Will Self

My aunt Phoebe – bless her – is obsessed by sell-by dates. I say “bless her”, but really it is infuriating to watch her reverently examine the label on some perfectly edible packet of broccoli or bacon, and then ruthlessly consign it to the pedal bin. In vain do I remonstrate with her, pointing out that there are now two dates on each label – the “display until” and “use by” – and that while her Cheddar or chives may have passed the former they remain safely within the bounds of the latter. “Ooh,” she’ll say, shaking her snowy head. “You say that, but best be on the safe side . . .” Ker-chung!

What makes Phoebe’s behaviour all the more deranging is that she grew up on a farm in the 1930s, drinking unpasteurised milk fresh from the cow and eating meat that was hung until it was as high as a . . . well, you all know what rotten meat smells like. I say to Phoebe: “Revered Aunt, surely with your upbringing you’re well placed to make your own judgement about what’s fit for human consumption, and don’t need to be a passive tool of this shamefully wasteful system?”

And then I go on to explain how the entire food labelling protocol has evolved, not so much to guarantee the health of the consumer, but rather to maintain the stock control of the retailer. I point out that the “display by” label is there to ensure that perishable products are repeatedly moved to the front of the shelf, or rack, or the top of the gondola, so as to minimise costly wastage.

The correct way of regarding sell-by dates, therefore, is as a form of temporal marginal preference enacted by the business upon the individual. In order to maximise my turnover, the supermarket thinks to itself, I will choose him rather than her, because he has troubled to look at the display-by label and acted accordingly. William Burroughs observed of heroin that it was a unique kind of product, because rather than it being sold to people, people were sold to it. But Burroughs was being disingenuous, and his characterisation was only of an extreme – and quasi-outlawed – form of late-capitalist consumerism.

In truth, under conditions of optimal distribution, all people are sold to all products at both ends of the supply chain. Food producers are compelled to accept the enormous discounts imposed by the retailers’ de facto price cartels, while food consumers are driven to carry about sugar snap peas or sugar for a few days before discarding them. The entire point of the process is not to sustain the people, but to facilitate the viral spread of the products.

“Don’t patronise me, young man!” my aunt will invariably say once I reach this point in my analysis. “You forget that I grew up during the Great Depression – and I know a thing or two about getting by on very little.” When she reacts like this, I’ve pretty much achieved what I was after: middle-aged men invariably bait older people so that we can fraudulently earn the ascription “young”. But while Aunt Phoebe may have witnessed the terrible consequences of speculative fever (and what is this particular madness, if not the human correlate of an asset bubble?), it hasn’t stopped her falling victim to all the delusions perpetrated by 21st-century retailing.

So what, I hear you chide, should I do in order to avoid becoming the passive tool of some Parmesan? Are you saying I should wilfully ignore sell-by dates? Or that I should buy only stuff I find in the cut-price bin? To which my reply is: neither. On the contrary, what we should all do is only buy the stuff that’s at the back of the shelf, the rack, or the bottom of the gondola. This simple act, if undertaken by the masses, will completely banjax the system – in a matter of days the supermarkets’ stock-control systems will break down and they’ll be chock-full of rotting food.

The “ker-chung!” of a cosmic pedal bin will awake us zombies from our merchandising fugue. No longer will we totter along the aisles, brainlessly checking sell-by dates. Within a matter of weeks, wholesale breakdown will have happened and the hegemony of the products will have collapsed. I like to think that I’ll be at Aunt Phoebe’s shoulder on that magnificent day when, once more, she finds herself standing in a street market, contemplating a rotten mangel-wurzel and jingling a few heavy copper coins in her palsied hand.

My wife told me recently that “panini” is a malapropism, being the plural rather than the singular. Think about it: every time you ask for “a panini”, you are in fact requesting several of these inoffensively phallic snacks, or speaking complete nonsense – depending on which way you want to look at it. Either way, you’re giving Italian-speaking café workers an opportunity to snigger at you behind their polythene-gloved hands as they take sundried tomatoes from one Tupperware container, mozzarella from the next, pastrami from a third, and incorporate them into the eponymous white roll.

Not that anyone could be that sad – even though Italian amour propre can be staggering, especially when it comes to the English, whose style every self-respecting Italian intellectual seeks shamelessly to emulate. I well recall meeting my Italian ex-publisher for the first time. We’d arranged to rendezvous at a pub in Kensington, and as I came cycling down the road I saw a man wearing brown corduroy trousers, a tweed jacket, a Viyella shirt and brogues. I pulled up beside him and said: “You must be my Italian publisher,” at which salutation he jumped about a foot in the air, yelping: “But ‘ow deed you know?” I can’t remember if on that occasion Carlo Brugnatelli and I ate panini – but I doubt it, as we were at a gastropub and the ethos of such establishments couldn’t be further from this foodstuff: gastropubs disguise continental European mores in the tweedy fug of the saloon bar, while panini are basically just ham-and-cheese sandwiches by Emporio Armani.

No wonder they’ve taken over the country. There’s this whiff of pseudo-sophistication about them; but more than that, they’re firm, warm and portable, and by some weird sleight-of-mind they allow otherwise health-conscious Brits to ignore that they’re eating a huge chunk of white bread. Not that warmth is intrinsic to the panino; in Italy they’re just as frequently served cold, becoming by the absence of heat and pressure merely a regional variant on the pan-European baguette. Indeed, the Italian colloquialism for a toasted panino is quite simply “toast”, yet another example of Italians’ devotion to lo stile degli inglesi.

