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.

I’ve been aware of Parks’s writing for a number of years, but apart from his Booker-shortlisted novel Europa – which I liked well enough – this is the only other book of his that I’ve attempted. An elegant essayist, who describes well the tortuous labyrinth of contemporary Italy – where he has lived for 30 years – his pieces crop up from time to time in the literary reviews and are notable for their air of quietly insistent rationalism. Parks is one of those writers whose prose seems always to be muttering the subtext: You and I, we understand each other perfectly, don’t we, and in so doing we can comprehend also this crazy world.

It’s the sort of confident comity that Orwell inspires in his readers, and it speaks to me of a very English empiricism: this is this – and don’t you forget it. It was no surprise to learn in this book that Parks is the son of a Church of England vicar (albeit one who tended towards the charismatic) and that while he may have rejected faith in miracles when he was a teenager, Parks retained the concomitant – and equally Anglican – faith in science (so long as it knows its limits). Like his parents, Parks had a deeply ingrained resistance to all crystal-dangling, Om-chanting and tableturning – indeed anything that smacks of mumbo jumbo.

Up until his early fifties, Parks’s very familiar brand of lapsed Anglicanism served him perfectly well. From his own luminous descriptions of kayaking and hill walking, we gain the impression of a man who was comfortable in his body, and while not exactly brimming over with job satisfaction – what ambitious writer is? – he nonetheless found his work lecturing on literary translation in Milan perfectly rewarding. From the asides he lets fall, we can gather that he is also a thoroughly married and familial man. And apart from an infection of the prostate gland that he had had in his twenties (and from which, against the odds, he had completely recovered), Parks enjoyed good health. Then came the deluge: to be precise, intense and searing pains throughout the pelvic area that yet remained curiously nonlocatable.

Accompanying this was the irritable bladder, the six-times-a-night micturition, the need to be constantly within range of a facility, the creeping impotence – all the panoply of mental and physical discomforts that zeroes in on the ageing human.

Good Cartesian that he was, and so viewing his body as a mechanism that should be fiddled back into functionality, Parks immediately hied himself to the doctors. His experience from then on was wearily familiar: the tests, and then more tests – blood, urine, semen – the breezily overconfident consultants, then the firm recommendation of radical surgery.

In Parks’s case this took the form of a procedure known as a Turps (Transurethral resection of prostate surgery), which is precisely what it sounds like: laser-burning one highway through the pesky gland, while suturing up another. The medics were so keen to begin blasting that when they had him in the stirrups for another test – a cystoscopy – one suggested that they just do the other procedure while they were at it. But Parks cried, no! And he was right to do so, because the cystoscopy revealed there was nothing wrong with his prostate, while punching the words “prostate pain” into Google conjured up 6,820,000 hits, many of which turned out to be the cris de coeur of post-Turps patients who were in more pain than ever.

Of course, while by no means Damascene, Parks had already started his conversion some time before while on a trip to India for a translation conference he had consulted an Ayurvedic doctor. Dismissive of the astro-babble surrounding the diagnosis offered, he nonetheless took note when the doctor’s wife observed ? apropos of Western mechanistic medicine ? “You only say psychosomatic … if you think the mind and body are ever separate.”

What’s most interesting about Parks’s journey back to health is that he convincingly portrays, from within, what it’s like to abandon an assumption – the mind-body dichotomy – that is itself, of necessity, ineffable.

True, there are digressions into the neurotic compulsions of Coleridge, the subtle velleities of Virginia Woolf’s characters, and the radiant verisimilitudes of Velazquez, but the main thrust of this book is towards a new kind of gestalt. Parks’s turnaround came courtesy of breathing exercises he read about in a book with the deliriously unappealing title: A Headache in the Pelvis. The authors stressed that the “paradoxical relaxation” aimed for could be achieved only under their own medical supervision, but Parks was desperate – and disciplined – enough to go it alone.

The relief from his chronic pain was dramatic: “Suddenly my belly drew a huge breath, absolutely unexpected, and a great warm wave flooded down my body from top to toe. I nearly drowned. Shocked and tensed, I sat up and opened my eyes. ‘What in God’s name was that?’.” It would be misrepresenting Parks if I portrayed him as going belly-up to his breathy belly – in fact, his journey back to health was circuitous, while throughout he retained his gentle but insistent scepticism – no credulous crystal-dangler he. Nevertheless, there was no gainsaying the intense effects of these breathing exercises or the even more intense ones when Parks begins Shiatsu massage – then the Big One: fullblown Vipassana meditation.

