You can read Will Self writing about his addiction to vaping at Esquire magazine here.

All You Need is Cash is a 1978 TV mockumentary written by and starring Eric Idle of the Pythons and his long-term comic collaborator Neil Innes. In the film, The Beatles are satirically reformed as The Rutles, but as well as taking an affectionate swipe at the Fab Four (re-dubbed The Prefab Four), Idle and Innes extended their comic vision to the British blues revival of the early Sixties.

In one sublime scene, the hapless reporter journeys to the Mississippi Delta to uncover the origins of The Rutles’ distinctive sound; upon interviewing some blind, crippled, or otherwise disabled old bluesman on the broken-down porch of his cotton-pickin’ shack, he is bamboozled by this strange inversion of musical history: “We learnt everything we know from The Rutles,” the ancient man croaks, “there was no music here at all before we heard their records.”

As it happens, having a nascent teenage guitar hero in the house, I’d watched All You Need is Cash not long before I myself trained, planed and automobiled my family all the way to Clarksdale, Mississippi, the so-called “cradle of the blues” – even so, I was shocked when the man who was checking us into the Shack Up Inn outside of town looked up from the register, and in reply to the question I’d put to him said: “Well, y’know, hereabouts we learnt everything we know about the blues from… The Rutles.”

OK, granted, he didn’t actually say this, but he did utter words pretty much to the same effect.

It was a modest 90°C with 90 per cent humidity in Clarksdale; I hadn’t so much walked as splodged my way into the corrugated iron lobby of the Shack Up Inn. With heat like this, my conversation with the man on the desk was of necessity to the point: “Have you got a guitar we can borrow?” was my first sally, to which his reply was a thumb jabbed at three nearby acoustics on stands, and a growled, “Them are all loaners.”

My next question was equally direct: “Do you know where the crossroads are at which Robert Johnson bartered his soul with the devil so he could become the greatest blues guitarist of all time?”

Again, the Shack Up Inn man didn’t hesitate for a second, and much in the manner of anyone in the hospitality industry directing a wayward tourist, he told me that while the officially recognised “crossroads” was where Highway 61 and Highway 49 intersect in what passes for downtown Clarksdale, he personally favoured a more secreted junction, where the old Simmons Road intersected with Ritchie Avenue. This was, my informant vouchsafed a far “shadier” part of town, full of the kinds of authentic juke joints where, to put it bluntly, white folks don’t go.

Read the rest of Will’s article at Esquire here.

To paraphrase Eighties art-rockers Talking Heads’ immortal lyrics: “And you may find yourself, staying in a 15-star hotel… And you may find yourself, horning cocaine from the jewelled navel of a nubile… And you may find yourself, in the most dramatic landscape in the world… And you may find yourself, behind the wheel of a high-performance automobile that’s just slain a deer… And you may find yourself, about to tuck into a dish of the potentially poisonous piscine delicacy, fugu… And you may well ask yourself… well, how did I get here?”

And more to the point, will I survive? Survive not simply eating the fugu, a dish made using parts of the puffer fish, and much beloved of the morbid Japanese, who savour the risk of a lethal dose of tetrodotoxin (more than 1,200 times stronger than cyanide) quite as much as they do its unique taste, but survive much longer at all. Because looking down into my dish of raw fishy bits it occurs to me my goose may well be cooked, and by eating the fugu I will have inadvertently completed a bucket list I never realised I was drawing up. But ignorance of the law is no defence, and given the rigours of contemporary life, with its insistence that we wring every last tepid drop of pleasure from the damp flannel of existence, having done all the things I ever wanted to do in my life, clearly my days, hours, minutes even, must be numbered.

I never paid much attention to the phenomenon of the bucket list, to me it was simply another instance of the way we egg each other on to take a hedonistic and self-centred view of our own mortality. The notion that hang-gliding off Mount Fuji, or cuddling with manatees in the Florida Keys, or sucking on the Koh-i-Noor diamond as if it were a Murray mint, could somehow mitigate the horrors of a terminal illness has always struck me as being on the side of absurdity known as “revolting”.

