I knew it was going to be a great day out when I got to Halesworth Station: for a start, the sun was shining, and I like that. I’m not one of those brooding types who goes in for the pathetic fallacy of saying, “Ooh, I love cold, rainy weather”, as if this somehow confirms the dank seriousness of their own inner life. No, give me May sunshine, and a trip to a small Suffolk terminus with a museum in the old ticket office, and I’m as happy as a sandy beach boy. And what a museum! Complete with Iron Age artefacts, and a lady at a desk who looked at me suspiciously when I asked her where the public toilets were, presumably because she herself hadn’t had a bodily function since the coronation.

I detoured into the centre of town to perform my offices, then retraced my revolutions — I was on the fold-away bike — and headed for Holton, a mile distant. I’ve known the seaward part of this area since childhood, but I’d never been to Halesworth before. I think of east Suffolk as a landscape of repose and ingress: the lion shall drink Adnams, then lie down in an osier bed and sleep for a decade. It’s not overly oppressive like the breckland of Norfolk, or the fens of Lincolnshire, but gently rolling like the lightly rumpled duvet of a snoozing Ceres. Church spires and the sails of windmills loom above the fields, so that over miles you can orient yourself by the twin — and immemorial — poles of English rural life: God and bread.

The particularly fine windmill at Holton beckoned me into the village, and shortly thereafter I was cycling up the track towards St Peter’s Church — flint-knapped, round-towered, 11th century at a guess — where, in the vicarage, my purchasers were waiting for me. Yes, it was that time of the year again when I spent a day with the successful bidder in The Independent’s Christmas charity auction. This year the Reverend Liz Cannon had bought me, ably assisted by her husband, David, a retired systems analyst, who — among other talents — has internet auctions down to a fine art.

Liz — as did David — grew up in Norwich, and it was to there — after spells in Lowestoft, Ipswich and London — that she returned after her first husband died, in order to raise her son and daughter. She was raised a Methodist, worked in education, and always had a strong faith. However, Anglicanism, like her vocation, seemed to have rather crept up on her: a slow-burning conviction of the universality of God’s love, and the need for her to convey it. She was ordained as an Anglican priest at Norwich cathedral almost 12 years ago.

And after a curacy in Norfolk, during which she and David met and married, they moved to a parish at Cross Roads near Keighley in West Yorkshire. The parish abutted the Brontë’s Howarth, but it was more the experience of working in a hilly, and ethnically mixed community, that struck the couple. That, and the way the position crept up on Liz: “Initially I found the moors very claustrophobic, and the town looked very dour. The Archdeacon said I should take as long as I wanted to think about it, and when we came back again it all seemed completely different.” They stayed for six years. “I remember being at the big anti-war demonstration in Bradford, and feeling quite intimidated by all the chanting, but then thinking to myself: we’re all on the same side here, we’re part of a community.”

Eventually, however, Liz and David returned to East Anglia, and I could understand why as we left the vicarage and strolled down paths, past apple orchards, to the old Southwold railway line, which we followed into Halesworth. Over the Millennium Green (“It was quickly established,” David told me, “to stop Tesco grabbing it for a superstore”) came the sound of St Mary’s Church bells, a carillon being rung — I was told — in my honour.

Well, things don’t get much better than that — but they did: I got to meet the bell ringers, and then, after lunch at the Angel, the three of us strolled back to Holton. Talk had been eclectic: from the Archbishop of Canterbury (Liz’s employer), to Bernard Matthews (a big local employer, until his turkey-processing plant went down with bird flu). And we’d also discussed my pet notion that the places we end up staying in choose us, rather than vice versa.

As we looked round St Peter’s, David said to me, “You know, I’ve been thinking about your idea that places choose people, and I think there’s a lot to it. When I was a boy my parents often drove down this way to get to Southwold, and when Liz and I were first together we did the same thing. I never paid much attention to the area, but perhaps it was choosing us after all.”

That’s east Suffolk for you, a broad landscape of ingress and repose, not unlike the Anglican Communion.

