Will Self

A corner of north London that is forever mine

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.

The Mersey seat

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?

The strange case of the mistaken banana skin

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.

In the nick of time

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

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

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

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.

Chris The Saviour: Will Self on Chris Morris – The Observer, March 1997

Chris Morris’ Brass Eye turns satire into art of a very high order indeed

Will Self
Sunday March 9, 1997
The Observer

About halfway through Wednesday night’s final episode of Brass Eye (Channel 4), it began to occur to me that Chris Morris might possibly be God. The idea of a Morrisian deity is appealing for a number of reasons: it explains why the world is so consummately absurd it explains why there is little real justice to be had for the poor and the oppressed and it provides a convincing explanation for why public life in this country is dominated by talented mediocrities.

The sketch that occasioned this lurch of theism on my part was a typical piece of Morrisian excess. We were asked to take on board the idea that an utterly undistinguished, ring-road, provincial business had decided to incentivise its management by providing them with unlimited quantities of drugs. As the sketch began, we were treated to the sight of various middle-management types snorting lines of cocaine, toking on joints and shooting up smack (the managing director). Not only were all the paraphernalia and substances depicted with uncanny accuracy rare on television but the reactions of the drugged executives were also utterly credible.

Another comic might have dared this scenario but would have cut it short. Not Morris. As the anguished, bearded face of the new marketing manager went puce with the effects of excess cocaine and the camera stayed right on him, it became apparent to me that this was art of a very high order indeed. David Lynch used the same technique of dramatically over-extended emotion to telling effect in Twin Peaks, but both contemporary satirists have really borrowed the idea from the high avatar of absurdism Samuel Beckett.

As the new marketing manager fell out of the tedious boardroom gasping and retching, one of Morris’s henchwomen intoned in perfect cod voiceover: ‘Soon he will learn to maintain his levels.’ Maybe he will but I doubt Chris Morris ever will. Put starkly, this man genuinely knows no limits. His programme is the televisual exemplar of Yossarian’s motto in Catch-22: ‘Death to all moderators.’ I didn’t see a great deal of The Day Today, because its transmission coincided with my long period of box furlough but what I did see was both brilliant and congruent with the strange, satiric anti-persona that Morris developed during his radio days. Coming to Brass Eye was witnessing that most unusual and remarkable of phenomena: an artist who has grown and reached the height of his powers.

I had read the pieces about it I had heard the substance of the brouhaha. When, in the first episode of Brass Eye ‘Animals’ I saw Carla Lane, Jilly Cooper et al being not so much led, as driven up the warped garden path of Morris’s contempt, I, like any self-respecting bourgeois couch potato, thought: really, he has gone too far this time. Claire Rayner one of the spoofees writing in this paper, had the nous to be able to identify what it is about duping ‘real’ people into fake broadcast scenarios that might undercut the meaning and purpose of satire.

If satire exists to provoke moral reform in HL Mencken’s formulation, ‘To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’ then the muddying of the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ can only be conceived of as a perversion of satiric justice. But Claire Rayner, in her impassioned, self-regarding piece about her experience with Morris, got it wrong in one vital particular. It wasn’t us the afflicted who were being spoofed it was her the comfortable. In fact, I’ll go further than that: the reason why it’s legitimate to gull people like Rayner into making silly asses of themselves on television is that, in a very important sense, they aren’t real at all.

Rhodes Boyson is real-ish. He’s real enough for me to have seen him walking through the central lobby of the Houses of Parliament the other day. I looked into his guileless, headteacher’s countenance. I recognised him. I thought about it hard, but as ever it was a killing case of esprit d’escalier what I should have shouted at the mutton-chopped former Minister was: ‘Oi! Got any cake, Rhodes?!’ Because Boyson was credulous and bigoted enough to allow himself to be conned into deploring the effects of a drug called ‘cake’, on the Brass Eye episode that dealt with narcotics.

Morris in one of his numerous personae apprised all of the dimwits who fell for it that ‘cake’ was a ‘made-up’ drug. He called his pressure group founded to rid society of the evil of cake ‘FUCKD and BOMBD’ he described the effects of cake in lurid, pantomime terms that wouldn’t have convinced a 14-year-old ingenue.

So why did these people fall for such fakery? The Rayners, Boysons, Mad Frankie Frasers and Worsthornes of this world? Because they aren’t real people any more they’re hyperreal. They’ve made the Faustian pact of being that oxymoronic incarnation, ‘television personalities’.

You can always spot a ‘television personality’, even when they aren’t actually on television, because they carry their ‘made-up’ persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces. They are like nose-pickers for whom the wind has definitively changed.

All Morris has done is to give these unpersons an opportunity to demonstrate the fact that they’ll do anything to get a chauffeured car, a Styrofoam beaker of tea and five minutes in the green room goofing out with others of their ilk.

