We’re eating at a restaurant in the ‘burbs to the east of Santiago, which has been recommended to us as distinctively Chilean. We were driven out here by one of the plush hotel cars, and swishing over overpasses, and swooping through underpasses, we might have been anywhere in the developed world. Still, I’ve read my stats — I know that while the average income here is around $12,000 per annum, perhaps 40 per cent of the population remain below the United Nations poverty line. Even so, if Chile is the England of South America, Santiago is doing a remarkably good job of looking like its Basingstoke.

And if Santiago is Basingstoke, then this restaurant is its Angus Steakhouse. Perhaps this is a distinctively Chilean eating experience, these acres of empty, red-and-white check, plastic tablecloths, the warm breeze soughing in the rustic, thatched trellises that overarch them. I try to tell myself this, as a bullish waiter comes, erratically charging out from the faux-Bavarian-bodega of the restaurant’s interior, but I’m not convinced: it’s Saturday night, and we’re the only customers.

It gets more Basingstoke by the second, because the menu has photographs of the available dishes. Despite this, we still manage to balls-up the ordering — or possibly not. We get a pig product platter to start: slices of thick, fatty ham, smoked ham, chunks of pork pate, circlets of compressed pig’s head — with sections of brain and skull.

Next up is an enormous fist of a fillet steak, with two orangey knuckles of fried egg. It’s garnished with a Jenga tower of chips, and comes with a dish of pulped corn wrapped in a cornhusk. This food isn’t heavy — it’s ballast. This is food to take on board before you cast off from Chile’s elongated coastline and head out into the turbid swell of the Pacific.

An hour later, the driver picks us spheroids up and rolls us back into town. Swishing along the Basingstoke bypass he brakes by the entrance to a dubious establishment with two flaming torches by its entrance.

“You gentlemen want to go to the nightclub?” He calls over his shoulder. I can see two burly bouncers, and the name of the club in neon letters: “WOMN”. The absence of the crucial vowel suggests an ambience beyond the sordid. I picture leering satyrs, with botched chimeras from the island of Dr Moreau gyrating inches above their big top laps.

“Er, no,” my companion, Marc, says. “I think we’ll pass on that one.” Indeed, even if our porky flesh were remotely willing, it’s difficult to imagine me cutting it in Chilean clubland, what with my cagoule, jeans and walking boots. I’m well aware that the men who frequent these establishments fantasise about walking all over the womn who work in them; still, I doubt they go quite so obviously attired for it.

The next day the home-from-home vibe persists: a dream of England strained through the grey mist that’s blown down from the Andes. Marc and I never have any truck with guides when we’re abroad, oh no. We’re cool traveller types, not snap-happy tourist ignoramuses. However, we were offered a guide and we’ve only half a day to cover a lot of ground, so we accepted him.

I’m glad. Ivan Bustamante turns out to be urbane and almost preternaturally wised-up. Besides having the same first name as my second son, he also spent his formative years in Clapham, south London. I kid you not. The Bustamante parents were refugees from Pinochet’s regime who ended up living a mile away from my London home. Between 1981 and 1986, Ivan attended Lilian Baylis, one of the local schools that the Conservative MP, Oliver Letwin, said he’d rather beg than send his child to.

Clearly, Chilean exiles are made of sterner stuff than Tory politicos, because Ivan has turned out very well indeed, leaving school to study music at Croydon College, before returning to Santiago in the late 1990s. He tells us he took the job as a city guide so that he could continue with his studies in classical guitar, which isn’t any more of an earner in South America than it is in south London.

So, it’s off to town, with Ivan discoursing on everything from constitutional reform to 19th-century urban planning, via detailed statistics of Chilean copper and nitrate production. Squint a little, put my fingers half in my ears, and I could be sitting in an Angus Steakhouse, listening to the Member for Basingstoke. Could’ve been, except for one thing: on returning to England, I checked up on Mrs Maria Miller. Judging from her Hansard entries, she’s a perfectly conscientious Conservative MP, but doesn’t to my ear display half the eloquence of my new-found Chilean friend. Vote Bustamante! I say.

03.03.07

The Santiago Metro could make any other mass urban-transit system feel like a raddled old whore. I’m staying in a flashy hotel in the upmarket El Golf district, and from the 10th floor this teeming, Latin American capital appears cluttered with the banal forms of mirror-shiny buildings. They transform the city into a desktop covered with modular trays: are there office workers in that one, or paperclips? But the Metro, now there’s a thing. I’ve never come across a subway station with its own preserved-fruit shop and lending library. There are also oil paintings on the platforms, and how clean is that? They’re big, well-lit canvases of seaside views and rural farms, perhaps a little neo-realist for my taste — but you can’t have everything. Hell, in Santiago, if you so desire, you can ride smoothly into the centre of town, while reading a Spanish translation of Ken Follett, and stuffing yourself with peaches in syrup. Moscow, eat your dark heart out.

Downtown, the Torre Entel looms over all. It’s homey to be in a country where a monopolistic telecommunications company has planted a 200-metre-high concrete caber in the ground, then stuck a steely yoghurt pot on top. Perhaps the Torre explains why Chileans are called “the English of Latin America”? It could be this, or it could be the riot-control trucks, complete with rotating water cannons, that patrol the streets around the old presidential palace in the Plaza de Armas. Mmm, so A la recherche de Falls Road.

