I think about Adrian Chiles’s cock more than is strictly necessary — which is pretty obviously: at all, unless you happen to be Adrian Chiles, his sexual partner, or his doctor (should Chiles be afflicted with a disease affecting his cock).

I didn’t even really know who Chiles was much before I acquired this problem – I had a vague idea he was a television and radio presenter, but since I don’t watch the former, and don’t listen to the radio station he broadcasts on, Chiles wasn’t in my world.

I did vaguely know he was in a relationship with Kath Viner, the editor of the Guardian, because I’d read a couple of columns he’d written for the paper that were such utter flim-flam (Wilde described wit as “the epitaph of an emotion”, and by extension, Chiles’s efforts are the epitaph of cogitation), that their presence in the paper was only explicable if his cock were in some way involved. Clearly, Ms Viner – if we accept the idea that she’s an even halfway decent newspaper editor – must be blinded by Chiles’s cock to at least this extent.

Read the rest here …

I thought my anti-monarchy feelings had become fairly torpid in recent years – there’s been so much to be unhappy and discontented about … But the slavish response of the British press and public to the Queen’s death, followed by an equally servile and sententious one to the publication of ‘Spare’ made me realise an important thing: no one seemed capable any more of framing their response to these royal ructions within an assumed – and profound – critique of the institution itself … Yet polling consistently shows that a third of the British population remain obstinately unhappy with our much-lauded – and ineffable – constitutional settlement … After the Queen died, my voice was deemed unacceptable in Britain – I wrote two pieces for the foreign press, in the US and France – and only now am I able to write for British readers of The New European what I truly think and feel: the Queen is dead – and let’s try to keep it that way …’

Out of their minds by Will Self

Will’s Multicultural Man column on the artist JG Ballard rhapsodised as “a novelist who writes very short books”:

“Arguably, never in the decline and fall of the avant-garde had so few sold out for so much so quickly. From 1997, when the Royal Academy daringly mounted the Sensation exhibition, in less than five years, the likes of Hirst, Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn et al., went from maybe scandalising to definitely cashing in: far more than the Britpop bands, it’s these lite – and often quite high – artists who personified the Blair era, with its serious comfort when it came to being seriously rich sugar-wrapped in social conscience.”

“Obviously, written words are received in a different context to spoken ones – but both allow for discursive explanation. If I teach Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, I give a trigger warning to students about the ten instances of the n-word in the text, but I also reserve the right – should we be discussing one of the relevant passages – to utter the word. In practice, I don’t think that has ever occurred (Huckleberry Finn might prove more problematic, since it’s bedizened with n-words), but the principle remains that to render any word unspeakable and un-writable, is to impose totalitarian double-think rather than advance the cause of racial justice.”

Will’s latest New European column.

Will’s latest New European column has landed.