Will Self

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In the nick of time

February 23, 2006

Psychogeography 3

My friend Noel “Razors” Smith is in prison, serving a life sentence for armed robbery under the “two strikes and you’re out” ruling. His tariff is 11 years, which means he still has a minimum of nine to serve before release on license. Noel is inclined to view the sentence as harsh, given that he never hurt anyone during his blags, or even had a bullet in the chamber that was aimed at them. But his victims doubtless take a diametrically opposed view, and I can see their point.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been helping Noel with advancing his career as a writer. 2004 will see the appearance of his autobiography, A Few Kind Words and a Loaded Gun, a book the birth of which owes something to my midwifery. The first time I visited Noel in prison he was temporarily residing at HMP Downview in Surrey, the reason being that all prisoners have to be allowed a month per year of their incarceration at an institution within 60 miles of their family.

The visit had to be fitted into the normal weal of Sunday family life, so on consulting the map it was decided that my wife and the kids would do some shopping at Ikea in Croydon, while I skirted the southern periphery of London to meet with my protege. Even at the time this shoe-horning of a prison visit into a shopping trip had all the hallmarks of a modern nightmare: one inhuman and fixed period of time further confined by another hardly more humane or flexible. The motor-pootle through Carshalton, Sutton and Ewell did have its charm. Outer south London suburbia is a psychogeographer’s paradise, where the outliers of the North Downs massif push their green fingers into the city’s grey flesh. It’s difficult to whoosh past a 1930s redbrick villa, complete with mullions, loggias and all the accoutrements, without wishing to stop the car, walk up the front path, ring the doorbell, and force your way into another identity altogether. At gunpoint if necessary. But the visit was stressful, and by the time I got back to Croydon my wife had suffered the predictable Ikea depression, and longed only to spend the rest of her life alone on a remote Baltic island chainsawing sheep in half.

I resolved that henceforth I would take my time visiting Noel. He had plenty of time to spare, so I would factor some more of my own by association. Furthermore, I liked the idea of radically juxtaposing our views of the locales where he was imprisoned. Noel tends to arrive at his next high-security billet in one of those Securicor vans that are known in prisoner parlance as “sweatboxes”. He may’ve been up and down the country several times, and changed sweatboxes as well, before reaching a prison only tens of miles from the last one where he resided. He never knows exactly where he is and certainly not what the world without the walls looks like. I remedy this deficiency by arriving at the jail on foot or by bicycle.

When Noel was at HMP Whitemoor in Cambridgeshire, I took the folding bike up to Peterborough on the train, and then cycled there 25 miles along the River Nene. I was able to report to him the curiously unfinished aspect of the surrounding countryside, its flatness imparting no far horizons but a distinct sense of claustrophobia. In those scattered farmhouses redolent of subsidy, it was easy to imagine that there resided atavistic farmers cut off from the march of time. Were an escaped prisoner to encounter one of these throwbacks, he’d probably be commanded to “Fertilise my land!”, and then treated to both barrels.

Now that Noel has moved to HMP Grendon, north of Aylesbury, the visits have become an altogether more bosky affair. In August I took the train up to Bicester in the morning and then after dropping in at the jail, pedalled back through the Three Hundreds of Aylesbury, before ascending the Chiltern scarp and rolling down to the outskirts of London. Midnight saw me dodging inebriated hippy bargees on the tow path of the Grand Union Canal. But en route I stopped in a country pub where I was bearded by a bearded youth, who asserted that he had a story to tell me. Childhood in Luton, maths degree, website designing, trip to the USA, mad incident which ended him up in Brixton prison, hippy girlfriend, baby, Greece, Turkey, India, and now this village in Buckinghamshire where they were all living – he whispered – “on the social”.

Of course, this wasn’t a story at all, it was merely a succession of events strung together on the feeble continuity of his life. As I pedalled away I reflected on how it was that despite his freedom to roam the world, the youth had managed only this linear narrative, while Noel, banged up in a cell a few miles away, had amassed a great tangle of convoluted tales.

On peages

February 23, 2006

Psychogeography 2

It’s worth considering that the first theoreticians of the railway saw rails and locomotives as essentially component parts of a single machine. The patents lodged in the early years of the 19th century were for rails with projecting “teeth” which meshed with cog-wheeled engines. Initially it was thought that smooth steel wheels on smooth steel rails wouldn’t provide the necessary traction, but even when this was proved wrong, the French coinage “chemin de fer” still caused problems for Gallic late adopters: “Il y en croient que ces routes sont pavees avec des plaques de fer,” wrote one bemused commentator in 1820, “mais ce ne pas cela de tout …”

Others first saw the revolutionary transport system as an evolution of existing roadways. In 1802, Richard Lovell Edgeworth published the first proposal to construct railways for public transport. He envisaged rails implanted in the busiest highways, which would be supplied with cradles on to which existing carriages could be lifted. These would then be drawn on by horsepower, a principal advantage of the system being the reduction in friction. But in a visionary anticipation of the shape of things to come, Edgeworth wrote: “The chief convenience of this project arises from the mode of receiving and transporting on the rail-ways every carriage now in use without any change in their structure, so that the traveller may quit and resume the common road at pleasure.”

