In the 1970s my mother did book production at Duckworth’s, the publishers in Camden Town where Beryl Bainbridge had once worked and which had published her first novels.

Colin Haycraft, the Duckworth’s supremo, was an emollient, cigar-smoking figure in a tweed jacket his wife Anna (the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis) was stylishly Gothic in dark, stretchy clothing. I did part-time work packing books at the octagonal Old Piano Factory in Gloucester Crescent where Duckworth’s had its premises.

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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.

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In March I was on the panel for an edition of Question Time filmed in Canary Wharf. The big news that week — I say “big” but “awful” might be more accurate — was that Jon Venables, one of the ten-year-old boys convicted in 1993 for the murder of the toddler James Bulger, had broken the terms under which he had been released on licence and was being returned to jail. Now we have the further atrocity exhibition of two boys — aged 10 and 11 — convicted of an attempted rape on an eight-year-old girl. With such crimes as these, surely — we must collectively ask ourselves — it becomes possible to explain them only by positing the existence of some exceptional depths of inner darkness?

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It’s a measure of how our conceptions of Eden have done an abrupt 180-degree handbrake turn that Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us should have become a bestseller. This thought experiment, imagining what a post-human world might be like — and how quickly Mummy Gaia would recover from the depredations of her wayward sons and daughters — ended up being advertised on the Tube. As you descended the escalator into the frowsty netherworld, you could feast your eyes on the book’s cover image: Nelson’s Column entwined in a bushy convolvulus while the admiral’s stony gaze surveyed a tree canopy undulating towards the horizon.

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A review from the Times from December 2007, in its way the opposite of the Real Meals concept from the New Statesman:

There are London restaurants where having a well-known name secures you a table at short notice – and then there’s the Ivy. The Ivy plights its troth on being wedded to notoriety. It’s the kind of restaurant that, if it could, would tear itself from its foundations and heave across town to squeeze into the Big Brother house, before happily having sex on camera with the Wolseley or Scott’s. If you’re bridge-and-tunnel folk – snob Manhattan-speak for suburbanites – then you haven’t a hope in hell of reserving a table at the Ivy unless you call weeks, if not months, in advance. But if they know who you are, you can be magically seated.

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The Times recently asked Will Self “What would you do if you were Culture Secretary?”, and this is what he said:

“There’s too much substandard art, and while not going to the lengths of Goering and reaching for my gun at the sound of the word ‘culture’, it’s difficult not to want to shoot the numskulls, hacks, wannabes and no-hopers responsible for it. Henri Bergson thought that aspiring writers should be offered grants to persuade them not to write. A discriminating culture secretary should offer a whole range of Bergson grants to artists, writers, film-makers and theatrical impresarios to encourage them not to produce. True, it would cost a lot of money to get Andrew Lloyd Webber to not open a new musical, but it would be money well spent.”

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“I think it ill behoves recovering alcoholics – among whose number I include myself – to complain about the mores of the great drinking majority. After all, we’ve had our fill, and we’d be well advised to shut up and take our sparkling mineral water like the good men and women we’d like to become.

“But then … there’s the use of that verb – drinking – to indicate alcohol drinking without any modifier being required; it’s tough living in a society where the very act of imbibing is synonymous with intoxication, and all the harder because the available alternative drinks aren’t so much soft as sugary gloop suitable only for inducing fits in preteens (or mixing with teens’ and kidults’ vodka).”

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For World Book Day, Will Self was asked by the Times which book he’d like to give and receive:

“One to give: I would like to give JR Ackerley’s My Father and Myself to the entire Tory shadow cabinet. While ostensibly fashioning a memoir of a late Victorian bourgeois paterfamilias, Ackerley – who was arts editor for The Listener – turned out what is probably the most subversive book about British social mores and social hierarchy ever written. Both Ackerleys served in the Army, JR fought in the first world war, his father had served in the Guards and was a respected importer of bananas. However, Ackerley fils was gay, while Ackerley père was a bisexual former rent boy and a bigamist to boot. The brilliance of this book is that – rather like Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That – it shows how tissue-thin the narrative of power and ‘respectable’ class-consciousness always has been. The likes of David Cameron should read this book and think again if they believe hegemony to be part of their birthright.

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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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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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