Will Self

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A journey to the bottom of my bin bag

November 30, 2021

“Click-clack goes the kitchen bin flap and it’s as if some definitive barrier has fallen into place in our minds and we forget — we forget about our rubbish. You may be like me, and have a dedicated recycling bin in your kitchen as well, in which case where you deposit your detritus delivers you either a little positive stroke — see how virtuous I am, carefully discarding this cardboard packaging — or a tiny demerit: perhaps I should have exhaustively washed out that yoghurt pot, so as to avoid it going up in smoke?

“Because that’s the reality of what happens to our waste: the days of extensive landfill are over. The new solution is to recycle as much as possible and incinerate the rest, in the process generating electricity. I wasn’t aware of this before researching a BBC Radio 4 programme on the subject, which is not say that I wasn’t conscious of my own lack of awareness, if you see what I mean.

On the contrary, I’ve always been intrigued, good Freudian that I am, by the nature of the rubbish heap upon which our civilisation is built. For the discoverer of the unconscious, it was the desire to repress the reality of our own organic nature — and together with it, its derelictions, defecations and eventual death — that resulted in the refinements of society. But surely: as it is to the individual, so it is to the collective — if we didn’t forget about that empty yoghurt pot the second we discarded it, we might not be able to get on with our important economic role as consumers, and buy another full one.”

Read the rest of Will’s piece on what happens to our waste, published in the Times (paywall) here.

Will-of-the-Dump is on BBC Radio 4 today at 4pm.

The end of the typewriter

November 21, 2012

“It saddens me that Brother has packed up shop, but the last typewriter to roll off its very truncated production line was an electric model. I did enjoy the strange ultrasonic hum of my mother’s Brother electric in the 1970s, but while I may have begun typing at around this time, when I first began to seriously produce fiction on a typewriter it was on a manual — my by then late mother’s own Olivetti Lettera 22, which she brought with her from the US when she emigrated in the late 1950s.

“I switched to working on a manual typewriter in 2004 (all my previous books had been composed either on an Amstrad word processor or more sophisticated computers), because I could see which way the electronic wind was blowing: dial-up internet connections were being replaced by wireless broadband, and it was becoming possible to find yourself seriously distracted by the to and fro between email, web surfing, buying reindeer-hide oven gloves you really didn’t need — or possibly even looking at films of people doing obscene things with reindeer-hide oven gloves. The polymorphous perversity of the burgeoning web world, as a creator of fictions, seriously worried me — I could see it becoming the most monstrous displacement activity of all time.”

To read the rest of Will Self’s piece, which has a picture of Nick Reynolds’ sculpture of Will and typewriter, go to the Times website here.

In defence of the Shard

May 25, 2011

A peek with our digital stepladder over the Times paywall to see some of what Will Self wrote about Renzo Piano’s Shard in London:

“At dinner with a table of design professionals, including Terence Conran, I found myself defending the Shard, the 1,000ft incisor of a building currently being implanted in the rotten old gums of the Thames’s banks to the immediate south of London Bridge. Not just defending the Shard but positively eulogising it, while my companions appeared suitably bemused. They – and you – might well have suspected that I’d be agin’ the thing, as an example of all that’s fatuously overblown in the modern urban environment.

“After all, does any city – and in particular London – really need another slab of concrete with a glassy sheen stuffed full of financial services, a luxury hotel and assorted other romping rooms for the mega-rich consumer? Especially now. There’s a concept that bridges economics with urban theory called the ‘skyscraper index’, according to which the tallest building in the world tops out immediately before – in any given economic cycle – the stock market crashes. I’m not sure that the theory can be applied at the microlevel of the individual nation, and certainly Britain seems only to partially confirm the hex of the hypertrophic. One Canada Square, 770ft, the signature building of the Canary Wharf development, was completed immediately before the 1991 downturn, while Tower 42, 600ft (formerly the NatWest Tower), was fully erect in 1980, just in time for the economy to go floppy, but the Heron Tower, 663ft, was finished in the bust year of 2010, while the rather more modest Partagas Perfecto, known as the Gherkin, inflated to 591ft in the contrastingly boom year of 2004.