Well, delete the word “pleasure”, elide the Frenchman and Edgeworth, and it seems to me we have a pretty accurate description of the peage autoroutes which a century later snake across France like blue veins through Roquefort. I know, I know, some will cavil that the highway and the vehicle moving on it don’t truly constitute a machine ensemble, because the car is capable of independent motion, but try telling that to a strung-out paterfamilias piloting a people-carrier full of enfants terribles from the Dordogne to Calais. Work time, holiday time, both are strictly delimited in the modern era, and all too often the interface between the two is the highspeed motorway drive.

It may be theoretically possible to leave the peage and meander off into the vineyards, there perhaps to seduce a numinous “thou” with a flask of wine; but in practice, embankments, cuttings and tunnels eradicate the soft contours of the landscape, while the cogs of the car tyres mesh with tarmac teeth to make 140kph forward motion as ineluctable as a funicular. Entree … Mussidan, Sortie … Arveyres, PRIX … 5.70 euros. The little paper tongue licks the lobe of your ear with its patent insincerity, have you not just been winched over an ancient and venerable monoculture of great sophistication in a steel cask of unspeakable crudity? Are not you and your offspring merely a portion of that great human vendage, whereby the British bourgeoisie are squeezed out of the heart of France in the dying days of August?

St Emilion, Monbazillac, Saussignac … the great grapes are trampled by the whirling rubber of wrath and stress. Ferchrissakes! We just steamed past St Michel-de-Montaigne without so much as a sideways glance! What would the venerable essayist have made of this? His take on the world was compendious to the point of being encyclopaedic, but the closest he came to penning “On peages”, is his fragment “On riding ‘in post’ “. According to Montaigne, “The Wallachians … make the fastest speeds of all … because they wear a tight broad band around their waists to stop them from tiring, as quite a few others do. I have found no relief in this method.” Nor me, nor me, even a conventional seatbelt is irksome after 500km and a pit stop to peck on a reconstituted prong of pureed pig meat with a six euros prix.

Still, at least the kids are holding up well as we whack up the A10 past Angouleme, Poitiers and Tours; not for them the insistent jibing of this road to unfreedom. My mind drifts back to my own childhood, and family voyages in the Austin to Wales, embarked upon before the construction of the British motorway system. I recall it took days, as my father appeared to have been taught to drive at a purely theoretical level by Jean-Paul Sartre, and so regarded each depression of the accelerator as an existential leap into being. There was snow too, great drifts of it, out of which lorries lumbered looking like woolly mammoths.

My reverie is finally dispersed by the great dark lodestone of Paris. We leave the machine ensemble of the peage, only to be locked into another one: tens of thousands of cars inching forward in near-gridlock. It isn’t until we’ve been stuttering along for over an hour that my 13-year-old vouchsafes that this is the day of the European athletics championship. It would be ironic, this joyless driving for hundreds of kilometres only to be held up by people fun-running, were it not that the true psychogeographer never experiences irony. “See that,” says the lad, indicating the fragment of a map Michelin have put on the cover of their France 2003 Tourist and Motoring Atlas. “D’you think they’ve put Brest on the front so that they’ll sell more copies?” My heart swells with paternal affection, a psychogeographer in the making, n’est ce pas?

Dissolving the matrix

February 23, 2006

Psychogeography 1

I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography. So this isn’t walking for leisure – that would be merely frivolous – or even for exercise, which would be tedious. No, to underscore the seriousness of my project, I like a walk that takes me to a meeting or an assignment; that way I can drag other people into my eotechnical world view. “How was your journey?” they say. “Not bad,” I reply. “Take long?” they enquire. “About 10 hours,” I admit. “I walked here.” My interlocutor goggles at me; if he took 10 hours to get here – they’re undoubtedly thinking – will the meeting have to go on for 20? As Emile Durkheim observed, a society’s space-time perceptions are a function of its social rhythm and its territory. So, by walking to the meeting I have disrupted it just as surely as if I’d appeared stark naked with a peacock’s tail fanning out from my buttocks while mouthing Symbolist poetry.

My publishers were holding a sales conference in Eastbourne and I agreed to go along and address the bourgeforce. I decided to entrain from Victoria to Lewes and then walk the South Downs Way for the final 22 miles. This would be a nostalgic walk, putting myself securely back in my father’s world of pipe-smoking, grey flannel trousers, chalk downlands, Harvey’s bitter, Bertie Russell, nudism, the Peace Pledge Union … Gah! Christ! … I can’t breathe in this interwar period … I’d better come up for air. Even though, nominally, I was born in 1961, my father made sure that I too was raised in the interwar period, and we roamed the South Downs a great deal together during my childhood. “It seemed perfectly natural,” said the minicab driver who took me from Lewes station to the start of the walk, speaking of his own ambulatory upbringing … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

As I consulted maps and timetables at my desk in London, I found myself faced with a dilemma. On the day, should I wait for the branch-line train from Lewes to Southease, where I could join the South Downs Way, or should I gain a half-hour by taking a cab there? I dislike cars more than trains – they con their autopilots with the illusion of freedom – but half an hour is significant when you’re pushed for walking time. I thought about the options for two long days, then called Talking Pages.