They have a cosy yet threatening look, these battered, brown, bullet-dimpled trucks. Wire mesh has been artfully shaped over their windscreens and wing mirrors, they circle the square under the blank, granite facades of 1930s office blocks that are also pockmarked by gunfire, on one of which hangs a banner showing a handshake and the one-word slogan: “Mediacion”.

Funny old Chile, eh? The Latin American country that works. The Chileans are sober, industrious then in 1973 they went bonkers, the air force strafed and bombed the presidential place, while inside, the incumbent, Salvador Allende, topped himself. Even now, Santiago feels like a decapitated capital, with the Head of State floating in a jar of preserved fruit.

During the Pinochet years, the Plaza de Armas was tunnelled under to create a paranoid network of dictatorial bunkers, but in recent years there’s been a democratic dividend, and instead of the nation’s history being connived at underground, some of the bunkers have been turned into a Museum of National History.

Decorticated, the presidential palace was rebuilt — but only as a theme park version of itself. Now, through its off-white-walled courtyards, past the plashing fountains, their epaulettes tickled by palm fronds, come marching, astonishing squads of girl-soldiers wearing Ruritanian uniforms: shiny-peaked caps, figure-hugging, off-white tunics, olive-green breeches with satin stripes down the side, blanco-ed bandoliers, patent-leather knee boots with spurs. They’re as yummy-looking as chocolate soldiers, while their male counterparts in the Presidential Guard seem freakishly elongated.

Allende himself is commemorated by a sculpture in front of the Palace, which is of such overpowering ugliness it’s difficult not to conclude that the Chileans revile him with a passion. The once mild and professorial socialist leader is depicted with a horse-brush moustache and spectacles as thick-rimmed as welder’s goggles. He strides forward on his plinth, the sharp lines of his double-breasted suit blurred by a strange, thick membrane, which I stared at for some minutes, before realising that it was meant to be the Chilean flag.

Ah, Santiago! With your quaint old stationers, with your little carts selling motte con huesillo, a traditional soft drink compounded from boiled corn and peach juice, while, in the next precinct, global goths munch flame-grilled Whoppers to the “pop-pop-pop” of automated pedestrian crossings.

At the Church of San Francisco there’s a terrifying shrine. In a gold-framed glass cabinet sits Our Saviour, chopped off at the waist, his hair human, his stigmata spray-painted, and bracketed by mad flower arrangements. Poor Jesus, he looks like a mechanical model at the end of the pier of faith. Put a penny in his box and he’ll start to lick his wounds.

Back at the hotel it’s time for me to feel acute self-pity. The turn-down service has come, and besides ensuring that there are 34 large white pillows on the bed, on top of a white chocolate, they’ve re-enacted a scene from The Shining in the bathroom: five inches of bloody, perfumed bathwater have been drawn, a candle lit on the tile surround, and beside this has been placed a glass of red wine. I’m sure this is meant to be the acme of good service, but instead of feeling pampered I feel freaked out and embattled. The fighter-bombers are strafing the plastic tray, and it’s time for me to fall on my paperclip.

24.02.07

Psychogeography 12

Los Angeles, again. Sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset, I listen idly to the beautiful native Angeleno as she tells me what she and her boyfriend – an equally beautiful Spaniard – did last New Year’s Eve. “We drove all the way out to the Joshua Tree, man, and we did some ‘shrooms and we just let it all sink in.”

“Yeah,” puts in the Spaniard, who’s writing a doctoral thesis on deconstruction or construction – one or the other – “and we made love, amazing, fragile love. It was too much in a way. Much too much. There were shooting stars, and these ancient trees, and the coyotes and bobcats … and, well … I felt a little, y’know …” he laughs, embarrassed at his own psychic fragility, “… like bits of me were dropping off.”

“I know what you mean.” I try to sound avuncular as I puff on my pipe, somewhere between a drug counsellor and a keen stamp collector. Yards of tweed pleat into hairy mountains in my crotch. However, the tobacco I bought earlier in the day – Royal Vintage Matured Ribbon – is the rankest thing I’ve tasted since I last swigged a can of flat beer and fag butts, and the Angeleno is just a little too pulchritudinous for me to want to even hear that she’s been making love, let alone imagine it taking place in the Mojave Desert. Bits of me are dropping off as well – and it isn’t ‘shrooms that are to blame.

Still, down in the hotel car park, I have a sloppy General Motors coupe – a hire car for a hireling – and my flight out to London isn’t until late the following afternoon; perhaps I too will head for the Joshua Tree and commune there under its giant toilet- brush limbs? In fact – I must. Nothing hurts more than waiting in a vast and alien city for an intercontinental friction toy to whirr you into the stratosphere. The surly gravity of LA – pickled in its own nastiness of pollutants – drags you so that you feel like a grounded astronaut, each of your limbs subjected to 5Gs of thrust, as you struggle to make it to the minibar for $6.50’s worth of jelly beans.

