The time I gave up smoking, I lasted just short of a year, so in some ways I’m not the best qualified person to write about it. Added to that, my love affair with La Divina Nicotina is intense, protracted and tempestuous. I smoke cigarettes, I smoke cigars, a few years ago — after the sabbatical — I even took to puffing on pipes, and rapidly acquired a whole mantelpiece full of them, together with scores of obscure pipe tobaccos with names like Velvan Plug.

As I write this piece, I’m puffing on a hand-rolled cigarette of finest Kendal Dark, obtained from the redoubtable Jeremy Cole of Smith’s in the Charing Cross Road, my long-established tobacconist. This afternoon I’ll probably sip meditatively on a pipe, and the evening will be punctuated with long draughts of Havana smoke from a Hoyo de Monterrey Epicure No 2 — one of the finest cigars known to humankind.

Yes, I’ve smoked through colds, through bronchitis, through cancer scares, through the head-shaking, tut-tutting weariness of all branches of the medical profession. I’ve smoked in New York, I’ve smoked in LA. I’ve smoked in Queensland, Australia, where they already have the draconian anti-smoking ordinances that we’ll no doubt soon see in our once grey and acrid land, to whit: no puffing permitted within 15m of any public building; a bylaw that creates not posses of filter-tipped felons, but bizarre semicircular chain gangs of us.

But for all that, I have no objection whatsoever to the smoking ban in England — indeed, I salute it as an inevitability. I quite understand that non-smokers — by now the vast majority of the adult population — don’t wish to have rank fumes thrown in their faces as they sip their wine or bib their lobster. This is a democracy, and the people have voted with their lungs. Yes, I grasp all of this, because I too was once a non-smoker, and I know what it feels like.

I know what it feels like to get up in the morning and take great gouts of clean air into your pristine lungs, I know what it feels like not to have a tongue as hispid as an Axminster with butts ground out on it, I know what it feels like not to have to eructate a rigid cookie of sputum before you can choke down your breakfast — or the first fag of the day. So I can unequivocally state that I loved not smoking — and I loved giving it up as well.

I may be a little bit of a special case when it comes to giving up drugs (and nicotine most surely is a drug — in my view one of the strongest and best) because I’ve given up most of them: alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy, speed, heroin, LSD — you name it, I’ve jacked it in. So, when it came to packing in the fags, I took the approach that served me well with all my other addictions. Coincidentally, this treatment programme is not at all dissimilar to that enshrined in Allen Carr’s famous masterwork The Easy Way to Stop Smoking.

Carr himself rather rejected the 12-step recovery programmes of Alcoholics Anonymous, and claimed that recovering drug addicts and alcoholics were unsuited to his stop-smoking method, but I suspect that this was because he was an alcoholic himself, as well as a shrewd businessman who didn’t want competition from a free service.

There is, incidentally, a self-help group called Nicotine Anonymous, and although I’ve never attended myself, my informants tell me it can be extremely helpful.

But the Easy Way is a blend of common sense and cognitive behavioural therapy that I found did the trick for me. Carr’s method eschews substitution of any kind: you go cold turkey right away, no patches, no gum, no nothing. Some people say that nicotine withdrawal is a nightmare, comparable to heroin. I say: bullshit.

In fact, nicotine withdrawal is a rather pleasant experience — giggly, slightly trippy, rendering the recovering smoker emotionally volatile, likely to laugh, cry or shout. It’s also over in 48 hours or so. Substituting gum or patches simply continues the addiction by other means, and although I appreciate that some smokers do quit using these as aids, I’d wager it isn’t them that have made the difference: something has changed for them in their attitude, which makes it possible for them to stay stopped, once the drug is finally out of their body.

I once saw a well-known hypnotist do a stop-smoking session for a client. He was very forthright in countering the notion that hypnotists can’t get you to do anything against your will. On the contrary, he told me, hypnotism is about doing precisely this, and stopping smoking is a case in point. Yet what I observed was that once he’d put the client under, he simply told her all the nasty factoids about smoking that we’ve all heard before — and that Carr retells in his books, seminars, sessions et. It was only that the tranced-out woman was in a better state to receive them.

I’ve known people for whom hypnotism has worked very well, but once again, I suspect this was because the important mental changes required to stay stopped were already under way for them. Carr runs through all the negative stuff about smoking, but his clincher — which, if you can hold it in your mind and truly believe it, works 100 per cent — is that not only is smoking not in the least enjoyable to you any more, but you never really liked it to begin with!