As the great metaphysical poet John Donne wrote: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”; whereby it follows that should you be granted a preview of the abyss about to swallow you, the important thing is to make your peace with your fellow men, not take them for a valedictory bungee jump.

I’ve never been bungee jumping at all, but somehow I don’t think that’ll save me because I have been white-water rafting, and as any serious bucket list-compiler knows, it’s one or the other. I did it against my will: my then teenaged children insisted on it. Yet despite kicking and screaming all the way to the launching-off point when we were slaloming down the Tully River in North Queensland with our raft master screeching, “This is how we do it, yeah! Doggie style!” then vigorously miming anal sex (pitching rather than catching), I did manage to forget my abject terror. Why? Because I was so bloody intent on saving my soaked skin.

It does strike me as, um, paradoxical, that anyone who knows they’re about to die should want to take part in a potentially fatal activity. I suppose the logic is that you can properly relax and enjoy it because it hardly matters if you pop your clogs. Either this, or possibly for some devout, sanctity-of-life types, putting a dangerous sport on your bucket list is a way of inadvertently procuring assisted suicide.

But I say: why wait until you’re dying to off yourself? Surely one of the most adrenalised activities imaginable would be booking an appointment with Dignitas, flying to Zurich, entering the pokey room where you’re meant to do the dread deed, and when you’re presented with the foaming glass of sodium pentobarbital, taking a big gulp and holding it in your mouth for a few seconds before spitting it back into the concerned Swiss face hovering over you. OK, I’ve wandered off topic… still, you can understand why: I’m still sitting here staring at my fugu while contemplating the possibility of my imminent extinction, so it’s hardly surprising.

Now, where were we? Ah, yes, I was casting my mind back over my life to see whether I really have done everything I ever wanted to do (in which case I’ve had it), or if there’s at least one unfulfilled desire to keep me hanging from the cliff-edge of existence.

Read the rest of Will’s article on bucket lists at Esquire magazine.

‘Try visualising the Union Jack without the Saltire, which is just a fancy way of saying imagine the British flag without its Scottish component. It looks pretty weird: just a bunch of red lines radiating across a white field like a burst blood vessel. But if, by some caprice of the old gods, the Scots vote on 18 September to leave the Union, that’s what the rest of us will have flying over us. If the metaphoric implications are disturbing enough, what about the symbolic ones? For that red-legged-spider-for-a-flag will also be relaying a chilling fact – with Scotland gone it’ll be just us… and the Welsh.

‘It’s my belief that as an individual correlate of the collective imperial drive, every Englishman either chooses or is allocated a Celtic nation. Left to my own devices, I would’ve gone for Ireland: its people are poetic, fey and hard-drinking with a vicious streak when roused and a fine 20th-century modernist literary tradition, so you can see the suitability of the match. But it was not to be – my brother nabbed Hibernia very effectively by moving there in the early Nineties, so faute de mieux I took Scotland instead. Granted, I got the better deal when it comes to landscape – but when we consider the human factor, things are a little more problematic. Over the past 20 years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Scotland. I should say an average of at least a month a year – which is probably more than Sean Connery, the Greatest Living Scotsman, has managed (of whom, more later) – and on that basis I’d like to offer you my view of what exactly it is we’ll be losing should the Scots opt to pack up their sporrans and go.

‘It was David Bowie who got me thinking this way. Back in February, speaking through his bizarre – but easy on the hand – Kate Moss glove puppet at the Brits, the Greatest Living Englishman issued a cryptic cri de brave-coeur: “Scotland stay with us!” It was the first time I’d heard anyone on either side of the debate allude to the loss some 54 million English would experience should the five million-odd (some very odd) Scots go their own way.

‘Mostly, the media has banged on about how the poor independent wee nation will suffer a terrible buffeting as it tries to plot a course in the vicious currents of international capital flows; how the dosh will be sucked out of its economy faster than oil gushing from a North Sea field; and how its sheepish folk will be wandering in the fiscal wilderness once they’ve been deprived of our sterling currency. I want to redress that balance, but I won’t be cataloguing all the obvious Scottishery. There’s no place in this article – and arguably in the world – for kilts, claymores, the Krankies and bigoted Australians with blue-painted faces.