The other important point to be made about Morris’s elision of ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ is that it’s at the very core of his attack on television itself. What Morris realises is that television isn’t a ‘medium’ in any meaningful sense at all. Rather it’s a skein of different media imprisoned in a bogus proscenium. Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the ‘artistic’ potential of television qua television are equally deluded. There are filmic artists working in television, and there are dramatic artists there are costume and set designers there are actors. None of them are peculiar to the ‘medium’ all could be set in different contexts.

All except Chris Morris , that is. His savage truncations of Shakespearean English I particularly relished tags such as: ‘Whatever you forget about tonight’s programme remember this’ his fantastical nomenclature last week’s show included a slaughter man called ‘Gypsum Fantastic’ his subversion of the apparent logic of television graphics a bogus diagram featuring the heads of dead foxes and his own crazed demonism on screen a brilliant character actor acting the part of a brilliant character actor all of it testifies to the fact that this man is a true television artist perhaps the only one currently at work.

When the semi-fraudulent credits of the last episode of Brass Eye began rolling up, I turned to the friend I had watched it with and we both said almost in unison it’s a privilege to be alive when people such as Morris are at work. And as for his much-feted reticence and unwillingness to be made into a ‘personality’ himself well, you’d have to say that was the icing on the cake.

Elsewhere on the non-medium, the current torrent of superbly photographed wildlife programmes continued with The Eagle Empire (BBC1). Sea eagles hang out in the arctic north of Norway because they’ve been pushed back there by us. They’re partial to the odd eider duck and do lots of nifty fish-plucking from the waves. This Wildlife on One programme didn’t feature the staggering bird’s-eye photography we’d seen in Incredible Journeys, but it made up for it with astonishingly intimate and slow-motion photography.

There was that, and there was the ineffable presence of David Attenborough. He ended the programme on an up note, telling us that sea eagles were heading south once more, extending their empire after years of attrition. I dare say we’ll soon see one of the elegant birds being interviewed by David Jatt on Brass Eye.

Last Sunday, I did something nobody should ever do. I watched the omnibus edition of EastEnders (BBC1) and then I watched the preview tapes for all of last week’s episodes back-to-back. It was almost like having a soap opera that ran in real rather than virtual time (Pauline says: ‘I’ll just put on the kettle’ and then everybody waits in silence for five minutes while it boils) either that, or like watching The Family, the hideous soap opera Ray Bradbury created for his dystopic fantasy Fahrenheit 451. Viewers of The Family broadcast on three, wall-sized screens receive a copy of that day’s script, complete with their ‘own’ lines. At certain key moments in the action, all the actors peer out of the screen and say: ‘What do you think, Will?’ Or Paul, or Jenny, or whoever it is watching. Whereupon I find myself replying: ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t mind shagging Grant Mitchell, save for the fact that I couldn’t run my fingers through his hair. . .’

Book Review: Killing Pablo: the hunt for the richest, most powerful criminal in history

Will Self reads a life of Pablo Escobar, the most notorious dope dealer of modern times, and recalls his own adventures in the land of addiction

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Mark Bowden – Killing Pablo
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“I’ve got cocaine running around my brain!” So chanted Dillinger, the reggae toaster, in a mid-1970s paean to the white stuff that was an instant hit with those of us adolescent delinquents intent on an instant hit. Dillinger wasn’t the first or the last reggae star to take his moniker from a famous outlaw, but his cheerful little ditty was a curtain-raiser on a quarter-century during which the only criminal act in the global village worth talking about has been the production, export and sale of drugs.

At the tail-end of Mark Bowden’s impressively single-minded account of the hunt and execution of Pablo Escobar, the most notorious dope dealer of our era, one consumption statistic is belatedly supplied. In the year of Escobar’s death, 1993, the best estimate is that between 243 and 340 tonnes of cocaine were sold in the United States alone, and it is further estimated that Americans paid $30.8bn for the white powder.

But we all know this already: the cocaine trade is full of lines, more damned lines, and statistics. When I began doing cocaine regularly in the late Seventies, a gramme cost between £70 and £80. The quality was variable, a lot was pharmaceutical (obtained by break-ins on chemists), but much of it was still smuggled into Britain by individual freebooters, often rough bits of posh. I knew at least a couple of old Etonians who regularly jetted off to Bogota, picked up a key, and brought it back through customs tucked in the capacious crotches of their Turnbull & Asser green corduroy trousers. This is the kind of penny-ante trafficking glorified by Robert Sabbag in his autobiographical Snowblind. In those days, sniffing a line was, erroneously, perceived as the preserve of Studio 54 jet-setters and ageing roues, hangovers from some unhappy valley of interwar Arcadia.

In fact, cocaine had always been part of drug addiction, and remained so. In my early days, I encountered older addicts who could recall being prescribed injectable cocaine in “jacks” (small, soluble, pure cubes of the drug) under the medical maintenance model of treatment that used to prevail in Britain. These addicts were part of the criminalised core of drug users who, when cocaine increased in availability, became the early adopters, first of freebasing (precipitating a smokeable salt of cocaine by mixing it with ether or acetone) and then of crack (doing the same thing with bicarbonate of soda).