He takes you back to those first, nauseating, chemical inhalations, and keeps you there, your head spinning with adolescent angst. He has a brilliantly simple line on stopping smoking and weight gain: don’t substitute food for fags, because you don’t really want food at all! It worked for me when I stopped using his method. I kept my deliciously lissom figure.

Carr makes of giving up smoking the same kind of ritual that smoking is itself. He encourages you to move towards Q-Day in well-defined increments, shedding the crinkled-up leaves of tobacco from the quick, green shoots of new health. He allows you to talk about it — ad tedium if necessary — and he implants the vital notion that every day without smoking is a positive benefit, the very treat that you thought you were rewarding yourself with, when in fact you were slowly committing suicide.

As I say, I read Carr’s book, stopped, and had a thoroughly good time. I immediately took up much more physical activity: running, long-distance walking, cycling — and rapidly became fitter than I had ever been in my adult life (I started smoking at 12). I enjoyed my food, I felt clearer and more focused.

Many writers — and indeed anyone with a keyboard-based job — say they can’t concentrate or compose without a hit of nicotine. Carr’s method knocked that idea into touch for me: I wrote an entire novel during the year I was off fags, together with my usual quota of journalism, and found no difficulty with it at all. I simply substituted other work rituals — chewing gum, special stationery — for those I’d had around tobacco.

Within about three months of stopping smoking, I found that I’d ceased to think of myself as a smoker, and indeed, seldom thought about smoking at all — if, that is, I was alone.

Of course, as a non-drinker, I didn’t have that dangerous trigger of disinhibition occasioned by a few drinks. I’ve seen many people, many times, fall off the clean-air wagon because they’ve got tipsy at a party and had a smoke (Carr’s method also enshrines the AA code that “one is too many, a thousand never enough” if you want to stay stopped, never again have so much as a suck).

I’ve also seen occasional marijuana smokers come a cropper because they had a few tokes on a joint rolled with tobacco, thinking that it couldn’t do any harm, that it was a “different thing”. Wrong! With neither of these pitfalls facing me, what was my undoing? Well, as I say, I was fine with not smoking when I was alone, but I was a holy terror around other people. I just couldn’t get my attitude right towards them, whether they were smokers or not. Already a tricky presence socially, I found that shorn of the defensive blue-brown drapery, I felt terribly naked and exposed. I became more and more antisocial.

I also became vastly intolerant of those close to me smoking, exiling them from the house, even hounding them down the street. I didn’t like this in myself, and in part felt I should seek further therapy for that deeply seated, defective part of myself that couldn’t just live and let die. I also lost sight of the positive benefits of not smoking, once I’d become used to them.

In five short words: I took them for granted.

The fall from clean-air grace was both sudden and protracted: the cigarette at a party was followed by three, painful months of re-toxification, during which I felt the drug reoccupy all those brain centres it had been so blissfully blown out of. Only once I was well and truly addicted again did I cough a sigh of pained relief.

Still, there is an upside to this woeful, wheezing tale: I know that it’s possible — and even enjoyable — to stop smoking, and I know that some day I’ll do it again with equal enjoyment. The method I followed is not the only way — there are many ways to flip a butt. The only hard and fast rules seem to me to be not substituting one dependency for another, and taking physical exercise so you can enjoy your release from bondage.

I was going to give up in July — like so many others — but I confess, I am, childishly, rather enjoying the dumb rebelliousness of still puffing, and plan to continue with cigarettes until the current supply exhausts itself in August.

Then I will confine myself to cigars when I’m working at home, and smoke nothing when I’m out.

I’m bound to feel a little uneasy, scratchy and vulnerable to begin with. I won’t have anything to do with my hands, I won’t have a barrier between me and the world, I won’t be able to strike my familiar attitudes. Still, the alternative — hunching under garden heaters with other throwbacks, while the winter whistles in — is as unappealing as licking an ashtray…

26.06.07

John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue, has resisted the siren call of the Tories and come out as an independent candidate for the 2008 Mayoral elections. I’m delighted. And delighted, too, that he’s standing at all. The London electorate desperately need some fresh blood on the local political scene, and most especially a challenger to the newt-fancying incumbent, who’s beginning to take on the mantle of an Estuarine Fidel Castro, such is his unopposed longevity in office.