To see Ralph Steadman’s artwork, visit here
31.05.08

To paraphrase Oscar: “Some people come to resemble their pets, that is their tragedy some people don’t come to resemble their pets, that is theirs.” I think in this context of the German woman I have met twice now walking her Leonbergers down the road near Clapham Junction where the boys and I wait to get the bus on the way back from school. The woman is frowsty with a leonine head of pink, dyed hair, thick round the middle – she’s only 5ft 2in, or thereabouts, and must weigh getting on for 10 stone – and as for the dogs… well, they’re not called Leonbergers for nothing. This is the nearest thing you get to lion that’s still canine. Their dotty owner – who snapped “Leonberger!” at me, when I asked what breed they were (as if it were entirely obvious) – must have to go out with a shovel to pick up their dung.

How much more appealing is the equally dotty woman I’ve encountered by night in Battersea Park, her white perm flaring around her pretty face, her retrousse nose questing the night air. Around her ankles bounce five creatures that closely resemble Japanese Manga comic creatures, or vaguely canine Teletubbies. They are, it transpires, Bichon Frisees, and she loves them to bits. Loves them so much, that when she told me her husband had said he’d leave her if she got any more, I detected a distinct froideur in her tone. This is one fellow who may come home one night to discover that the dogs have eaten his dinner, his house, and half of his income for the foreseeable future.

I swore that I wouldn’t become one of those dog owners who anthropomorphise their pets, and attribute to them all sorts of qualities they manifestly don’t possess, the sort of Jilly Cooperesque twerp who puts up monuments to the animals who died in two world wars, incised with the words “They Had No Choice”. Of course they had no fucking choice – and they had no say in your bloody memorial either. But then there’s Maglorian, my Jack Russell, who isn’t so much a dog as … a furry baby. There was a piece in The Daily Telegraph a few weeks ago saying that people who sleep with their pets in the bed are laying themselves open to diseases however, at the end it was conceded that you’re far more likely to contract something nasty from your kids.

Same diff’ chez Self, where dogs, children, whatever – they all end up in the big duvet tent. No doubt much like the home life of our dear new London Mayor. Still, dogs have it over children in all sorts of other ways: they don’t ask continuous – and impossible-to-answer – questions they never grow up and, better still, they really like going for walks.

But this being confessed, I have a ruthless streak when it comes to Maglorian. I had him up that vet to get his balls scythed off as soon as I could. I wanted him docile, I wanted him to be a homebody, I favoured the idea that he would become a superb counter-tenor barker, as against him shtupping every little waggle-tailed slapper in the neighbourhood. Also, it means that when he goes after balls in the park – which he does all the time, under the signal delusion that he can play football – it means I can quip: “He wants your ball … because he hasn’t got any of his own.”

Ah, park life. I thought I’d done it to death, I thought I’d covered the pondfront, what with working in parks for the Greater London Council in my twenties, followed by nearly two decades of having children under eight. How wrong I was with Maglorian to be walked three times a day the intensity of my relationship with parks – and their habitues – has deepened inexorably. And where there are parks, there are other dog owners, which in our part of sarf’ London means owners of huge savage-looking dogs with studded collars, straining on the end of their leashes while some character with tattoos/gold teeth/gold bracelets/gold necklace/ sidearm (delete where appropriate) says, “Back! Fang/Blood/Bruvver (also delete where appropriate) – and frankly, such is the ire that these playlets of male impotence masked by canine potency induce in me, that I’d happily put the Staffordshire Bull Terrier/Bullmastiff cross’s owner to sleep.

Until, that is, you begin talking to the buggers, and they turn out to be perfectly mellow fellows, with nothing but sweet, cuddly, loveable things to say about their furry babies: “Nah, nah, mate – ‘e’s not a fightin’ dog, ‘e’s great wiv kids – blinding, really.” Blinding indeed, and bark-stripping as well – the trees in the local park look as if an incendiary bomb has been let off in the vicinity, a nice conceit, given that before the Blitz this open space was covered in terraces.

The only question is, is it the man who’s taught the dog its parenting skills, or vice versa? Oscar would know.

