You could’ve knocked me down with a semi-transparent pop-up ident of a feather when I got an email from Bill Gates. To begin with I thought the scrambled syntax, banjaxed grammar, and dubious content was yet another spammer: “C’mon Big Boy see my lake glistens 4 U. All Xs pays bi me if U cum kwik.” But later I was called by an assistant who informed me that the multi-billionaire software tycoon wasn’t trying to sell me Viagra, but rather wanted me and Ralph Steadman to join him at his $97m lakeside eco-mansion for what Gates terms a “Think Week”.

“It’ll be blue-sky stuff,” the MicroWonk said. “How you and Ralph view the future of space – and time – that kinda thing.”

“I’ll tell you that for nothing,” I snapped. “Time will go on, space will get bigger.”

“That’s great, just great.” The WindowsWimp was not to be dissuaded. “First-class tickets to Seattle will be delivered by courier later today.”

“But what if I don’t want to come?” I became querulous.

“Try Viagra,” the MiniMonopolist said and hung up on me.

The trouble was that Ralph adores a freebie of this kind, and even though he was just back from Davos, where he’d been advising the head of the World Bank on corporate re-imaging, he insisted on going. Well, I couldn’t let him set out alone – Ralph may be brilliant at taking a line for a walk, but off the page he lacks basic orientation skills.

Arriving at the serried concrete bobbins of Sea-Tac airport on a brilliant winter’s morning, I couldn’t face climbing into a cab. Instead, I put Ralph in one and told him to break the ice over at Bill’s place, while I stretched my legs. “For Christ’s sake, Will,” Ralph bridled, “what am I going to talk to him about?”

“You both dig Da Vinci – ask to see his Leonardo stuff. He has the Codex Leicester, cast your eye over it, then get out your pen and begin flicking ink – I’m sure he’ll see the funny side.”

I slogged through the suburb of McMicken Heights and Crystal Springs Park, down to the deliriously named Interurban Avenue. Picking up the Green River Trail I trod on beside the rows of poplars screening off the Boeing Plant. The Pacific North West always invigorates me, with its soft, temperate climate and its boundless woodiness. All those trees, photosynthesising like Billy-o – it’s a tonic to the air sacks.

The long tramp into town on 4th Avenue would’ve been dull, but I had work to do. Bill had set up a SharePoint website for the three of us, where we could post sketches, notes, and supplementary information relating to the space/time think week. I had my Tablet PC with me, so using invaluable OneNote and OneWord software I was able to post stuff as I went, such as musings on Bill’s brilliant coinage “Creative Capitalism”, and how it might possibly relate to the man walking ahead of me, pushing a supermarket cart piled with old tin cans and festooned with plastic bags, who couldn’t seem to keep his trousers up.

Past the Qwest Field and on into downtown as darkness was falling, and if it hadn’t been for the unearthly up-light of the computer screen, making of me an ambulatory ghoul, I’m sure some of the shambling homeless might’ve clubbed together to mug me. As it was, I took Madison Street to Washington Park then the long, scuzzy tongue of the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge across Lake Washington to the lakeside community of Medina.

It had been a 25-mile walk, and it was now past midnight. I was cold, hungry, and thought the very least I could expect from a man with a net personal worth of $56bn was a cheese toastie and a cup of tea – but not a bit of it. The familiar goofy boy scout’s visage peered through the security louvres, then Gates admitted me to a nerdish bedlam: piles of old Marvel comics and empty Yakult cartons were scattered everywhere, an Atari games console was pinging in the sink. Ralph was in the conversation pit, making paper darts out of pages from the Codex, and I don’t think he can possibly object if I tell you, gentle reader, that he was a little tipsy.

“You tossers!” I cried. “While you’ve been behaving like overgrown teenagers, I’ve been sorting out the whole space-time continuum.”

“Gee,” Bill said. “I’m sorry – I guess. Melinda’s vacationing at the moment, and I kinda let things go. Please tell me your thoughts – I’m sure they’re real inneresting.”

“The shift key – get rid of it!”

“But why?”

“So no one will ever again, anywhere in the world be able to conceive of typing the words ‘SharePoint’ or ‘OneNote’.”

“Or SpaceTime!” Ralph yelled from the pit.

09.02.08

… You take my impotence for example. Up until a few years ago, the old todger was as big as a bloody battering ram: I used to fear my erections. Since then, well, I blame Nigerian traffic wardens. They come over here, can’t speak the lingo and strut about the place slapping tickets on anything that moves – it’s intimidating.