‘No, I want to give you the authentic Scotland, and to that end I want you to picture me as I was on the first day of June this year, driving at some speed along the B871 through the desolate moonscape of Sutherland, one of the northernmost counties of this hyperborean realm, en route for the Garvault Hotel, an establishment that styles itself “Britain’s most remote hotel”. This is the true Highlands, a vast and empty realm, devoid of population since the early 19th century, when in pursuit of woolly profits, the so-called Red Duke of Sutherland and his duchess slung their tenants off the land. All that goes on here now is toffs stalking deer, men of a certain age trout fishing and huge semi-trailers roaring along the patchy roads hauling southerners’ fresh-cut tax breaks – sorry, I mean “timber”. There’s nothing picturesque about central Sutherland unless, that is, your favourite paintings are the mineralised landscapes of the surrealist Max Ernst.

‘And fortunately mine are. As I drove and drove and drove some more, my spirits rose. In our right, tightly-populated little island, it’s heartening to realise that these extensive wastes still exist; you could release thousands of cracked-up southern ne’er-do-wells and conniving wanker-bankers into these bleakly peaty hills and never see any of them ever again.

‘Packed into our urban battery farms, we need at least a background awareness of this free-ranging opportunity – even if we never avail ourselves of it. Pulling up at the turning to Garvault, I read on the hotel sign “non-residents welcome” and burst into laughter. The very idea of it! As if anyone would undertake a minimum two-hour-round drive in order to eat and drink at what must – Scotland being the country it indubitably is – be an establishment typified by madly surly service and tinned soup.

‘Perhaps the best contemporary debunking of Scotland’s pretensions to be a premium holiday destination has to’ve been the Scots hotel sketch on Little Britain. Like all its sketches, it follows a tight formula: in this case, Matt Lucas plays the gullible English guest and David Walliams the gurning, flute-playing, off-with-the-fairies proprietor of a godforsaken hostelry. Welcoming Lucas in with nods, winks and mad insinuations, Walliams then introduces the unusual menu delights enquiring: “Have you heard of such a thing as… soup?” or bread, or tomatoes, or indeed any other food staple, the point being that in the straitened culinary atmosphere of Scotland, such things are indeed astonishing exotica.’

Read the rest of this article at Esquire magazine.

“Five or six times during the 11 hours I spent at the festival, people came up and asked me what I was doing there, and I explained that I’d made a bit of a mistake, having assumed that I was coming to a reading festival, not the Reading one.”

Will Self on attending Reading Festival with his son Ivan – read the full Esquire article.

“The time comes in any upright British male’s life when he needs to have made his peace with all of the following: his homosexuality, his dress sense, and Germany. The first two of these I got out of the way decades ago (true, I still occasionally wake up in the morning and flirt with becoming a dandy for the few short seconds before the stiff denim of consciousness descends on me), but Germany has proved more problematic.

“It doesn’t help that I’m half-Jewish, although we can make too much of this. It was the great English anti-Semite GK Chesterton who observed that the Jews are like everyone else – but more so. In which case, what can English Jews possibly be like? Only like the English – but more so. Still, as we’re succouring Krauts here, best to be up front: my Jewishness hasn’t helped when it comes to my getting gemütlich in the great liberal democracy known for a period as the Third Reich.

“In Germania, Simon Winder’s magnificently crazy circumambulation – through time and space – of Germany, its history, and his obsession with both, he writes that our shunning of the country is a ‘mutilating of Europe’s culture’, and that furthermore there comes a time, surely, when we must stop allowing Hitler’s estimation of his own country to prevail, to which all right-thinking Britishers must reply: ‘Donner und Blitzen! He has a point!’

“But Winder goes further, describing Germany as Britain’s ‘weird twin’, and while I’m not sure I’m ready to fully endorse this view, I have always thought the great joy in having identical twins – were one to be so blessed – would be to subject them to unnatural psychological experiments, and perhaps Germany’s history is just such an experiment… Then again, maybe it is Britain that’s the lab rat, a still more disturbing thought.”

Read the rest of Will Self’s Esquire article here.

Will’s Esquire piece about the Lake District can be found here.