Those of us who had used cocaine intravenously were not at all surprised by the intense effects of the drug when inhaled. The big distinction between sniffing coke and smoking or fixing it is the speed with which it is absorbed into the brain; with sniffing, it takes three or four minutes; with smoking or fixing, it takes around six seconds. This produces a huge rush, which is followed almost immediately by a profound comedown. The only way to get back up is to take another hit, but because your tolerance has already been hugely increased, you require more to produce the same effect, and more and more ad infinitum. Except that nobody can afford an infinite amount of cocaine, even though I estimate, with my own, back-of-the-envelope methods, that the street price of the drug is now less than 30 per cent of what it was a quarter-century ago.

It isn’t solely that crack cocaine is in and of itself highly addictive that makes it such a devastating drug in our society; it’s more that it acts as a turbo-charger on people who have addictive personalities. In circles of recovering drug addicts, I often hear my peers say they are “grateful” to crack, because it so accelerated their own addictive disease that they had no choice but to stop – or else die. However, even on this bobsleigh run of toxicity, there is still plenty of lying, stealing, violence and psychosis. Crack has winnowed out whole urban communities, both in the US and now here, like some bizarre plague of ephemeral pleasure; a grotesque synecdoche of rapacious, global capitalism, which, in its reduction of all of a human’s life to the business of meaningless consumption, exactly enshrines William Burroughs’s adage that addictive drugs are a perfect commodity, because instead of selling them to people, you sell people to them.

But you won’t find much about the effects of cocaine – either sociological or existential – in Killing Pablo. If you want to understand the former, I urge you to read Land of Opportunity: one family’s quest for the American dream in the age of crack by William Adler (which was published by Atlantic Monthly Press in the US, but is now sadly out of print). This is a coruscating account of the family that dominated the Detroit crack business during the epidemic years of the early 1980s, and how they did it using good old American business know-how. If you want to understand the existential effects, I modestly offer my own account of a crack cocaine rush in my short story “The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz”.

No, what Bowden excels at in this tome is a long, painstaking investigation into the tough tough boys and their tough tough toys, who fought in the Eighties and early Nineties to control the Colombian cocaine trade. This book is ostensibly a blow-by-blow account of the political shenanigans, corruption, compromise and murder, that led to Escobar’s execution (which was in all probability delivered in cold blood by a bullet to the brain, possibly even fired by an American Special Services operative). But the real pay-off for the entire exercise comes with Bowden’s remarks about the head of the American Drug Enforcement Agency station in Colombia in the wake of the killing: “Toft worried that they had created a monster. They had opened a bridge between the Colombian government, its top politicians and generals, and the Cali cartel that would be difficult, if not impossible, to close down.”

And so, indeed, it has proved to be. In the hunt to kill Escobar, the North American narco-warriors suborned still further the civil law and democracy of Colombia, a nation already devastated by years of political violence and extremism. By encouraging the Colombians to use the sicarios (hired killers) of the country’s other powerful drug cartel to pick off and murder Escobar’s Medellin people, the CIA, the FBI, Delta Force, Centra Spike and all the other shadowy American agencies who pitched in on the War Against Drugs acted as midwives to that monster.

Bowden’s account of the rise to power of the man known in his native city as “El Doctor” is thoroughly researched. His uncovering of the inter-agency feuding that surrounded the hunt for him is exemplary. His detailing of technological toys employed to hunt Escobar down is exhaustive. With Escobar on the run (and heavily protected by a populace to whom he was a folk hero), the only way he could be located was by using sophisticated listening devices capable of picking up the signals from the mobile phones and radios he used to communicate with his organisation. At one time, three American agencies had their spy planes aloft over Medellin. Bowden provides a convincing and systematic account of why Colombian political culture proved so tragically vulnerable to the corruption the cocaine trade brought with it.

But what is most bizarre about Killing Pablo is the consuming, ravening narrative hole in the text. Reading it is like watching Jaws without the shark. Apart from a couple of offhand remarks about wealthy Yanks wasting their money on marching powder, there is absolutely no cocaine in the book at all. If you came to this book without any background knowledge, I think you’d be genuinely flummoxed as to what all the fuss was about. You certainly don’t discover from its pages the extent of the cocaine problem in Colombia itself (catastrophic, unsurprisingly).

And this matters. Just as the futility of US policy should, by rights, adumbrate the whole sorry story – yet is revealed only at the denouement – so the psychic and cultural reality of the drug itself is crucial. Ploughing my way through Killing Pablo, I was reminded of Howard Marks’s autobiography, Mr Nice, which, while ostensibly about hashish smuggling, was so freighted with tedious detail about dates, numbers and quantities that it could just as easily have been the life story of an accountant. I have every expectation that Killing Pablo will do just as well commercially as Marks’s book did: they both fulfill a vital need among the reading public for drug-free books about drugs.

4th June 2001

Drive-In Saturday

Drive-In Saturday

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

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

Scary Monsters

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

Jean Genie

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

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

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

Space Oddity

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

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

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

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

Let’s Dance

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

05.11.05

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