“Some of its opponents succumbed to schadenfreude at the end of September 2007, when it looked as if the Shard was tempting fate with its lofty hubris demolition of the existing building on the site was halted, owing, it was said, to the gathering storm in world financial markets. But then, joy of joys, those genies of the built environment (they make everything bigger), the Qataris, stepped in and financed the upthrust by buying a £150 million stake and taking full control. It was perhaps a bit of a downer for Irvine Sellar, the London developer who had chivvied, bullied and generally augured the Shard into getting planning permission from such architectural luminaries as Ken ‘Chav-ez’ Livingstone and John ‘Two Ministries’ Prescott, but hell, the important thing was that the behemoth was being built …”

“… As for worrying that the Shard marks the beginning of a Manhattanisation (or Dubaiifying) of London, there’s no chance of that. Even a well-built splinter of modernity such as this is still built to only a 50-year spec – plenty of people alive today will see it being implanted, and see it getting wrenched out again.”

A mountain of Montaigne

March 10, 2011

There’s a short, edited version of Will Self’s recent talk on Montaigne at the Institut français that can be seen here. There’s also a write-up of the event at the Literateur here.

Self recently wrote about a trip to the remote Orkney island of Rousay “fleeing a broken marriage and the physical objects of my addiction – if not the psychic furies that screamed attendance on them” and how he ended up reading Montaigne’s Essays for the first time. Here’s a little peak over the Times paywall:

“I had absolutely no preconceptions about Montaigne indeed, so ignorant was I of him that he was confused in my mind with Montesquieu, the Enlightenment political thinker (not a felicitous mistake, given that it was my failure to discourse on the latter that led to my failing the viva voce exam for my philosophy degree a decade before). And so it was without any forethought that I scanned the contents pages, listing essays on subjects as diverse as smells, silence and civil administration – then dived right in.

“Saving the feelings of three authors who have recently penned works intended to introduce new readers to the Essays, this, surely, is the best way to be exposed to him in all his joyful multifariousness. True, it’s not within everyone’s power to arrange for an uncomfortable exile simply to read a book, but then the Essays are no mere book, rather, as Sarah Bakewell makes clear with the title of her excellent synoptic biography of Montaigne, the Essays are an answer to the question that troubles all who are riddled by self-consciousness: How to live? Actually, I’d go still farther than that.

“Bakewell set herself the task of extrapolating from the Essays what biographical information is available, and others of Montaigne’s papers, the kind of answers that the sage would give to this question, as exemplified by his life and his thought. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this, and Bakewell’s book is a concordance almost as vivified as the work it parasitises upon. She is particularly adept at placing Montaigne in his proper milieu: the savagely roiling 16th-century France beset by civil wars of religion, and in giving us a portrait of the man in reciprocal relation with the evolving fame of his Essays. She writes brilliantly on the afterlife of the writer – in particular his involvement with his “adoptive daughter”, Marie de Gournay, who became his first great editor, working from earlier editions of the Essays, annotated by Montaigne, to produce a definitive edition of what, for its author, was always an inchoate and evolving work.

“Bakewell is enlightening also on the ways in which Montaigne has been a writer for all literary and philosophical seasons: a humanist universalist to his fellow Renaissance men (such as Shakespeare, whose signature we have in a copy of the first English translation of the Essays), a Roman Catholic moralist – if a wayward one – to Blaise Pascal a feeling romantic to the Romantics, a source of succour to thinkers as various as Friedrich Nietzsche and Walt Whitman and so on, right up to a present in which we can, if we like, characterise the seignior of a wine-producing estate on the fringes of the Dordogne, who almost half a millennium ago had Latin mottos carved into the beams of his tower library that can still be seen, as a kind of protoblogger.”

Rap decoded

December 11, 2010

A few peeks over Murdoch’s paywall to see what Will Self made of Decoded by Jay-Z and The Anthology of Rap edited by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois:

“I well remember hearing Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s The Message for the first time released in the United States and the UK in 1982, it charted here in August and got some airplay for a while before dropping out of earshot (although Stateside it went platinum in a month). At the time I had an early-adopting friend who earnestly assured me, while wearing a capsleeve T-shirt, that this was the shape of things to come. I didn’t think his taste in singles quite as laughable as his singlet, but nevertheless disputed it. However, nigh on 30 years later he’s been more than vindicated, for if any genre of popular music can claim to be a global soundtrack it’s rap, and if any popular art form can be said to have been genuinely influential on mainstream culture then it’s hip-hop.”

“What makes Jay-Z’s story quite so engaging is his acute self-awareness of the issues involved, when he trots shop-worn analogy between drug-dealing and other pernicious forms of capitalism you listen, because he has had frontline experience as a crack dealer himself, as well as becoming another sort of entrepreneur. And when he details the terrifying near-decimation of his father’s generation that was wreaked by the drug, and the links between the crack epidemic and the corrupt financing of the Iran-Contra arms deals facilitated by the Reagan Administration, you listen as well, because Jay-Z isn’t blethering about conspiracy, but bearing witness to a chain, the links of which
he has minutely observed.”