Here is an insistent scepticism – and an even more insistent humour. I think it’s this ability to crack a deadpan joke, whether discussing his bowel movements or the doughnut addiction of a doctor friend, that makes Parks’s descriptions of the romantic internal landscape of the meditational pupil – jagged peaks of ego lit by lightning, deluges of watery remorse – so compelling. There’s this, and his screamingly funny pen portrait of an overweight and slightly lecherous American guru who nonetheless – or perhaps because of this – is wholly authentic.

I’ve been interested in Buddhism for years, but I would say that Parks’s account of the transformations that occur to him when he goes first on a three and then on a ten-day silent meditation retreat is among the most convincing I’ve read. The realignment that Parks achieves is not some high-flown transcendence, but more akin to GK Chesterton’s credo that “even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits [is] extraordinary enough to be exciting”.

Then, towards the end of this elegant and rewarding book it began to bother me that I was enjoying Teach us to Sit Still quite as much as I was, simply because I was its ideal reader: another questing middle-aged writer with his own undelivered prize speeches (Parks digresses hilariously on the false humility of self-deprecating Booker prize-winners) and his own chronic pain. At the time of reading Parks’s book I was plagued by a torn ligament in my shoulder and, like the author, I am a stressed man who cannot find an hour in the day to sit down and breathe easily. The parallels don’t stop there: Parks grew up in Finchley, North London I was only a couple of miles away in East Finchley. True, I didn’t up sticks and move to Italy, and nor do I have the unusual mental diplopia – and again, Parks evokes this brilliantly – that comes with being bilingual.

And nor do I have Parks’s lightness of touch. It’s difficult to think of a memoir that manages to be at once as intrusive of its subject as a Turps laser, while still managing to leave the emotional tissue surrounding it entirely untouched so that while we hear of Parks’s wife and children, we never feel we have intruded on their lives.

But then, although I finished this book a few weeks ago and put it to one side, it has managed to stay with me, like an inverse corollary of the pain that it so marvellously evokes. In a world dominated by cheap self-revelation and quack self-help, I suspect that Teach us to Sit Still may be the real thing: a work of genuine consolation that shows the way out of the dark wood of middle age in which everyone, at some time or another, will inevitably find themselves lost.

This review originally appeared in the Times on 26 June 2010

It was predictable that a question concerning Venables would be put to the Question Time panel: the killing of Bulger (I refrain from using the term “murder” for reasons that will become apparent) had gripped the nation. While there were some of the usual liberal suspects who protested at the idea of ten-year-old children being put on trial for murder, English law remained quite unambiguous: the age of criminal responsibility was — and remains — just 10.

Terry Eagleton, in his book-length essay entitled simply On Evil, is quick to home in on the Bulger case as deeply illustrative of our contradictory thinking on the subject. He quotes one of the police officers who dealt with Robert Thompson and Venables as saying that the minute he clapped eyes on one of these culprits he “knew he was evil”. Eagleton observes that while the policeman seized upon the term as a badge to ward off the possibility of liberal apologias for the dreadful act, in fact the ascription of “evil” does nothing of the sort. It is by no means clear that anyone could be held responsible for being born evil.

This is precisely the contradiction that James Hogg teases out in his 1824 classic whatdunnit, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In the novel, a young Calvinist Scot encounters a mysterious figure who informs him that he is one of the elect (in other words, predestined for Heaven), and so encourages him to embark on a murderous spree on the basis that everything he does must be good by virtue of his exalted state.

Eagleton of course will have read Hogg, and the queasy equivalence between the non-responsibility of the virtuous murderer and the evil one wouldn’t be lost on him. As well as being a cradle Roman Catholic, he has also been a card-carrying Marxist. Although Eagleton may be heterodox in relation to both systems of thought, it’s nonetheless these two totalising ideologies that inform his quest for evil. For Eagleton evil is very definitely innate in humans, being a sort of French plaiting of Schopenhauer’s universal Will to Life, St Augustine’s Original Sin and Sigmund Freud’s thanatos or Death Drive. We are all born with this lust for annihilation, just as we are all born with an equal and countervailing drive towards going forth, checking out some nice tourist destinations and fruitfully multiplying. If I understand Eagleton rightly, evil arises not simply when individuals deviate from the good (this is mere wickedness) but when they try to cope with their own overpowering fear of death, pain and destruction by wreaking it on others.