Talking Pages had been absorbed into the great telephone-answering gulag known only as “118”, so doubtless my call was answered by a Mongolian former yak herder, deep in the Altai Mountains. I pictured the call centre wedged like a corrugated spacecraft in some dusty gully. Inside, bandy- legged men in traditional dress slouched about on leather cushions, watching antediluvian videotapes of Police Five, in order to assimilate the social mores of telephone-banking customers in the Potteries. A once-proud nomad, doing a passable imitation of a Staffs accent, gave me a choice of three minicab companies that served the Lewes area.

Naturally, the first two I called turned out to be located in Brighton, despite their Lewes exchange numbers. And no, they couldn’t answer my distinctly local enquiry about the time it takes to drive to Southease. The third company was different. They were located right inside Lewes station, and yes they knew the area intimately. The Controller spoke as if every one of his drivers had – like some humanoid nematode – filtered the very earth of Sussex through their bodies. The Controller assured me the drive would take mere minutes, so I booked the cab.

The next morning was bright and clear. Sunlight flashed off the braces of orthodontically challenged teenagers who boarded the train at Plumpton on their way to school in Lewes. After detraining, I was so high with anticipation that it wasn’t until the cab had gone about 200 yards in the wrong direction out of Lewes that I pointed it out to the driver: “I want to be on the east side of the Ouse, at Southease Station.”

“No problem,” he breezed. “I’ll drop you down a track on this side and you can cross the river on the swing bridge.” Then he went on about his childhood, engendering such a warm feeling of mateyness in me that I over-tipped the sly fellow.

In fact, he’d dropped me outside Rodmell, over two miles from where I wanted to be. As I puffed along the track, my pipe sending up great clouds of smoke from the Presbyterian tobacco stuffed in it (a blend introduced to Stanley Baldwin in 1923 by the future Moderator of the Church of Scotland), I saw in the mid-distance the little two-carriage train stopping at Southease station. Now, no matter how hard I walked for the rest of the long day, I would still be lagging behind. The sinuous Downs, the soaring Seven Sisters, the majestic Beachy Head, all suddenly concertinaed into the space between two low-firing synapses in the lazy minicab driver’s mind. Machine Matrix – one, Psychogeographers – nil. I could hear Durkheim’s low and evil laughter in my inner ear; not a pretty sound.

Illimitable Australia

February 23, 2006

Psychogeography 110

You left me last week in a playground on the esplanade at Cairns in Northern Queensland. I say that with some authority, but the truth is that I left you sitting at your kitchen table reading about me and my four-year-old swinging in the antipodes, whereas in fact I was in frosty south London. I still am – that’s psychogeography for you. Like some bizarre typing bee, I like to store up my memories of hotter, sunnier climes so that I can write about them through the long, crepuscular winter days.

Although it was none too bright in Queensland last August. That close to the tropics there are only two seasons: wet and dry. But displaying an unrivalled flair for the holiday cock-up, we’d managed to decamp around the world only to find ourselves sloshing about in the wettest dry season on record. Not that the Australians were perturbed by this climatological anomaly; they chose to see it as just that, rather than sinister evidence of global warming.

One night, sitting on our dripping verandah, we were lectured by a local science teacher on the vast span of the continent’s geological history. He told us how an ocean once separated the eastern and western halves of Australia, while a land bridge connected the northern coast to New Guinea. To listen to him talk – discoursing on antediluvian inundations and prelapsarian droughts – I got the impression that he himself had been present in the Jurassic, wandering the rainforests of Gondwanaland, a rampant bore in pursuit of tiny-brained diplodocuses.

We, on the other hand, couldn’t help but see the shitty weather as a timely smack delivered by Mother Nature. We should never have squandered our carbon allowance for the next 20 years, jetting 12,000 miles to see the Great Barrier Reef and in the process helping to speed its destruction. We only managed to get out to the reef once, and even then the wind-tossed waves had churned up too much sand for us to see much besides the flapping fins of the snorkeller in front. True, from the dive boat on the trip back to shore we did see migrating humpback whales, but their tail fins looked to me like two massive fingers stuck up in our general direction.

After a week or so of this Australian water torture we could take it no more. We loaded up the people carrier with little people and set off for the Atherton Tableland. Beyond these mossy green hills, the great semi-arid plain of Central Australia opened out. There would be sun, there would be heat, all our illusions would be burnt away and we would face the true and authentic Australia. Up we wound through dripping, lush farmsteads, where the Friesian cattle grazed incongruously beside palms and tree ferns. We stopped for a damp sandwich at Milla Milla Falls and then headed on, the windshield wipers carving slices of bitumen out of the greenish blur.

We were a few clicks past Revenhoe and heading downhill on the Kennedy Highway when it happened all at once: the rain ceased, and the convolvulus of the rainforest – which had been retreating for a while – was replaced by the regular stippling of eucalyptus, row upon row of straight trunks shading the dips and runoffs of the semi-arid landscape like charcoal marks. The metalled road stuttered then gave out, to be replaced by a corrugated track of red dust; and there, lumbering towards us like a dinosaur of the carboniferous era, was our first road train.