“But ignorance is a great prophylactic – so long as you keep it on – and now these two intelligent and considered works have divested me of my prejudicial latex, I feel nothing but grateful to have been allowed to come up close and personal with such an astonishing body of inventive, subtle and assured lyrical work. I’m not prepared to assert that rap lyrics equate in quality to this or that part of the established poetic canon – such arguments are self-evidently factitious, song lyrics exist vitally only in a Gestalt that comprises music as well, whether they’re penned by Cole Porter, Bob Dylan or Jay-Z – but what I can sign up to wholeheartedly, is that far from being a derogation of African-American lyricism, rap may be its apogee.”

Memories of Beryl Bainbridge

August 8, 2010

In the 1970s my mother did book production at Duckworth’s, the publishers in Camden Town where Beryl Bainbridge had once worked and which had published her first novels.

Colin Haycraft, the Duckworth’s supremo, was an emollient, cigar-smoking figure in a tweed jacket his wife Anna (the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis) was stylishly Gothic in dark, stretchy clothing. I did part-time work packing books at the octagonal Old Piano Factory in Gloucester Crescent where Duckworth’s had its premises.

Beryl and Anna were the first real novelists I ever met and, aged 15, I thought them unbelievably louche, stylish and soignee. Of course, I was absolutely right. Beryl had recently published The Bottle Factory Outing, that dark journey into the heart of office life which, thankfully in my view, failed to win the Booker Prize.

The cover of the original hardback (I still have it) featured a photo of Duckworth’s staff and, indeed, it was a publishing company outing to Windsor, rather than a bottle factory, that was the inspiration for the novel.

Duckworth’s parties were legendary, hard-drinking affairs with authors, staff and hangers-on all gathering in the circle of Dexion shelving where the product was stacked before packing and dispatch. You could see Oliver Sacks accompanied by one of his Tourettic patients-cum-subjects, Alan Bennett blinking owlishly and Quentin Crisp holding forth in a cloud of face powder. On one memorably drunken occasion Beryl kissed me full on the lips — I was smitten for life.

She was an unusual, angular and yet deeply compassionate woman, whose fiction reflected the idiosyncratic angles of life she tenanted for her 75 years. As I say, I am glad that she never won the Booker: this would have been too conventional a seal on what was a life far less ordinary than consensus. Beginning with dark and macabre shadings-in of the untenanted corners of the social psyche, Beryl’s writing opened out into quite astonishingly achieved acts of period ventriloquism, a million miles away from the chocolate box portrayal of historical epochs.

I cannot claim to have seen a great deal of Beryl over the years — although she gave my own first book a generous push, for which I was hugely grateful. But I was still more grateful for the impromptu speech that she gave at my mother’s funeral. When asked if anyone wanted to say anything she was the first to break that dreadful silence, and her voice — arch, husky, achieved — was as inspiring as what she said was heartfelt. I feel privileged to have known her enough to be able to appreciate that her prose style was an intimate outgrowth of a rare spirit.

I last ran into her in Flask Walk in Hampstead a couple of years ago — she with a grown daughter, I with a small son — and after the unusual pleasantries (nothing she ever said to me was commonplace), we avowed that we would meet up. Sadly we didn’t — and now, of course, we never will.

03.07.10

Teach us to Sit Still – it’s the real thing

July 15, 2010

Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing by Tim Parks, Harvill Secker, £12.99

Do I have to say this? Yes, I suppose I ought: Tim Parks‘s digressive memoir of his debilitating but ultimately life-affirming struggle with pelvic pain made me leak a few tears, guffaw a lot, and besides quietly instructing me in some fresh perspectives – on such matters as Samuel Beckett and Buddhism (and that’s only the Bs) – ultimately taught me an eminently practical lesson about coping with age and mortality. Must I utter the blurbish cliché? Why the hell not: Teach us to Sit Still made me laugh it made me cry and it made me seriously think about taking up Vipassana meditation.

I’ve been aware of Parks’s writing for a number of years, but apart from his Booker-shortlisted novel Europa – which I liked well enough – this is the only other book of his that I’ve attempted. An elegant essayist, who describes well the tortuous labyrinth of contemporary Italy – where he has lived for 30 years – his pieces crop up from time to time in the literary reviews and are notable for their air of quietly insistent rationalism. Parks is one of those writers whose prose seems always to be muttering the subtext: You and I, we understand each other perfectly, don’t we, and in so doing we can comprehend also this crazy world.