Eagleton, of course, has to account for the great charnel house of the 20th century — its mass murders and genocides. On the face of it, this is where the commonsensical view that there is a line to be drawn between the merely bad and the downright demonic should favour the existence of Christian evil. Certainly Eagleton’s version of it allows for a distinction to be drawn between individuals who were carried away or coerced into abetting genocides and those who instigated and even gloried in them. But I’m not sure that he makes his case; he wants the Holocaust to be qualitatively different from all other mass murders, and so judges that it was almost uniquely purposeless — or, rather, was a collective enactment of the evil individual’s insatiable lust for autonomy.

The mass murders of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, by contrast, Eagleton believes did at least have a point — but did they, beyond the naked exercise of power? Surely inciting an entire nation to turn upon itself in an orgy of highly personalised violence — as Mao did — is just as bad (or evil); as is a regime such as Soviet Russia, where people were murdered with supremely brutal inefficiency.

And then there’s the worrying spectacle of those bureaucrats of death such as Adolph Eichmann, who inspired Hannah Arendt’s ringing phrase “the banality of evil”. With Eichmann Eagleton seems to want to have it both ways: the office manager of the Final Solution gave exhaustive testimony before his Jerusalem trial in 1961 — mind-numbingly boring to read — but while one is left with an impression of Eichmann as insanely deluded, vain and ambitious, it’s not at all clear that he was abetting murder to assuage his own fear of death. Eagleton acknowledges the potential for evil in all of us — so might not its banality be because it is everywhere we look?

Eagleton’s problem is that he needs evil to be special, different and achingly banal all at once. He needs this because his view of what human beings are remains very deeply conditioned by his religious upbringing and his political sympathies. For Eagleton humans are, first and foremost, rational beings with the capacity for freedom of will. Of course, being a superannuated Marxist as well, he also can’t help seeing them as mired in a false consciousness that stops them moving towards God/communism.
On the Eagleton definition, we cannot really know whether Thompson and Venables were evil or not — any more than we can absolutely “know” that anyone either is or is not evil. To have a definitive answer we would need to get inside their heads in a godlike fashion.

I fear that for Eagleton the debasement of the term “evil” is of a piece with the loss of Christian faith in the West. For the fact about evil is that it exists in a purely historical sense: there is no evidence for it in religions that much predate the Christian era — nothing in Eastern religion, Plato or even Biblical Judaism. It comes into the world through the teachings of Jesus as redacted by St Paul, and probably resulted in part from a cross-fertilisation by the very Manicheanism that Christians are always at pains to disavow (even unto burning such heretics at the stake). In other words — and to be fair to Eagleton, he doesn’t really dodge this — no Christian God, no evil.

The message of the book’s success was clear: a significant proportion of the reading public were prepared to entertain the idea of life-after-them, and not as a dystopic vision, but an Edenic one: the garden without Adam and Eve, only their much-loved pets, now happily liberated.

Looked at one way, every era gets the apocalypse it deserves. Wells’s alien invasion of the 1900s spawned thousands more — and these then overlapped with the nuclear fry-ups that became current from the 1940s. The natural disasters — droughts, floods, earthquakes — that ushered in the age of environmental consciousness became more and more extreme until they purged the planet as utterly as the fire and brimstone of Revelation.

So what should we make of the new fashion for a post-human world itself, rather than the 20th century’s obsessive dwelling on the wipeout? One view is that it’s simply the recasting of religious fables that are ineradicably human. Richard Dawkins might fall to the floor gnawing on the woolly his wife knitted for him, but just as his own works supply us with a story of our own origins to match any creation myth, so the post-human world supplies our need for an end-state. What’s it all been for? we cry, existentially tormented adolescents that we are. And the answer comes back: a lovely arboretum.