Or: The Failure of the Psychedelic Revolution to so much as Slow for One Instant the Incessant Gobbling-up of the Earth by the Moloch of Globalisation Considered as a Solo Uphill Bicycle Race through Basel

This story begins in November 1979 inside a spire made from gaping mouths stitched together by their lips – mouths screaming the negation of all of hope, all of love, and even all of existence in its manifold entirety. Our scaly tale lashes across the years, taking in an episode during which I was the Great White Spirit controlling everything by wires from the fifth dimension, another in which I held a tea party for Victorian ladies wearing florescent crinolines in a portable conservatory that happened to be the back of a Mini Clubman (the old, authentically mini kind – not those modern BMW imposters), and a more playful chapter during which I flew a miniature kite in the airstream from a household fan, much to the amusement of my future wife, who had just returned from the Last Night of the Proms and was as high as one (a miniature kite, that is).

Our narrative zigs in, and zags out of the months and the years, with no interest in the banalities of chronology. Sometimes it incorporates other people’s perspectives – disparate individuals, a handful of intimates, most never known – snuggling up behind their eyeballs like a hideous psyche-schlupping body snatcher, and everywhere this pinpoint of view pricks the thin skin stretched between what is and what-is-not, it draws blood: red blood, heliotrope blood, blood the thick-slick surface of which is patterned … like tweed. Yes, and when all is said and done, and we’ve pushed the rental bike to the top of the hill, freewheeled down, then returned it to the spotless garage under the Hauptbahnhof, so the ravenous monologue remorselessly returns us to the waking nightmare … Those screaming mouths stitched together – and did I mention the skeletons? You know the ones … they have shreds and globs of putrefying flesh dangling from their griddle ribcages, and they use carved fibulas and tibias to play upon glockenspiels the keys of which are other ribs, picked clean. Did I mention the skeletons? Because they’re the most loathsome things of all, not, you appreciate solely because in their number and their aspect they form an orchestra-sized memento mori (there are perhaps a hundred of them, and they each have a bony instrument to saw, pluck, beat or blow), but because of what they play: the rinky-dink, bang-crash-wallop, tin pan alley schmaltz that is Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue … Christ! How I loathe it – how I regret putting the record on the turntable: when I dropped the needle into the groove, I pinioned myself to this undulating bed, where I lie staring up into that spire of howling orifices. I’ve been here for a while … I’m here now … It feels horribly as if I’ll be here forever …

In case you hadn’t bitten down on the bitter pill by now, this is a story about drugs – specifically about major hallucinogens, and in particular about Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known on the street as acid. Although this is an idiomatic expression I’ve always found a little confusing; after all, which “street” does it refer to? Certainly not Lichtstrasse (“Light Street”), in Basel, Switzerland, where, on the morning of February 5 this year I found myself standing astride my stalled rental bicycle and addressing a pair of employees, who had quit the Novartis “campus” (as the HQ of this huge pharmaceutical company is styled) in order to enjoy a rather more mundane drug experience: ingesting nicotine. They were surrounded by a gaggle of heavy-puffing colleagues whose smoke and condensation rose up into the gunmetal sky. Beyond them the Mondrian-Modernist glass panels of the campus buildings formed a grid of rationality upon which to plot these billowy curves of self-harm. I’d picked this duo because they looked slightly younger and hipper than the rest. After establishing that this wasn’t the main entrance, and that I’d have to backtrack to Fabrikstrasse (yes, yes, I know you know what this means), I asked them if they’d ever heard of Albert Hofmann.

They looked blankly at me, as I spluttered: “Y’know, Hofmann, he was a research chemist with Sandoz – now part of the Novartis group …” the blankness persisted, “Hofmann, the man who first synthesised LSD …” the blankness intensified. “L-S-D,” even though their English was faultless; I spelt it out for them with trans-cultural emphasis, “acid – the drug, the hallucinogenic drug. It was first synthesised right here, on April 16 1943 by Albert Hofmann, surely you know that?” But they surely didn’t know that. Indeed, not only did they not know about Hofmann, I’m not altogether sure they even knew what acid was. That evening in the hotel bar, I struck up a conversation with a woman in her early 30s, and she wasn’t on the same street as acid either – cocaine and marijuana she admitted to having heard of (although she swore she’d never taken either), but LSD was a complete terra incognita to her; she’d certainly never lain on a writhing mattress staring up into a spire of full of screaming mouths – the very idea was preposterous, and quite at variance with the atmosphere of Basel; staid, moneyed Basel, where Switzerland, Germany and France nuzzle up against each other in a welter of banking accords and powdery profitability.