24.05.08

To see Ralph Steadman’s accompanying artwork, go here

Last time I was in Dublin, Vivian drove me round in a big black Merc; this time it’s a still bigger and blacker Chrysler. “I should’ve bought a cement truck,” he observes, as we ooze past the Point, a massive new shopping-cum-entertainment complex that’s sprouting a small forest of large cranes. “I’d be coining it now.” Last time I was in Dublin, the old city seemed teetering on the edge of being metropolitan – now it’s fallen over. Last time I was in Dublin, the joke was the group of three pyramidical office blocks on the bank of the Liffey that were known locally as “Canary Dwarf”; now it’s them that have been dwarfed – or, at any rate, flanked by acre upon acre of plate glass and steel.

The day I was in town, things looked to be going well for the egregious Bono, and his partner in development, the Edge. Their plans to have Norman Foster revamp their Clarence Hotel – also on the banks of Holy Liffey – were flowing through the planning board meeting, and despite some sour remarks from a local conservationist, Michael Smith, who described the proposed building as a “cannibalistic behemoth”, it looked as if they’d get the go-ahead.

I couldn’t get excited about the new hotel – but then, who can? Show me someone who’s excited about a new hotel, and I’ll show you a raving eejit with the soul of a shebeen-keeper. Vivian drove Cormac and I out to the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, not, you appreciate, because we were old soldiers who needed taking care of, but because the historic building (complete in 1684, two years before the Royal Hospital in Chelsea), is now home to the Irish Museum of Modern Art. We were going to see an exhibition of William Burroughs’ shotgun painting, bizarrely juxtaposed with examples of Hans Christian Andersen’s beau coupage. Hmm.

The paintings were shite, basically, any old junkie with a shotgun could’ve pulled it off, but more importantly there was one of Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s original “dream-catching” machines. The whirligigs of light and motion that the two writers believed put them in touch with the noumenal world. I’m already hot-wired to this, but Peter – who we’d picked up en route – was a tad dismissive: “It’s basically a Lava Lamp,” he said, but I came back at him, “What’s wrong with Lava Lamps? I love Lava Lamps; in fact, I love Lava Lamps more than I love people.” Incidentally, the Andersen cut-outs were quite pretty.

In the bowels of the ancient building, where James Connolly was held for a time after the Easter Rising until the Brits got round to executing him, we chanced upon a potent symbol of Ireland, old and new: a photo-real image of a man’s hands cradling a rugby ball made from the hide of a living cow, complete with several teats. “It makes me feel queasy just looking at it,” Cormac said, but I caught the hint of desire in his tone.

Last time I was in Dublin, the European Union heads of state were there; this time it was José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission. Barroso was intent on selling the benefits of a new World Trade Agreement, but the Irish farming community weren’t so sure; they’d come up from the sticks in force, and as Cormac and I reached Heuston Station there they were, florid-faced men in tweed, their fingers itching to grab the teats on a living rugby ball.

This was to be the highpoint of my visit: last time I was in Dublin, the traffic was all snarled up because they were building the track for the new light railway, the Luas, but now it was done and we were to take a ride. “It wasn’t open two days,” Cormac said, “and they were calling it the Daniel Day.” The Daniel Day hove into view, all shiny and new, but still, unmistakably … “Look, Cormac,” I told him, “I don’t know how to break this to you, but that’s a tram.”

We rode the tram into Jervis, by the Four Courts, and then crossed the James Joyce Bridge to the other side of the Liffey. At least, I think it was the James Joyce Bridge; it could’ve been the Samuel Beckett Bridge, or the Jonathan Swift Bridge, or the Flann O’Brien Bridge. At the rate they’re going with these writerly Dublin bridges, they’ll have one for old Maeve Binchy ‘n’ all. Still, if they know how to honour their writers in Ireland, they also know how to honour their painters. After all, Francis Bacon’s London studio was painstakingly dismantled, crated, shipped, and then reassembled in a Dublin art gallery.

It’s the same with smoking. That night we dined in a small bistro where an outside area had been equally painstakingly contrived to look like a room, complete with walls, carpeted floor, and an almost ceiling. Space heaters kept us warm as we puffed, supped and munched. Last time I’d been in Dublin, it had been … exactly the same. Pure genius, indeed.

