I went to a demonstration. A demo, after all this time. Oggy, oggy, oggy. For Pakistan, because I love Pakistan, and so few people seem to at the moment. Actually, I was feebly lending support to my friend Imran Khan, who’d been locked up, roughed up and charged with terrorism. The world has turned upside down when they accuse the greatest cricketing all-rounder of being a terrorist. On the scale of human possibility, you have, at the bright-light end, a batsman with effortlessly elegant cover drives; and at the far, far, far dark end, you have people who think murdering random strangers is a good way to start making the earth a happier, fairer place. I almost honestly believe that being able to play cricket counts as an inoculation against evil. How sad, mad, bad and bunker-brained must General Musharraf have become to arrest a man who arranged more garlands of pride, joy and prestige for his country than any other in its short history.

All this is a salutary reminder that a unique selling point of democracy isn’t that it’s necessarily or intrinsically better than the alternative, but that it’s never quite as awful. Governments are the only man-made thing where the disposable and mass produced is preferable to the custom, handmade and unbreakable. Fundamentally, it’s not how you get a government that’s important, it’s how you get rid of it.

What to wear. This is, of course, the big demonstrative conundrum. I haven’t done this for 30-odd years. Army surplus, I reckon, never fails, but at the door I discarded the beret. For my generation, it’s a bit Spanish civil war, a touch Che. In Pakistan, it just looks like every president not called Bhutto.

Demos consider themselves the most committed and active of all political engagements. They are the coalface, the barricades of the collective will. Actually, they’re the simplest binary form of goldfish-like involvement: all you have to do is turn up and open and close your mouth, and not get further than 5ft from the people on either side. Become disengaged and you cease to be a demonstrator and are merely an onlooker.

It all took me back, standing outside an embassy, the bull horns, the bedsit placards, the cold, an exciting sense of a shared grievance. There’s nothing as socially galvanising and pleasant as the warm security of a self-righteous crowd. I remember marching for Vietnam, South Africa, Bangladesh, Chile, Czechoslovakia, hideous sooty bits of the north of England, and once for Greece, though I can’t think why. And for student grants – not improved loans, mind, but more free cash.

I got such a strong dose of tempus fugit nostalgia. And then I looked up, and bless my Palestinian scarf, it was Tariq Ali, just where I’d left him, making the same speech: American imperialism, war-criminal president, yadda, yadda. Imagine a lifetime of saying the same thing, over and over, but just making your way around the world, like a tour guide with only one spiel. “On the right, you’ll see the CIA and the military-industrial complex.” Standing on damp, cold corners delivering it with fresh enthusiasm to the back of bored policemen’s heads. What do we want? When do we want it? Actually, what we should be asked is, when do we expect to get it? Never. We never expected to get any of it. Or anything to change. Demos are about being right, not being practical.

And then, would you believe it, bless my little CND badge, they went and released Imran. For the first time ever, something Tariq and I protested about actually happened. Now, I know I obviously can’t claim to have freed Imran single-handedly – the point of protest is collective responsibility – but I know that the Pakistan secret police study photographs of these events pretty carefully, and I’m confident that the image of Tariq, me and Trudie Styler at the barricade will have convinced Musharraf that the game was up. I shall say no more.

I don’t think I ever demonstrated for the Ukraine. But I might chain myself to the railings outside Divo on behalf of abused ingredients. People occasionally ask me if I pick bad restaurants on purpose. I don’t, but you don’t look a gift Cossack in the mouth. Divo is spectacularly awful. To begin with, it’s a laughably awful name. They say it means “wonderful” or something, but we took a Ukrainian with us (who must remain anonymous to protect his family and donkey). He said it actually means sort of weirdly wonderful – and that covers it. Just as long as you don’t want to eat there.

Which, apparently, hardly anyone does. When we arrived, I was asked if we wanted the light room or the dark one, which seems to have taken over from smoking or non. I said light. Wrong answer. There was some sort of interrogation heat lamp that was so blinding, I denounced all my neighbours. The decor is late oligarch. The money spent on this large, gilded, swagged and distressed room, with its hysterical fixtures, prostitutes’ fittings and Ruritanian lavatorial splendour, hasn’t been so much wasted, or squandered, as sent to a gulag of tastelessness. The chairs are vast and histrionic, but still managed to be more uncomfortable than sitting on an Ethiopian Santa’s knee. The pièce de résistance is a gold Louis the Pimp baroque frame that holds a large plasma screen, onto which swim postcard views of delightful Ukraine through the seasons. I wish I’d been there when the owner told the decorator that he wanted one just there.

The menu looks like a Slavic burger bar. Apparently, Ukrainian food is Russian food but without the sense of generosity or bohemian sophistication. I started with a traditional plate of pig fat. Thick slabs of lard arranged by rather sweaty, nimble fingers to resemble small, dead pudenda. They came with tiny pubic triangles of fried black bread, as impenetrable as roof tiles. And raw garlic cloves cut in half. Whether these were all supposed to be garnish or ingredients, or just there to ward off the werewolves on the next table was not explained, and I didn’t feel like asking anyone. It was a dish of spectacular, multifaceted incompetence. Horrible on almost every level. I can’t imagine that there are a handful of people in all of London who would ever say: “Let’s go out. I want to buy a dish of labial white pig fat with garlic.”

Garlic turned out to be the taste Tourette’s of the kitchen. Dishes didn’t so much taste of it, as competed for garlic density. The menu couldn’t have been more brothel repellent if it had been devised by the Baptist committee for teenage sexual abstinence.

Bowls of various dumplings were stuffed with peasant cud, which was both insipid and offensive. Cossack sausage was far nicer as a euphemism than it was in the gob. My chicken kiev was, contrarily, the only thing that didn’t taste of garlic – it came wrapped in a thick pack of cagey batter, like a postcommunist computer travel bag. (Chicken kiev, incidentally, has nothing to do with Kiev, or the Ukraine. It was invented in Soho in the 1950s by Italians.) Every dish was another small, pretentious, sniggeringly tasteless disaster. Pudding included a New York cheesecake.

The waitresses were all provocatively perky and fitted out in humiliating asymmetrical mini-dirndls. They’re not Ukrainians, of course. They’re Balts, Liths, Lats and Ests. The Blonde suggested that perhaps there was just one waitress, with other waitresses of decreasing size stacked inside her. Needless to say, it was all meritlessly expensive, and there’s a bar for vodka drinking and new democratic pickup lines: “Hey, baby, you got any Ukrainian in you?”; “Is that a Cossack sausage in my pocket, or am I pleased to see you?”; “Hey, dolly tatty person, you want wake up with me and smell the garlic?” Go soon – the wonder of Divo can’t last much longer.

12 Waterloo Place, SW1; 020 7484 1355.
Lunch, Mon-Fri, noon-4.30pm; dinner, Mon-Thu, 6pm-11pm, Fri-Sat, 6pm-midnight

Slav to love: 5 stars; Slav to the rhythm: 4 stars; Slav away: 3 stars; Slav labour: 2 stars; Slav trade: 1 star

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