Seven-thirty am on Sunday morning and I swing out on to Sunset, my tyres squealing as they slap the oil-stained concrete. In LA it is pointless to adopt any psychogeographic perspective that is unmediated by the automobile. Don’t walk or allow yourself to be driven, grasp the burning nettle of the 21st century and look at everything through a screen, or on one. This is not a city for the faint-hearted or for those who demand human scale, because it goes on and on and on. There are no featured players – only extras. By the time I reach the entrance ramp on to Highway 10, I feel as if I’ve done a good morning’s driving. I listen to the Phil Collins station, WMCPHIL, on the car radio, back-to-back plays of Phil’s greatest hits, segued with advertisements for colonic irrigation and
cryogenic preservation.

Chunk-a-clunka-chunk. Highway 10 rears and gallops through El Monte, Baldwin Park, West Covina, Pomona, Montclair, Ontario – the city is so big that it contains an entire fucking Canadian province within its boundless limits. Then, around Banning, on the edge of the desert, it finally loses its grip, mountains rear up, eagles replace aerials. “I can feel it coming in the air tonight …” Phil expostulates, and I can only join in “Oh Lord!”

I pull in to a rest stop and stroll over to where an immaculate California Highway Patrol car idles; for several long moments I look at the two tousled me’s in the mirrors of his sunglasses, before asking how far it is to the turn-off for the Park. “Route 62 is about a half-hour on, the Park entrance a half-hour after that.” He replies unfazed; although I note that like all Americans he now pronounces “route” to rhyme with “doubt”. This transformation occurred about 10 years ago in a mass act of strange Stalinist forgetting on the part of the people. Now, all Americans swear that they’ve always said “rout” not “root”. Even when you sing a few lines of “Route 66” and point out to them that it isn’t a song about the 66th time of putting an aggressor to flight, they still deny it.

These things trouble me, trouble me more than the fat, bourgeois weekender bikers who stream past me on the switchback road, more than the vast perimeter fence of the Twentynine Palms Marine base to the north of the road, wherein a thousand thousand jarheads are ironing their hair before church.

By the time I reach the Park I have only half an hour to crunch the sand, climb a rounded rock, breathe the cool, strained air, goggle at the leguminous toilet brushes. The Official Map and Guide is apologetic about the desert: “Some think it wretched and seemingly useless,” it says, as if describing a minor character in a play by Samuel Beckett. But it isn’t the Park that’s useless – it’s me. I’ve driven for eight hours to take a half-hour walk. I thought I was rolling with the Firestone go-round of LA life, but really I’m just another piece of tousled road kill.

Psychogeography 11

Slogging up through the woods and on to the main ridge of the Chilterns on a damp morning in late autumn, the joys of summer rambles seem long departed. Ah! If only I could recapture that fearless rapture with which I turned the golden key, wrenched open the door and ran laughing down the corridor into the Queen of Hearts’ rose garden. Dandelion days! Sweet scattered spore of youth! When to the sessions of sweet silent thought we summon up … and so on and so forth, jaw-jaw, bore-bloody-bore. No, the fact is that it’s pissing down and I’m a middle-class, middle-aged man making tea on a miniature gas stove in a tiny covert, while down the muddy track beside me ride upper-class, middle-aged women on chestnut stallions, exchanging the small change, the he-shagged, she-spat of hacking society.

But I’ve no time to get lost in such regrets; I’m on a mission. In my rucksack are enough uppers, downers, twisters and screamers to transmogrify the passive pheasants of these pleasant hills into the avian equivalent of suicide bombers. Strange Miles, my neuro-pharmacological consultant – who operates out of a light industrial estate near Princes Risborough – has been working on this gear all summer. He swears blind that if I leave enough of it in the feed bins scattered along the ridge, then come the first day of the shooting season, instead of doing the flying equivalent of ambling towards the wavering guns of a lot of tipsy City brokers, the fowl will
rise up and descend in a fluttering, bombinating horde, their
target: Chequers.

I only hope the Prime Minister himself will be in residence that weekend and get espaliered by a thousand tiny beaks, but if not, if he’s in Texas or Timbuktu, then I’m prepared to accept whatever fatalities may be caused by the drug-crazed birds. Strange Miles and I simply see this as collateral damage in our two-man war against the entrenched power of the state.

On I slog and slide, the rich clayey soil spattering my nylon flanks. But what’s this! Just past Cobblershill Farm I come across a folding table set up by the wayside. A number of clingfilm-wrapped placards enjoin me to sign a petition against the use of this bridleway by four-wheel-drive vehicles. Of course I should sign! Every fibre in my being cries out against the desecration of the countryside by these disgusting vehicles … and yet … and yet … if I’m entirely honest I cannot deny that I myself have done a fair bit of off-roading. In the early 1990s, when I found myself temporarily marooned in a small cottage in deepest Suffolk, the green lanes beckoned to me with their cushioned camber and their soft verges.

Few people realise quite how many green lanes there are in England, let alone that you’re allowed to drive cars along them. If I took the B-roads back from the Ship Inn at Dunwich, or The Bell in Walberswick, to my cottage outside Leiston, there was always the slim chance that I might encounter one of the two patrol cars that cover East Anglia. Not that I would’ve been over the limit you understand, it’s just that encounters with the authorities of any kind have always given my sensitive nerves a dreadful jangle. No, much better to slide out of Walberswick and then across the common on the sandy, rutted, potholed track past the haunted hippy house. In deepest darkest winter there was always a tremendous frisson when I reached the last outpost of civilisation and doused the headlights. Proceeding by the light of the stars at a stately 5mph, the wind battering the featherweight chassis of the little car, always made me feel that I’d stripped away all the useful accoutrements of motoring, to leave merely a locomotive residuum.