03.05.08

To see Ralph Steadman’s accompanying artwork, visit here

Read Will’s latest Psychogeography column here
10.05.08

To Broadstairs, not to bathe – it being April – but merely take the air. The Isle of Thanet has always been a little problematic for me; I can’t even say it without recalling Ian Dury’s lines: ‘I rendezvoused with Janet / Quite near the Isle of Thanet / She looked just like a gannet … ‘ &c. Somehow the great bard of the Kilburn High Road perfectly summed up this, the very coccyx of Britain, with its seafowl and its foul maidens.

Of course, seldom has anywhere more gentrified become more chavvy. Dickens, a habitué of the town, has one of his characters in The Pickwick Papers almost expire with relief once she reaches the haven of the Albion Hotel in Broadstairs, having had to endure the day-tripping of Margate en route. Dickens wrote to a friend of the town, that “[It] was and is, and to the best of my belief will always be, the chosen resort and retreat of jaded intellectuals and exhausted nature; being, as this Deponent further saith it is, far removed from the sights and noises of the busy world, and filled with the delicious murmur and repose of the broad ocean.”

He eventually bought the misnamed Bleak House, which still stands above the little horseshoe bay, looking not remotely grim, but more like a castellated Victorian fantasia on chivalric domesticity. What, I wonder, would he make of the town now, perfused as it is with tracksuited, gel-haired denizens of Margate and Ramsgate? Indeed, the whole of this coast feels like some suburb of outer East London, so full is it of the sights and noises of the busy world.

The sandy bay that is the town’s focus remains, girded by white cliffs of chalk and terraced houses, complete with micro-interwar pleasure gardens and a lift down to the beach that looks like an off-whitewashed crematorium chimney. There’s Morrelli’s, the beautifully preserved 1950s gelateria, where you can get Jammie Dodger sundaes, and glass mugs of vaguely caffeinated froth, then consume them under a bizarre oil painting of a flooded Venice – the water creeping up over St Mark’s. These are good things, and up the steep High Street there are chip shops and charity shops and Doyle’s Psychic Emporium (“Open Your Mind”), and a sweet shop selling orange crystals, spearmint pips and liquorice wheels. There’s even an optician’s trading under the name of See Well.

We hung out on the beach, fetching teas from the Chill Time café. One ageing hopeful came metal-detecting along the strand, Dr Who gadget held out in front of him, nuzzling the sand. Then another came up along, his gaze fixed on the gritty mother lode, his headphones clamped over his cartilaginous ears. Disaster! One metal detector detected the other, and one treasure seeker grabbed for the other’s wand. A vicious mêlée ensued as the two men fought for the right to possess these found objects. The kids and I sat in the beach hut and laughed like gannets.

A happy scene, but come nightfall and the profile tyres began to screech on the tarmac, and the darkness was full of harsher, more discordant cries. I took the dog for a walk in the local park. The blackout was complete, but I was aware of the presence of many others. In any large city these might have been furtive seekers after fleeting, anonymous congress, but here, in Broadstairs, they turned out to be enormous gaggles of teenagers, wheeling around on the mown grass, their mobile phones held under their chins so that the wan uplight weirdly illuminated their vestigial features. As I grew closer to one of these gaggles I became aware of an insistent and peculiar gobbling noise; the sound of many breaking voices intoning “Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off” over and over again.

I blame Hengist and Horsa for Broadstairs’ current fall from gentility. The two Danes – or, possibly, Germans – were invited by King Vortigern of Kent to come here in the fifth century: an early form of economic migration. Fifteen hundred years later, in 1949, the anniversary of their arrival was commemorated by some latter-day pseudo-Vikings: Danish oarsmen who completed the voyage in a replica boat. They landed on the sands below Dickens’ Bleak House, and the local municipality laid on a slap-up feed of hot soup, cold poultry, and potatoes with fresh salad in ample portions. Later there was heavy-footed dancing to the accompaniment of Joseph Muscant’s salon orchestra.

But, not content with such a welcome, the town councillors foolishly changed the name of Main Bay to Viking Bay. Doubtless they thought this would cement Anglo-Danish relations, but so far as I can see the main upshot has been that the town’s inhabitants go berserk from time to time. Waiting for the train back to London, I overheard two Thanet warriors discoursing on the platform: “‘E’s a cunt inne?” said one, “always bum-licking, but if you turns yer back on ‘im ‘e’ll give you a smack in the mouf.” They were drinking Stella Artois; if only it were reassuringly expensive.

