So I was walking through London recently, no particular purpose in mind, as one might in this rapidly-crumbling society of ours, when bright lights descended upon my eyes, and a loud screeching sound begun to ring in my ears. When the lights cleared, and the noise diminished, a deeply unexpected vision presented itself to me… was I hallucinating? Had I had a stroke? There was no way this could be real.

A shop. In the middle of London. That is just MnMs.

MnMs t-shirts, MnMs soft toys, MnMs dressed as policemen, MnMs keyrings, MnMs jewellery, MnMs stationary, MnMs statuettes, MnMs microbrewery ale, MnMs trenchcoats, MnMs power tools, MnMs intimate lube, MnMs pencil sharpeners, a range of MnMs ‘modern classics’ (including an MnMs ‘Ulysses’ and an MnMs ‘Mrs Dalloway’), MnMs stamps, MnMs picture frames, MnMs football shirts, MnMs toy cars, MnMs gilt mirrors, MnMs astrological charts, MnMs shoes… the complete sweep of human civilization, reconstructed in MnMs form.

And yet the shop appeared to have intersubjective reality. Other people were trotting into it quite happily, as if it really existed and completely justified itself. Indeed (and this is always what most fascinates me whenever I happen to be presented with this sort of phenomena, see also Westfield Stratford City), they weren’t even really questioning it on any level. People seemed to be having fun in the shop, sure, but their faces were far blanker than they ought to be after seeing (I’m guessing in most cases for the first time) a shop that is just MnMs, by all rights they should have been presenting with the same mix of impossible amusement and utter terror that I was.

Because the thing is, there is literally no way that this place should exist. When I say that the complete sweep of human civilization has been reconstructed in this shop via MnMs, I’m not kidding. They have pictures on the wall, oil paintings, representing great leaders from history, only they are (for example) the Red MnM instead of Henry VIII. They were selling some sort of calender (I think it was) where the Green MnM was Marilyn Monroe. There is a reconstruction of the cover of Abbey Road, but with the fab MnMs four instead of John, Paul, George and Ringo (I am reminded of an exhibition I once saw in Lodz, Poland of art by the Slovenian industrial band Laibach, which somehow, I forget how exactly, juxtaposed imagery of the Beatles and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, via Laibach, three different ‘fab fours’, well maybe the MnMs are the fourth, and most terrifying).

But strangest of all is, of course, the fact that there is all this stuff, and it is really expensive, and yet surely no one could possibly want it. The prices are astonishingly extortionate. Fine a keyring is £6, a t-shirt maybe £18: expensive but not mind-shatteringly so… but you can buy a statuette of ‘Yellow Surfing’ and it will cost you £170.

This one of them in a rock band is £907.

(there are loads more really expensive statues like this, for example one where they’re all on a roller coaster)

And I’ve neglected to mention this thus far, but there are four floors of this. Four floors in the middle of London, of MnMs junk. This is prime real estate. And look at the prices… someone is definitely losing a lot of money here. But why? There must be some conspiracy, but I didn’t see enough to unearth it.

One possible reading is the following: civilization has failed. The MnMs are taking over now, to re-do everything again, only through the prism of the one thing that is really, finally, salvageable from the mess we have made of our culture: the MnM. No history without MnMs, no art without MnMs, no literature that does not exclusively feature the four MnMs as characters, if you need more you have to dress them up differently. The air even smells of MnMs, as to tell us that all other smells have now been replaced, there is only chocolate and earwig extract. That is the new smell.

But like I say, that’s just one reading of these bizarre scenes.

Whatever the case may be, I think, really, that after being confronted with this shop, your sensible reaction ought to be to despair utterly of ever reconciling your life with the world, and declare, along with this keyring (pictured, but slogan somewhat blurred, though it really is this): “I AM A DEAD MAN.”