely get out less.”