It helped that I was driving a Citroen Deux Chevaux. Yes, not for me the padded monstrosity of a Toyota Land Cruiser or the effortless functionality of a Land-Rover Discovery. Not for me the effortless traction of four massive tyres. What made my night-time, green-lane driving an acceptable form of transport, rather than a dubious kind of recreation, was that I allowed the countryside itself a fighting chance. True, the 2CV does perform impressively in the rough, but there was always a chance that I’d get myself bogged and end up having to slog home 12 miles on foot. It happened several times – and I felt good about it. But these bastards ploughing the Chilterns into a furrowed morass, they simply shouldn’t be allowed. I withdrew my tungsten-carbide ballpoint from its oiled leather sheath and signed the petition with a flourish, before plopping on towards Little Hampden.

A fortnight later, the PM stepped out on to the ha-ha of Chequers in the lemony light of a perfect autumn morning. The shotgun reports up on the ridge sounded like the doors of so many suburban semis being precipitately slammed by hurrying commuters – or so he thought in a rare moment of metaphoric insight. And that cloud up there, what could it be? So many airborne motes fusing into coherence and then fissioning into chaos, like thoughts in a disordered mind.

Psychogeography 10

This column began in the British Airways flight magazine – and I’m not knocking that. The good people at High Life gave Mr Steadman and I a full year of monthly excursions within which to impress upon its readership the psychogeographical way of proceeding, but inevitably we had to part. The editor’s pretext was a redesign, but in my heart of hearts I knew that it was one of those relationships where I was obscurely grateful to the other for having had the guts to end it.

After all, just how much can you meaningfully divulge to the commercial airline passenger about the discombobulation of space and time effected by modern transport? Sitting in orderly rows, twiddling the tiny clitorises of computer games toggles, or watching epic movies on screens the size of fag packets, as in a blueish haze of nicotine withdrawal they scream through the stratosphere, these frequent flyers are wholly credulous consumers of the Promethean charade, ever on their way to wrest the Calibri lighter of the gods from a duty-free shop in Dubai Airport.

When the last Concorde was withdrawn from commercial service there was much sentiment expended about how dreadful it was that this futuristic aircraft was to become a thing of the past (nostalgia for the future, now there’s a thing), but personally I couldn’t resist a throaty cheer. No longer would Joan Collins and a chemical toilet containing a dollop of her chocolate mousse excrement sonic-boom over my south London home of an evening; and no longer would we be compelled to think how amazing it was that you could land at JFK before you’d even taken off from Heathrow. Such a gross failure to appreciate the relativity of space and time could only afflict a culture senescent with its own sense of creaking determinism. After all, if Joan really did arrive in New York before she’d left London, wouldn’t it necessitate a radical rethink of her own approach to time zones?

You can imagine New York Joan (let’s call her JNY for convenience) witnessing via a simultaneous telecast the absurd anachronism that was London Joan (JL) arriving at the airport, her cheeks stapled behind her ears, her waist cinched so tight that designer names were incised on her flesh, her make-up as thick as Bakelite, and 22 pieces of matching Samsonite luggage strung out behind her like the very drogues of death. “Wow!” JNY, might well ejaculate, “I can’t go on pretending that I’m a young sex-pot, it’s undignified and absurd …” Whereupon JL would disappear in a puff of whales’ intestines, while JNY would find herself mysteriously embarked – older-looking and wiser – on a Saga holiday to Madeira.

I digress – but not much. Now Concorde is out of service there’s also the agonising question of what to do with the 0.33 scale model of it that stands on the roundabout outside Heathrow. Surely visitors to the busiest airport in Europe can’t be welcomed by a model of an obsolete aircraft? I agree. The best course would be to press Little Concorde into service itself as a kind of back-to-the-future theme park conveyance. Board Little Concorde outside Terminal 2 and a team of Shire horses will drag it – and you – to Legoland, where you can witness durable models, built in small, brightly coloured plastic bricks, of a happier Britain.

All of which is by way of saying that when Ralph and I flew the flag for BA we couldn’t mention any of this stuff. We couldn’t treat of any cynicism concerning the nation state, and we couldn’t even touch upon the vexed question of flying itself. The last thing people flying want to be reminded of is that they’re in the air. Everything about the whole flying experience – the yards of ultra-mundane corridors, the stockyard of the check-in, the prosaic poetry of the in-flight announcements – conspires to make the traveller believe that far from being propelled by mighty jet engines 35,000 feet above the earth, she is in fact sitting in the waiting room of a mildly upmarket dentist, awaiting a mildly uncomfortable procedure. The idea that one minute you might be reading a novel by Joan’s sister, and then the next your thigh bones would be entering your occiput as the vehicle plunges at 32 feet per second per second through the bottom of a reservoir near Staines, is too dramatic a reversal for even the psychically robust among us to contemplate.