I never seriously thought Bird would take up the Conservative candidacy. He may have some Essex Man, knee-jerk opinions, but the policies he limned out in his interview in yesterday’s Standard warrant serious consideration. He’s right to stress the vital need to break down the ghettoisation that fosters crime, and he’s right to insist on more social housing. He’s right, also, that the clone high streets are making London unliveable, and he’s put a lot of effort into his Wedge card, designed to promote local shops.

Particularly canny was Bird’s full audit for the congestion charge, and a commitment to ask its critics what they would put in its place – if anything. But most significant was his claim that he has many backers in the City. Make no bones about it, while Livingstone may have got the popular vote, his ability to make any policy while Mayor has been contingent on wooing the Square Mile.

Increasingly, the City is London’s biggest employer, and the international financial mavens the paymasters for civic investment. It’s always been the Tories’ desire to find a candidate who can yoke big business to the ballot box, but ever since “Two Shags” Norris was rubbed out by a smear of lubricity, no one has come forward to fit the bill.

In a way, the Tories should stop looking for a businessman-hipster like Branson to be their candidate. I doubt the wisdom of this. While we Londoners may accept the reality of our economy, we don’t want it shoved in our faces by having a multimillionaire mayor. There’s no reason why the City can’t be encouraged to practise inward investment by a maverick like Bird.

If I were Cameron and his Notting Hill pseuds, I’d be worried by Bird’s campaign. Londoners may have given Ken the crown in part to cock a snook at the Thatcherites – and their Blairite heirs – who hobbled city government for so long. But the wind is changing now. Bird says a non-partisan mayor would be a good thing for the capital and I agree. Let him be our own, noble Mercutio, and cry out: “A pox on both their houses!”

***

A social whirl for us pariahs

Lounging outside a central London restaurant the other night having a fag, I was musing on how this was the shape of things to come, when I fell into conversation with a fellow pariah. He’d just been on a speed-dating evening and was still wearing his sticker.

Had it gone well? I asked, and he launched into an explanation of the whole process, followed by some witty and self-deprecating remarks on his love life. Soon enough, he’d flicked his own butt and returned inside, but I was left with the impression that I’d had a worthwhile – even intimate – encounter, and all in less than four minutes.

Could this speed socialising also be the shape of things to come?

I’ve long contended that most dinner parties could usefully be over within quarter of an hour, while even full-scale balls needn’t top the hour mark. It seems unfair that following the new ban it should only be us diehard smokers who benefit from such glancing, yet profound, encounters. I look forward to a time when everyone lounges in the street, only popping inside occasionally to earnestly debate global warming, or trade the latest gossip.

***

Classy Cate is no Iron Lady

The news that Cate Blanchett is being considered for the role of the young Baroness Thatcher in The Iron Lady, a film of 17 days in the run-up to the Falklands War, fills me with a deep gloom. As a schoolboy in Finchley I met Thatcher, our local MP, on several occasions, and I have to say I always found the idea that she radiated a deep – and even sexual – charisma to be unfathomable. Only screwed-up old Tory men, with dominatrix nanny complexes, could possibly have been aroused by her steely coif and mean features.

Blanchett, on the other hand, is bright, beautiful and unaffected. I know every actor worth her salt wants to increase her range but I beg of you, Cate, don’t do it, lest the Thatcher sourness rubs off on you.

22.03.07

Today, 1.2 million parents will find out if their children have got the secondary school place of their “choice”, and loud will be the cries of rage when many of them find that this choice is, at best, Hobson’s, and at worst no place at all.

In my own borough, Lambeth, every year thousands of secondary pupils have to leave, in order to seek an education in an adjacent one. Under Labour the idea was to create a more “diverse” state system. Duff schools were to be shut down, good ones expanded. Tambourine-banging Tony was happy to see the expansion of faith schools, and, of course, there have been the privately sponsored city academies.

But none of this has given parents more effective “choice”, while removing the responsibility for admissions policy from the local authorities and handing it over to the schools themselves has only resulted in more covert selection. As a result, the trickle away from the state sector in London is turning into a torrent. The latest wheeze is to allow local authorities to run lotteries for places: what sort of “choice” is that? It’s like saying that when you scratch your National Lottery card you’re “choosing” to become a multimillionaire.

What a damn stupid idea “parental choice” was to begin with, and how it pains me to see the Government tinkering frantically with its “admissions code”, trying to level up a playing field that can never be anything of the sort. If we’re lucky – very lucky – when his time comes we may be able to get our son into Pimlico comprehensive in Westminster. Pimlico is not a bad school – but it’s not a conspicuously great one. I well recall giving a former Labour minister a lift home from a party last August. He lived two streets away from Pimlico comp. When my wife asked him if he’d considered sending his children there, he said that he hadn’t considered it for a second.