It seems that MI5 has largely given up on the terrorists who for years now have expressed their love for some apes by trying to kill others. It’s not that Huntingdon Life Sciences is to be allowed to go about its slicing and dicing entirely unmolested — it’s only that a clearer and more present danger has emerged: Earth First! and other eco-warrior networks have, we’re told, their wilder fringe, those who believe in the most radical solution to the threat humanity presents to the planet and its biota: getting rid of people altogether. Actually, I incline to the view that such folk are as sweetly deluded as Sarah Palin-style climate-change deniers. And like the deniers, they’re completely anthropocentric; after all, it’s still all about them — or us. But if Gaia does shuck humanity off its back, or it transpires that our own instinctive impulses — to go forth and to multiply packaging — result in the flame-grilling of our own cities, the only way of comprehending this, without recourse to a sky god, is that it’s not really about us at all. Despite our ability to comprehend our own death — whether individual or collective — and our much-vaunted free will, we’ll have to accept that our belief that humanity is different from any other species of life, whether religious or scientific, has been utterly groundless.

The writer John Gray has described the current standing-room-only situation on Earth as an example of a “population spike”; the same sort of thing you see with rats or rabbits when they’re provided with particularly easy pickings. Indeed, Gray also proposes a new Latin tag for us; no longer should we be called Homo sapiens, but Homo rapens, such has been the ferocity with which we’ve munched our way along the world’s buffet. Gray anticipates an era of resource wars and pandemics as the world warms; the population collapse will be cataclysmic — from 11 billion in the middle part of this century to…? Well, who can say?

Clearly the human suffering embodied in this stark subtraction is inconceivably vast; luckily we lack the equipment to empathise with it. Humanity is not a single family of angels but a great mass of chimpanzee troupes. Those who place a premium on human exclusivity — whether progressives who look for a technological fix or the Luddites of Earth First! — cannot help but be angry with us and themselves: we screwed it up. As things get worse, the self-hatred of humanity will ramp up accordingly. But those of us who truly accept that people are animals just like any others will have at once the most sympathy and the most detachment.

We couldn’t help despoiling the world — it’s in our nature. You cannot expect a puppy to rub its nose in its own shit — but that doesn’t make you love it any the less. I have the luxury of doubt: I don’t know if there ever will be a world without us. What I do know is that sympathy and detachment are a better basis for action than anger and recrimination.

28.12.08

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.

All of which is by way of conceding: they do know me at the Ivy. Not quite as well as AA Gill, who wrote its cookbook, but well enough. Well enough that when I called for a table recently, I was asked to confirm my identity because, apparently, there’s a comic impersonator who calls up and blags reservations by pretending to be me.

Actually, I feel like I’m pretending to be me when I’m at the Ivy. As Nietzsche observed: “When I see a so-called ‘great man’, I see someone who is aping their own ideal,” and at the Ivy, there’s usually some monkey business going on. The paps gather outside the theatre opposite, where The Mousetrap is now in its fiftysomethingth year, and act out their own little play: not a whodunnit, but a who-is-it?

Inside, the warm and woody interior cossets its clientele, while through the diamond-mullioned windows comes the lightning flash as an A- (or F-) lister enters the lobby beneath the snappers’ lenses. Famous people like to be around famous people because it’s cosy and pally. And sticking together gives the comforting delusion that it is they who are the herd, while the rubberneckers are actually rather fabulous and unique individuals.

This is a win-win game that the Ivy’s front-of-house staff play brilliantly. If you have a “name”, they remember it; they say it’s nice to see you, they inquire after your wife, husband or even dead pet gerbil. They are the supernannies of the celeb circuit, and command salaries that reflect this. It’s rumoured that the doorman at Scott’s takes home about £80,000. I see nothing odd about this: getting moguls, models and mafiosi, and even muggins here, to feel good about ourselves is something a posh shrink would murder to be able to achieve.

Since I was last at the Ivy, the restaurant seems to have significantly upped its game. When I ate there in April, the food was substandard and I saw a mouse dart across the stairs to the gents. But unless the offending beastie could prove it was escaping from the theatre opposite, there’s no way its presence could be deemed acceptable.

Still, that was nothing compared to the dozen oysters I once ordered in the Ivy, which came complete with their own lice. When I objected, the then head waiter had the nerve to try and persuade me that they were a sure indicator of freshness. But that was before Chris Corbin and Jeremy King flogged it – along with Le Caprice and J Sheekey – and moved on to pastures new.

