Read Will Self’s take on the new visitor centre at Stonehenge from the Guardian Review here.

‘A few years ago, I was walking with a friend in some fields on the southwest coast of Rousay, one of the northern isles of Orkney. There were a fair amount of cattle about, but we weren’t paying much attention to them and nor were they to us. True, one beast did look significantly bigger than the others, and I said to my friend, “Oh, d’you think that might be a bull?” at the exact moment that this rather larger kine lurched into a trot and began heading our way.

‘My friend – whose guiding spiritual principle derives from a koan given to him by a sadhu he found sitting cross-legged at the source of the Ganges when he was a young man – cannot bear witness to a physical challenge without immediately responding to it: if he notes that a cliff might be tricky to scale, he scales it; if he supposes that a current might be treacherous to navigate, he strips and breasts it. Anyway, as the beast – which I could now see was conspicuously horned – came barrelling towards me, I realised that my dharma buddy was already 50m away and on the far side of a triple-stranded barbed wire fence. I reiterated: “D’you think it might be a bull?” And he shouted back: “Of course it’s a bull – look at its bloody great balls!”

‘I relate this anecdote in a spirit of unabashed nostalgia – there’s really something rather marvellous about being pursued across a field by a charging bull, even if at the far side you rip the crotch of your trousers to shreds on a fence. The experience puts you on a footing with all those finely cross-hatched figures doing similarly stereotypic rural things – spooning on haystacks, caught in mantraps – that I recall from the ancient back numbers of Punch magazines I used to read in dentists’ waiting rooms. Now, of course, these are gone – the magazines, and the free dentistry – and for the most part you don’t see bulls in fields at all. I don’t know where they keep bulls when they’re not “servicing” cows, but given our current mores it’s probably in a scrubbed and antiseptic barn unit, where they’re shown beefcake pornography and fed energy supplements so as to excite them to the correct pitch. Meanwhile, I’m still impotently out in the fields – and, trudging across them, I’ll often come across the animal’scontemporary incarnation: an empty Red Bull can.’

Read the rest of Will’s article in the Guardian here.

“A few years ago, I decided to walk on the foreshore of the Thames from Battersea Park as far to the east as I could. I had observed over the years that, at especially low tides, quite large areas of hardened mud were exposed; these were either studded with pebbles and flints, or gave way to chunks of concrete slipway, or elided into true shingle. Naturally, being the sort of man I am, I hadn’t made a comprehensive survey of either the littoral or the tide table, so I soon found myself wading thigh-high in the obscuring mocha of the waters, and feeling the thick silt ooze between my sandals and my soles. Impulsiveness has at least this virtue: it impels you.

“I’ve lived in Stockwell, about half a mile south of the Thames, for the past 17 years. At best, it has provided me with amazement: like the time when I was cycling over Vauxhall Bridge, saw a small crowd gathered by the parapet, and dismounted to see a poor whale who, scrambled up by sonar, had made his way upriver to die. And at worst, it allows me some sense of the physical landscape that underlies London‘s portentous human geography: its hulking blocks and loitering street furniture set along elongated and repetitive arterial roads. To feel the city’s location as topographically (rather than financially) determined, it’s necessary to either gain sufficient height to see the lazy S-bends uncoiling along the floor of the valley, or go down to that river itself.”

Read the rest of Will’s piece on the Thames, taken from his catalogue essay on Kurt Jackson, exhibited at the Redfern Gallery, from the Guardian here.

An interview with and piece on David Shrigley, ahead of the Turner prize exhibition, from the Guardian Review, here.

Big piece by Will Self in Guardian Review at the weekend on the efficacy of psychiatry and the role of pharmaceutical companies in treating psychopathologies, which prompted this response in the Guardian letters page.