I was coming out of the Cross Keys in Wilmslow and there was one of the bastards skulking under the moot hall having plastered a big yellow sticky one right across the Range Rover’s windscreen. Well, I went to have it out with the blackguard – I wasn’t about to be intimidated! I fought in eight world wars and put down the bloody Mau-Mau, man, armed only with a Martini-Henry! Anyway, to begin with he’s cringing and scraping, but then he pulls some ghastly little fetish out of his tunic. Looks like a cat’s paw wrapped in a hairball all tied round with kidney stones – fair gave me the willies, ha! If you’ll forgive the pun – or rather, anti-pun – because it didn’t give me the willies, it took mine away! Ever since I gave that illegal immigrant chappie a rollicking I haven’t even caught sight of poor John Thomas, seems he’s completely hidden away inside me. Saw the same thing in Malaya during the Emergency in the Fifties, native wallahs would get the damn-fool idea their meat’n’veg were sort of retreatin’ inside their bodies – latah they call it – thing is, in their case it was a bloody fantasy; in mine it’s a reality. My missus, well, she may be getting on but she has certain perfectly reasonable expectations: a Tory government, no one frightening the horses, no redevelopment in Hungerford High Street, Sunday afternoon rumpy-pumpy right after matins – you get the photo. When I realised I wouldn’t be able to service the old mare I got pretty antsy, I can tell you. Went to see the quack sharpish. Well, she’s only some junior harridan sporting a Harriet Harman horror mask, ain’t she. Has the bloody nerve to tell me I ought to be cutting out the sleepy Ribena and the fags at my age. My age! I explored the Lost-bloody-World and climbed the Empire State Building with my mits up Fay Wray’s jacksie so the likes of her could have free school milk. The chit wouldn’t even write me a prescription for Viagra, told me it was “contra-indicated” for a man of my age. That wasn’t going to stop me, oh no. Jimmie Wemyss, mine host at the Bald Eagle in Netheridge told me about this interweb thing, and how a chap can get anything he needs with a push of a button, so I ordered the contraption from little Freddie Dixon, and when it pitched up, he came up and got me started. Turns out you don’t even need to go looking for the stuff, there are all sorts of obliging fellows out there who send jolly emails offering Viagra, Cialis, and even this sleepy Ribena in pill form called Ambien. But before I could even divvy up the old Diners’ Club I got rather sucked into correspondence with them. I mean, I’m not lonely or anything, but the trouble and strife spends an awful amount of time with her committee work, and early February … well, the time before opening can lay heavy on a chap’s hands. Besides, when you get a tinkle out of the blue yonder headed FuckStickAmpleFloyd, or GargantuanPenisBeau, well, it’s a tonic in itself. I began writing back to Karen Knutsin, Stanislaw Baczmonski, Kumar Senthil, and all the other obliging souls out there in hyperworld. Nothing too personal, just stuff about the village, who’s breaching planning regs with his fucking dreadful conservatory, and who’s dipping his sheep in liquid MDMA then rogering ’em – harmless gossip, really. Back they come – my emails – with more exciting headings: BodyPartEnlargedShawn and BarneySchlongBroad, well, I mean, who are they when they’re at home?! If they ever are at home. I imagine they’re “hanging out” on some Thai beach or other, with a whole tribe of itty-bitty little fillies to satisfy their every urge. Natural Manhood Enhancement, Watch it bigger day by day! – that’s what they were offering me, but I preferred to keep ’em at arm’s length. I said to Giles Woode at the Cock and Bull in Bent Parva: Y’know, I’m almost grateful to that bloody Nigerian for opening up a whole new realm of experience for me – it’s something you don’t expect at my age. Turns out Giles is no stranger to PenisPlumpingCarla himself. I’d no idea that – to coin a phrase – he needed “easily to get male package”. Always assumed he’d lost it all together during the Suez Crisis. Ho-hum, another bottle of Ribena, or are you riding?

02.02.08

Crumbling the progesterone into Cyril’s Pedigree Chum worked, and a litter of Jack Russell puppies duly arrived. Staying with Cyril’s human “owners” in the Vale of Pershore, my 10-year-old got up early and spent the morning with the little bundles of joy. He battened on to the spunkiest one of the litter, a bite-sized doglet he dubbed Maglorian. Why Maglorian? Well, the child has a considerable – and in my view, misplaced – affection for the works of J K Rowling, and apparently there’s a centaur called Magorian that lives in the Magic Forest adjacent to Hogwarts. However, Magorian, he explained, “sounds too gory”, so the “L” was inserted so that “he can be ‘Glory’ for short”.

But I wasn’t willing to call anything Glory for short – it’s either too homoerotic, or too patriotic reminiscent either of the glory holes of Manhattan’s Mineshaft in the early Eighties, or else of “Land of Hope and Glory” either way, you won’t get me wandering round south-London parks shouting “Glory!” at the top of my voice – what do you think I am, a cabinet minister? Disputes about nomenclature set to one side there was no further let or hindrance to the beast pitching up, which, a few weeks later he did. Now, my resistance to canine culture is a matter of record: not for me the shit-picking, dull-walking two-step of the tethered promenade, nor the exorbitant veterinary bills to round up sheep with a beautifully trained collie, using only a whistle and a crook is one thing, but to lower your emotional horizon to the level of these urban pavement-crawlers, selectively bred to fulfil the furry baby fantasies of the frustrated and the barren, well, that suckles.