Thinking back on these episodes later, it occurred to me that mine had been the common error of my generation: a late baby-boomer (born in 1961), since the demographics have made me and my peers the greatest part of the Western European population, I/we naturally assume that the cultural foment of our childhood and youth remains zeitgeisty. Perhaps, if I’d asked the Novartis fag-smokers about K-holes they’d have opened up – but quite possibly not; after all, the last thing you want to ‘fess up to when you churn out licit drugs for a living is taking street ones. And Basel is a company town: there were adverts for Sandoz’s products ranged along the travelator at the airport, so that you reached arrivals feeling like a dissolving human pill, a bubbly effervescence streaming out of the back of your head.

Anyway, I’d had the same blank response from the PR flaks at Novartis and Sandoz when I got in touch with them to ask whether I could see the laboratory where the drug that launched a thousand trips had been synthesised: emails and phone calls went resolutely unanswered. If it hadn’t have been for the sleuthing of a an Anglo-German friend who lives in Cologne (and who spoke to both the archivist at Novartis, and to Hofmann’s own son), I’d never have discovered that the chemist’s 1943 laboratory is still part of the campus, nor the precise location of the modest suburban house Hofmann cycled to on that April afternoon.

At the main reception on Fabrikstrasse the man-in-black behind the marble desk nearly corpsed when I asked if I, a mere member of the public, could stroll around the campus. What a ridiculous notion? Then, in between issuing plasticised name-badges to pukkah drug-dealers, he took pity on me, and explained that the city council ran a tour on Saturdays. What a fool! This was what every acid-addled journalist should always remember: whenever you have to access the heavily-guarded corporate HQ of a multinational drug company simply go on the weekend tour. But it was Tuesday, so instead all I could do was to stare plaintively through the gates at the original Sandoz building – a smaller, calmer, beige stone cuboid set among all those scary tesseracts – then mount my 6 CHF-per-hour steed and head for the hills.

As I pedalled along the achingly prosaic Basel streets, the blood draining from my wind-chilled fingers, it seemed to me that never had life seemed more anodyne: the streets were grey – my thoughts were too. Normally the combination of a quixotic little excursion such as this, involving an early morning start from London, a bumpy plane flight and an unfamiliar city at the end of it, would at least induce a mild alteration in my consciousness – a disorienting sense of the expanding possibilities of the universe, and the dilation of my psyche as it struggled to encompass them … But not today, today I was dull and earthbound. How unlike this it had been for Hofmann, almost 70 years ago to the day. The then 37-year-old research chemist had been synthesising for the second time a batch of LSD-25. He’d already performed this task five years before – deriving the colourless, odourless salt from ergotamine, a substance that itself derives from a fungus naturally occurring on rye seeds. Ergotamine had some uses reducing blood pressure in women affected by preeclampsia during pregnancy – and Sandoz were interested in discovering new blood pressure drugs, but LSD-25, when Hofmann had tested it on various lab rats, seemed to affect them not one jot, so he discarded it and went on tinkering with different molecular arrangements.

In his charming account of the discovery, LSD My Problem Child, Hofmann describes the “peculiar presentiment” he had that led him to re-synthesise LSD-25 (the 25 refers simply to it being the 25^th variant derived from ergotamine), and describes the very first acid trip ever “coming on” (as we say down my street), with this equally charming understatement: “I was interrupted in my work by unusual sensations.” Hofmann asked his lab assistant to accompany him home, and this being wartime (although Switzerland was a neutral country, there were still fuel shortages), they mounted bicycles, and as Hofmann pedalled across town he also proceeded into a parallel world. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Lance Armstrong! When the research chemist reached the nondescript house in the hilly suburb of Binningen he laid down “and sank into a not-unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterised by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours.”