With guardians of public morality like these, who needs the Tories? Offering parents a meaningless choice is worse than us having no choice at all. Frantic lest they be seen to be going to the bad old days of the 11-plus, Tony and his hypocritical chums will offer any sop to the electorate other than what we want, which is good, local schools not the “choice” for our kids to spend hours travelling across town to get to a half-decent one.

If anyone’s remotely interested, here’s my action plan for these good, local schools: reintroduce selection by ability and strictly to within a given local postcode, abolish state faith schools and dodgy “academies”, double the salaries of teachers and end private finance initiatives and all other forms of private-sector investment in state schools. Er, that’s it. You can reach me through the Standard, Tone – or Gordon – when the next reshuffle’s due. I may not be an MP, but when’s that stopped you lot handing out a portfolio in the past?

01.03.07

Tony Blair should watch it: he was up late on Tuesday night sending out a “personalised” email to the 1.8 million car drivers who added their signatures to the petition against road pricing on No 10’s website. I can’t help feeling that the PM will leave us with one, peculiarly “Blairite” legacy: namely, a political process in which protesting is either ineffectual or electronic, which amounts to the same thing.

Decoupled from the engine of trade-union power, and no longer relying on personalised bonds forged in the workplace or the committee room, never before have so many protested against so much to such little effect. On the one hand we have mass demonstrations, such as those mounted by the Countryside Alliance or the Stop the War movement. Neither the ban on foxhunting nor the invasion of Iraq was seriously affected for a second. Both lobbies were full of people who, were they not marching in roughly the same direction, would have happily trampled all over each other.

On the other hand we have the anti-road-pricing petition, the campaign against “Tescoisation”, and the latest consumer-driven mass protest – this time against excessive charging by the Big Four high-street banks. These are also “single issues”, but the only principles involved are individual rights to drive, shop locally and extract cash from holes in walls. Moreover, the very medium by which these campaigns are pursued – the internet – undermines the very possibility of their succeeding.

For, the internet, while it may spread a dissenting view with viral alacrity, completely fails to marry it to any sustained or consistent position. Tapping on a keyboard is an isolated affair, and no matter how colourful a VDU may be, it’s no substitute for the infinite nuance provided by face-to-face communication. If the anti-road-pricing lobby really want to get Tony Blair worried, rather than sending him emails, they’ll have to get in their precious cars, drive somewhere and hold one of those quaint anachronistic things called a meeting.

At the back of all this lies the tremendous success of this old New Labour government in promoting a society in which individual choice – whether for consumer goods, public services or political commitments – is seen as far more valuable than any concept of collective welfare.

It’s a paradox that it should have been a nominally “social-democratic” government that hardened these ethical arteries, just as it’s a paradox that a more individualist society should prove so inimical to genuine contact between real people. Still, I don’t think you’d better spend too much time contemplating these conundrums, send someone an email instead: it’s what your leaders would want you to do.

22.02.07

For some time it has been my contention that every English person “gets” a Celtic country. By this I mean that he, or she, ends up in a tangled association either with Wales, Ireland or Scotland. I ended up in bed with Scotland. Literally, since I married a Scot.

But despite this, while I never had much difficulty learning to love its landscape, its culture, or its whisky, the Scots have, I confess, been more of an acquired taste. Perhaps the definitive modern remark on the English by the Scots is voiced in the film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s fine novel Trainspotting, when the hapless Edinburghian junkies seek to kick their habit with a healthy spot of hill walking. Against the frozen peaks of the Cairngorms, one of them remarks: “It’s not the English I mind so much. Sure, they’re wankers, but it’s being colonised by a nation of wankers that I really object to.”

It’s this objection that seems to be overtaking the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union. Instead of a Royal Tattoo or two, we’re being treated to the spectacle of a resurgent Scottish Nationalist Party. If the SNP gains a majority at Holyrood in the May elections, they will press for a referendum on the Union and if a majority of Scots vote for independence, then – according to the Scottish Secretary, Douglas Alexander – the Government will have no option but to honour their democratic right to secede.

It’s a prospect that appals the Labour Party – and not simply Brownite kings-in-waiting, who would see their new Prime Minister’s legitimacy cut from under him. Others on the Left recoil from an independent England, for it would very likely turn a darker shade of blue. Of course, the majority of English Right-wingers are also opposed to Scottish independence. With the Scots gone – and presumably, like Ireland, likely to embrace the euro – what future for our own isolationism?