To view Ralph Steadman’s artwork, visit here

26.04.08

For those of you frustrated by the absence of Ralph Steadman’s artwork when we publish Will’s Psychogeography columns from the Independent, here at last is an archive of them.

Lowland Scotland is networked with motorways – many of them astonishingly empty. Where my mother-in-law lives, in Motherwell, you can get in the jamjar, and within an hour be in Stirling Castle, or Edinburgh Castle, or clambering up the natural fortification of Ben Lomond. So, you can be forgiven for thinking of the entire statelet as a series of arbitrarily interchangeable visitor attractions. We were zooming up to Stirling when I saw the sign for the Falkirk Wheel. We’d been meaning to go on the Wheel for yonks, but somehow hadn’t got round to it. Boom-boom. Now seemed like the right time: the day was as bright as a political theorist who’s just solved the West Lothian question, and the views – I felt confident – would be superb. I diverted on to another empty motorway and drove straight into a filthy fogbank. Still, even if the prospects had dimmed there was still the miracle of engineering itself for us to admire.

The Wheel comes complete with its own tourist infrastructure: glass-roofed cafe-cum-infopoint, mandatory gift shop. Even in the thick mist the 15-metre long arms, shaped like double-headed axes, which bracket the Wheel looked impressive. Why wouldn’t they? The Falkirk Wheel is almost unique: a rotating boat lift that links the restored Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal. It lifts canal boats up to the height of an eight-storey building in two enormous caissons full of water, that are so finely balanced the whole thingamajig uses only as much electricity as boiling eight kettles of water – if, that is, you were minded to boil eight kettles of water.

The boys weren’t wound up by the Wheel, but I thought it a finely balanced madness to be in a boat, in a lift, going up to an artificial river, that was itself on a bridge. Frankly, you can’t get a more psychotic geography than that! I happily coughed up £21.50 for our family ticket, and we boarded the Archimedes, together with a handful of other wheelies: ginger boys and old girls with skin like foundation. Our guide for this memorable voyage was a jolly soul who looked a little like Hagrid’s younger sister. As the Archimedes ground into its caisson she gave us the spiel: the Wheel was, she trumpeted, a triumph of Scottish engineering. An assertion that was somewhat undermined by her next statement: it was designed and built by a Derbyshire firm, Butterley’s. Then she continued, explaining the “Celtic” inspiration of double-headed battleaxe template, and the nuts and bolts of the operation.

I confess, I couldn’t concentrate on this deluge of information I was far more taken by the jerky – and yet oddly fluid – sensation of being on a boat in a lift. The visitor centre fell away below us, while beyond it the mist moiled over the pennants of corporate hospitality marquees – Bosch, I think, or possibly tosh. With a bump and a grind our caisson married with the aqueduct, and then we were off along it heading for the Rough Castle Tunnel, which took us below the main Edinburgh-Glasgow rail line and the remains of the Antonine Wall.

In fairness, you couldn’t get a denser layering of the ways: I half expected to see the lost eagle of the Ninth Legion being carried out of a hospitality marquee by James Watt. So, why did I have to be so churlish as to enquire of our guide: “How many canal boats, exactly, have used this since it was all opened in 2002?” She had the figure at her tongue-tip: 4,000. I went on with my churlishness, venturing that this seemed like an awful lot of expenditure to make a couple of thousand Scots retirees happy. (Being the man I am, when I got home I checked the figures: it cost £85m for the Wheel, the aqueduct and the tunnel, making it over £20,000 for each trip.) Oh no, she said, that wasn’t the way to look at it all – besides, the Wheel was already paid for by European Union and Lottery Fund money. With logic as inertial as the Wheel itself I kept on: that means we paid for it. Ah, but you don’t understand, she persisted, the Wheel has brought myriads of tourists and millions of pounds of inward investment to the Falkirk area. Aha! Investment – I maintained – that could just as easily have been boosted if you’d built a giant tomato, or a 35 metre-high Tunnock’s Tea Cake.

But by now the other passengers on the Archimedes were rallying to her defence. There was talk of the greening of Scotland, the restoration of canals, the dawn of a new and gentler age – I was hounded off to the car park along with the hell spawn. As we drove on to Stirling, I ruminated: certainly, we might be headed back to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, but if society underwent that kind of reversal the only double-headed battle axe that would be required was one actual size.