Still, it was pointed out me, quite forcibly, that small boys need dogs, and so there was Maglorian: an itty-bitty fait accompli with tan and cream markings. Then, horror of horrors, a dreadful thing happened, the Dog Instigator had to go away for a few days leaving me in sole charge of the puppy. Well, I may be a hardhearted bastard, but I’m not a robot, and an infant is an infant, even one with a muzzle and claws. What I’m scratching at here is that – in psychoanalytic jargon – Maglorian and I both
cathected. Of course, he has imprinted me radically differently to the way I have him: to him I am a noble pack leader, scouring the horizon for the next kill, and planning how to separate the vulnerable straggler from the herd then rip its throat out whereas, to me, Maglorian’s an itty-bitty … well, I think I’ll spare you any further nausea.

My dog ownership is gifting me some new insights into the patch of town I’ve been pissing in for the past decade there’s an entire stratum of local society that I’ve previously been excluded from: the nervy lady who looks like the late Dick Emery doing a drag act, and who punctually at 9.00am walks her miniature spaniel along our road the muscular six-foot clone in the bomber jacket with the short-haired Alsatian the elderly gent who has come, inexorably, to resemble his arthritic Airedale terrier – with all of them I am now on nodding terms. Actually, I’ve always been on nodding terms with them, but now the nod is just a fraction deeper, the chin tucked down to the chest in a submissive way as we mutually acknowledge the Suzerainty of the Hound. No, it’s not the local dog people that bother me it’s the ignorant masses who coo and bill over Maglorian wherever I take him. I swear, if another femme d’un certain age, or broody couple, comes waggling up to me, speaking in baby talk, and twittering away about how sweeeet he is, I’m going to puke. Have these people no shame? Of course, I understand that they don’t really want to have dog babies any more than I do, it’s just an atavistic impulse, of the same order that makes perfectly respectable stockbrokers put on three-piece tweed suits and shoot more pheasants than they could ever possibly eat.

Perversely, although we chose Maglorian on the grounds that a small dog was better for town, the Dog Instigator has been reading up on Jack Russells, and it turns out that they are regarded as “big dogs wearing little dog suits”. I thought as much, when the five-month-old pup happily trotted along behind me for a strenuous six-mile walk. This is no lapdog to be concealed in a feminine muff (or ruff, if you’re prudish), but a noble fox terrier, a working dog, capable of tearing Vulpes vulpes apart in seconds. Good thing too – since there are plenty of foxes in this neck of the woods. Yes, as soon is Maglorian is full grown I’m going to take him out into the Magic Forest and let him bring his near-namesake to bay. A horse with a man growing out of its back? Goddamn mutants shouldn’t be allowed.

19.01.08

On a recent plane flight from Heathrow Airport, London, to Glasgow, I entered into a typical – but for all that grindingly depressing – altercation. I had been assigned the window seat, while the aisle was occupied by a man two decades younger and a head-and-a-half shorter than myself. I pointed this out to him and suggested that he might have some compassion for his elder, taller, better but he demurred, saying that he wanted to “get out quickly” at our destination. “What are you,” I snapped irritably, “a bloody brain surgeon?”

Of course, he wasn’t – he was a runner for Endemol, the TV production company responsible for such gems as Can Fat Teens Hunt? And to confirm that I was in a purgatorial transit, he and his little colleague in the middle seat spent the rest of the flight yakking nonsense, while slurping kiddie drinks – vodka and lemonade, the alcopops of a criminally extended teenage. However, in a way they did me a favour, because they forced me to contemplate: first my own weird hypocrisy – here was I, a fearless psychogeographer, ever-determined to assault the conventions of mass-transit systems, yet still falling prey to the most blinkered of herd instincts – and then, latterly, the view from the window.

It was a night flight, but even by day viewing the British Isles from the air can be a problematic endeavour: they’re too damn small, and more often than not covered in cloud, like an ancient dessert submerged in whipped cream that’s going off. At least, that’s what I like to tell myself. When I grope back through the frayed card index of my memory, I do come across startling prospects I’ve experienced from the air: the west of Ireland, spread out below, a green counterpane bejewelled with tiny lochs, the snow-bound Orkney Islands, streaked black-and-white like killer whales in the hammered lead of the Pentland Firth.

But what marks these sights out is their singularity – they are not what you expect of Britain, and especially England, its unmade bed of a landscape cluttered with human leftovers. Moreover, they are views I experienced when I – if not the world – was still young. Still, there I was, and rather than listen to the he-wank, she-wank talk of my travelling companions, I decided to garner what I could from the darkling empyrean, the bejewelled cities of the plain – like inversions of the Milky Way – and the metropolises along our route: Birmingham, Manchester, then Glasgow itself, which seemed like transparent jellyfish, sparking with unknowable sentience.

What is it about flying? Why is it that what must, by any reasonable estimation, be the most exciting and extreme, technologically mediated experience any of us are ever likely to have – apart, that is, from radical surgery – is hedged round with such ineffable tedium vitae? Getting into a titanium tube? Being hurled by vast jet engines six miles high, then impelled down an Aeolian slalom into another time zone? Why not squabble over the aisle seat, bury yourself in Grisham wood pulp, goggle at the pixellated manikins cavorting on the back of the seat in front of you, or plug your ears with soft rock – do anything, in short, to avoid being fully conscious of this revolutionary, quintessentially Modernist experience: the 600mph, hundreds of miles wide vantage of a superhero – or a god.