And let’s face it, none of us are that robust anymore. After September 11, when the rot really set in for international travel, all those downed aircraft became the very reification of our inability anymore to suspend our disbelief in the hocus-pocus of consumerism. Somewhere out in the Mojave Desert there’s a great parking lot full of 747s, aisle after aisle of the idle behemoths. If only we could be allowed to wander amongst them, marvelling at their obsolescence, and occasionally reading illustrated columns in their glossy, on-ground magazines, then perhaps people would no longer need to fly the flag?

Psychogeography 8

My zest for the seemingly more adventurous forms of travel has been in decline for decades now. When I visited India in my early twenties, it took me about three months to get over the culture shock; nowadays it takes me about three months to acclimatise to a weekend in Wiltshire, a development that makes the country-house party – so beloved of the English upper-middle and upper classes – pretty much anathema to me.

But if I can’t be arsed to visit that humungous euphemism “the developing world” (developing into what exactly? A banana? A moth?), at least I know some people who can. Jon Wealleans, an architect of my acquaintance, has made a couple of pilgrimages to the ancient city of Hampi in the central Indian province of Karnataka. Jon, as well as drawing buildings that have yet to be constructed, takes a fierce delight in producing exactingly realistic renditions of Hampi in oils. Over liver and bacon in The Stockpot restaurant in London, Jon waxed lyrical about the unique character of Hampi, a city at its zenith during the Golden Age of India, when Hindus and Muslims cohabited amid opulent, many-pillared temples.

I had an idea: since Jon’s paintings were, he assured me, slavishly like the real thing, I could walk from my house in Stockwell to his house hard by Borough Market, and thus encounter the Subcontinent without leaving my own immediate purlieus. I set off in bright autumnal sunlight that was soon palled by the mighty sooty bulk of St John the Divine, Kennington. This is the sort of Victorian neogothic church that should have been dropped – in a friendly fashion – on John Betjeman. John Ruskin Street, which is flanked on both sides by vast estates of high rises, led me to the Walworth Road. In Spring Street market, a long nave of knickers, mobile-phone covers and pigs’ trotters, I had a sharp exchange with a stallholder.

“I want a big black cap,” I said.

“A big black cap just like that?” the man snapped back. “I’ve only small blue caps.”

“No good,” I stressed. “But I’ll be back.”

Jon and his partner Natalie live in a c1650 house full of things that might well be on sale in the so-called Thieves Market across the road. The apartments are roomy and wood-panelled; Jon works in a studio on the first floor. The Hampi paintings were all I could’ve hoped for, like oblongs of half a world away, radiating painful lemon dawn, reeking of untreated sewage, cardamon and chai. The temples had the magisterial appearance of ruins that have yet to be scaled by a recreational multitude, and indeed, as Jon described the 22-hour cab ride from Goa, followed by the coracle ride across the river required to reach them, I felt wholly vindicated by my desire to merely stroll across town in order to visit them.

Jon himself is no stranger to the banjaxed world view. He’s currently working on the building that will enclose “Dickens’ World” at Chatham, a structure he cheerfully describes as “a big black cube”, broken up only by those points where “the rides” emerge. He was also responsible for Madame Tussaud’s in Las Vegas, a tricky commission which saw Jon implanting huge airconditioning units into the portico to prevent the waxwork of Don King – which played the role of greeter – from melting away. He has long eschewed the practicalities of his profession – site visits, meetings, etc – in favour of just drawing; so that quite often he rounds an unfamiliar corner in a familiar city only to find himself face-to-face with a building he himself designed, but which he’s never seen in the flesh.

But the Hampi paintings are the reverse of this. Like all realist painters, Jon attempts to make things look like they ought to do in photographs, but actually can’t. In place of the unified focal length of the photographic image,

Jon substitutes the saccades of the human eye as it surveys a prospect, zooming in and out, panning continually. Of course, this is quite like an analog of memory itself, as it ranges over space and time,

and the Hampi paintings, while at first glance fairly straightforward, on closer inspection suck you into their golden glow of
be-here-nowness.

Still, unfortunately for Jon – who takes aeons to paint them – his dealer, Francis Kyle, has been less than supportive. “I’ve shown these paintings to Indians who’ve been there,” he told the artist, “and even they didn’t like them.” So now, in a drive to actually make a little money, Jon has turned his attention to meticulously rendering little corners of overcrowded English gardens. I’m sure they’ll be a great hit with Francis Kyle’s clientele, but personally I shan’t be going to the private view; unless, that is, it’s held in Hampi.

Psychogeography 7

I arrived in Varanasi by minibus, a stubby little eight-seater that clumped and bumped along the straight and rutted roads of Uttar Pradesh from the Nepalese border. It took three interminable and baking days – days I spent sitting opposite an Australian hippy wearing a Victorian nightdress. Having no humanity or fellow feeling whatsoever he read aloud from Shakespeare’s sonnets the whole way. Frankly, I’ll never compare anyone to a summer’s day as long as I live; not after that.

Other passengers included an immaculate family of diminutive Indians. The pocket paterfamilias wore a white shirt, string vest, pressed trousers and shined shoes; the mini-matriarch was sandalwood-scented in a silk sari; the young princeling sported an Aertex shirt, grey shorts, old-fashioned school sandals. They never seemed to sweat this family, the flies never alighted on them. They took chapatis from one Tupperware box and scooped up dahl from another, yet no grease was left on their nimble fingers. Were they perhaps – I idly considered – coated in transparent Teflon?