But I say: bring it on. No considerations of short-term ideological advantage should prevent a revision of the current antidemocratic state of affairs. The West Lothian question is not trivial. It isn’t that Gordon Brown, John Reid and Douglas Alexander are Scots that troubles me when they formulate legislation that applies exclusively to England it’s that they haven’t been elected by voters in these constituencies. If we wish to live in a proper democracy, a fair electoral system must have primacy. As I see it, Scottish independence is of a piece with proportional representation, a written constitution, a non-hereditary head of state and an elected second chamber.

To those in the north who bleat about regional English assemblies I say: forget it. If there’s any case for a federalised British Isles, it’s within the context of a federal Europe. Far from Scottish independence increasing what ill feeling there is between our two peoples, my suspicion is that it will dissolve it. Who knows, once the Scots stop feeling colonised, they may even feel better about us.

18.01.07

Drive-In Saturday

Then to the Wolseley for an after-show supper. This was my first trip to this happening eatery – and how pleasingly daft it is. The decor looks as if the old car showroom has been remodelled as a cross between the Batcave and a fin-de-siecle Viennese coffee house. However, instead of caped crusaders the banquettes were stacked with the usual Footballers’ wives and nouveau riche provincials.

The food was goodish, excellent trimmings, including superb espresso, but my companion’s halibut came swimming in a sauce as thin and salty as the sea it had been pulled from. Worse still was the behaviour of the staff. When we arrived the Maitre D’ said “Please wait in the bar Mr Self until your table is ready.” But when that time came he stuck his head round the corner and cried “Come on, Will!”. While that sort of wanton familiarity may be all right with Privy Councillors – it’s anathema to me.

Scary Monsters

Like most London householders I deplore the rise of thuggish trick-or-treaters. Hulking young fellows turn up on your doorstep demanding sweets, their costumes consisting of little more than a hoodie pulled down over their eyes and a scarf wound round their mouths. If you were to refuse, they look well capable of “tricking” you with a few rounds from a Glock. Still, such antics do have their upside. I went out on Monday evening wearing nothing but my habitual Will Self horror mask, and came back a couple of hours later with my pockets stuffed with all manner of cachoux, truffles and other expensive bonbons.

Jean Genie

To the Criterion for the revival of Simon Gray’s 1975 satire on middle-class mores, Otherwise Engaged. Anthony Head and the other flared-jeans-wearing players were superb. The set was a delight – a perfect recreation of an echt Hampstead home during the Heath administration, right down to the Eames recliner, the Hockney print on the wall and the Habitat lampshade. The strange thing was that just as this modernist decor hadn’t dated at all over the past thirty years, nor had the Anglo-Saxon bourgeois attitudes so cleverly skewered by Gray.

Here was the same tedious preoccupation with the superiority of an Oxbridge education, the same fatuous remarks about literature and publishing, the same misogyny masquerading as permissiveness. The only line in the play that jibed at all was when one character – a public school teacher – remarked that soon private education and healthcare would be abolished.

How strange it is to recall a time when Britain seemed on the brink of a socialist dawn! And yet, if Otherwise Engaged demonstrated anything conclusively, it’s that despite Thatcher and Blair the metropolitan middle class have enjoyed – if that’s the right word – an era of unparalleled social stability.

Space Oddity

I don’t imagine there will be too much mourning today for the defunct ministerial career of David Blunkett. Only the prurient could wish this farceur to go on stumbling through Westminster with his trousers round his ankles. Only the deluded can imagine that his work on the pensions crisis would’ve averted it. Blunkett’s supporters say he was drawn into his dodgy DNA dealings by the need to pay for the court costs arising from his battle with Kimberley Quinn over access to their child William. More morally conservative types might say: tough titty, if you embark on an affair with a married woman you’ve got it coming. Slightly more liberal pundits would incline to the view that while adultery is understandable, inadequate contraception is not.

My feeling is that there’s something breathtakingly crass about having any dealings with a firm specialising in paternity testing, when you yourself have inflicted so much damage on so many people by an act of unthinking insemination. It’s impossible for anyone but Blunkett and Quinn to know the full extent to of their mutual acrimony – but I would argue that it’s also only they who can solve it, and make adequate provision, both emotional and financial, for their child.

