Mr Justice Bell, suave, wry, nods. Mr Rampton, fastidious, grey, unremitting, refers to his notes. There he finds that, if there are 470,000 purchases averaging two meals per purchase annually in each of 521 British branches of McDonald's, then 489,740,000 meals are sold every year. There is a sort of pause as all our imaginations struggle to cope with this unthinkable, glutinous avalanche of Coke, burgers, fries, shakes and McNuggets.
The UK chief executive, Paul Preston, buttoned-down, buttoned-up, shiny, amiable, nods to indicate that the figure sounds about right. Meanwhile, the two defendants, anarchic, intense, angry, unemployed, watch the transcript rolling by on the laptop computer screen.
Weird and significant things have happened in the mad Gothic wedding-cake fantasy of the Royal Courts of Justice, but probably never anything quite as weird or as significant as the case they call McLibel. Last week, McDonald's, whose twin golden arches bestride the world, embarked on a libel case against two north Londoners, Dave Morris, a single parent and former postman, and Helen Steel, an unemployed gardener.
The case will last more than three months, with each side calling up to 80 witnesses. Since September 1990 there have been 28 pre-trial hearings. Poverty and the lack of legal aid in libel cases oblige Mr Morris and Ms Steel to conduct their own defence. Should they lose, neither would be remotely capable of paying any costs - likely to be at least pounds 1m. In addition, Mr Rampton has said that McDonald's is not seeking damages. The company simply wants to clear its name, to keep Ronald smiling and the arches golden.
At one level, one can see why. This is the ultimate one-product company. Oh sure, you can have Filet-o-Fish instead of the Big Mac, large fries instead of the small. But this is all one thing - food that is fast and served the world over with the technique and uniform, have-a-nice-day impersonality that McDonald's invented, refined and perfected. Taint this one thing and the whole dollars 24bn-a-year edifice is imperilled.
''Yes,' admits the spokesman, 'we are litigious, but we don't feel we've got any other option.'
This case is about an attempted tainting. It centres on a leaflet - in circulation, says McDonald's, for at least 10 years and latterly available worldwide - that was published by an organisation called Greenpeace (London), which, confusingly, has no connection whatsoever with Greenpeace.
This leaflet is a small masterpiece, an exquisitely paranoid distillation of all that people believe, suspect or fear may be wrong with big, smooth, glossy multinational corporations. It accuses McDonald's of poisoning its customers, starving the Third World, exploiting its staff, destroying the environment, torturing animals and corrupting children. It is, says McDonald's, a pack of lies.
Fair enough, except that this trial must, for the company, be a very high-risk strategy. For a start it publicises the allegations. People - a term now in effect synonymous with the phrase 'McDonald's customers' - are not particularly conscientious about reading trial reports, they just pick up the good bits. And the good bits here will not be Mr Rampton or Mr Preston saying McDonald's do not eat babies or whatever, but Ms Steel and Mr Morris saying they do. These are the things that stick and they will not necessarily be dislodged by a courtroom victory expressed as an immensely thick and probably unreadable judgment by Mr Justice Bell.
On top of that, the whole spectacle is inevitably grotesque, a crazy apotheosis of the sledgehammer-nut polarity. Here is this gigantic American corporation and all the pomp, irony and Gothic vaulting of the British legal system bearing down on a couple of grumpy, disaffected anarchists with chips - sorry, french fries - on their shoulders the depth of the Grand Canyon. Difficult, in the circumstances, to avoid looking like McBullies.
'McDonald's started in 1955,' says the compulsively pleonastic Dave Morris. 'Speaking personally, I was born in 1954. I was born before they started. I intend to outlive them. In this case on one side we have McDonald's Corporation with an annual turnover of dollars 24bn every year. On the other we have two unwaged individuals, members of the public.'
This is not strictly true - it was 1954 when the legendary Ray Kroc stumbled on the original restaurant run by the McDonald brothers in San Bernardino, California - but one catches Mr Morris's drift: people are more important than companies.
Add to that the fact that even the Americans have learnt to loathe big business. In probably 50 per cent of Hollywood movies the baddy is the big company. If you are large and corporate you are assumed to be sinister. The only way they could make a movie of this trial would be to have the defendants played by Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise and Richard Rampton played by Harvey Keitel. In the dominant narrative form of the day the little guy must be the good guy.
McDonald's says the leaflet's allegations have seeped into the vernacular. Bright-eyed American kids, straight out of Happy Days, might start vaguely to believe that, yes, Ronald McDonald does destroy the Brazilian rainforest and, of course, Chuck and Peggy Sue love the rainforest as much as Dave and Helen. Perhaps if they learn, via this trial, that the source of the idea was a couple of unemployed anarchists from north London, they might think twice. These guys, straight-shooting, hamburger-chomping Chuck would conclude, are flakes and Ronald is a regular guy after all.
So it becomes clear what this trial is about - the globalisation of culture and belief systems. In terms of real impact on the real world, McDonald's is the most important institution of our time. Ronald is a revolutionary beside whom Lenin and Robespierre pale into insignificance. He has utterly changed eating, the most elemental of commercialised human activities. He turned plates into paper and polystyrene, dispensed with crockery and deleted the cook. His formula works everywhere, the style and imagery slipping without the slightest modifications into local streets and alien lives. To be in a McDonald's is to glimpse the world as reducible to a management and marketing issue. This is the globalisation of profit.
Yet equally globalised is the burning resentment of Mr Morris and Ms Steel. We are all threatened by the behemoth of profit. To them the very word multinational is an invocation of Satan. They are possessed by a Rousseau-esque vision of the world as a green and pleasant place, sullied and soiled by the cold organisation of mankind.
'There are probably 101 things I would rather be doing than campaigning to fight this court case,' said Ms Steel in her opening remarks, 'for example, climbing mountains, walking through forests, gardening, just to name a few.'
She had plucked from the air a list of the activities most definitively opposed to burger-eating. These, she was saying, are my virtues, yours are to drag me to this pompous palace and call me a liar. This is globalisation of paranoia.
This trial will resolve nothing. These are worlds in perfect conflict. Globalisation to McDonald's means bringing people together; to the north London anarchists it means the reduction of the natural paradise to an exploitable system. Confronted with the stubble-chinned, angry-eyed Dave Morris, smooth-suited Paul Preston spreads his palms and shakes his head in dismay and despair. Of each other's lives, purposes, feelings and motives, they each understand precisely nothing.
(Photograph omitted)
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