15.03.08

I’m seriously considering making a late bid for rock stardom and reforming my student band, The Abusers. We split sometime in 1981 – or possibly 82 – over differences concerning nomenclature. I favoured changing the band’s name to Will Self and the Abusers, but understandably the others were against it. Pete Miller, the bassist, and a black kid called Chris, who played the drums and came from the Rosehill estate outside Oxford, split to form their own, more reggae-centric outfit dubbed Dub Vendor (like the celebrated platter shack in Notting Hill). Apart from me, they were the best musicians, and without them the Abusers were the empty chassis of a car with its rhythmic engine torn out.

Not that we’d ever been the tightest band around. Tight, mmm… as I recall this was always the purest approbation: standing in the sweaty, beery, fag-saturated crowds at the Marquee, the Electric Ballroom and the Roundhouse, watching bands with names such as the Pink Fairies, and Alien Sex Fiend, nodding sagely, then turning to your companion and uttering the shibboleth: “They’re really tight, man.” The Abusers, by contrast, were really loose – baggy, even.

Sometimes as many as 12 of us would mount the stage and crash into our legendary 25-minute cover of The Crystals’ “Da Do Ron Ron”. The line-up included: a 6ft 6in Rastafarian poet called Rocky, who spouted performance poetry, a lesbian-separatist guitarist with an extra-long lead on her double-headed axe so that she didn’t have to associate with the rest of us and, in the early stages at least, Geoff Mulgan who went on to head Demos, and then the Policy Unit at No 10. It was said of Robert Johnson, the legendary “King of the Delta Blues singers”, that he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for the ability to play anything he wanted on the guitar. This took place at midnight, sometime in the 1920s, at a crossroads near Dockery’s plantation in the rural fastness of Mississippi. Johnson is credited with being the father of rock’n’roll, and indeed his hard-driving, percussive style of guitar-playing, and his ability to belt out misery with such cogency, had an immeasurable influence on generations of middle-class English white boys.

In the States, where the blues and country music are twined together into the DNA of an authentic tradition – a true folk music – movement has always been key. The experience of black sharecroppers, pushed off the land during the Depression, and forced into the northern urban ghettos, contains within it all the propulsion that has kept American rock’n’roll continuously evolving. The US is also a huge country, one in which the mythopoeic road, married to the insistent rhythm of the four-stroke internal combustion engine, has generated a thousand thousand songs.

Of course, in this tea-towel-sized island, the idea of a “road song” is just as much of a solecism as a “road movie”. English rock music has, instead, always had a distinctly performative feel to it – music hall rather than Motown. The quintessential songs of place are concerned with creating proscenium arches, then populating the stage with characters. From “Waterloo Sunset” to “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” to “Parklife”, these are static-romantic contrivances. Not that they should be condemned for it, there is the continuation of a tradition here, but it ain’t rock n’ roll so far as I’m concerned. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? There wasn’t much comparison between Oxfordshire in the early 1980s and Mississippi in the 1920s, but the Mephistophelean remained surprisingly constant. Despite being entirely self-taught, I was by the age of 19 undoubtedly the finest rock’n’roll guitarist in England. My lightning riffs, ceaseless invention, and note-perfect picking were the envy of such giants as Eric “Slow Hand” Clapton, and Keith Richards. The latter often used to run little errands for me – such as popping up to the corner shop to get a pint of milk – so in awe of my playing was he. Then, one night, coming back from a gig, I met the Devil at the crossroads of Carfax and the High Street. He appeared to me in the guise of a Human Resources manager for ICI, and offered me a decent career in industry with job security. Instead of dieing an early death, I would live long enough to raise a family, receive a decent pension, and become a Tory councillor. In sum: I would receive the very soul of Englishness in exchange for my ability to play the guitar.

How could I refuse? With Pete and Chris already gone from the Abusers the band was limping along, and besides, I already intuitively grasped the limits of Anglo rock, and foresaw the arid classicism that would lead to Coldplay. I signed the contract in blood and never regretted it. Until now, after all, rock’n’roll will never die – and besides, my pension is woefully underperforming.