My hunch is that the way in which every aspect of air travel is trammelled by the ineffably dull – tedious airport architecture, monotonous muzak, anodyne announcements, superfluous consumer opportunities – is the result of an unconscious collective denial. After all, if flight crew wore winged helmets, and “The Ride of the Valkyries” came blasting over the PA as the plane picked up speed on the runway, then, when the oily behemoth slipped the surly bonds of gravity, the captain cried: “Weeeee!”, the latent anxieties of every passenger would be unleashed. Even if we survived the flight, we’d probably land determined never to do it again: “Flying? What a trip! Once is enough for me.” And the whole go-round of work-consume-travel-die would grind to a halt.

As it is, plane flight is the most intense juxtaposition of the banal and the sublime available to humanity: we sit, belted in, eating dry-roasted peanuts, and veering between contemplating our own unavoidable mortality, and the bad karma of the person sitting next to us – it’s bad enough to be working on Can Fat Teens Hunt? but to die working on it, that, like, sucks. We sit, cramped (and in my case, thanks to the teeny-rotters, with my knees pressed into my eye sockets), while just beyond two layers of Plexiglas the very curvature of the earth can be glimpsed.

It’s all enough to make anyone philosophic – except, that is, a bloody brain surgeon.

29.12.07

In July, when the ban on smoking in public buildings was introduced in England, I was in Brazil, a country where men are men (although often they have the secondary sexual characteristics of women), and they like to smoke cigars the size of Amazonian trees. They smoke them in restaurants, they smoke them in offices – they smoke them anywhere they damn well please. It’s as difficult to imagine a smoking ban in Brazil as it is a moratorium on commercial logging.

When I left Brazil, I went to the US, a country where a smoking ban has been in place for so long now that the inveterate nicotinistas have fully adapted. Setting to one side the – possibly apocryphal – tale of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg trying to have Keef Richards arrested for smoking on stage during a Rolling Stones gig at Madison Square Garden, you only have to wander the Manhattan streets for a few minutes to see the future of smoking – and how well it works. Purpose-built puffing booths, chatty, coughy colloquia at the foot of office blocks, trim uptown girls skipping along Fifth Avenue, a Hermes scarf over one shoulder, a smoky pashmina slung across the other. The American tobacco culture has rolled with the Puritanical punches, and survived.

Back in Blighty, I found a curiously unembattled smoking fraternity: we had seen the ban coming, and mostly made our peace with it. The powers-that-be had already launched trial blitzkriegs on Ireland – north and south – Scotland and Wales, so nobody was in any doubt about the consequences. I suspect the majority of smokers were like me, and accepted the ban as a fait accompli. After all, once the tipping point had been reached, and well over half the adult population no longer indulged, only a dumb bear squatting in the Forest (Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco) could reasonably expect them to put up with our shit-laden breath.

There were also those who, quite sensibly, looked to a ban as a means of assisting them to break off their affair with La Divina Nicotina once and for all. So there was little dissent, apart from the usual suspect “libertarians” banging on about their “rights”, and a few crypto-licensing agents, who inveigh against any measure that constrains an industry that derives the vast majority of its income from addicts. However, the trade had already been softened up by the timely introduction of 24-hour drinking, so, not much trouble from that quarter – and certainly no die-hard mavericks risking prosecution in order to preserve their establishments in the acrid mists of time.

The smoking ban was a quintessential Blairite policy – perhaps the signature legislation of an entire decade of government. It was a measure taken after the fact of its acceptance that nonetheless allowed the politicians involved to style themselves as the vanguard of a new health consciousness. It involved minor government spending for maximum effect, and it fitted perfectly into a hard utilitarian calculus, that sees the promotion of life – even if it’s a life endlessly prolonged in miserable sub-standard state “care homes” – as the pre-eminent moral good.

Opinions differ enormously as to whether the ban has actually achieved a decrease in English smoking. The statistics will be hard to crunch, given the porousness of our borders to cigarettes and rolling-tobacco-seeking asylum. Some opine that the ban has actually increased smoking, now that the hard-core element stop at home, chaining away, but I have my doubts. One thing is for sure: it’ll take a long time for the policy to filter through to any unequivocally positive health benefits, while the possibility remains – remote but real – that the ban may make smoking still more attractive to yoof seeking optimal transgression. Remember: nicotine is a drug.

For myself, while I never opposed the ban, I have to say that I find it a bit more of a drag than I thought I would. Perversely, although I’m a frantic gourmand when it comes to most means of intoxication, I always rather fancied myself as a tobacco gourmet. Not for me the bum-sucked Silk Cut, oh no. I always favoured the Hoyo de Monterey Epicure No 2, preferably ignited in the cosy confines of St John, my favourite London restaurant. Now that this gestalt of good food + good talk + great cigar has been blown away, I feel quite deprived. Not for me the whey-faced company who cluster beneath drenched awnings, nor the ambulatory injection of the required dosage. I have taken to nicotine substitutes in order to bridge the gulf of need that has opened up outside my own pipe- and humidor-lined study and I suspect that, fings not being wot they used to, I may soon abandon the fags altogether.