As soon as it had pummelled past I slewed the people carrier over to the side of the track and rousted the family out. “This is it!” I cried. “This is the true and authentic Australia! Look at that,” I gestured at the too much of wilderness, “it spreads from here all the way to West Australian, thousands of miles! It goes on forever!”

“You go on forever,” snapped a surly adolescent, before replacing his earphones and crawling back into the car.

We ended up that evening sleeping in a defunct railway carriage which had been converted into a tourist chalet. This was at something called the Undara Experience, a faux “bush camp” sighted on the edge of the Undara Volcanic National Park. We had dinner at Fettler’s Iron Pot Bistro, and the breakfast the following day at the Ringers’ Camp. It was all deliriously inauthentic, from the “billabong-style” swimming pool to the grotesque didgeridoo class held by some inner-city refugee the following evening. Even the wallabies and kangaroos lolloping through the bush were there under sufferance; on any real cattle station they’d have been shot on sight.

But I didn’t care, I kept dragging the kids hither and thither, thrusting their pimply snouts into the illimitable, as if I could somehow get them to consume this vast hinterland. After a while they did begin to appreciate it – all except the four-year-old that is. He said he’d rather go to the playground again, even if it meant getting chomped by a saltie.

Forests

January 12, 2006

Psychogeography 105

Oliver Rackham, the magisterial historian of the English countryside, has several bees in his bonnet. One them concerns the word “forest”. If you believe Rackham, there’s no necessary connection between “trees” and “forests”. Forests are areas set aside for the hunting of wild game – deer, boar and suchlike – while wooded areas of country are, doh!, woods. Forests are characterised by their ancient laws and royal-appointed officers, while woods feature toadstools, crapping bears, fairy rings and farouche child abusers.

I love Rackham’s writing on the countryside. To read his accounts of woodland management, the structure of field systems and even soil drainage, is to have the godlike sensation that when it’s all tarmaced over and there’s a Tesco Metro where every copse used to be, one could simply reconstruct the whole palimpsest of our biota, using Rackham as a set of instructions. My friend Con has slightly disabused me concerning the omniscience of Rackham. He too is a disciple, and once made a pilgrimage to the great seer of the bucolic at Corpus Christi, his Cambridge college. It transpired that Rackham obviously took his agenda from what he could see from the window of his rooms; and that his masterwork: “The History of the Countryside”, should really be called: “The History of the Bit of Countryside I can See from my Window”.

If I animadvert on Rackham it’s because of what happened to Mr & Mrs Ralph this week. They awoke during the night to the sound of a loud crash echoing through the vastness of Steadman Towers. On arising they found a trail of bite marks and paw prints leading through the elegant chambers and along the marble colonnades. A large, silk-covered ottoman had been reduced to a tatter-medallion, a turd had been deposited in the toilet. Eventually they cornered the interloper in the kitchen. How a fox cub had had the wit to become housetrained after only that very night entering a house for the first time is a source of wonder to us all.

Now, Rackham’s take on foxes is sanguine to say the least; given that he views the two cataclysmic events in the English countryside to have happened during the Iron Age, and then in the late nineteenth century. The first was the clearing of the primary woodland, and the second was the turning over of whatever little spinneys remained to the intensive rearing of game birds. Set beside these awesome reductions in biodiversity, the artificial preservation of the fox in order that it may be hunted stands as an amusing little appendix. And preserved it has been. Rackham’s hunch is that it would have been extinct in the early-modern period were it not such good fun cornering it on horseback, then watching it torn to shreds by doggies.

The irony that the fox was preserved for so long that it managed to adapt to the growing urbanisation of England cannot be stressed enough. Over the last few years, during which this environmental appendix became so inflamed that it poisoned the body politic, it was hilarious to hear the fox-hunting lobby bleat on about how they had to hunt foxes in order to a) keep their numbers down b) keep countryside folks’ numbers up. In essence this was the same as a talking hamster tell you that it was essential he kept running round and round in order to preserve his wheel.

Looked at from the point of view of the parasitic fox, the redcoats were a good survival strategy. However, now that you can’t walk down a London street without seeing an insouciant fox strolling towards you it’s clear that it must be foxes themselves that were behind the whole mad convulsion. While hunting was essential for their survival they happily ripped chickens to pieces and ran amok in the farmyard. But a few years ago a top-flight delegation approached the late Roald Dahl and got him to write “Fantastic Mr Fox” as the first in a string of clever propaganda tricks aimed at ensuring their long-term niche in the human-dominated ecosystem.

Most of the time I feel fairly well disposed to foxes. We often get up in the morning to see two or three of them sunning themselves on the tops of the garden sheds in back of our house. Granted their shit smells dreadful, they rip bin bags open, and their sexual behaviour – even by South London standards – is both violent and rambunctious. Still, I saw no need to have them culled for this until the fox got into Ralph’s house. After all, to follow Rackham on this, why there may be no necessary connection between forests and trees, the prospect of one’s kitchen becoming a game preserve is not a comfortable one. Mark my words, it’ll begin with the odd fox breaking it, but before you know it you’ll be transported to Australia for laying a hand on one of the Queen’s dinosaur-shaped turkey nuggets.