01.03.08

Feeling like the protagonist of Kafka’s fragment Before the Law, I cycled across town on a windy February evening to the Royal Courts of Justice. They’re Gothic, certainly, but the Gothic is so entrenched in British architecture – as style, recursive style, fakery and mockery – that to call the Courts this is a mere allusion. They are bulbous stupid Gothic, Gothic as an elaboration on High Victorian delusions of mightiness and rightiness, with finials of lumpy complacency buttressed by hefty hypocrisy. It’s no surprise to discover that George Edward Street, the criminal architect responsible for designing them, originally qualified as a solicitor.

Who but a solicitor would conceive of decorating the gates of the Law with the carved heads of celebrated judges and lawyers? Who but a solicitor would have the plodding nerve to surmount them with Jesus, Moses and Solomon, while the poor litigants are immortalised as a fighting dog and cat. And who but the Ministry of Justice – crazy Kafkaesque name, crazy Kafkaesque institution – would dream of hiring out the Great Hall by the hour, so that City types can trough down in splendour, and applaud their own huge feats of avarice, and tiny ones of beneficence.

I was here almost a year ago, called upon by a charity called War Child. Having been offered the opportunity to fundraise at a bond traders’ dinner, they were desperate for a speaker and asked me to step into the breech. On that occasion, things went reasonably well – if begging is ever OK. I doffed my rhetorical cap, and the rich guys listened respectfully to my spiel, before tossing a 10p coin into it. In fact, they divvied up a couple of hundred grand, but proportionally – given there were trillions in the Great Hall – I was a Big Issue seller in a suit.

This year, War Child came knocking again, and I didn’t have the gall to give them knock-back. True, I do believe in the work they’re doing – helping kids in war zones, feeding them, clothing them, building them schools – it’s just I’m not sure it’s them that should be doing it. Charities and other NGOs follow in the wake of our Government’s foreign adventuring like vultures with sociology degrees, feeding off the carrion left behind on the battlefield. They alight for a few months or years, putting out celebrity-endorsed pop CDs back home to fund their endeavours, and then flap away again to feed on more Humanism.

Still, any good is better than no good, and so it was that I found myself, within the gates of the law, watching the black ties getting spattered with red wine, and admiring the multicoloured up lights playing upon the pillars of the great hall. It transpired that this lot were different: not as grand as last year’s mob who were mostly CEOs, these poor cousins were responsible for leveraged finance and syndicated loans. Hmm, and the dread credit crunch was squeezing them until the Faberge pips popped out. Why, some of them would only be getting six-figure bonuses this year. Nevertheless, the dinner was an opportunity for these nabobs of debt creation to give themselves glitzy awards with snappy names like Best Arranger of Project Finance Loans and Best Arranger of Turkish Loans.

Now, I like to come into an environment and try to understand it, even one as bizarrely unwholesome as this. So, I dutifully asked the studious young man seated next to me what exactly a “mezzanine loan” was, and he explained that it was a loan where the borrowers’ failure to repay would result in the loaners acquiring equity in their business. Simple, really: banking as a kind of invasion of the body snatchers.

On they went, to the grossly amplified strains of pop hits, sashaying up to the lectern and booming out such rousing speeches as “We did the Imperial Tobacco loan!” It felt like aeons – yet it was only an hour or so. Finally, it was my turn to approach the gatekeeper of the Law. I spoke for 20 minutes or so, giving a run-down on War Child’s work, exhorting the assembled extremely wealthy people to divvy up for building toilets and schools in Iraq, and retraining traumatised child soldiers in the Congo, before ending up with a description of one case history: a 12-year-old Afghani girl raped by her uncle and then imprisoned for – you guessed it – adultery.

It was then that I began to hear a distinct susurration spreading through the Great Hall and lapping against the pretentious pillars: they were talking. And not just one or two of them, exchanging the odd remark – but entire tables chatting away while they slugged back the Rioja. I stopped, and boomed at them over the PA: “I’m wondering what exactly it is that you’re discussing that can possibly be more important than a child being raped?” But it was a stupid question, because I knew already: it was money – and there was certain justice in that, oh yes.

