“A couple of years ago, a locksmith high on junk food pulled out of a McDonald’s drive-thru without looking and wrote off my car. At the time, as I went in a split second from steel-cosseted calm to rain-drenched shock, I wasn’t that pleased; but as time has gone by I’ve realised that he did me a big favour. However, it isn’t the madness of autogeddon that I wish to examine this week but the plague of overfamiliarity that has swept British society.

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“Wagamama has been serving a bizarre fusion cuisine – part Japanese traditional, part English nursery slop – for nigh on 20 years now. When the first restaurant opened in the early 1990s its exposed kitchens and austere interior design seemed the dernier cri in foodurism. Checking out the T-shirted waiting staff, punching orders into handheld computer terminals, one was convinced that this was exactly the joint where Deckard the blade runner would chow down, were he sent to hunt replicants in London.

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Watch Will Self and Jay McInerney talking about the legacy of JD Salinger, who died on Wednesday, on Newsnight.

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There’s a lively Start the Week that Self took part in earlier in the week, whose guests included the geneticist Steve Jones, Montaigne biographer Sarah Bakewell and Charles Hazlewood. Listen to it here, or subscribe to the podcast here.

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To listen to Self talking about WG Sebald on Nightwaves from January 11, try signing up to the Arts and Ideas podcast on the radio 3 website here.

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To celebrate its 75th anniversary, Penguin asked authors to name their favourite from its classics backlist. Will Self explains why he picked HG Wells’ War of the Worlds.

Self has also written about the “significance of catastrophe books” on the Penguin website.

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Will Self appears very, very briefly in BBC2’s Newsnight at 30, available to watch until Saturday. Guests on the panel include Martin Amis, Jarvis Cocker and Tracey Emin. Worth watching alone for Charles Wheeler’s complaint to camera that “I’ve got Ian Smith coming in my ear”.

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“I’ve been putting it off, hopping up and down, tensing first one buttock then the other, waiting until the pain is insupportable . . . but although it’s a dirty job, someone has to let go and ask the question: why is it that so many men piss in the streets nowadays? Time was when the average British male would no more publicly urinate than he would fornicate or defecate – but now the streets round my way run yellow. Indeed, there’s an alley opposite my house that I can see from where I’m typing this column, and if I chance to glance in that direction I’ll often clock some perfectly ordinary-looking chap duck into it, unzip, then splutter.

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Still on a Bristol theme, Self has written about Massive Attack’s new album, Heligoland, for the Sunday Times, which can be read here.

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Will Self is going to be at the Thunderbolt pub in Bristol on Thursday February 25. For tickets, which cost £10, and details, call 0117 9299008.

Will's Diary | No Comments »