The nights we spent in wayside caravanserai, where I sweated and boinged on unstrung charpoys. Grey dawn would find me as fatalistic as any native, and shamelessly shitting at the side of a field. The landscape was so unfinished and yet so used up, like a vast kitchen in which no one had troubled to do the washing up for several millennia. By the time we reached the Holy City I’d just about had enough of travelling. I booked into the government tourist bungalow and took to my bed. The room was an upended stone shoebox with nothing in it besides a mattress and a bare lightbulb. Outside there was an ox park. All day long an untouchable woman scraped up the dung and mounded it into a compact ziggurat which abutted the exterior wall of my room. When night came she lay down on top of it and we slept within arm’s reach of one another.

After three days I felt well enough to venture out. I’d met an excitable Ukranian while sucking on tall bottles of Stag Ale in the bungalow’s restaurant. He told me that he was in exile, his father – a high Soviet official – had sent him abroad to escape military service in Afghanistan. He believed in every single conspiracy theory going: the Jews controlled the US and the USSR, while in turn themselves being controlled by Venusians whose spacecraft was moored in the Bermuda Triangle. You could spot the aliens, he said, by their propensity for baldness and driving convertible Mercedes.

We went to the railway station, so that I could buy a ticket for the Himigri-Howra Express, a mighty Aryan iron-horse that would drag me clear across the north of the Subcontinent to Chandigarh. I got a chitty from Window A and took it for authorisation to Window B. At Window B I received a second chitty and took it to the Sales Booth. Every single step had to be taken through a dense thicket of humanity, thorny limbs pricked me, twiggy fingers scratched me. I emerged blinking and bedevilled into the harsh light of the maidan. The Ukranian examined my ticket and pointed out that I’d mistakenly bought one for the service that departed in eight days’ time, rather than on the morrow. I considered the hour-long battle that would be required to change the ticket, and taking my lead from the ideas of astrological propitiousness embodied in Indian culture, rather than the cult of horological precipitateness enshrined in my own, I determined to stay the extra seven days in the Holy City.

Another kulfi-headache dawn. I’d linked up with a Canadian Buddhist – the very worst kind. He propped me on the handlebars of his Supercomet bike and pedalled us both down to the bathing ghats. Downriver I could see smoke rising from the death barbecue: long-pig griddling for breakfast. The Buddhist knelt and prayed angrily, while I shared a chillum with a crusty sadhu. There was grit in the air, grit on my eyes, grit in my retinal afterimages. The terracing of temples and shrines, the lapping brown limbs of the goddess Ganga – for some hazy, hashy reason it all reminded me of Brighton. So it seemed like a perfectly logical step to strip, wind a lungi around my snaky hips, and descend into the natal flow. Half-way across I collided with the corpse of a cow, which, bloated to four times its life size, revolved slowly in the viral current. I spluttered, coughed, and went under while ingurgitating spirochaetes to last me a lifetime.

All this happened 20 years ago, and I’d like to say that it seems like yesterday, but it doesn’t: it seems like 20 years ago. Nowadays I’m a much older, less adventurous and less stoned man. Nowadays I would change my ticket. Although, come to think of it, since my ultimate destination was Kashmir, I probably wouldn’t be travelling there at all. The past is another country – and the frontier is
always closed.

Psychogeography 6

My friend and colleague Nick Papadimitriou has long coveted an oblong of woodland tucked behind some rich villas on a hilltop in north London. Nick knows about woodlands – he’s been a conservation worker; he knows about ecology – he’s written scientific reports on the subject; he knows more about the topography of London than anyone I’ve ever met, and, naturally, he also speaks Polish, having spent a couple of years teaching English literature and language to naval officers in Gdansk. All in all, Nick’s psychogeographic credentials piss on mine from the height of Angel Falls, so when he says “Jump!” I politely request: “Broad?
Triple? High?”

We rendezvous in a pub car park about a half mile from the wood. “We won’t actually be able to get in,” Nick warns me. “I’ve walked right round the perimeter roads; there’s no possible access.”

“But Nick,” I remind him, “you don’t have the Superplan.” The Superplan is a 1:5,000 Ordnance Survey map, and I have one for the hilltop. “This thing is so detailed,” I tell him as we set off, “that I can see a boil on the arse of a woman in an upstairs bedroom of that house over there.”

“Well, in that case, can you see us as we walk along this road?”

“No, no, now you’re being fanciful. Moving maps – you’ve been reading too much Harry-fucking-Potter.”

It’s a damp autumn morning and we scoff dried fruit as we walk past the opulent detached villas. The best of them are late arts and crafts, all masonry mullions and heavy on the red brick, but the worst are early-1970s neoclassical, featuring wholly un-ironic ionic columns, two storeys high and gilded. Both Nick and I grew up within a couple of miles of this arriviste enclave, but in our youth it was mostly Jewish; now I notice a strong Asian and Nigerian presence. Really, it occurs to me, the nouveau riche – like the black-backed gull – are what zoologists term “a ring species”: they circle the entire globe, but while adjacent populations can mate and produce fertile young, those on the opposite sides of the earth are not so compatible.

