Will Self

“I find it absolutely mind-boggling that on our high streets there are more than 214 branches of Nando’s, a restaurant chain originally started in South Africa by ethnic Portuguese refugees from Mozambique – but then I suppose that says everything about my failure to grasp the following: capitalism, globalisation, the free market and the great British public’s gnawing desire for chicken.

“Yes, we’re back in the chicken coop again – but in fairness, as this column treats of real meals that people really eat, we should probably never stray too far from the chicken wire. The Nando’s website thoughtfully provides a map showing the distribution of its outlets that makes it look as if doughty Britannia is being pecked to death by sinister, strutting, stylised cockerels – the chain’s logo. Using said map, you could quite easily complete a coast-to-coast walk, à la Wainwright, solely provisioned with the Nando’s signature dish of peri-peri chicken.

“This being noted, there seems to be a marked preponderance of Nando’s in inner-city areas, and I would wager – although I haven’t checked up on this personally, I do have a life you know – that many of these areas have high ethnic-minority populations. It could be that there’s an awareness in the black community of the African roots of Nando’s but, if so, it’s pretty residual. Certainly, when I mentioned this to a black friend who eats there regularly, she didn’t know about it, having just assumed the gaff was Portuguese.

“Indeed, there’s nothing obviously southern African about the Nando’s decor, which is heavy on the faux-adobe, the faux-corrugated iron, the job lots of clay pots and plenty of cockerel-related tat – cages, feed bins and so on. There are also hokey signs on the walls bearing fowl sayings, which stick even in the human craw. Still, the overall feel is tastefully muted: the tables are dark wood, the floors are tiled and the lighting is angled down.”

Read the rest of the latest Real Meals column here.

“Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), to which this column owes its title, devotes a chapter to the subject of men’s hair and beards. However, while Mackay locates the fashion for western men to wear their hair short in St Paul’s declaration that ‘long hair was a shame unto man’, his reticence when it comes to the mass follies of religion means that he only dichotomises his way through history, noting that this faction wore theirs long, while that one went for the No 1.

“Mackay is unwilling to venture into the semiotics of hairstyle, although he concedes that during the English civil war ‘every species of vice and iniquity was thought by the Puritans to lurk in the long curly tresses of the monarchists, while the latter imagined that their opponents were as destitute of wit, wisdom, and of virtue, as they were of hair’.

“The association between plentiful hair and the farouche is easy to divine, as is its paradoxical tangling of effeminacy and machismo. In our own era, the Janus-faced view of hippies – at once filthily feral and girlishly gentle – would seem to have been the apogee; by the mid-1970s, one might have hoped, the tedious go-round between long and short hair would have been abolished, peace and prosperity having been instantiated in the valiant figure of Richard Branson, with his carefully oiled locks flowing over his well-laundered collar.”

Read the rest of the latest Madness of Crowds column at the New Statesman here.

“At what mute, inglorious juncture in the history of British cuisine did the ‘all-day breakfast’ make its appearance? I can’t recall it being scrawled on a yellow cardboard sunburst in Magic Marker until the early 1990s – which makes sense, dating it to the same era as 24-hour rolling news and the export of western values through the cross hairs of a USAF bombardier.

“This is not to suggest that Saddam could have been ousted during the first Gulf war by laser-guided egg, bacon, sausage, baked beans, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, chips and toast – but the all-day breakfast coincided with a devastating new onslaught by irony on Britain’s social structure. Certainly, as the British middle classes loft-converted their way out of the recession of the early 1990s, they began eating all-day breakfasts (or ‘fry-ups’, as these are known to graduates), while washing them down with copious amounts of ‘builder’s tea’. Before this jumbling of mores, a café was a caff, and its clientele was decidedly proletarian.

“Lunching with the writer Nick Papadimitriou at the Max Café on the Wandsworth Road, we mulled over caff food as we dabbled our chips in the shocking fauvism of our oval platters. Nick observed that the meal was a Proustian madeleine, a sense datum linking one unerringly to the past. But which past specifically, I wanted to know? Nineteen seventy-four, Nick snapped – it’s always associated in my mind with leaving Emerson, Lake and Palmer concerts feeling incredibly hungry. But why, I pressed him, were you famished after prog-rock gigs? He grimaced: because they went on and on and on – especially Greg Lake’s bass solos.”

Read the rest of the latest Real Meals column here at the New Statesman.