“I thought Burgess Park pretty much the arse-end of the universe, an oppressively thin ribbon of an open space which still showed the scars of the houses and factories that had been cleared to create it. A mere stripling, I had yet to appreciate the necessity of a park for urban dwellers, nor how even the most unprepossessing and debatable of lands can be a source of pride and joy.

“Thirty years, four children and a dog later, I know my London parks; and when a friend who’s a local resident called to tell me she was concerned about Southwark Council’s plans to “revitalise” Burgess Park I happily agreed to take a tour with her, confident that nothing – and I mean nothing – that could be done to the place could fail to improve it.

“How wrong I was. The Mayor – who I often think looks a little like a tree himself, what with his impressive blond canopy – has divvied up £2million of our money to add to the £4million (also, of course, ours) that Southwark is spending. Boris isn’t only dendriform but he also spent more tax money on a pamphlet called The Canopy: London’s Urban Forest in which he urged: ‘We must also ensure that we reverse the decline of existing mature trees that has occurred over recent years and seek opportunities to increase their numbers.’

Read the rest of Will Self’s piece on Burgess Park at the Evening Standard website here.

“It’s a nice irony, for The Road, the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel that Hillcoat has directed, is — looked at one way — all about stuff and the culling of it. Shot over the winter and spring of 2008-9 in four US states and more than 50 locations, The Road depicts with uncanny realism the halting progress of a father and his 11-year-old son (played, respectively, by Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee) across a post-apocalyptic America.

“All the useful stuff they have is stashed in a shopping trolley, while their desperate search for food is conducted against a backdrop of civilisation’s discarded toys, its smashed cars, crushed houses and defunct machinery.

“On the afternoon I speak with Hillcoat, he’s just learned that the film failed to secure any nominations for the Golden Globe awards. Despite this weighing a little heavily on him, he does his best to shrug it off: ‘The Globes are voted for by anyone in LA who’s ever written for a foreign newspaper or magazine,’ he says. ‘That means, like, Romanian cookery writers.’

“Nevertheless, the coming Baftas and, of course, the Oscars, are a real worry for the director — which is a shame, I think, because The Road is such an artistic triumph it should elevate Hillcoat above such mundane concerns. But that’s not the way it goes with the movies — and John Hillcoat knows that better than most. ‘It’s not awards per se that bother me, it’s entirely to do with the impetus they give for marketing a film.’

“The Road is only his fourth feature in more than 20 years, and while a lesser man might be tempted to blame the studio system, or the almighty dollar, Hillcoat owns his stuff: ‘Basically, I frittered away the Nineties making pop videos and being pretty self-indulgent.’

To read the rest of Self’s interview with John Hillcoat, visit the Evening Standard.

“‘You’re looking tired out,’ I quipped, but when he failed to smile I went on philosophically: ‘Well, that’s London for you.’

“‘No,’ he replied, still stony-faced. ‘That’s Stockwell.’

“I went on my way a little chagrined at his stereotyping of my neighbourhood, which, while it may have its problems, still deserves a less negative attitude from its law enforcers.

“But then it occurred to me that I was guilty of propagating a stereotype as well – and mine had been even broader, reducing the entire metropolis to a zone of petty crime.

“We all do it, though, don’t we: view this great and infinitely varied city through the reducing lens of stereotypy?

“I think it’s a coping mechanism: after all, if we stopped to consider the individuality of every single person we came across in a given day, we’d probably go crazy.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column here.

“You and I might well imagine such activity should be confined to the Ministry of Stating the Bleeding Obvious but why make things easy when you can generate great mounds of paper and waste the time of a great many people and the money of a great many taxpayers to discover that, lo! The inhabitants of leafy Richmond upon Thames report an approval rating of 92.4 per cent.

“This made Richmondians only the second happiest bunch in the country, beaten by the nabobs of the Square Mile but that hasn’t stopped the Westside posse declaring victory, on the grounds that the 10,000 City of London residents are a statistically insignificant sample.

“So, London boasts the most satisfied residents in the land but also, doh! the least: the inhabitants of two-stops-short-of-Dagenham (they’re Barking), and Dagenham itself, have recorded a meagre 56.5 per cent approval rating for their own riverside manors; which may, it’s fair to say, find themselves in the Thames, rather than upon it, if the world keeps getting hotter.

“Being a Stockwell resident and while not exactly miserable, certainly not brimming over with the joys of life, I decided to go west for a day to find the secret of the Richmondians’ inner peace.”

To read the rest of this article, visit here.

“Perhaps the most London-locked time I ever experienced was when I had a house in Shepherd’s Bush, and then latterly on the fringes of Notting Hill. True, I could get a prospect from the top of Ladbroke Grove — but it was only of more Ladbroke Grove; if I wanted any sense of relief — in both senses — I had to walk to the western edge of Wormwood Scrubs, from which corner of the urban veldt the towers and trees of Campden Hill appeared as a distant oasis.

“For the past decade, however, I’ve been in Stockwell, and while a trip along Wandsworth Road to Clapham Junction offers some vistas, the most prominent natural feature hereabouts is the daddy of ‘em all — Old Father Thames. No matter how claustrophobic I may feel, a stroll along the embankments never fails to reposition me in a world that’s as natural as a cormorant scudding across its empurpled wavelets rather than as artificial as a red-faced Cabinet minister tendering his resignation.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s psychogeographic walk along the Thames with his nephew Jack, here.

“It’s gratifying that in the 77 years since Aldous Huxley published Brave New World his vision of a future in which humans are produced in assembly-line laboratories, according to predetermined characteristics — physical, intellectual and emotional — still remains so deeply embedded in the popular consciousness.

“Of course, I may be kidding myself here, and it’s not Huxley’s inspired — if a trifle didactic — satire that makes so many people so suspicious of assisted reproduction techniques but some sci-fi Z-movie with a title such as Mad Lesbian Scientists Destroy all Men.

“Because to read the lubricious versions of Dr Nayernia’s paper about his work in the press (it was published initially in the drier-sounding journal Stem Cell and Development), it is but a short wriggle from achieving successful spermatogenesis in the lab to the annihilation of anything human that has — in our charming cockney colloquialism — meat ‘n’ two veg.”

To read the rest of this article, visit the Evening Standard website here.

“I know I’m not alone in thinking that the boom years led London to have a somewhat bloated self-image: we began to think in terms of the City traders’ bunce; if we were property-owners, we fell prey to the delusion that money in bricks and mortar was also cash in the bank; we ignored the widening gulf between rich and poor.

“But while all of this may be true, we never lost our sense of integrity or civic pride. London was the first of the world cities – and it remains one of the greatest. I’ve travelled extensively in the States and while there are some cities that indisputably have a character of their own, for every San Francisco or New York there is a Dallas: a plantation of homogenous skyscrapers and shopping malls that, for sheer blandness, makes Basingstoke look like Baghdad.”

Read the rest of Self’s Evening Standard column here.

“The facts are stark: epidemiologists don’t really know how many people have been infected in Mexico, so the ratio of deaths to diseased is also unknown. At the same time, the outbreak in the US seems to have markedly different characteristics, with no deaths, and children rather than young adults principally affected.

“Yes, the outbreak has spread; and, yes, it may well turn into a flu pandemic – but previous flu pandemics have had a slight impact on human populations, differing only marginally from the annual winter flu that kills the elderly and the weak. The only real exception was the Spanish influenza pandemic after the First World War.”

To read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column, go here.