My Superplan shows a narrow alleyway stretching down between two garden hedges. We locate it, but instead of it being overgrown – as I suspected – the grass is freshly mown. At the far end, 20 metres away, there’s a padlocked, six-foot-high gate. Beyond it mature-growth trees – hornbeams, elders and sessile oaks (or so Nick tells me) – stand, massy and stately. A vast flock of woodpigeon lifts off from the trees and wheels in the sky, ecru on grey. It’s a weekday midmorning, and we’re about to break into a secret six-acre wood, a fragment of the original Great Middlesex Forest which belongs to these wealthy swine the way their Bentleys and Bulgari do.
Total bliss, property is theft, trespassing is recovering stolen
natural goods.

Once inside we move crunchily through the undergrowth, heading uphill along the backs of the gardens. When I was a kid our school run passed by the wood and the playground myth was that a leprous child lived in one of the big houses. Furthermore, her parents were so rich that they’d had two swimming pools built, one for the little leper and one for their other progeny. My Superplan shows that one of the houses does indeed have a largish pond in its grounds, but swimming pools of any kind – despite my arrogant bullshitting – aren’t marked.

Nick isn’t too bothered with any of this, he discourses elegantly on the character of the woodland, identifying different plants, commenting on the depth of the humus, and how the soil changes along with the gradient from Bagshot sand to London clay. He points out holly, rhododendron, bracken – balancing keystone against indicator species.

The wood is big enough to pretend that we’ve lost ourselves in it. But everywhere we tramp there is evidence of careful husbanding: piles of cordwood, areas of clearance. Yet none of it has that indefinable – and yet oh so concrete – feel of the municipal. Neither Nick nor I can figure out who owns the wood. Is it the richies, and if so do they employ their own urbane back-garden woodsman? Over bottled water and a sticky bun I phone the local council. No, it isn’t theirs, and nor do they believe it belongs to the Corporation of London who manage the adjacent parkland. For a delirious moment I entertain the notion that this arboreal refuge might – through some unprecedented glitch – belong to no one at all; that it might be a fragment of terra nullis lost in the terrible city which surrounds it for mile after mile. Nick and I should go native here, rogue males living off berries and tubers, emerging from tree cover only to bag the occasional international financier and drag him back to our lair.

Psychogeography 5

Sitting in a soft-stripped flat on the 21st floor of a semi-abandoned tower block in the Kensington district of Liverpool I am temporarily the highest resident on Merseyside. I can see the sunlight dapple the flanks of Snowdon nigh on 70 miles to the south. I can see the Wirral like a spatulate tongue licking the Irish Sea. I can see the Mersey itself, coursing through its trough of defunct docks. Towards Bootle, the gargantuan sails of wind turbines look like propellers powering the upside down burgh through the steely grey sky. Ranged across the mid-ground are the signature buildings of the city: the Liver Buildings with their sentinel herons; the mucoid concrete of the hospital; the dirty white stalk of the radio station with its restaurant revolving like a conjurer’s plate; and the two cathedrals, one the outhouse of the morally relativist gods, the other a split yoghurt pot oozing spiritual culture.

The graticule of streets spreads out from the base of my tower, a tight stacking of tiled roofs which gleam wet with rain. I sit here from dawn to dusk watching the weather systems roll in, completely divorced from the human life of the city. The block will soon be demolished. Twenty years ago, tens of these concrete snaggle teeth gnashed Liverpool’s flesh – but they’ve mostly been extracted. Draughts sough in the empty corridors and cavernous stairwells. As the block is emptied out – so is the city itself; and despite endless talk of regeneration, the fact remains that Liverpool has halved in population since the Second World War. To apprehend this you have only to observe the slow trickle of outward-bound traffic which is the rushhour, or descend into the financial district at 5.30pm, where you’ll find hardly anyone at all. The impressive Victorian municipal buildings lower in the dusk, stage sets for an epic long
since wrapped.

Occasionally the Wirral is too tantalising and I grab my foldaway bicycle, sprint to the lift, plummet to the ground, freewheel all the way down the hill to the Pier Head and take the ferry across the Mersey. “Ferry, cross the Mersey!” sings Gerry over the Tannoy, while the Pacemakers plink- plonk their accompaniment. This is a moment of maximum urban quiddity, the song hymning the vehicle while you’re actually on it. It’s like a busker singing “Streets of London” in the streets of London, at once sweetly homely and infinitely claustrophobic. But all too soon we’ve heaved to at Seacombe and I’m pedalling along the magnificently sculpted Wallasey Embankment past the tidy villas of Egremont. On and on, the peninsula curving and curving to my left as I circumvent the last resort of New Brighton.

Empty sky, flat sea, sharp wind. The occasional lonely walker, head bowed to escape the oppression of the sky. If I felt alone in the echoing precincts of the city, I now feel completely abandoned. On the outskirts of Hoylake, a fat middle manager sleeps off his expense-account pub lunch slumped in his Vauxhall Omega, while I take a piss in a WC acrid with fresh saltwater and ancient urine. I thought I might walk from the point across to the tidal island of Hilbre, there to commune with seals, but in the event my timing is wrong, so I cycle to the station, fold the bike up and take the train back into the centre.

