Or: The Failure of the Psychedelic Revolution to so much as Slow for One Instant the Incessant Gobbling-up of the Earth by the Moloch of Globalisation Considered as a Solo Uphill Bicycle Race through Basel
This article will appear first in Esquire magazine.
Will Self was awarded Writer of the Year (Consumer Media) for Esquire magazine at last night’s Professional Publishers Association awards. Read two recent Esquire pieces here.
A bulky parcel arrives at the door of my house in south London, and as I tear open the wrapping – first thick transparent plastic, then a padded envelope, then bubble wrap – the courier looks on uneasily: What is this, his expression says, some as yet respectable-looking crackhead who’s heading way on down – and fast? Sensing his mounting opprobrium, I scribble with the stylus on the hideous little grey screen of his hideous little handheld computer and gesture him away. Alone, I head for the kitchen … and the knives.
“I first met Bruce Robinson in the mid-Nineties – it was a vague decade for both of us, so I feel no need to hammer down the year. We were lunching with mutual friends, whose house in the vegetable underbelly of Birmingham is a curious Arts and Crafts repro of a Tudor mansion. So, picture the scene: side tables strewn with well-carved beef bones, a long dining table scattered with dirtied plates and smeary glasses, silvery winter-afternoon light falling from high, diamond-mullioned windows and oily ancestral gentry peering down from the wood-panelled walls.