Still, what goes around comes around, and for all those triumphalist former health secretaries out there, basking in their success, it’s worth biting down on this: public smoking was banned in 17 US states in the 1870s, but when the peoples’ habits changed again, so did the legislation.

28.12.07

The past few weeks, both here and in the US, I’ve been trolling around promoting the collection of these pieces entitled, with rare percipience, PsychoGeography. Author events have a fairly rigid format, and it’s one that I’ve learnt not to monkey with over the years. It’s all very well coming on singing and dancing in a heliotrope jumpsuit, but your average attendees simply can’t absorb such a spectacle: they are like unto the Hungarian peasants, who, upon being shown an early cine film of a train, bolted from their seats lest the iron horse trample them to death.

A key component of the author event is the Q&A session. I always make it clear that anyone can ask me anything whatsoever, whether this be my views on literary matters, or simply a prurient enquiry into my personal life, such as you wouldn’t hazard with your closest friend. Needless to say, what often gets thrown at me is: “How did you and Ralph Steadman begin working together?” I then lie, saying that we met in a brothel in Patpong, where Ralph was squeezing ping-pong balls out of his vagina in order to pay for his drinks. This normally shuts them up, although the other evening in Bath a very proper lady, who looked as if she’d stepped from the pages of Northanger Abbey, did contest the notion that Ralph had ever visited Thailand.

In fact we were teamed by Ian Hargreaves, then editor of the New Statesman, during the 1997 General Election. Ralph had become fed up by the noxious vanity of politicians which meant no matter how savagely he caricatured their venal features, they still asked to buy his drawings. In retaliation, he resolved never to draw a politician’s face again, but only their legs. I was drafted in to do some copy to go with the legs. Ralph’s stratagem worked, and to my knowledge no one bought their leg picture. Ha!

All this is by way of introducing Ralph’s caricature of Hilary Benn in conversation with a pig at the recent UN conference on climate change held in Bali. Benn, perhaps one of our most conscientious environment secretaries to date, declined the £330 per night hotel suite laid on for him in favour of staying in a pig sty, and while the other delegates went on surfing trips, he built an eco-friendly geodesic dome out of pig shit and straw. Of course, such behaviour was soon seized upon by the trendy publicity-seekers who flock in the wake of these global beanos. Apparently Leonardo DiCaprio moved out of his suite and into a mouse’s nest, while Al Gore had to content himself with a lobster pot.

Pessimists, who believe that there’s little that can be done to reduce the human impact on global warming, predictably point to events like the Bali summit as confirming their bleak vision. How can it be, they ask, that flying 15,000 delegates, media types and soi-disant “green campaigners” around the world, in the process dumping a further 100,000 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, will really help to improve things? After all, this is equal to the emissions of the entire country of Chad for a single year!

This very point was made by a delegate to the summit, and luckily Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, was on hand to offer a timely solution: the carbon emissions of the UN conference could, he said, be completely offset by eliminating Chad altogether from the map of Africa. This proposal received near-unanimous assent from the Conference, the only dissent coming from the Chad delegation, which was unceremoniously hustled out of the venue and put to work by the Indonesian Government planting trees in West Timor.

The excision of Chad was achieved by the US corporation Halliburton, which deployed a scalpel with a blade 500km long, that sliced along the borders of Niger, Libya, the Sudan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon and Nigeria, leaving a neat wound. Besides the carbon offset, an unexpected – but beneficial – effect of getting rid of Chad has been a shake-down in regional political alignments, with stunned power elites and corrupt rebel armies joining together in the common cause: swapping their Mercedes for Toyota Priuses.

I think from the above you can see where Ralph and I stand on this issue: shoulder-to-shoulder and leg-to-leg, as usual. The benefits of pursuing a close collaboration with a fellow artist over many years is that you begin to anticipate one another’s thinking with almost uncanny precision. Sometimes I write a few words and Ralph consents to graphically embellish them. On other occasions – such as this – Ralph sends me a picture that is like a photograph of my very unconscious.

15.12.07

Lewes, East Sussex, where this column began all those horned moons ago. As I walk from the station under another horned moon I spy, standing outside a cosy-looking pub, the cuddly dolmen of Matthew De Abaitua. Thirteen years ago, Matthew – who is now a talented novelist in his own right – spent a six-month sojourn as my live-in amanuensis and secretary. It was a thankless task: so far as I can remember I was completely spark-a-loco. We were living in a tiny cottage in Suffolk, and I was given to harvesting opium from the poppies that grew wild in the field margins, then driving my Citreon deux-chevaux across the same fields, solely by the light of a horned moon, Matthew placidly crammed into the passenger seat.

Bizarrely, he retains affectionate memories of his secretaryship, saying that I taught him how to prepare lobster, and also impressed upon him the importance of convincing foreign journalists – who had come to interview me in my rural fastness – that we were an elderly lesbian couple, akin to the Ladies of Llangollen. But this lies in the past, nowadays Matthew and his burgeoning family are ensconced in Lewes, where come Guy Fawkes Day, the incomer crystal-danglers and the native hobbits make common cause: promulgating the anti-Popery of the local “firework societies”, which roll burning barrels of pitch down the tortuous medieval streets.