Walking The Dog

January 12, 2006

Psychogeography 103

“Walking the dog! Walking the dog! If you don’t know how to do it, I’ll show you how to walk the dog.” This is a song lyric that I have always taken literally – because, truth to tell, I’ve never known how to walk the dog. I want to leave the dog lying on the floor, after all, is there any creature in creation more deliciously reposeful than a slumbering hound. But no: the dog must be walked; this clever species, which has parasitised on humans now for thirty-odd thousand years, understands how to rouse us up, force us to clip ourselves on to their lead, and then let them lead us about cheerless suburbia for an hour or two. How pleasing it is to think that as soon as civilisation crumbles, dogs will be out together again, the Borzoi and the Poodle, reunited in a quest for carrion.

The family dog belonged to my brother. She arrived together with a litter, in a basket brought by the RSPCA. Those were the days – any weirdo could ask to have a dog and a whole bunch of them would be pitched into your house. Now you probably have to be assessed by social services for months before they let you get your hands on a vulnerable puppy. The litter was tumultuous, and as I recall they stayed with for a day or so, so that my brother could choose the one he wanted.

Naturally my brother – a gentle soul – picked the sixth, the runt; a brownish, canine scrap, which had remained lodged under the sofa throughout the trial. In fairness to him, Brownie – as she became known – was the perfect dog for our family. It’s hard to say whether nature was trumped by nurture in her case – or only augmented, but within months she’d become a neurotic, people-pleaser of an animal. We fought over every aspect of her care: feeding, walking, worming, petting – she was the passive victim of an unloving tug.

We did know how to look after dogs – we were a very doggy household. Not my father – who was largely absent, and not my mother either. She spent much of her time upstairs in bed, reclining on a bolster full of benzodiazepines, the victim of a savage pincer movement enacted by depression and migraine. During her down times my brother and I were disciplined – and the word is most appropriate – by Alison, a redoubtable, warm woman, whose principal occupation was the obedience training of dogs.

Alison didn’t just any old mutts to heel – she trained Alsatians. She trained Alsatians for the Metropolitan Police – and one of her dogs, Katie, scooped a third in her class at Crufts. Alison didn’t just know how to walk the dog, she knew how to get a dog to jump over a bench, go round a tree, track an armed assailant by scent alone, and then bring him down unharmed. When I was little I went on a lot of dog walks with Alison, Katie and the others; so many that I began to feel like one of the pack: the tense exhilaration as the woods finally hove into view, the surge of adrenaline as the back doors of the little station wagon were opened, the first glorious bounds through the sweet-smelling leaf fall, the near-orgasmic joy of treeing a squirrel.

You would’ve thought that with all this training I’d have become a very capable dog walker indeed. Not so. As the family fragmented, so poor Brownie became more and more distrait, until eventually, she had to be pensioned off to Alison in Essex. For the remainder of his life my father paid Alison a modest allowance, and referred to Brownie, gloomily, as “the stipendiary dog”.
I didn’t have anything much to do with dogs again, until years later, in Northern Australia, I found myself in charge of a Doberman pinscher belonging to a friend who’d gone on holiday. Presumably from his pet, for to call Boysie “frisky” would have been a grotesque understatement: he was a massive beast with a great, stilted, lolloping gait, who could run down a beach jogger in the twinkling of an eye. When I’d run up puffing, drag Boysie off the hapless runner and attach the leash to his choke collar, the terrified prey would almost always bellow: “˜Can’t you keep your bloody dog under control?” To which I was forced to reply: “Keep him under control? I can’t even keep myself under control!”

I should’ve learnt the important lesson by then, that if you can’t have a healthy relationship with a dog, you’re unlikely to have one with a human being. Sadly, a lot more humans – and quite a number of dogs – had to be sacrificed before the truth dawned on me, that I was better off lying asleep on the floor of the bar, than racing around making trouble.

Tully, Northern Queensland, Australia

January 12, 2006

Psychogeography 102

Tully, Northern Queensland, Australia. The sugar mill belches smoke as thick and flocculent as candy floss. Along Highway 1 from Innisfail, the narrow gauge tracks incise the bluey tarmac and serpentine trains heavy with the sweetness of cut cane, trundle through the endless fields. Sugar cane – the humanity’s biggest crop, weightier than rice and wheat combined. Strange that a world dedicated to producing so much sweetness should nevertheless seem so sour.

And seldom sourer than in Tully, which, to be frank, is a dump. The old 1950s storefronts are warped and mildewed, the tiny grid of commercial premises feels mired in desuetude. Within a few blocks the Queensland equivalents of pound shops and greasy spoons have given way to overgrown subdivisions and clapboard houses on knock-kneed stilts. Obese, hydrocephalic types crawl along the sidewalks, looking as if they’re on their way to audition for a remake of Deliverance.