After a couple of hours of this, the colours subsided and Hofmann fell to considering what had occurred. He reasoned – rightly – that if it had been the LSD-25 that had affected him the substance must be highly potent: he had observed correct lab procedures and it could only have been absorbed through his fingers. But how could he be sure? And here comes the true loveliness of the story – if you’ll forgive an old hippy’s floweriness – because while almost any other dull Swiss research chemist would’ve exhibited aching caution, Hofmann became wildly abandoned, and decided to test the drug on himself. Three days later he ingested 0.25 milligrams of LSD, reasoning that this was the smallest amount likely to be an effective dose. His diary of this self-experiment is marvellously terse: “17.00, Beginning dizziness, feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to laugh… Home by bicycle. From 18.00 – circa. 20.00 most severe crisis.”

The “severe crisis” that began on the bike ride was a full-blown bad trip: “Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror. I also had the sensation of being unable to move from the spot. Nevertheless my assistant later told me that we had travelled very rapidly.” At home, after collapsing on to a sofa in a swoon, Hofmann saw that “familiar objects and pieces of furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms.” Being a Swiss, he asked his assistant to borrow some milk from the next door neighbour (I love the idea of a dairy antidote), but when she pitchered up “She was no longer Mrs R, but rather a malevolent insidious witch with a coloured mask.” As if these external freakeries weren’t bad enough, poor old Hofmann was disintegrating internally: ‘A demon had invaded me, had taken possession of my body, mind and soul… I was seized by the dreadful fear of going insane. I was taken to another world, another place, another time. My body seemed to be without sensation, lifeless, strange. Was I dying?”

But far from dying, Hofmann lived to be 102, and remained to the end of his days a devoted father to his strange mind-child, believing that the LSD journey could be profoundly meaningful – if undertaken in the right, medically monitored circumstances. On this formative occasion a doctor was indeed called by the trusty assistant, but by the time he arrived, the peak of Hofmann’s Alp-sized bad trip had been reached, and the intrepid research chemist was gently coasting down the far slopes, transfixed by the characteristic synaesthesia provoked by LSD: “Every sound generated a vividly changing image with its own consistent form and colour.” But if Hofmann’s decision to test LSD on himself was remarkable, still more astonishing – and I think a major factor in the multicoloured mayhem that radiated out from the impact of that 0.25 milligram bomb – was his reaction; bad trip or not, Hofmann was a convert. In the words of the erstwhile Harvard psychologist Dr Timothy Leary – who became the pied piper of the hippies – Hofmann had turned on, tuned in, and, while he may never have actually dropped out, things were never going to be the same again for him.

The following morning he took a stroll in his pocket-sized garden, “Everything glistened and sparkled in a new light, I felt as if I had been reborn.” Within a remarkably short time Sandoz were offering the drug to responsible practitioners – mostly psychiatrists and psychotherapists – to use in practise, on the basis that by producing a “model psychosis” it enabled practitioners to both understand mental illness and treat it. There followed a long twilight period in the late 1940s and through the 1950s when acid, perfectly legal, could be obtained from Sandoz under the predictably dull trade name of Delysid. All sorts of people worked with LSD, notably the English-born Dr Humphrey Osmond, who had considerable success in Canada with the treatment of chronic alcoholism. But as time went by the semi-permeable membrane between psychological investigation and bohemian experimentation began to be penetrated by these super-charged molecules. Somewhere along the street, Hofmann’s problem child was waylaid by the egregious Leary, and introduced to the Eton-educated novelist and psychonaut Aldous Huxley, whose account of his own mescaline experiences, The Doors of Perception, had already become a handbook for the emergent counter-culture.