A couple of hours later, Ralph Steadman, who has materialised looking like Great Uncle Bulgaria with an attitude problem, is sitting on a stage in the local arts centre, taking an enthusiastic audience on a strange journey through the labyrinth of his creative unconscious. Juxtaposing his own projected images, with a staccato commentary, in the manner of Chris Marker’s La Jetee, Ralph imagines a conversation between Marcel Duchamp and Luis Bunuel, in which the venerable – and now, quite dead – Surrealists animadvert on the relationship between chance encounters, narrative and destiny.

Far be it from me to extol the virtues of my collaborator, but he’s definitely hit on something here – and quite brilliantly: the relationship between psyche and place can only, it occurs to me, be understood through such abrupt transitions. The memory is not Bayreuth – or even a multiplex – but a converted provincial church hall equipped with a PowerPoint projector, operated by a young man called Simon.

Nineteen hours later, I’m sitting in the front row of a lecture theatre at the Sorbonne in Paris, listening to Didier Gerard, a handsome young professor of contemporary English literature at the University of Perpignan, take a somewhat less enthusiastic – but for all that, I hope, engaged – audience on a strange journey through the labyrinth of his creative unconscious. Or is it mine? To begin with the only PowerPoint projection is this gnomic slogan: “Radical No Saying, Paradoxes and Contradictions of the WILL / SELF “, but Professor Gerard then supplies several disconcerting canvases by the German painter Neo Rauch that he feels evoke the same imaginative hinterland as my fiction.

Here we are, buried in the venerable foie-gras-coloured masonry of the Sorbonne a few score metres in one direction from Shakespeare & Company, publishers of Ulysses in the other, a few hundred from the Ile de la Cite, where the Situationists who coined the term “psychogeography” slept off their drunken derives. On our way in, Francois Gallix, the Sorbonne professor who has invited me to address this conference on contemporary inglit, pointed out the chapel, a stable for revolutionaries’ horses during the Terror, and where an annual mass is held for Cardinal Richelieu.

It was also in this courtyard, during Les Evenements of 1968, that the students camped for weeks, attempting to lie down on the Society of the Spectacle until it gave up the ghost. Francois, who was a young academic at the time, and who joined in the demands for direct, participatory democracy, recalls those days with a certain wry regret: “And now, with these recent disturbances we have over Sarkozy’s new education bill, well, yesterday the University was closed, the road was full of the police, and the students, they were split into two groups – one of which was fighting on the police side!”

Since my last visit to Paris, a mere six months ago, the Mairie has launched a bike-hire scheme. I never really believe these schemes work, but as I leave the Sorbonne in the winter lamplight there are scores of people – Parisians and tourists – toodling up and down the Boulevard St Germain on their eco-Noddy-bikes. At L’Odeon there’s a customised rank for the things right beside the statue of Danton, which, in turn, is right in front of a multiplex called the UGC Danton.

And there you have it, as we contemplate the arrival of 2008, and another year of speculative venturing, what is it that we can offer you save more of the same? To whit: a chance meeting between a dead fish log and a caricature on a picnic table.

05.01.08

At the Seneca Hotel, on Chestnut Street, Chicago, things are not going well. I’m without stoicism: my room is a chilly suite with glass-topped tables and a tomb-like kitchenette, wherein the elements rise up from the stove in sinister curls. When I turn on the electricity, they reek of burnt hair. If I don’t get out of the Seneca and walk, I’m going to do something gratuitously inhumane — which would be doubly bad, given that I’m here to attend the Chicago Humanities Festival.

I’m not getting on with the desk staff either — they’re brusque to the point of being rude. They couldn’t give a shit about my alarm calls or messages, and when I wither at them for helming a great concrete ship like this, with no internet access to be had — they wither right back. Nevertheless, when I ask how far it is to the nearest Wal-Mart, I do manage to spark some interest. “Whydjew wanna know that?” says one, and when I reply that I’m minded to buy some socks, she observes that, “There’s a Walgreens on the next corner.” I concede this — but it’s Wal-Mart I want, and I’m desirous of walking there. “Walking? That’s gonna take you, like, a million years.”

Quite possibly, I concede, then quote the hotel’s namesake: “If virtue precedes us every step will be safe.” Clearly, my interlocutor doesn’t know her Seneca, for she looks bemused. Then she consults MapQuest on her computer and prints me out a sheet: “The nearest is at forty-six hundred up on West North, it’s 5.7 miles away…”

“But that’s driving, right?”

“I guess.”

I estimate an eight-mile walk — at any rate, it takes me two-and-a-half hours at a good clip. It’s a sunny Sunday brunchtime and the downtown streets are thronged with big people in leather and silk pointing at big buildings in glass and steel. Then, as I plod out over Goose Island and under the Kennedy Expressway, everything begins to stretch out — including the homeless men who are sleeping beneath its squat piers.

Chicago is the grid city ne plus ultra: the principal avenues and cross streets are at mile intervals, with eight blocks to the mile. The numbering — both of streets and properties — is savagely ordinal, radiating from a fixed point. A Chicagoan will give you directions simply in hundreds, as above.