The only tourist attractions in Tully are the sugar mill – which does a tour – and the Big Boot. The Big Boot is the same height as the flood waters which covered Tully during the early 1970s, and from its 6 metre summit there are commanding views of… the sugar mill. I’m all for the sugar mill tour but the adolescents are revolting – they want to go white water rafting. You can see their point, beyond Tully the Walter Hill range of mountains pushes a 1000 metres up into the cloudy skies, rocky summits draped in rainforest, vertiginous gorges, tumultuous cataracts – a vast wilderness of adrenaline.

I don’t want to go white water rafting. I’m not scared – I can’t even get close to being scared; it’s just that I’d sooner have my penis severed, varnished and put on sale in a provincial gift shop than entrust my frail form to a tiny rubber boat bouncing down the Tully River, which, given that this is the wettest dry season Northern Queensland has ever seen, is approaching full spate. Still – it’s not about me, is it? So we go white water rafting.

We’re issued with wet suits and crash helmets and climb into bus which jolts us through the cane fields and then up a winding road that coils between dripping trees festooned with lianas. The guides are all limber fellows with plenty of piercings and pigtails, they keep up a running commentary the whole way there: if you fall in stay on your back so that if you hit anything it’ll be your bottom that takes the impact; choose yourselves a team and get acquainted – your lives will depend upon each other; you must listen to the guide in your boat and do what he says – again, your lives depend upon it. This isn’t, it occurs to me, recreation at all, it’s survival.

Our team is me, my three adolescents, and a mismatched couple from Brisbane: Kurt and Pauline. Kurt is a rugged, good looking chap. As we carry our raft over the rocks to the river he tells me that the choice was between this and parasailing. Pauline, on the other hand, is so frail, pretty and anaemic, that her choices – which manifestly were ignored – must have been between a well-heated art gallery and dabbing eau de cologne on her blue-veined temples.

Our raft guide, a Kiwi called Dan with bleached bits in his hair, urges us to pick a name for our team. “Somethin’ rousing!” He enjoins us “So that when we’ve shot a rapids we can shout it out.” “Er, how about Deliverance.” I suggest in a desultory fashion, and Kurt, to my considerable relief, sniggers appreciatively. “Yeah, OK,” says Dan “although what I had in mind was, like, ‘Doggy Style’. So that I could shout out ‘How d’you like to do it?’ – and youse guys would all clash your paddles and shout ‘Oooh-ooh! Doggy style!'”. As we slip in the brown-and-white, sinewy embrace of the Tully River, I don’t exactly feel that Dan and I are on the same wavelength. But realistically it’s too late for a meeting of minds, because we’re in the raft, floating towards the rapids and he’s telling me what to do not only for my own survival – but to stop the rest of the team from being dashed to pieces on the rocks.

The strange thing is that it works – the team that is. We paddle when Dan shouts “Paddle!” we back-paddle when he shouts that. We shift from side to side of the raft, and as it teeters then plunges over falls we get down in it with our paddles held to attention. At the rapid called ‘Wet & Moisty’ I fall out of the raft – and the team gets me back in. At ‘Double D-Cup’ my daughter falls out midway through the cataract and yet is hauled to safety. Whatever our differences concerning nomenclature – it’s clear that Dan has the measure of the Tully Gorge.

Rabbits

January 12, 2006

Psychogeography 101

Consider the rabbit, for in the arc of its lollop is described the rolling landscape of lowland Britain. Consider the rabbit, for was it not an immigrant to our shores, brought here by the Romans? Consider the rabbit, once banged up in massive coney enclosures – the walls of which penetrated feet into the soil – and farmed by weirdo monks. Consider the rabbit, which went hippety-hoppety in lockstep with the expansion of western civilisation, from its native lands of the Iberian Peninsula, across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and eventually to Australia where it meets its viral nemesis.

Oh yes, consider the rabbit – for is it not doomed to be viewed as inconsiderable? True, it’s right tasty eating. Hippy Bob shot them with his air rifle, or even scraped myxomatotic road kill of the hot tarmac. He skinned them (no trickier than taking off a tiny wet suit once you get the hang of it); jointed them; added stock, samphire, and sliced puffballs. He put the whole gubbins in a biscuit tin, buried it in the ground and then lit a fire on top. These ‘earth ovens’ are slow cooking and by the time the tin was dug up and opened the bunny’s flesh was as succulent as a ripe fig.

True, you find rabbit on the menus of upscale eateries fairly often – but you never exactly consider it. Rabbit is a faut de mieux kind of dish, not to be ordered as a first option. It’s the same with its fur – common as muck, suitable only muffs. I daresay it’s the same for the vivisectionists, they probably feel rather disappointed when another gross of these breeding machines are carted up from the depths of the lab, and can’t wait to get their rubber gloves on rats, or beagles, or just about any other mammal who’s dying for a fag and a shampooed eyeball.