Listen, far be it from me to promote any culinary nationalism. Quite self-evidently, as it is to all aspects of culture, so it is even more so to cuisine. Were it not for the Italian POWs who stayed behind after the Second World War and opened ice-cream parlours, cafés and chip shops, entire swaths of Caledonia would be uninhabitable due to the ghastliness of the indigenous diet. (The same is true for the rest of the Union, too.)

No less a thinker than Michael Gove has called for greater emphasis on the narrative history of these islands, and appointed no less a historian than Simon Shawarma-Kebab to smear wholesome dripping on the national Hovis. Shawarma-Kebab would do well to begin with snacking; after all, it was a noble Englishman – the Earl of Sandwich – who invented the sandwich. True, I find it impossible to imagine His Lordship’s eureka moment without recalling Woody Allen’s inspired riff on the subject: “1745: After four years of frenzied labour, he is convinced he is on the threshold of success. He exhibits before his peers two slices of turkey with a slice of bread in the middle. His work is rejected by all but David Hume, who senses the imminence of something great . . .”

But there’s nothing risible about the modern British sandwich, which has done everything in its power to keep abreast with the times by incorporating ingredients, from tandoori chicken to hummus to salt beef, into all manner of breads – seeded, sourdough, pumper-fucking-nickel.

And yet . . . and yet . . . It’ll take more than Gove’s planet-sized percipience to prevent the sense of presque vu we all still have, even when biting into a marinaded fugu with julep and endive on manna. For, somewhere not far from the tip of our collective tongue is a recollection of that national humiliation – the soggy beige triangle of unwonderful loaf, seamed with bilious cheese and garnished with wilted lettuce and E coli. We long to escape the cold misery of the sandwich, just as our valiant forefathers longed to escape Colditz. And so it is, that when we find ourselves at the lunch counter, we cast aside all thoughts of patriotism and call for panini. Lots of them.

Arguably a crowd comprising 59 men (and, perhaps, the odd – very odd – woman), between them carrying 109 guns, is about as mad as it gets, especially when they’re all milling about the elegant terraced houses of Chelsea. I’m not too interested in dissecting the minutiae of the five-hour “siege” that ended up with the 32-year-old barrister Mark Saunders receiving five fatal shots from four police marksmen – but what must be countered is the ludicrous ruling of the jury at the coroner’s inquest, held on 7 October this year. Ludicrous, because there is no way that 59 armed officers could be construed as acting in “reasonable self-defence” under such circumstances. Saunders was an alcoholic. The shotgun he was waving around has an effective lethal range of 50 yards at most, and he was up in his flat – the marksmen were down on the ground. Besides being able to take cover, they were all wearing body armour.

As in other, similar cases, the coroner had already debarred members of the jury from delivering a verdict of “unlawful killing”, so we cannot blame them for not checking the madness of this particular crowd. But they did criticise the way senior officers had handled the “siege” and, with due contrition, the Metropolitan Police subsequently conceded that there were “lessons” to be learned. But it seems the one lesson which cannot be learned is that it’s unacceptable in a democratic and open society to have any group of people, let alone armed police officers, who are in effect above the law.

Saunders was gunned down in 2008 and this year we had the revolting snuff newscast of Raoul Moat but, overall, the British police are fairly parsimonious when it comes to wasting citizenry: there have been 29 fatal shootings by police since 2000, of which 13 were by the Met. Nevertheless, no officer has ever been prosecuted for unlawful killing and I have had it from sources close to the apex at the Met that no officer can ever be. On one occasion – when there was a flagrant failure to give due warning before a man wielding a chair leg was gunned down – spokespersons for the firearms officers made it abundantly clear that they would down tools if any of their colleagues was charged. What a peculiar Mexican stand-off! The very police officers charged with the greatest responsibility on our streets, acting like a juvenile gang – it doesn’t exactly instil confidence.

Ah, say the lovers of Laura Norder, but what would you have done? Well, I don’t know exactly what operational errors the senior officers at the Met are conceding, but the very presence of the armed mob would seem to be one, as was how Saunders was killed while a “trained negotiator” was talking to him. Such is the modern way that this horror show was broadcast for all to witness: the poor, disturbed man waving his shotgun about while we hear a woman saying: “You need to pick up the phone, Mark. You need to pick up the phone.” Seconds later, the fatal shots were fired.
Trained negotiator she may have been, but she sounded as sympathetic as a raddled barmaid calling last orders. Is this snobbery?

I rather suspect it is: vocal snobbery. If I’m ever in a dangerous stand-off, I want someone plummy and faintly amusing to talk me down – think Joanna Lumley, Simon Callow, or the chap who used to do the voice-overs for Mr Kipling. Perhaps if any of these exceedingly calming voices had been deployed, Saunders might still be alive.

In the wake of the Jean Charles de Menezes killing, the Met went through the hoops backwards in an effort to exonerate not only the actual shooters, but also the entire chain of command involved in this colossal and tragic cock-up. After writing certain trenchant remarks in the press, having been given an off-the-record briefing by the late, lamented Liberal mayoral candidate Brian Paddick, I was summoned to Scotland Yard for a chat with the then headmaster, Ian Blair.

There was tea and biscuits and he came on soft, for all the world like a sociology lecturer at a former polytechnic. I got the message: it’s fantastically bloody hard, policing this city, and we’d be grateful if you weren’t so mean to us.

Wassums. Still, should the current commissioner wish to have a chat with me about Saunders’s killing, my door is open. Just don’t rush round.