I meditate on this as I troll through the fringes of trendy Ukrainian Village, then the dinky clapboard streets of West Town. I’m walking to Wal-Mart to buy some socks, a) because I need them, and b) because in some occult way I believe this will bring me face-to-face with the primal profit drive that powers American society. If Chicago, with its triumphal skyscrapers, were to be upended, it would form a towering block graph on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan, and so fuse reality and representation.

Wal-Mart, the biggest company on earth, with its two million employees, and its annual turnover of $315 billion. When Dubya cut tax in 2004, the family of the founder, Sam Walton, made $9,500 an hour by this break alone. Walton catapulted this global empire of tat into the air, using the tedious gusset of a pair of two-barred tricot panties with an elasticated waist, after observing that if he bought said pants at $2 per dozen, and only marked-up a little, he could still make more profit on increased turnover.

Through Humboldt Park, empty save for cops and geese, then past the HQ of Illinois National Guard — a Babylonian burial chamber, complete with sentinel griffins — and on along North Avenue, for block after block, mile after mile. I am a tiny human pen describing a flat line past moribund storefronts, and empty lots, their fences strung with razor-wire. Is it fanciful to think that Wal-Mart has sucked the commercial life out of Austin and Gatewood, where — wouldn’t you know — the population is overwhelmingly black and Hispanic? Probably not: one economist, after remorseless number-crunching, reached the conclusion that over a 10-year period, the net impact of the business was to help keep just 20,000 poor US families afloat.

And then there it is, big, certainly — but not humongous. More like any old Asda that’s been bingeing on welfare cheques. Inside it’s a barn full of stuff for sale — nothing obviously malevolent. The coffee concession is called Uncle Remus’s, and there’s an offer on key lime pie. I buy my socks. I pay. I leave.

At the bus stop I fall into conversation with a guy who bums a cigarette. He’s on his way to work flipping burgers at a Wendy’s way over on the other side of town. “It’s aggravating work,” he explains between puffs. Aggravating and poorly paid — like Wal-Mart. Nevertheless, despite the fact he’s broke until payday, and he only has one tooth in his mouth, he could teach Seneca a thing or two about stoicism.

01.12.07

“When I see a guy lighting a goddamn cigarette as I come round the corner, I see a guy who ain’t taking the bus into town!” exclaims the bus driver, a competent black woman, who even as I feed my four one-dollar bills into the machine, is ramming the big, whooshing box up the ramp on to Route 101, heading north for San Francisco. “City of Industry” is the slogan picked out in big, white letters on the hillside ahead — presumably it’s some sort of riposte to “HOLLYWOOD”, but I doubt the Los Angelenos can read it at this distance.

It’s pointless to explain to the bus driver that this is a guy who’s down to three cigarettes a day, after a lifetime spent flying around inside a blue-brown cloud. In previous columns, I’ve animadverted on the way the space-time continuum is graduated by smoking, but now I’m down to three the shifts are dizzying: I was last embodied in dank Toronto, then I winked out of existence for a few hours, before being beamed down a white paper tube into smouldering California.

I’m absurdly happy. I may not be undertaking my favourite form of airport transit — walking — but I have eschewed the cab, and that has to be a good thing. Cabs suck: they’re the real culprits when it comes to urban disorientation. You aren’t merely hiring a car and driver — you’re hiring the cabby’s local geographical nous. No matter how hard you try to concentrate on where he’s taking you, you still end up subsiding into foggy supposition: this is somewhere you don’t know, and he’s going the long way round this agglomeration of ignorance.

But take the bus, and the mere act of finding the stop, looking at the route map, and then negotiating your way from the city centre stop to your hotel, will begin to make things legible. Dusk is falling as I turn the corner into Market Street, and I’m still happy to be reading the city, so happy that I swerve into a bookstore and buy a copy of Great Expectations, because I’m certain I have them.

The following morning the weather is set fair, and I resolve to walk to Sausalito. It’ll be a modest enough 12-miler from downtown San Francisco, dog-legging over the Golden Gate Bridge. Of course, I don’t have a topographic map, and although Nob Hill is in my face, I can’t find a way round it. I slave up the famously vertiginous streets, listening to the chains of the funiculars rattling beneath my feet. By the time I reach the North Point I feel like Herbie in The Love Bug. My bonnet is flapping, my oil is leaking.

It’s Sunday and the esplanade is thronged with walkers, joggers, bikers, crackpot preachers, and those ubiquitous denizens of American cities — in many ways their most typical inhabitants — the homeless, who have been tossed by the rampaging bull of commercialism, and compelled to wander the streets pushing shopping carts piled high with their fucked-up chattels. I bet they know where they are, though.

Up on the bridge there are still more walkers. Indeed, it occurs to me that this is more ambulatory activity than I’ve ever seen anywhere in the States before — except Manhattan. Perhaps this is what Americans need to galvanise them: something really big — but manmade — to walk over. Halfway across there are emergency phones advertising: “Crisis Counseling” (sic) “There is Hope. Make the Call. The Consequences of Jumping from this Bridge are Fatal and Tragic”.