No one has ever said “As sagacious as a rabbit”, or “as wily as a rabbit”. No, “fucking like rabbits” is what we say, while the cuddly worms bore into loose and sandy soils, eroding banks and dykes, contributing to the vermiculation of the ground. When I lived up in Suffolk there was Council bounty of 25p for a rabbit tail and the thing to do was go lamping for them. I went out once with a local farmer and it bothered me less than I thought it would. For a start there was the monster truck off-roading involved in getting the pickup in position. Then, when the light went on the rabbits, mute and curious, come nosing into the killing cone.

My accomplice handled his shotgun with studious, unflashy movements: aiming, firing, breaking, ejecting, reloading – a piece worker on a cat food production line. The rabbits’ eyes coruscated in the big wattage, the gun reported, the dust and cordite smoke cleared to reveal another brown lump. We packed it in at close to three in the morning, the back of the pickup bobbled with little corpses. But then East Anglia is rabbit country the way Montana is cattle country. There’s something about the shaven turf, bedizened with little black balls, surrounded by crazy palisades of desiccated furze, that seems lapine to the core. In certain East Anglian pubs it is de rigeur to wear at least two or three coneys dangling from the poachers’ hooks inside your jacket; I remember that my landlord’s welcome when I moved into my cottage was a brace of corpses casually chucked on to the doorstep.

Yet consider the rabbit – for will he not have his revenge? He’s already made his mark. In Australia there’s a rabbit-proof fence running clear across the country for thousands of kilometres – a pest-control measure that’s visible from space! I should imagine that rats, locusts and all manner of other vermin look upon this thing with savage envy, much in the way that certain US politicians regard Middle Eastern oil reserves. Then there’s myxomatosis – it’s not every animal that gets a disease purpose-developed to eradicate it, and then (Ha! Ha!) manages to outflank it with immunity.

One month’s gestation, three litters a year, up to ten cuddly bunnies in each litter. Speedily, inexorably, the rabbit bores through the world, they’ve done in two millennia what it took us a hundred and fifty. Those of us who view the future that’s hotting up with a certain fatalism, like to think that Gaia will replace humans as Top Species with the cockroach. To be beaten by a creature vastly older and radically different to ourselves is somehow acceptable. How much more galling it would be if it was the rabbit who ground us down beneath its paw? And if we were to expire to the loony tune of its nibbling, as the hateful anthropomorphism echoed in our ears: “Eee, wassup Doc?”

Parklife

January 12, 2006

Psychogeography 100

For much of the time the local park has a bad vibe. It’s bordered on one side by a narrow lane, along which are ranged a Baptist hall, an Anglican church rendered with snotty stone and a backpackers’ hostel lodged in a defunct, eleven storey office block. Late at night you can find truculent Scandinavians wandering the nearby streets, doubtless searching for a half-timbered, sixteenth century coaching inn.

The foot of the park – which has been landscaped with scraggy shrubbery and the shaved pubises of artificial hillocks – dabbles in a busy arterial road. The other two frontiers of this debatable land are defined by residential streets – although some of the houses are notably bizarre: an Edwardian pub converted into a glass origami penthouse; a simulacrum of an Italian villa, complete with burnt sienna paint job and finial cypresses; and a ramshackle dwelling which, despite being surrounded on three sides by the park, still endeavours to persevere, its paling fences seized in a convolvulus of barbed wire, the tops of its walls saw-toothed with broken glass embedded in mortar.

Broken glass – it’s everywhere in the park. Shards glint in the long grass, in the shrubbery, and on the defunct tennis courts. I wonder if the children who play here will forever find the crunch of rubber sole on shattered glass powerfully evocative of their childhoods? Perhaps that, of the febrile crack underfoot of the disposable insulin syringes which litter the brick paving beneath the crap loggia, by the drained ornamental pond, in which sits a single, enigmatic boulder.

In the playground the swings stand like gibbets, a few lengths of chain dangling from their rusty crossbars. The rubberised flooring – beloved of some safety-conscious bureaucrat – has long since been eroded by the scuffing of many thousands of feet, exposing the concrete and clay of the urban bedrock. The climbing frame is a pirate ship, with steel masts and bowsprit, there’s a chain ladder teeny buccaneers can employ to swarm aboard. They do, because there’s nothing else to do here, the roundabout is chained up, the sandpit covered and padlocked.

That rubberised matting! And those security cameras! Cameras which were, presumably, intended to lead to the arrest of whole rings of paedophiles – but instead are cloudy with the artificial eye equivalent of glaucoma. The idea that these safety measures could prevent injuries in a recreational area smeared with a thick impasto of dog shit and broken glass, and patrolled by marauding bands of giant adolescents stoned out of their heads from smoking a noxious combination of crack and mashed up pituitary gland is, frankly, rather droll. Especially when you consider that a couple of years ago the remains of a woman’s corpse were found smouldering on a bonfire near the outdoor exercise bars.

Still, I don’t want to gross you out with this stuff, the fact of the matter is that the park has its moments. The Portuguese who’ve taken over the old café have turned it into a lively focus of their unlikely community. Cut price Ricky Martins hang out in front of it, swigging cerveza and eating broad beans soused in olive oil, while listening to fada wailing from the dustbin-sized speakers of their dustbin-sized cars. On Sundays the whole polyglot cavalcade of this inner city area can be seen in the park, staking out a football pitch with sloughed off coils of clothing. An anthropologist could have a field day here, trying to establish on what basis the Afro-Caribbeans cede territory to the British Asians, or the graceful Somalians give ground to the galumphing Turkish Cypriots.