It’s the sort of confident comity that Orwell inspires in his readers, and it speaks to me of a very English empiricism: this is this – and don’t you forget it. It was no surprise to learn in this book that Parks is the son of a Church of England vicar (albeit one who tended towards the charismatic) and that while he may have rejected faith in miracles when he was a teenager, Parks retained the concomitant – and equally Anglican – faith in science (so long as it knows its limits). Like his parents, Parks had a deeply ingrained resistance to all crystal-dangling, Om-chanting and tableturning – indeed anything that smacks of mumbo jumbo.

Up until his early fifties, Parks’s very familiar brand of lapsed Anglicanism served him perfectly well. From his own luminous descriptions of kayaking and hill walking, we gain the impression of a man who was comfortable in his body, and while not exactly brimming over with job satisfaction – what ambitious writer is? – he nonetheless found his work lecturing on literary translation in Milan perfectly rewarding. From the asides he lets fall, we can gather that he is also a thoroughly married and familial man. And apart from an infection of the prostate gland that he had had in his twenties (and from which, against the odds, he had completely recovered), Parks enjoyed good health. Then came the deluge: to be precise, intense and searing pains throughout the pelvic area that yet remained curiously nonlocatable.

Accompanying this was the irritable bladder, the six-times-a-night micturition, the need to be constantly within range of a facility, the creeping impotence – all the panoply of mental and physical discomforts that zeroes in on the ageing human.

Good Cartesian that he was, and so viewing his body as a mechanism that should be fiddled back into functionality, Parks immediately hied himself to the doctors. His experience from then on was wearily familiar: the tests, and then more tests – blood, urine, semen – the breezily overconfident consultants, then the firm recommendation of radical surgery.

In Parks’s case this took the form of a procedure known as a Turps (Transurethral resection of prostate surgery), which is precisely what it sounds like: laser-burning one highway through the pesky gland, while suturing up another. The medics were so keen to begin blasting that when they had him in the stirrups for another test – a cystoscopy – one suggested that they just do the other procedure while they were at it. But Parks cried, no! And he was right to do so, because the cystoscopy revealed there was nothing wrong with his prostate, while punching the words “prostate pain” into Google conjured up 6,820,000 hits, many of which turned out to be the cris de coeur of post-Turps patients who were in more pain than ever.

Of course, while by no means Damascene, Parks had already started his conversion some time before while on a trip to India for a translation conference he had consulted an Ayurvedic doctor. Dismissive of the astro-babble surrounding the diagnosis offered, he nonetheless took note when the doctor’s wife observed ? apropos of Western mechanistic medicine ? “You only say psychosomatic … if you think the mind and body are ever separate.”

What’s most interesting about Parks’s journey back to health is that he convincingly portrays, from within, what it’s like to abandon an assumption – the mind-body dichotomy – that is itself, of necessity, ineffable.

True, there are digressions into the neurotic compulsions of Coleridge, the subtle velleities of Virginia Woolf’s characters, and the radiant verisimilitudes of Velazquez, but the main thrust of this book is towards a new kind of gestalt. Parks’s turnaround came courtesy of breathing exercises he read about in a book with the deliriously unappealing title: A Headache in the Pelvis. The authors stressed that the “paradoxical relaxation” aimed for could be achieved only under their own medical supervision, but Parks was desperate – and disciplined – enough to go it alone.

The relief from his chronic pain was dramatic: “Suddenly my belly drew a huge breath, absolutely unexpected, and a great warm wave flooded down my body from top to toe. I nearly drowned. Shocked and tensed, I sat up and opened my eyes. ‘What in God’s name was that?’.” It would be misrepresenting Parks if I portrayed him as going belly-up to his breathy belly – in fact, his journey back to health was circuitous, while throughout he retained his gentle but insistent scepticism – no credulous crystal-dangler he. Nevertheless, there was no gainsaying the intense effects of these breathing exercises or the even more intense ones when Parks begins Shiatsu massage – then the Big One: fullblown Vipassana meditation.

Here is an insistent scepticism – and an even more insistent humour. I think it’s this ability to crack a deadpan joke, whether discussing his bowel movements or the doughnut addiction of a doctor friend, that makes Parks’s descriptions of the romantic internal landscape of the meditational pupil – jagged peaks of ego lit by lightning, deluges of watery remorse – so compelling. There’s this, and his screamingly funny pen portrait of an overweight and slightly lecherous American guru who nonetheless – or perhaps because of this – is wholly authentic.

