Amol Rajan: If you must have a selfie with a celeb make sure it's one you love

Stick & Bowl in Kensington is a packed, sloppy, cheap and cheerful Chinese place four minutes walk from our office in Kensington High Street. I used to go there quite a bit years ago, back when I was eating carbs and didn’t mind chopsticks.

I still walk past on occasional strolls into Kensington Gardens and look longingly at the customers knocking back bowls of sticky rice without a care in the world for type 2 diabetes. But something happened this week that is going to reset my relationship with the place completely. It might even cause me to pop in for dinner, say, three times a week.

Ibrahim Salha, one of the young superbrains who works for The Independent’s website, went in on Monday night. And who should he see there getting his own takeaway but the living legend who is Michael K Williams. Staff say he’s in there most nights.

What’s that you say, you don’t know who Michael K Williams is? Well, my friend, you need to get an education, and fast.

Williams played Omar Little in The Wire, the seminal HBO American cop show based on life in modern Baltimore. Omar was the gay, snarling, scar-faced, wise and deeply caring drug dealer. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest television creations, as funny as Falstaff and as complex as Caliban. Not for nothing did Barack Obama, choose him as his favourite TV character. Little was a beautiful bundle of contradictions, a killer full of compassion whose sexuality challenged the assumptions of macho gangsterism.

Regular readers will know that I wrote a few months ago about meeting Bryan Cranston, who plays Walter White in Breaking Bad. Williams is on a similar pedestal in my view, someone who I’ve — without being creepy, I hope — devoted hours of my life to.

It seems to be quite natural, therefore, that when I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and admiring someone, I’d love to meet them. But by conventional wisdom this human instinct makes me a lickspittle, or a star-struck scumbag. And if I wanted to take a selfie with Omar, apparently I’d be a narcissist too.

This is such rubbish, and I want to stand up today for meeting admirable people who happen to be famous, and for selfies too. First of all, I’m not a star-gazer. You could sit me next to any old spiv from Made in Chelsea, or even Jeremy Clarkson, at dinner and believe me I’d much rather be catching up with one of my mates.

The only famous people I want to meet are those I admire. And what, pray, is so wrong with wanting to take a selfie and so record the moment for posterity? After all, it would give me not just a lasting image to remember the occasion by, and instant kudos among my mates, but something to talk to Clarkson about if I was ever sat next to him, and didn’t want to talk about guns , car s or punching people.

This is why, dear readers, I shall be heading to Stick & Bowl every work night for the foreseeable, in the hope of meeting one of the great actors of our time. Not because I’m a grovelling toad but because a selfie with Omar would be a joy forever.

And if you think that makes me a loser, well, frankly I don’t care, because I’m off to get a chow mein. If I see Omar, I’ll let you know.

Amol Rajan is editor of The Independent.