Leary and Huxley had very different ideas about what to do with this new and still more powerful psychedelic drug – Huxley favouring the initiation of a small group of influential adepts, Leary going for mass tripping with a vengeance – but by then it was too late. Those hipsters who experienced acid trips as portals into a mystical consciousness also saw something cosmically coincidental about Albert Hofmann’s bike ride. Noting that it took place at around the same time as the Manhattan Project was gearing up to produce the atomic bombs that would be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they reasoned that God or gods had given LSD to humankind so that the turned out masses would recoil from the nuclear Armageddon. If any younger folk reading this require a couple of primers on what happened next, I can heartily recommend Jay Stevens’ Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, and Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; between them these two books paint the 1960s up in the right Day-Glo shades. (Actually, even older readers could probably do with a re-briefing; after all, if you were there at the time you almost certainly can no longer remember what happened.)

For myself, I think I probably only really did the Hofmannesque bike ride once – by which I mean full-blown hallucinations, ego-death and rebirth. And that’s where you came in: with me lying on a bed in my college room in 1979, staring up at the interior of a spire stitched together out of mouths screaming my own annihilation – and everyone else’s. At the time it seemed that acid trips, far from being some avant garde voyaging, were already hopelessly passé: cheap day returns to the garden of earthy delights taken by already ageing hippies in Gandalf costumes. Illegal since the late 60s, acid was just another street drug. Or was it? True, I probably ended up taking it scores of times – perhaps as many as a hundred – but at an unconscious level I always ensured I didn’t ingest sufficient to return me to the spire of nothingness. Once was enough. However, every time I did take acid I had the same epiphany: I might’ve been getting pissed, smoking weed, and taking all manner of other intoxicants, but when my pulse began to accelerate, and my pupils dilated until their blackness smudged my pasty face, and the objects in the room became charged with an unearthly vitality, and the faces of my companions took on the aspect of masks either comic or tragic … Well, it dawned on me once again that this was what was meant by “drugs” – all the rest of it was mere doodling in the margins of consciousness, while this was shaking the Etch-a-Sketch of your mind until it disintegrated.

So, in answer to the question that I know is preying on your resolutely sober mind, no, I didn’t drop acid before I recreated Albert Hofmann’s famous bike ride. LSD and paternity don’t mix (what if you had a head full of it and began to see your children as malevolent demons?), and apart from a brief re-immersion in the psychedelic maelstrom in between marriages – hence the miniature kite flying incident above, which took place around 1996 – I haven’t messed with my head in that way since Thatcher was off her own in Downing Street. Besides, I didn’t need to: like Obelix in the Asterix comic series, the druid Getafix has long since dunked me in the cauldron of magic potion; so that nowadays, even on cold and dull mornings in Basel that seemed to betoken not expanded consciousness but a pitiless shrinkage of all mental faculties, it only took a few pumps on the pedals, a few squints at the pollarded trees along the boulevard – which writhed like the severed limbs of giants – and a couple of whacky conversations with elderly Swiss (“Do you know where I can find the house of Albert Hofmann … y’know … the man who discovered LSD?”), for me to peel away the transfer of my psyche from this cardboard backdrop and begin to fly.

By the time I reached Albert Hofmann Weg (or “Way”) the tiny, stepped alleyway named in honour of Basel’s most influential 20^th century inhabitant, I was as high as a miniature kite. The house where he’d laid supping milk and staring at phantasmagoria was a shuttered box that gave nothing away – but what about this bush? Why if I squinted at its leaves closely enough I could make out tiny cellular worlds in them. And what about this electricity junction box with its cryptic graffito – surely it was telling me something? And as for the airy-fairy sky, mounting up above me, surely if I got back on my rental bike and pedalled hard enough I’d soon be up there eating fondue with the Swiss mountain gods and Heidi’s uncle …? So I got on the bike, and pedalled for all I was worth, and shot back down the hill then along the boulevard to the Hauptbahnhof, and down the curved ramp into the bicycle garage, which was so insanely clean and orderly that I could barely stop laughing long enough to return the bike. As for the spire full of screaming mouths – it was nowhere to be seen.

I suppose the moral of this story is: kids, don’t do this at home – do it first of all in the past … and then in Basel.

A version of this article first appeared in Esquire magazine.

Or: The Failure of the Psychedelic Revolution to so much as Slow for One Instant the Incessant Gobbling-up of the Earth by the Moloch of Globalisation Considered as a Solo Uphill Bicycle Race through Basel

This article will appear first in Esquire magazine.