I’ve been interested in Buddhism for years, but I would say that Parks’s account of the transformations that occur to him when he goes first on a three and then on a ten-day silent meditation retreat is among the most convincing I’ve read. The realignment that Parks achieves is not some high-flown transcendence, but more akin to GK Chesterton’s credo that “even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits [is] extraordinary enough to be exciting”.

Then, towards the end of this elegant and rewarding book it began to bother me that I was enjoying Teach us to Sit Still quite as much as I was, simply because I was its ideal reader: another questing middle-aged writer with his own undelivered prize speeches (Parks digresses hilariously on the false humility of self-deprecating Booker prize-winners) and his own chronic pain. At the time of reading Parks’s book I was plagued by a torn ligament in my shoulder and, like the author, I am a stressed man who cannot find an hour in the day to sit down and breathe easily. The parallels don’t stop there: Parks grew up in Finchley, North London I was only a couple of miles away in East Finchley. True, I didn’t up sticks and move to Italy, and nor do I have the unusual mental diplopia – and again, Parks evokes this brilliantly – that comes with being bilingual.

And nor do I have Parks’s lightness of touch. It’s difficult to think of a memoir that manages to be at once as intrusive of its subject as a Turps laser, while still managing to leave the emotional tissue surrounding it entirely untouched so that while we hear of Parks’s wife and children, we never feel we have intruded on their lives.

But then, although I finished this book a few weeks ago and put it to one side, it has managed to stay with me, like an inverse corollary of the pain that it so marvellously evokes. In a world dominated by cheap self-revelation and quack self-help, I suspect that Teach us to Sit Still may be the real thing: a work of genuine consolation that shows the way out of the dark wood of middle age in which everyone, at some time or another, will inevitably find themselves lost.

This review originally appeared in the Times on 26 June 2010

On Evil by Terry Eagleton

June 10, 2010

In March I was on the panel for an edition of Question Time filmed in Canary Wharf. The big news that week — I say “big” but “awful” might be more accurate — was that Jon Venables, one of the ten-year-old boys convicted in 1993 for the murder of the toddler James Bulger, had broken the terms under which he had been released on licence and was being returned to jail. Now we have the further atrocity exhibition of two boys — aged 10 and 11 — convicted of an attempted rape on an eight-year-old girl. With such crimes as these, surely — we must collectively ask ourselves — it becomes possible to explain them only by positing the existence of some exceptional depths of inner darkness?

It was predictable that a question concerning Venables would be put to the Question Time panel: the killing of Bulger (I refrain from using the term “murder” for reasons that will become apparent) had gripped the nation. While there were some of the usual liberal suspects who protested at the idea of ten-year-old children being put on trial for murder, English law remained quite unambiguous: the age of criminal responsibility was — and remains — just 10.

Terry Eagleton, in his book-length essay entitled simply On Evil, is quick to home in on the Bulger case as deeply illustrative of our contradictory thinking on the subject. He quotes one of the police officers who dealt with Robert Thompson and Venables as saying that the minute he clapped eyes on one of these culprits he “knew he was evil”. Eagleton observes that while the policeman seized upon the term as a badge to ward off the possibility of liberal apologias for the dreadful act, in fact the ascription of “evil” does nothing of the sort. It is by no means clear that anyone could be held responsible for being born evil.

This is precisely the contradiction that James Hogg teases out in his 1824 classic whatdunnit, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. In the novel, a young Calvinist Scot encounters a mysterious figure who informs him that he is one of the elect (in other words, predestined for Heaven), and so encourages him to embark on a murderous spree on the basis that everything he does must be good by virtue of his exalted state.

Eagleton of course will have read Hogg, and the queasy equivalence between the non-responsibility of the virtuous murderer and the evil one wouldn’t be lost on him. As well as being a cradle Roman Catholic, he has also been a card-carrying Marxist. Although Eagleton may be heterodox in relation to both systems of thought, it’s nonetheless these two totalising ideologies that inform his quest for evil. For Eagleton evil is very definitely innate in humans, being a sort of French plaiting of Schopenhauer’s universal Will to Life, St Augustine’s Original Sin and Sigmund Freud’s thanatos or Death Drive. We are all born with this lust for annihilation, just as we are all born with an equal and countervailing drive towards going forth, checking out some nice tourist destinations and fruitfully multiplying. If I understand Eagleton rightly, evil arises not simply when individuals deviate from the good (this is mere wickedness) but when they try to cope with their own overpowering fear of death, pain and destruction by wreaking it on others.