The “tragic” is a nice touch, no? It places even the most commonplace suicide on a set of monumental proportions, enacting a Gotterdammerung of awesome scale, leaping from the very strings of this monumental lyre, as Aeolus himself strums them. But then again, presumably that’s why the most commonplace suicides are drawn to the Golden Gate, and the “tragic”, far from dissuading them, is likely to be the final confirmation of the rightness of their actiooooooooon!

Grim thoughts dog me as I double back under the end of the bridge, then trudge through the precincts of a coastguard station and on into Sausalito, where the houses are more shingled that anything has a right to be — unless it actually has shingles. There are these wooden excrescences, then there are the gift shops selling china knick-knacks and T-shirts, and “art” galleries shoving hideous daubs in my face.

I slurp down a dozen indifferent oysters at Spinnaker’s on the quayside. Dusk is falling across the bay. I feel moderately satisfied: at least I know where I am, even if the woman at the next table is having a nervous breakdown, sobbing noisily into her clam chowder. On the ferry back to San Francisco, the day-trippers light up the night sky with their camera flashes as we cruise past Alcatraz, imprisoning the empty penitentiary in their steely little boxes. Forever.

24.11.07

Ralph claims that this picture (right, in the Independent newspaper) faithfully reproduces a life-threatening encounter that he had with a grizzly bear during his most recent sojourn in Canada. According to Ralph, he drove the devilish bear off with his ink pot. It’s all lies, of course. I know because I’ve just been in Canada and I heard the whole story from several eye-witnesses who saw Ralph and the Grizzly together.

So, it’s not that Ralph was entirely deluded on the contrary it was inevitable that he would meet up with a grizzly sooner or later, as with global warming disrupting the environment of the far north, the ranges of the former (Artificer cantankerous) and the latter (Ursus arctos horribilis) increasingly overlap. We’ve all read tales of troublesome grizzlies venturing into North American cities, rifling trashcans for food and attempting swift – but brutal – congress with SUVs, just as we’ve all also read accounts of English satirists entering North American cities and pestering their inhabitants with visceral and disturbing graphic works. Most of us probably considered what might happen when the two species met up – although no one anticipated that they would fall in love.

I don’t know why Ralph is so coy about his inter-specific love affair with Griselda (for such, I have ascertained, is the name of “his” bear), because the previous year, during his time at the Harbourfront Festival in Toronto, the two of them were inseparable. Jim, the driver for the Festival (he says “Hello”, Ralph, by the way), picked them up together at the airport and drove them into town.

For the next three days, except when Ralph was required onstage at the Festival, he and Griselda were shut up together in Room 2146. Neither bear nor artist were seen to mingle with the other authors who gathered in the hospitality suite on the penthouse floor – leading them to suspect that Ralph was being huffy and stand-offish.

All except Kazuo Ishiguro who saw Ralph and Griselda swimming together in the hotel pool. “To be honest,” he told me recently, “I was a little bit fried. I’d pulled an all-nighter with Margaret Atwood. We got pissed and she used this computerised ‘long pen’ device that she’s invented to sign books at remote locations, to, ah, y’know, pinch people’s bottoms in European bookshops and otherwise generally molest them. It was childish behaviour, and I’m not proud of myself. Anyway, I thought I’d sober up with a sauna at around 6am, and went down to the spa on the fifth floor. There were these two enormous bear-like figures frolicking together in the pool …

“They seemed very affectionate. Steadman was sort of lifting the bear out of the water and tossing it about – or, as they say in Canada, ‘aboot’ – and from time to time he’d twang the strap of its bikini top. I was amazed, because I’d been for a swim in the pool myself, and the chlorine was so strong I’d spent the next four hours half-blinded, yet neither Steadman nor the bear seemed in the least discomfitted.”

“Discomfitted”, eh? I think the use of that very term alone confirms this indisputably as the authentic testimony of the Booker-prize winning author. But if any further verification were needed, we have the copies of Ralph’s room-service bills at the Westin Harbour. In three days, Room 2146 ordered up 27 club sandwiches, 18 cheeseburgers, 27 porterhouse steaks, 17 full breakfasts – and even requested the concierge that he simply “bring the goddamn wheelie-bin up from the kitchen”.

It’s fair to say that Canada is no longer the society it once was. Gone are the days when the entire culture was crimped by a dour – if polite – Presbyterianism, and sexual activity of any kind whatsoever was frowned upon. Nowadays, the Conservative Premier, Stephen Harper, is often seen at state banquets completely naked save for a strategically placed maple leaf and with a fetching beaver on his arm. Canadians explain their re-evaluation of all values with reference to changing climate – it never freezes anymore – and the high rate of immigration: Calgary is now the biggest Brazilian city in the world. In the US, those mad Manicheans would’ve put a stop to Ralph’s goings on, but such was the atmosphere of tolerance in Toronto, that he returned in September of this year, hoping to rekindle his passion. Only to discover that Griselda had run away with a Major League Hockey player, whose build was more to her taste. Hence Ralph’s defamatory drawing, and wish-fulfilment fantasy – both the work of a demented and rejected suitor.

10.11.07