Over the past 20 years an elaborate bureaucracy has been built up in this country, the aim of which is entirely to stop sundered parents from fighting with each other, and force them to put the needs of their offspring first. The Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service, the Child Support Agency, the Family Courts, the Lord Chancellor’s Department, umpteen family lawyers, family therapists and trained mediators have been hurled into the breach. Yet when all’s said and done – and more importantly spent – fathers don’t want to provide financial support for their children get away with it, and mothers who refuse to comply with court orders on access do as well.

I know of so many mucky and sad situations where legal interventions, far from bringing warring parents to their sense, have merely inflamed their passions and ushered them into a Bleak House of litigation. If Blunkett and Quinn, their affair over, had had the good sense to approach its aftermath as responsible and mature individuals, then perhaps the future happiness of their child would’ve been assured. Ministerial careers may only last a few years – sexual passion a few minutes, but relationships between parents always last a lifetime.

Let’s Dance

Apparently a survey has revealed that 67% of children believe that their mothers are the adult in the family who “wears the trousers”. My only surprise is that it’s not 100%. Where are these third of fathers who effortlessly juggle the work/life balance? Who remember recorder lessons and gym kit while dealing with an office crisis? Who know instinctively when the carrot and the stick should be deployed? I don’t see them on television, I don’t read their top-tips in the magazines. I suspect these children are deluded and that in our metrosexual age they’ve simply mistaken one trouser wearer for another.

05.11.05

Congratulations to Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell who’s had the guts to admit that the Government are considering ‘social engineering’ policies to ensure that more state school pupils enter university. A predictable tirade of abuse has followed from educationalists in the so-called ‘independent’ sector. These people aren’t independent from anything – they represent nothing more or less than long-entrenched privilege: the privilege of money, the privilege of class and nepotism. Up until twenty years ago great swathes of places at Oxbridge were ‘tied scholarships’ open only to public school students, and in my day it was commonplace to see these chinless thickos toppling over outside their colleges because they were unable to tie their own shoelaces.

People seem to forget that the whole reason we live in a remotely egalitarian society is because of the introduction of universal, competitive examinations to universities and the civil service. The last bastions of privilege, whereby hugely disproportionate numbers of mediocre young people are promoted above their intelligence and ability, need to be engaged with forcibly by any Government in the social democratic tradition.

Still, what a pity Mr Rammell and his colleagues don’t also have the courage to apply social engineering where it’s really needed. I’ve got a couple of radical ideas that might help to level the higher education playing field. One of them is ‘grants’ – these would be a universal, free benefit available to anyone going to university. The ‘grants’ would be allocated on the basis of need with the parents of students being means tested. Crazy, huh? Another idea is ‘social housing’, this is low-cost housing built at a local level with central government finance. An adequate provision of this means that disadvantaged families can nurture the university students of tomorrow without being in hock to interest rates.

I’ve got other, wild ideas as well – like a properly enforced ‘minimum wage’, which means that menial jobs aren’t done by economic migrants, in turn driving down the wages of other working people. Oh, and there are these things called ‘apprenticeships’, which some countries, I understand, have in great numbers. Because, Mr Rammell, the mere possession of a degree in Media Studies from the University of Former-Poly doesn’t guarantee anyone a middle class lifestyle with all the bells and whistles. Unless we want an entire nation of unemployed advertising copywriters, unable to pay off their student loans, there needs to be other forms of social engineering besides jiggling the goalposts for tertiary education. Unfortunately such policies would nudge ‘social’ back towards ‘ism’. Not a happy suffix, eh Bill?

The Island of Doctor Moreau

There can be few more revolting sights than the trestle table plastered with lurid photographs of vivisected animals which invariably gets put up in street markets all over London on a Saturday morning. I can’t understand why more people aren’t outraged by the “animal activists” and their emotive pornography of interspecies violence – I often stop and give them a row – but mostly they’re unmolested. There is something peculiarly nutty about attacking humans in orders to save animals – as the Animal Liberation Front have this week: a fire bomb at the home of the corporate controller of GlaxoSmithKline; another device at an Oxford University sports pavilion; and a third at the home of a broker who had merely invested in one of the contractors building the new University primate research laboratory.

Nutty – but effective. The contractor has pulled out, and such is the terror generated in the heart of Big Pharma, that the New York Stock Exchange is unwilling to list companies involved in animal experimentation. Meanwhile, Darley Oaks guinea pig farm – which has been the object of a vicious and sustained campaign – has announced that it will close by the end of the year. It was the theft of the remains of the mother-in-law of the Farm’s owner from a Staffordshire graveyard which highlighted the grotesque lengths the ALF will go to, to put animal breeders out of business.