23.02.08

At the time of writing, the fishing trawler Spinningdale is still caught on the rocks near to Village Bay, the only landfall on the Hebridean island of St Kilda. The National Trust of Scotland, which owns the island, has launched an “emergency procedure” to deal with the consequences of the shipwreck: baiting traps. Yes, you read me right: baiting traps. The 14-strong Spanish crew were speedily rescued from the stricken vessel, which ran aground during the storms on February 2, but there’s considerable anxiety that some of the Spinningdale’s probable stowaways may get ashore, and if even one pregnant Rattus norvegicus does take the plunge successfully, the outlook for St Kilda’s half million seabirds is pretty grim.

In theory, an incestuous ratty mummy and daddy can produce as many as 15,000 living descendants within a year. And on St Kilda, these frantic gnawers will have a veritable smorgasbord laid out for them on the springy turf – albeit one heavy on the raw egg. For the St Kildan petrels, fulmars, puffins and guillemots have no resident predators, the only native mammal being a subspecies of mouse. As Susan Bain, the trust’s manager affectingly put it, after four bad breeding seasons, the birds “really don’t need another stress”.

Of course, there is an irony cruising even these remote waters, 50 miles due west from the Isle of Lewis. St Kilda supported a human population from the Neolithic era until the 1930s, when the final remnant were evacuated to the Scots mainland at their own request. The St Kildans, unmolested by rats, lived in a strange and communistic Arcadia, where, for generation after generation, they harvested the seabirds from the island’s spectacular cliffs. So, as one land-based predator has quit St Kilda, now, after a 70-year moratorium, another one may be about to pitch up.

That Rattus norvegicus is itself parasitic on human populations adds another twist to the double spiralling of eco and system. I well recall, somewhere in the feverish slumber of a childhood illness, listening to an apocalyptic piece of afternoon theatre on Radio 4. In this play, a mad multi-millionaire fearing the coming Armageddon, retreated to a nuclear shelter on his private island, only to discover that he had brought rats with him, and that they were intent on devouring his carefully selected breeding pairs of humans.

Rats, islands, humans. In Konrad Lorenz’s masterly book On Aggression, the maverick ethologist writes of a Danish island where two rival “tribes” of brown rats had fought themselves to a standstill, occupying exact halves of the available territory, complete with a “front line” of burrows and runs. The possible fate of St Kilda is further illustrated by the incursion of rats to the even more distant Campbell Island, a New Zealand possession near the Antarctic Circle. Brought by 19th-century whalers, the little bastards did for all the native bird-life, including a rare flightless teal. In 2002, the Kiwis struck back, sending 120 tons of rat poison to the island, and killing an estimated 200,000.

The 200,000 figure is interesting, because 250,000 was the number of rats estimated to live in New York in 1949 by the charmingly named Dave Davis, who dedicated his life to their demography. Davis was intent, in part, on debunking the – in his view – preposterous, and oft-quoted, “statistic” that there was one rat per person in urban environments. This shibboleth – which in our own day has morphed into the often stated “you’re never more than 10 feet away from a rat” – in fact derives from a 1909 English study, The Rat Problem by WR Boelter. Boelter based it on the “reasonable assumption” that there was one rat per cultivated acre – he thought it absurd to factor in urban environments.

Forty million acres – 40 million rats and coincidentally 40 million people, a nice parity, and ever since, the idea that we all have a toothy little doppelganger has gnawed away at us relentlessly. The intimacy with rats implied by saying that you’re never more than 10 feet away from one is a kind of Mockney machismo: a tough-guy act in the pointy face of a creature certainly less prevalent – because constantly poisoned – and definitely wholly unaware of our bravado.

Which leads us, messily enough, to Ralph Steadman, who baited me with this rat [see the Independent February 16 2008 issue], together with the following observations: “It’s a picture of rampant hope beneath the boards … and if you’re asking, yes, the rat came from under the boards of the lounge, and had practically fossilised in the balletic pose as though it were defiant in death. It probably died in 1887 when the Old Loose Court was restored. I imagine the house surrounded by hop fields and begging peasants who would empty your cesspit with a shovel and wheelbarrow for sixpence and a clout round the ear. Now look at us! Consumed by living greed and cargos of rats …”

No man is an island – but Ralph gets close.

16.02.08