Eagleton, of course, has to account for the great charnel house of the 20th century — its mass murders and genocides. On the face of it, this is where the commonsensical view that there is a line to be drawn between the merely bad and the downright demonic should favour the existence of Christian evil. Certainly Eagleton’s version of it allows for a distinction to be drawn between individuals who were carried away or coerced into abetting genocides and those who instigated and even gloried in them. But I’m not sure that he makes his case; he wants the Holocaust to be qualitatively different from all other mass murders, and so judges that it was almost uniquely purposeless — or, rather, was a collective enactment of the evil individual’s insatiable lust for autonomy.

The mass murders of Maoist China and Stalinist Russia, by contrast, Eagleton believes did at least have a point — but did they, beyond the naked exercise of power? Surely inciting an entire nation to turn upon itself in an orgy of highly personalised violence — as Mao did — is just as bad (or evil); as is a regime such as Soviet Russia, where people were murdered with supremely brutal inefficiency.

And then there’s the worrying spectacle of those bureaucrats of death such as Adolph Eichmann, who inspired Hannah Arendt’s ringing phrase “the banality of evil”. With Eichmann Eagleton seems to want to have it both ways: the office manager of the Final Solution gave exhaustive testimony before his Jerusalem trial in 1961 — mind-numbingly boring to read — but while one is left with an impression of Eichmann as insanely deluded, vain and ambitious, it’s not at all clear that he was abetting murder to assuage his own fear of death. Eagleton acknowledges the potential for evil in all of us — so might not its banality be because it is everywhere we look?

Eagleton’s problem is that he needs evil to be special, different and achingly banal all at once. He needs this because his view of what human beings are remains very deeply conditioned by his religious upbringing and his political sympathies. For Eagleton humans are, first and foremost, rational beings with the capacity for freedom of will. Of course, being a superannuated Marxist as well, he also can’t help seeing them as mired in a false consciousness that stops them moving towards God/communism.
On the Eagleton definition, we cannot really know whether Thompson and Venables were evil or not — any more than we can absolutely “know” that anyone either is or is not evil. To have a definitive answer we would need to get inside their heads in a godlike fashion.

I fear that for Eagleton the debasement of the term “evil” is of a piece with the loss of Christian faith in the West. For the fact about evil is that it exists in a purely historical sense: there is no evidence for it in religions that much predate the Christian era — nothing in Eastern religion, Plato or even Biblical Judaism. It comes into the world through the teachings of Jesus as redacted by St Paul, and probably resulted in part from a cross-fertilisation by the very Manicheanism that Christians are always at pains to disavow (even unto burning such heretics at the stake). In other words — and to be fair to Eagleton, he doesn’t really dodge this — no Christian God, no evil.

The planet after humans

April 18, 2010

It’s a measure of how our conceptions of Eden have done an abrupt 180-degree handbrake turn that Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us should have become a bestseller. This thought experiment, imagining what a post-human world might be like — and how quickly Mummy Gaia would recover from the depredations of her wayward sons and daughters — ended up being advertised on the Tube. As you descended the escalator into the frowsty netherworld, you could feast your eyes on the book’s cover image: Nelson’s Column entwined in a bushy convolvulus while the admiral’s stony gaze surveyed a tree canopy undulating towards the horizon.

The message of the book’s success was clear: a significant proportion of the reading public were prepared to entertain the idea of life-after-them, and not as a dystopic vision, but an Edenic one: the garden without Adam and Eve, only their much-loved pets, now happily liberated.

Looked at one way, every era gets the apocalypse it deserves. Wells’s alien invasion of the 1900s spawned thousands more — and these then overlapped with the nuclear fry-ups that became current from the 1940s. The natural disasters — droughts, floods, earthquakes — that ushered in the age of environmental consciousness became more and more extreme until they purged the planet as utterly as the fire and brimstone of Revelation.

So what should we make of the new fashion for a post-human world itself, rather than the 20th century’s obsessive dwelling on the wipeout? One view is that it’s simply the recasting of religious fables that are ineradicably human. Richard Dawkins might fall to the floor gnawing on the woolly his wife knitted for him, but just as his own works supply us with a story of our own origins to match any creation myth, so the post-human world supplies our need for an end-state. What’s it all been for? we cry, existentially tormented adolescents that we are. And the answer comes back: a lovely arboretum.