In rainy weather the park has an ambience at once dull and threatening – like a blunt knife wielded by a halfwit. But when the sun shines and the greenery shimmers all that is forgotten. The park! What an excellent place – let us go there and frolic. Let us fly our kite, or if we don’t have one, lash one of our skinnier kids to a couple of bin bags and see if we can haul him aloft! The park, you see, has friends – it even has Friends. The Friends of the Park have been in consultation with both the public and the local Development Partnership with a view to doing the place up.

This or that new feature or piece of park furniture has been proposed – as if the open space were room or a garden, that only needed the attentions of a television presenter to bring it out in telegenic bloom. The truth of the matter is that the park doesn’t need any one-off investment, but a long term commitment. The park needs someone whose prepared to stick with it night and day, to keep it as a fat, rich man in an Astrakhan coat might once have kept a thin ballerina. In a word, the park needs a keeper.

Olympian Pursuits

January 12, 2006

Psychogeography 104

There are people in this world who possess an innate sense of the theatrical — and then there’s my friend Adam Wildi. Theatrical people strike attitudes and make entrances; they cannot see a situation without making a stage of it — then occupying its centre. Clothes are their costumes, furnishings their scenery, other people their supporting cast and their conscience their understudy. But for Adam the very world itself is a stand-in for a provincial playhouse; hills and rivers are his scenery; humungous stadia his “flattage”. His casts run into thousands — his audiences into billions. He must consider the wind, the sun and the moon when it comes to contriving his son et lumiere effects.

For Adam is the technical director for some of the world’s biggest celebratory events. Last year he was responsible for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Athens Olympic Games; he is currently involved in a bid to do the same job for Beijing in 2008. In 1997 he was the presiding spirit for the theatrics which announced the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese, and in between he spends his time dealing with the small change of global drama, the G8s and other international summits which constitute the marketing plan for the world’s kleptocracies.

Adam’s professional illness is a kind of mega-theatricality — he cannot see a city without wondering how it would look tidied up, revitalised, lit and mic’ed, then refracted through the lenses of an thousand thousand television cameras. He goes away and lies on beaches, only to be haunted by the delayed echo of ghostly tannoys in his inner ear, and the play of searchlights on the cloud scape. Adam is Oz, manipulating levers and buttons from behind a curtain, while out front we see the mighty Prometheus of technical progress fused with physical excellence.

Well, that’s my take on it at any rate — you’ll be reassured to know that Adam’s is both more down to earth and resolutely pragmatic: “When we arrived in Hong Kong to do the handover,” he told me over shredded duck in Soho “I was taken to the site and shown a heap of rubble which had been flogged to a developer. The rain was torrential. I had to climb over a fence to look at it, and then I was up to my neck in water — it was insane!” The same gargantuan scenery problems faced him in Athens: “I pitched up to look at the stadium, I had 700 people on my staff ready to go, and there was no roof on it — no roof at all! Even when we got the roof on the architect — Calatrava Santiago — didn’t want to us hang lighting rigs from it. So far as he was concerned it was a sculptural form rather than a structural necessity. Still,” he muttered into his roast fowl, “he was an amazing man to work with. Astonishingly creative.”

My own take on the olympiad is as jaundiced as George Best’s secondhand liver. I well remember cycling around the defunct remains of the Montreal Olympics in the late 1970s. It was only a lustrum since the Games had taken place, and yet here were crumbling velodromes and weedy rowing lakes. The whole shemozzle had just about bankrupted the city. Adam is, however, an incurable as well as a theatrical meliorist: “It’s true that the Games cost Athens a shit-load of money, and there are now quite a lot of sports facilities they can’t use, but you have to balance that against the city being revolutionised. They built a new airport, eight new metro lines, the pump-priming to the national economy — largely through EU grants — has been phenomenal.”

Adam’s quite as gung-ho about London in 2012. He was responsible for organising the media centre for the G8 summit in Gleneagles, so when the news of London’s successful bid came in he was standing by Tony Blair’s Armani shoulder pad. It was a cruel irony — we agreed — that there was Blair, punching the air, and twelve hours later getting fulsomely punched in the gut by news of the London bombings. Still, Adam was, presumably, already deep in a fugue involving the Lea Valley transforming into a simulacrum of ancient Delphi.

“Look!” he exhorted me, “the world needs its celebrations. It needs the sense of shared purpose that these things provide. Not, you understand,” he continued more sotto, “that I have anything to do with these decisions — I’m just the technical guy. With Athens we did a stop-motion DVD of the whole gig, from when we started work, through the opening ceremony, the Games themselves, the closing ceremony and the breaking of the set. Let me tell you, if you ever feel disposed to doubt the limitlessness of human madness and folly it’s worth taking a look at it fast-forwarding.”

Sadly, Adam, there are no limits to my belief in that limitlessness. None whatsoever.

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