The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

My nephew Jack and I are heading south after an unsuccessful attempt to reach the remote Hebridean island of St Kilda. Facing the implacability of a force-nine gale, Angus the skipper demurred. Mind you, when we arrived at the quayside in Stornoway, I’d felt like demurring as well; it wasn’t so much the prospect of 40 miles of heaving North Atlantic as the spectacle of hungry gulls mobbing the back of Angus’s pick-up. “They got a whole load of sausage rolls earlier on,” he admitted.

Journalism, New Statesman | No Comments »

As part of the Llangollen fringe festival, there weill be an Audience with Will Self at the Royal Pavilion, Llangollen at 7.30pm on July 22. Tickets cost £15. For more details go here.

Will's Diary | No Comments »

The latest Madness of Crowds column:

I hope you have noticed my forbearance throughout the recent football tourney, resisting the urge to prate upon the follies of fandom, let alone the poisonous catalysis that ensues when they are admixed with patriotism. But now, with fair Albion lain out upon the veldt, the Boerfarter’s jackboot on her heaving breast, the time has come for me to put my own boot in.

Journalism, New Statesman | No Comments »

A short interview with Will Self (and Martin Amis) at the Shakespeare&Co festival in Paris. Here’s the written version.

Interviews with Will | No Comments »

Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing by Tim Parks, Harvill Secker, £12.99

Do I have to say this? Yes, I suppose I ought: Tim Parks’s digressive memoir of his debilitating but ultimately life-affirming struggle with pelvic pain made me leak a few tears, guffaw a lot, and besides quietly instructing me in some fresh perspectives – on such matters as Samuel Beckett and Buddhism (and that’s only the Bs) – ultimately taught me an eminently practical lesson about coping with age and mortality. Must I utter the blurbish cliché? Why the hell not: Teach us to Sit Still made me laugh it made me cry and it made me seriously think about taking up Vipassana meditation.

Book reviews, Journalism, The Times | No Comments »

The latest Real Meals column is here:

I often have a kebab, though not as often as I might. In my part of the world – and along countless other urban arterial roads the length and breadth of the land – you can proceed from one samey shopping parade to the next, your forward movement registered only by the thinning and thickening of the stylised doner kebabs depicted on the signs vertically mounted above fast-food joints. What is it about the kebab? And more to the point – if you’ll forgive the pun – what is it about the Turkish community, which has percolated into this country with scarcely a perturbation of the body politic?

Journalism, New Statesman | No Comments »

To Sebastian Horsley’s funeral at St James’s in Piccadilly. I first met Seb in the early 1990s, he was living in Mayfair in order – or so he maintained – to be near to the prostitutes. He had the dead-white face of a Weimar cabaret compère, and the lisp of a studied aesthete. When we went out to the cash point together to get money for the dealer, Seb revealed that he had a loaded revolver back at the flat. I was furious – I’ve never liked guns, and guns and crack cocaine (as history seems to bear out), are seldom a good combo.

Liver, Will's Blog | No Comments »

En route for the tiny and remote Hebridean island of St Kilda I found myself grappling with a tiny and remote problem. I have told myself time and time again that there are no technical solutions for writers, only imaginative ones – but that doesn’t stop me from falling prey to these delusions: this computer/typewriter/research will catapult the work in hand to new levels.

My tiny netbook had burnt out after I’d stupidly shut it while it was shutting down then left it to burn out its mother board. Or so Nomi, the guy in the local cyber-café-cum-phone-unlocking hangout, told me. He ordered a new mother board from Hong Kong to replace it, and when the job was done (160 shitters), we checked that it booted up and I tucked it away in my rucksack.

Will's Blog | No Comments »

This is the speech that Will Self delivered at the Broadcast and Beyond conference on 19 May 2010 in which he addressed an audience of professional broadcasters and told them what he would do if he ruled television:

To me, if there’s a spirit of British television it’s this: a title sequence for a current affairs or news programme that unites the individual viewer with the commonality.

Essays, Miscellaneous | No Comments »

Watch Will Self being interviewed at the Shakespeare & Company festival in Paris at the Louis Roederer Champagne website here.

Interviews with Will | No Comments »