It seems that MI5 has largely given up on the terrorists who for years now have expressed their love for some apes by trying to kill others. It’s not that Huntingdon Life Sciences is to be allowed to go about its slicing and dicing entirely unmolested — it’s only that a clearer and more present danger has emerged: Earth First! and other eco-warrior networks have, we’re told, their wilder fringe, those who believe in the most radical solution to the threat humanity presents to the planet and its biota: getting rid of people altogether. Actually, I incline to the view that such folk are as sweetly deluded as Sarah Palin-style climate-change deniers. And like the deniers, they’re completely anthropocentric; after all, it’s still all about them — or us. But if Gaia does shuck humanity off its back, or it transpires that our own instinctive impulses — to go forth and to multiply packaging — result in the flame-grilling of our own cities, the only way of comprehending this, without recourse to a sky god, is that it’s not really about us at all. Despite our ability to comprehend our own death — whether individual or collective — and our much-vaunted free will, we’ll have to accept that our belief that humanity is different from any other species of life, whether religious or scientific, has been utterly groundless.

The writer John Gray has described the current standing-room-only situation on Earth as an example of a “population spike”; the same sort of thing you see with rats or rabbits when they’re provided with particularly easy pickings. Indeed, Gray also proposes a new Latin tag for us; no longer should we be called Homo sapiens, but Homo rapens, such has been the ferocity with which we’ve munched our way along the world’s buffet. Gray anticipates an era of resource wars and pandemics as the world warms; the population collapse will be cataclysmic — from 11 billion in the middle part of this century to…? Well, who can say?

Clearly the human suffering embodied in this stark subtraction is inconceivably vast; luckily we lack the equipment to empathise with it. Humanity is not a single family of angels but a great mass of chimpanzee troupes. Those who place a premium on human exclusivity — whether progressives who look for a technological fix or the Luddites of Earth First! — cannot help but be angry with us and themselves: we screwed it up. As things get worse, the self-hatred of humanity will ramp up accordingly. But those of us who truly accept that people are animals just like any others will have at once the most sympathy and the most detachment.

We couldn’t help despoiling the world — it’s in our nature. You cannot expect a puppy to rub its nose in its own shit — but that doesn’t make you love it any the less. I have the luxury of doubt: I don’t know if there ever will be a world without us. What I do know is that sympathy and detachment are a better basis for action than anger and recrimination.

28.12.08

A review of the Ivy

April 17, 2010

A review from the Times from December 2007, in its way the opposite of the Real Meals concept from the New Statesman:

There are London restaurants where having a well-known name secures you a table at short notice – and then there’s the Ivy. The Ivy plights its troth on being wedded to notoriety. It’s the kind of restaurant that, if it could, would tear itself from its foundations and heave across town to squeeze into the Big Brother house, before happily having sex on camera with the Wolseley or Scott’s. If you’re bridge-and-tunnel folk – snob Manhattan-speak for suburbanites – then you haven’t a hope in hell of reserving a table at the Ivy unless you call weeks, if not months, in advance. But if they know who you are, you can be magically seated.

All of which is by way of conceding: they do know me at the Ivy. Not quite as well as AA Gill, who wrote its cookbook, but well enough. Well enough that when I called for a table recently, I was asked to confirm my identity because, apparently, there’s a comic impersonator who calls up and blags reservations by pretending to be me.

Actually, I feel like I’m pretending to be me when I’m at the Ivy. As Nietzsche observed: “When I see a so-called ‘great man’, I see someone who is aping their own ideal,” and at the Ivy, there’s usually some monkey business going on. The paps gather outside the theatre opposite, where The Mousetrap is now in its fiftysomethingth year, and act out their own little play: not a whodunnit, but a who-is-it?

Inside, the warm and woody interior cossets its clientele, while through the diamond-mullioned windows comes the lightning flash as an A- (or F-) lister enters the lobby beneath the snappers’ lenses. Famous people like to be around famous people because it’s cosy and pally. And sticking together gives the comforting delusion that it is they who are the herd, while the rubberneckers are actually rather fabulous and unique individuals.

This is a win-win game that the Ivy’s front-of-house staff play brilliantly. If you have a “name”, they remember it; they say it’s nice to see you, they inquire after your wife, husband or even dead pet gerbil. They are the supernannies of the celeb circuit, and command salaries that reflect this. It’s rumoured that the doorman at Scott’s takes home about £80,000. I see nothing odd about this: getting moguls, models and mafiosi, and even muggins here, to feel good about ourselves is something a posh shrink would murder to be able to achieve.