The anxiety was always that the restaurant’s new proprietors, the soulless corporation that owns the Belgo chain, would never come up with homely touches like oyster lice – or, worse, that they would muck about with the time-honoured menu. The reason I like the Ivy quite so much is that, in keeping with its role as a nursery for the famous, it basically dishes up comfort food for adults.

This is not the gaff to go to if you want your palate to be stretched until it snaps back in your face. This is where you go when you’re hungover and tired and ulcerated: it’s the Rennie of contemporary cuisine. Shellfish, game, roasts, broths and chowders – this is what we pampered types expect at the Ivy. We want them cooked well, but without unnecessary frills: there’s only the tiniest drizzle of jus on the menu, and that comes with the roast poulet des Landes with dauphin potato (chicken and chips to you, squire).

I noticed few changes in this bill of basic fare since I’d last troubled to examine it. The caviar was still there, and the sautéed foie gras, too. A substitution for the chicken tikka masala seemed to be a Thai red curry, but otherwise, all was in order: pasta dishes, risottos, even hamburgers. Our waiter tried to sell us the fish of the day – a plaice fillet cooked in black-bean sauce with salsify – but that was way too adventurous for me and my companion who, by her own admission, had been utterly “trolleyed” the night before and was in a delicate state. So she – who, while a blonde, bears absolutely no other resemblance to Adrian Gill’s famous dining companion – opted for the beetroot salad with Ragstone goat’s cheese, while I had the sweetcorn chowder with cinnamon muffin, and a brace of West Mersea native oysters on the side, purely to catch up on the lice sitch.

The Bottle Blonde’s salad looked as if it had been put together in a Greek taverna circa 1973, but according to her, the competing flavours of sweet dressing and pungent cheese remained interesting throughout the munch. I ordered the chowder purely to see how “nursery” an Ivy dish could be. I wasn’t disappointed: this was the starter as geriatric dessert, a reassuring gloop with the consistency and sweetness of a vanilla frappucino. The cinnamon muffin really was a cinnamon muffin, and as for the oysters, there wasn’t a louse in sight – unless you count me.

Last year, I cried when I realised the grouse-shooting season was over and I hadn’t eaten enough. This year, I’m not going to make the same mistake. At the Ivy, good children can have their grouse taken off the bone. I pretended I’d been good and was rewarded with a perfectly cooked bird, accompanied by creamy mashed potato and a wad of spinach.

The Ivy’s wine list is the solid business you’d imagine, running all the way up from reds by the glass for a reasonable five quid to £235 bottles of vintage Krug, but I know nothing of this, not having had a drink for many moons now. My companion – for obvious reasons – was crying off as well. Frankly, she put on a pretty poor show altogether, not even making it through her salmon fishcake with sorrel sauce – “Too rich,” she moaned pitifully – and declining a dessert. I, meanwhile, managed to cram in a steamed chocolate and orange pudding, and downed a much-needed pot of verveine tea.

The Bottle Blonde tells me that Corbin and King have lured the celebs away from the Ivy, and on the night we were there, I didn’t recognise anybody. Not that this counts for much: I didn’t even realise who Kate Moss was when she introduced herself to me. The BB told me she’d run across Jimmy Nail, Jools Holland, Lucian Freud and Helena Bonham Carter at the Wolseley in recent weeks, although she neglected to say whether they were all eating together, which would be a sight worth seeing.

On the basis of our outing, which cost £112, inclusive of the extremely nurturing service, the Ivy has every right to grab back these luminaries – or, at any rate, someone who can do convincing impersonations of them.

The Ivy
1-5 West Street, WC2; 020 7836 4751. Lunch, Mon-Sat, noon-3pm; Sun, noon-3.30pm. Dinner, Mon-Sat, 5.30pm-midnight; Sun, 5.30pm-11.30pm

“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.”

“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).”

Read the rest of Will Self’s piece for the Times about drinking as a recovering alcoholic here, and his taste testing of various non-alcoholic drinks here.

“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.

“One to get: I was recently given a copy of David Flusfeder’s brilliant new novel A Film by Spencer Ludwig — and it’s the new gifts that count most with me!”

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

For those of you who can read German, there’s also an interesting review of the lecture by Gina Thomas at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.