At Birkenhead we descend clanking into the tunnel under the Mersey, and suddenly all is echoing expanses of white tiling, festoons of cabling, and glimpses of tortuous machinery which suggest the dystopic vision of Piranesi. Intended for a far larger population, the superb local rail system of Merseyside is housed in caverns beneath the city itself, a ghost train endlessly circumnavigating the interior of this dark star of urbanity. But as if these tunnels, and the Queensway road tunnel under the river, weren’t enough of a vermiculation, in the last few years a group of enthusiastic volunteers have been opening up the Williamson Tunnels. These brick-lined conduits were built by a local magnate during the early decades of the 19th century. Some say they were a labour-creating project, a piece of proto-Keynesianism, intended to provide employment for soldiers returned from the Napoleonic wars. Others aver that Williamson himself was a Millenarian, and that the tunnels were intended as a refuge for Liverpudlians from the
coming apocalypse.

If the tunnels’ genesis is in dispute, then so is their extent. Some claim there’s only a few hundred metres of them, but others swear that the whole fabric of the city is riddled like a vast Emmental cheese. Whatever the truth of the matter, the tunnels are a curious complement to the depopulation of Liverpool, an introjection of the municipality’s own sense of its emptiness; after all, if so many people have vanished, where can they possibly have gone to?

Psychogeography 4

A frozen moment at US immigration, JFK airport, New York. My British passport is scanned, the official scrutinises the computer screen with a worried expression and then politely asks me to go into the back room. I join what look like a hundred Koreans and a miscellany of other potential personae non grata. A Frenchman is being noisily grilled by an immigration officer at a high desk. The officer looks like an ugly, acne-scarred version of Jim Carrey, the Frenchman looks preposterous: fur-trimmed jeans, a leather patchwork shoulder bag, collar-length hair. Frankly, I wouldn’t try to get in to Legoland looking like that – let alone post-9/11 America.

“You say you’re a philosophy teacher in Grenoble,” the officer insinuates, “but you seem to spend an awful amount of time here.”

“Yez, like I say, I ‘ave ze girlfriend.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know that, in Manhattan, and you’re in and out of here like a yo-yo. There are stamps here,” he riffles the French passport, “for every month of the last godamn year.” The Frenchman shrugs: “She is my girlfriend.”

“Hey, whatever,” the officer is suddenly bored, he stamps the passport, and beckons me up. “Now, Mister Self, are there some little things you maybe aren’t telling us about yourself?”

“Well,” my voice drawls from deep in clubland, “there are perhaps one or two trifling drug offences, ancient history really.”

“We’re going to have deport you, you cannot come in on a visa waiver form with prior narcotics convictions.

You’ll have to go back to London and apply for a visa there.” My heart sinks then steadies: “Look, officer,” I say, “would it make any difference if I told you that I was an American citizen?” The Jim Carrey-alike scrutinises me intently: “What makes you
think that?”

I tell him that my mother was a citizen, born in 1922 in Columbus, Ohio, and that she registered me at the US embassy in London when I was born. Carrey says he will check this information, and shoos me back to the bolted-down seats.

Over the next two hours all the Koreans and some Africans with impressive cicatrization scars are admitted to the Land of the Free. The only people left are me and a silently weeping German family, comprising late middle- aged parents and a grown-up daughter. Apparently, the paterfamilias failed to get an exit stamp in his passport when he departed in 1987. Jim Carrey and I have struck up an acquaintanceship, we suck mints together and listen to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue played on the CD-Rom drive of his computer terminal. Finally he beckons for me to follow him, and leads me back through a warren of offices. “I’m taking you back here,” he confides, “because we’ve decided to admit you, but we’re going to deport the Germans and …” he pauses significantly, “I don’t want to upset them any more than necessary.”

In the back office sits an older, heavier-set man with a strict moustache and iron-filing hair. The Stars and Stripes limps on the flagpole by his desk. He looks up from studying my passport when Jim and I enter. “So, Mister Self,” he asks without preamble, “what exactly do you think you are?”

“Um, well, a dual citizen I suppose.” He breathes heavily, “Mister Self, I have been an immigration officer for 35 years and let me tell you something, you are either an apple or a pear.” He pauses, allowing this fructuous moment to dangle between us, “I don’t care if you choose to live in London. I don’t even mind if you travel on a British passport when you’re abroad, but let me tell you this,” his voice begins to quaver with emotion, “when you come here to the United States of America you are an American citizen!” I snap to attention, the Battle Hymn of the Republic swells in my inner ear as I deftly circle my covered wagon in front of the Lincoln Memorial, leap out, and march forward to receive the Pulitzer. “Sir, yes sir!” I bark. On the way out Jim Carrey passes me my British passport: “I don’t even want to hold this,” his voice is also choked with patriotism, “because it offends me to see you travelling on such a document.”

Now, a few months later, I am the proud possessor of an American passport, and to begin with I felt pretty strange about it. To tell the truth I’ve never felt my nationality defined me anymore than my shoe size (actually, since my shoe size is 12 a good deal less), but since actualising my Americanness I’ve given a good deal of thought to whether I feel American, or British, or European – or anything.

Am I in fact a citizen of a vast Oceania which stretches from Brest-Litovsk to Honolulu?

On consideration, weighing up all the geopolitical, historical and cultural factors, it’s dawned on me that the possession of two passports means one thing and one thing alone: shorter queues on embarkation either side of the Atlantic. I’m not an apple or a pear, I’m a banana skin, glissading through immigration.