Since I was last at the Ivy, the restaurant seems to have significantly upped its game. When I ate there in April, the food was substandard and I saw a mouse dart across the stairs to the gents. But unless the offending beastie could prove it was escaping from the theatre opposite, there’s no way its presence could be deemed acceptable.

Still, that was nothing compared to the dozen oysters I once ordered in the Ivy, which came complete with their own lice. When I objected, the then head waiter had the nerve to try and persuade me that they were a sure indicator of freshness. But that was before Chris Corbin and Jeremy King flogged it – along with Le Caprice and J Sheekey – and moved on to pastures new.

The anxiety was always that the restaurant’s new proprietors, the soulless corporation that owns the Belgo chain, would never come up with homely touches like oyster lice – or, worse, that they would muck about with the time-honoured menu. The reason I like the Ivy quite so much is that, in keeping with its role as a nursery for the famous, it basically dishes up comfort food for adults.

This is not the gaff to go to if you want your palate to be stretched until it snaps back in your face. This is where you go when you’re hungover and tired and ulcerated: it’s the Rennie of contemporary cuisine. Shellfish, game, roasts, broths and chowders – this is what we pampered types expect at the Ivy. We want them cooked well, but without unnecessary frills: there’s only the tiniest drizzle of jus on the menu, and that comes with the roast poulet des Landes with dauphin potato (chicken and chips to you, squire).

I noticed few changes in this bill of basic fare since I’d last troubled to examine it. The caviar was still there, and the sautéed foie gras, too. A substitution for the chicken tikka masala seemed to be a Thai red curry, but otherwise, all was in order: pasta dishes, risottos, even hamburgers. Our waiter tried to sell us the fish of the day – a plaice fillet cooked in black-bean sauce with salsify – but that was way too adventurous for me and my companion who, by her own admission, had been utterly “trolleyed” the night before and was in a delicate state. So she – who, while a blonde, bears absolutely no other resemblance to Adrian Gill’s famous dining companion – opted for the beetroot salad with Ragstone goat’s cheese, while I had the sweetcorn chowder with cinnamon muffin, and a brace of West Mersea native oysters on the side, purely to catch up on the lice sitch.

The Bottle Blonde’s salad looked as if it had been put together in a Greek taverna circa 1973, but according to her, the competing flavours of sweet dressing and pungent cheese remained interesting throughout the munch. I ordered the chowder purely to see how “nursery” an Ivy dish could be. I wasn’t disappointed: this was the starter as geriatric dessert, a reassuring gloop with the consistency and sweetness of a vanilla frappucino. The cinnamon muffin really was a cinnamon muffin, and as for the oysters, there wasn’t a louse in sight – unless you count me.

Last year, I cried when I realised the grouse-shooting season was over and I hadn’t eaten enough. This year, I’m not going to make the same mistake. At the Ivy, good children can have their grouse taken off the bone. I pretended I’d been good and was rewarded with a perfectly cooked bird, accompanied by creamy mashed potato and a wad of spinach.

The Ivy’s wine list is the solid business you’d imagine, running all the way up from reds by the glass for a reasonable five quid to £235 bottles of vintage Krug, but I know nothing of this, not having had a drink for many moons now. My companion – for obvious reasons – was crying off as well. Frankly, she put on a pretty poor show altogether, not even making it through her salmon fishcake with sorrel sauce – “Too rich,” she moaned pitifully – and declining a dessert. I, meanwhile, managed to cram in a steamed chocolate and orange pudding, and downed a much-needed pot of verveine tea.

The Bottle Blonde tells me that Corbin and King have lured the celebs away from the Ivy, and on the night we were there, I didn’t recognise anybody. Not that this counts for much: I didn’t even realise who Kate Moss was when she introduced herself to me. The BB told me she’d run across Jimmy Nail, Jools Holland, Lucian Freud and Helena Bonham Carter at the Wolseley in recent weeks, although she neglected to say whether they were all eating together, which would be a sight worth seeing.

On the basis of our outing, which cost £112, inclusive of the extremely nurturing service, the Ivy has every right to grab back these luminaries – or, at any rate, someone who can do convincing impersonations of them.

The Ivy
1-5 West Street, WC2; 020 7836 4751. Lunch, Mon-Sat, noon-3pm; Sun, noon-3.30pm. Dinner, Mon-Sat, 5.30pm-midnight; Sun, 5.30pm-11.30pm

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