But really the ALF would be better off getting hold of a time machine, because then they could go back a few thousand years and firebomb the ancient Peruvians who were responsible for domesticating guinea pigs in the first place. In truth, the relationship between humans and guinea pigs – like that between all settled populations and their domesticated animals – has element of circularity about it. The guinea pig is particularly useful to researchers establishing diagnostic tests for tuberculosis, because of their low resistance to the tubercle bacillus, yet tuberculosis itself is a disease humans have acquired from cows.

Personally, I see no real moral distinction between testing lifesaving drugs on guinea pigs, cutting up chimpanzees to examine their brains in the name of “pure” science, or dripping shampoo into puppy dogs’ eyes so we can have shinier coifs. It’s all part and parcel of way humans use other animals for our own ends. When people talk of “humane vivisection”, whether in terms of its ends or its means, they’re really referring to making people feel better about this ruthless exploitation.

Indeed, all epidemic diseases – just like hair care products – are a result of the settled lifestyle of humans, so if we want to eliminate animal experimentation our best possible option is to abandon civilisation and become nomadic. I suspect this is what the ALF would like to do – and good luck to them; if they find anywhere salubrious I’ll happily join them. Of course, by abandoning the cities we’ll be sealing the death warrant for viruses that require dense populations of human hosts – and surely viruses have rights too? I’ll become a supporter of the ALF when they become the Virus Liberation Front as well.

The Valley of the Blind

To the Greater London Assembly where the Mayor’s Women’s Affairs Advisor had thoughtfully arranged for a memorial to be held for the great American feminist writer Andrea Dworkin. It was an event at once thought-provoking and emotional. Looking out through the pregnant belly of the building’s facade at the phallic towers of the City, we heard extracts read from Dworkin’s devastating and eloquent attacks on pornography, sexual violence and misogyny in all its forms.

It was uncomfortable listening for the men in the audience – but then so far as I could make out there were only about three of us. The vast majority of the 200-odd present were women – and not just any old women, these were mostly radical, lesbian separatists who eschewed so-called “feminine” fripperies and furbelows. Speakers poured as much scorn on “liberal feminists” as they did on the hated “patriarchs”. How curious it was therefore to observe that these women in their neutral trousers and jackets, sporting short hair cuts and only the most discrete jewellery, looked so much like, well, like men. It was as strange as if communist revolutionaries rallied wearing black tie and smoking Havanas, or antifascists donned Nazi uniforms.

War of the Worlds

What is with the Met and their sirens? During the July terrorist incidents there wasn’t five minutes of the day when a siren couldn’t be heard, rising and falling like a demented whippoorwill, from the room in Stockwell where I work. Now things have calmed down a little, and the constabulary don’t seem to feel that the only way they can prove to the populace that they’re hot on the trail of malefactors is by advertising it to the world. Nevertheless, on Saturday night we were hopelessly snarled in traffic running down Earlham Street from Seven Dials to Cambridge Circus, when a police car started up its siren and left it on for a full ten minutes. There was no possibility of them gaining and advantage by this – the press of cabs, cars, rickshaws and revellers simply couldn’t budge. They’d have been better off getting out of their car, strolling up to the window of each of the jammed vehicles in turn and politely asking us to move as soon as we were able – a bit like Dixon of Dock Green.

28.09.05

Hogging the Limelight

As one of the curmudgeons who viewed London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympics with as much enthusiasm as a plague of locusts, it gives me nothing but pleasure to report that builders working on the site of the Games in East London are facing a similar infestation. The Lower Lea Valley is – as any keen London walker could’ve told them – home to large areas of Caucasian Giant Hogweed and Japanese Knotweed.

The Knotweed is a bizarre plant which reproduces by cloning itself – not unlike International Olympic Association bureaucrats – and getting it out of soil is an exhausting business. It can cost ££50,000 to clear an area the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Giant Hogweed, by contrast, is a 20-foot-high relative of cow parsley, the hairy stems of which impregnate human skin with a photo-active chemical, so that when its victims are exposed to sunlight they suffer terrible burns. Rather poetically, Giant Hogweed is thus a kind of anti-celebrity triffid – reminding athletes of the perils of over exposure. That these, two alien invaders should have to be grubbed-up to make way for many thousands of others is yet another example of Olympian folly.

