Val Carmichael credited Pete Stenning — who was called ‘the Martian’ — with getting him off the gin and on to the vodka. “Cleaver cunt, the Martian,” Val said to the assembled members, who were grouped at the bar of the Plantation Club in their alloted positions …
Listen to Will Self read the start of Foie Humain here and then here, the first of his four part story-cycle in Liver, which is available as an unabridged audio book from Whole Story Audio Books for £19.99 here.
“In the tense weeks leading up to the general election there was much media blether about the constitutional conundrum presented by the possibility of a hung parliament. It seemed that so short was the institutional memory of the state, no one in Whitehall had the least idea of what to do, were it the case that no single party gained an absolute majority.
“Yet I recalled perfectly well the mid-70s when the Lib-Lab pact was formed, and I am but a callow 48. Politics in this country is conducted at a breakneck speed, and by necessity this means there can be no looking back. No looking back and, it would seem, not much looking forward. In the days following the election, as preening Lib Dems – looking like teenage girls who’ve been asked to the school disco by everyone – trotted in and out of negotiations with Labour and the Tories, the adage that a week was a long time in politics had never seemed so recherché. Now an hour is a long time.”
Read the rest of Will Self’s Men’s Health article about slow politics here. He also wrote about slow sex too, here.
A curious incident on the South Downs: driving my eldest son and his stuff down to his new rented accommodation in Brighton, prior to his second year at Sussex University, we pulled the van off the motorway and drove up towards Devil’s Dyke. I wanted to show Lex the Dyke, and also his youngest brother, Luther, who was along for the ride. My own father used to take me up here on the weekends we spent in Brighton at my grandparents’ house on Vernon Terrace, and he would always tell the folk tale about how the Dyke was dug by the Devil to flood the Sussex Weald, but that he was surprised in the middle of the night by an old woman cotter lighting her oil lamp, and taking it for the dawn he jumped all the way to the North Downs where he landed forming the Devil’s Punchbowl on impact.
I digress – although not without purpose, the Dyke also features in the book I’ve just published, Walking to Hollywood. What goes around … Anyway, instead of taking the spur to the Dyke car park in towards the golf club we found the road closed with a police barrier and a bored-looking WPC standing in front of it. “You can’t come this way,” she said when I’d wound down the window, “haven’t you heard about the body found on the golf course?” Well, no – but what none of us Londoners had heard of before was cops so keen to impart. In the Smoke they wouldn’t give you the time of day, but down here in Miss Marpleville we got all the dope: according to the WPC, said corpse was “badly charred” and – here her voice dropped to a conspiratorial undertone – “the feet had been chopped off”.
I suggested it might’ve been that most loathsome of crimes, an “honour killing”, but the WPC looked at me as if I were a fool. Maybe she thought it was the Devil what done it.
Will Self is a guest on this week’s Loose Ends on Radio 4 at 6.15pm on Saturday September 11. Clive Anderson’s other guests will be the Labour MP Peter Hain and the actor Russell Tovey, with music from Imelda May. You can listen again here, until 18 September.
On Wednesday 8 September, from 7pm to 8pm, on the London arts radio station Resonance FM (resonancefm.com), journalist and will-self.com co-manager Chris Hall will be talking about the life and work of JG Ballard with James DC, John Churchill, and Howard Aggregate in the first of a new series of Atomic Bark covering SF, fantasy and horror.
Established in 1976 – or so their crest proudly claims – the noble house of Aberdeen Angus Steak Houses seems always to have been among us, yet I cannot recall ever speaking to anyone who admitted to eating in one.
My own definitive experience of the chain is definitely a case of le lèche-vitrine. Heading dreamily up west on a Saturday afternoon in late March of 1990, I emerged from Leicester Square Tube to find myself in the middle of a pitched battle between police and anarchists. It was, indeed, the pivotal moment of the poll-tax riots: the police, having forced the demonstrators back against a building site in Trafalgar Square, were now being attacked by lithe young men hurling scaffolding poles, apparently with all the skill of hoplites.
I watched, awed, as the Met – some on horseback, others forming a loose testudo with their riot shields – retreated up Charing Cross Road. I was struck by the timelessness of the scene; this, I felt, could have been the Peasants’ Revolt, or the Gordon Riots, such was the perfectly achieved choreography of the Law and the Mob. Still more atavistic were the spectators who filled the mouths of the side roads; they were in festive spirits, laughing and pointing when someone managed a particularly accurate pole-throw or truncheon-swipe.
But most remarkable of all was the behaviour of the diners I could see plumped down solidly on the leatherette banquettes of the Steak House on the corner of Cranbourn Street. These hefty American tourists, far from being intimidated by the biggest civil disturbance central London had witnessed in decades, continued unabashed with their bovine noshing. The rich, far from being eaten – as the Class Warriors would have wished – were still eating.
Back in the day there were 30-odd of these establishments, poised to capture unwary tourists as they staggered from London’s mainline terminuses. With their red paint and black leather decor, and their menus of uncompromising naffness – prawn cocktails, steaks, chips, gateaux – the chain had by the late 1980s become a synonym for “clip joint”.
No self-respecting native would ever dream of setting foot in one. But 20 years on, revolutionary socialism has been reduced to a mere rump – and so, for that matter, have the Steak Houses: there are only four left.
When I rang at Friday lunchtime to see if I could book a table at the Cranbourn Street branch for dinner that evening, the woman who answered was mildly incredulous: “We don’t take bookings,” she said, “and to be honest you really don’t need one.”
The small herd of three prime young men I’d assembled to dine with me were equally thrown when I revealed our destination. They muttered about cholesterol, prions and – most important, this – the terrible solecism of natives eating in such a tourist trap.
“It can’t be that bad!” I cried, leading the way. “Besides, I’m paying.” Such arrogance, for just as the Steak Houses barely survived the BSE and foot-and-mouth epidemics, so the bill took a near-fatal chunk out of my bank balance. It was £130 for a single course for four, with no wine to drink, only four Cokes (plus 15 per cent tip on top). True, the bullocks all had fillet steaks, while I had a sirloin, but there was no tricky preparation involved – just beef + fire – and as for side orders: chips and salad, d’oh!
The strange thing was that although we had to wait a ridiculously long time for our steaks, the meat was of a premium quality and perfectly cooked. The bullocks grazed contentedly, while I too happily chewed on someone else’s cud, ruminating that as beef production is such a wasteful and environmentally devastating business, it was probably entirely apt that those other steak-holders, back in 1990, ignored the civil disturbances within feet of their snouts, for wasn’t I doing exactly the same thing 20 years later? Granted, there wasn’t a riot going on, but all meat is by definition murder, and somewhere else in the world someone was suffering the attendant grief.
Not I, though. I paid the bill, said goodbye to a pair of the bullocks and, accompanied by the third, headed for home. Herding him down Charing Cross Road, I shared some of my thoughts with this, the prime cut of my loins. “Dad,” he interrupted me, “can we get some Krispy Kreme doughnuts?” And people say the young have lost all interest in politics.
Walking to Hollywood, Will Self’s new book, is published by Bloomsbury today. One of the first reviews is from the Sunday Times, who said that it was “Casually delirious and unfailingly precise … the whole book is a painfully brilliant performance full of Self’s characteristic obsessions with scale, texture and metamorphosis. The overall effect is hallucinogenic, paranoid and almost gruellingly clever.”
There was an interview with Self in the Telegraph last week talking about the book, which can be found here.
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