Crack Down on Fashion

I’m wholeheartedly in favour of Sir Ian Blair’s move to crack down on middle class drug users – but what about middle class fashion users? As any right thinking person knows, fashion is a dangerously addictive drug which drives both women and men alike to spend thousands of pounds on fleeting highs. The fashion habit gets going early; boys and girls begin with an occasional, social designer label or pair of flash trainers, but before long they’re desperate for pret a porter. Sadly, many will graduate to becoming full-scale haute couture users. As Sir Ian would doubtless observe, how can we send a robust anti-fashion message to the Tommy Hilfiger-sporting youths on council estates while permitting the middle classes to shamelessly parade in Prada?

Now we have London Fashion Week, and the disgusting spectacle of girls – some as young as sixteen – whose only crime is taking a little cocaine, and yet who are forced to march up and down draped with expensive clothing, in order to gratify the depraved tastes of fashionistas. As I write, all over Chelsea prefab booths are being erected within which these sordid “shows” take place – will no one put a stop to it?

Take Me to the River

It was the normal Sunday afternoon toddle down to the South Bank for the Self Family. But lo! What was this? For in among the stony hulks of culture, where the superannuated Marxists talk of video installations and the yoof skateboard, there was a mighty press of people. There were stalls selling all manner of nibbles: chicken a-jerking, pork a-noodling, veggies a-currying. There were Czechs strumming triangular guitars and ugly Hispanics doing the flamenco (why are all flamenco dancers ugly when you get up close?). In geodesic domes there were Indy guitar bands a-flicking of their greasy locks, while out front politically-correct children tried to slap Asbos on Punch, Judy and the Baby.

Yes, it was the Mayor’s “Festival of the Thames”, another of those bizarre attempts Ken makes to introduce new-old folkways to the London masses. He’s been at it since he was in County Hall in the mid-1980s, and while I don’t have a principled objection, the whole bang-shoot mostly seems like an excuse for stall holders to make a 200% profit on cans of coke. There’s that, and there’s also the poor old River itself, which on a gloomy afternoon presented the same miserable, face to the world. There was no trace of festivity on its grey waters – only the usual rusty rubbish barges lying at anchor. Get real Ken – next year call it the “Festival of the Thames Bank”.

Tessa Cohen That You Should be With Us Now!

Will nothing stop the remorseless expansion of Tesco which now has 30% of the supermarket sector in its grasp? Can no one prevent it’s gobbling up of old buildings – the Clapham Women’s Hospital was this week’s casualty – followed by their voiding in the form of yet another corporate barn full of clever merchandising? The short answer is no, because in the real world of consumer choice the sweeties are always – and I mean always – positioned right by the till.

Which came first, supermarkets or the global trade in foodstuffs which enables them to pile high and sell very cheap? The answer is that both arose at the same time, in a positive feedback process of the kind engineers term “autocatalytic”. Which came first, the stranglehold the big supermarket chains have on food distribution – and increasingly food production – or the government compliance in their relentless expansion? The answer is both, because governments are only weary parents, pushing the trolley of fiscal policy down the aisles of history, and desperate to quieten the fractious tax payers with yet more sweeties.

No, there’s no way back now – because to make the kind of choices that will keep small, local shops open, and favour low-intensive, organic farming methods, costs shoppers a great deal of money and time. If you take the long view, the move to supermarket shopping is analogous to the adoption of sedentary food production by hunter-gatherers 12,000 years ago. I’m serious, because all the evidence suggests that the hunter-gatherers had more free time and were better fed, and yet they ended up as overworked, malnourished farmers oppressed by god-kings and despotic bureaucracies.

Why was this? It was because the poor hunter-gatherers didn’t know what farming societies would be like – they had no experience of them. They adopted farming piecemeal, in much the same way that time-pressured consumers, with limited disposable income, start off shopping at supermarkets for a few convenience items and end up completely hooked on internet-ordered deliveries. The individual shopper doesn’t understand that she’s going to end up in a hideous Tesco nation – anymore than the hunter-gatherer saw Babylon on the horizon.

No, it’s all over bar the name change. Personally I think “Tesco” is a perfectly good name for Britain, reflecting our commitment to modernity and an economy dependent on ever increasing consumer demand. And I think Sir Terry Leahy, will make a just as good a head of state as he does a chief executive. After all, he understands the long view, when asked about Tesco’s current supremacy he said: “I remember when I started at the Co-op in 1979 – it had a 25% market share.” Yes, empires may rise and fall, but civilisation always progresses.

21.09.05