Listen to Will Self talking about how Britain is “a motorway race not an island race”, how motorway service stations are “microcosms of Britishness”, but how motorways nevertheless relate to “the yearning for bucolia” on the second part of this intriguing BBC4 documentary, which will be briefly available to watch on the BBC iplayer here. There is also a brief reading of Self’s short story Scale.
Recessive spleen
Click here to listen to Will Self talking about the role of satire in a recession, first broadcast on the Today programme on February 6.
Come clean, Mr Miliband – tell the truth about torture
“Now that Binyam Mohamed has returned to the UK from detention at Guantanamo Bay, there must be quite a few Whitehall mandarins — not to mention some ex-ministers — who are wandering Westminster frantically trying to clean the blood from their hands. For make no mistake: Mr Mohamed is only one among a number of British residents and citizens who claim they were tortured with the tacit support — and even connivance — of their own government.”
Read the rest of Will Self’s Evening Standard column here.
Scant cheer in Jade Goody’s tawdry circus of death
“A union between a compulsively attention-seeking and ignorant racist wearing a dress donated by Mohamed Fayed, and a golf-club wielding thug, which was attended by Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, together with assorted superannuated pop singers, while Max Clifford span a line and wangled publicity deals from Richard Desmond’s OK! magazine and Living TV.
On the face of it the wedding of Jade Goody and Jack Tweed was every single little thing every right-thinking man and woman in this country has come to loathe – the very recrudescence of the canker that infests the social body.”
To read the rest of Self’s First Post column, go here.
I shall die by inches
Will Self is going to be part of a panel discussing contemporary approaches to death and dying at the LSE on Sunday March 1, 11.30am. The event is free, but you’ll need to get a ticket.
Donors’ organs should be treated with more respect
“Twenty-six-year-old Kirstie Booker was killed in a car crash in 2006 and her organs were then used to help no fewer than five people. However, her mother has spoken out this week, seemingly suggesting that the way the NHS allocates such organs should be subject to a different ethic.
‘I find it offensive,’ says Eunice Booker, ‘that one in four of the livers donated go to alcoholics. If there are two people side by side wanting a liver, and both have the right tissue match, and one is an alcoholic and one isn’t, there’s no contest – you take the one who’s not an alcoholic, they are more entitled.'”
To read the rest of The First Post column from February 18, go here.
For better state education, we need a better state
“Last week David Cameron pledged to send his three children to state schools, saying it was ‘crazy’ to pay large sums for private education. Presumably he’d like his parents to have a refund on his own Eton fees – which at today’s prices would amount to a cool £156,000 – on the grounds that such privilege hasn’t really got him that far in life.”
Read the rest of February 12’s First Post column here.
Incidents along the road
In-depth piece about the late, great WG Sebald.
Bushy Park
You can find a Guardian news story about Will Self’s short story celebrating Bushy Park here, one of London’s royal parks, which is due to be published in May, and also Nicholas Lezard’s blog on it too.
Get off the phone and get on with your lives
“Ken Stott may be starring in A View from the Bridge at the Duke of York’s but it’s what he can hear in the auditorium that’s bothering him. Apparently, Stott was distracted by the sound of a mobile phone during a recent performance, so broke off to admonish the incontinently talkative playgoer thus: ‘Have you finished yet?'”
Mobile phones, Gerry Rafferty and Withnail and I’s London heritage all feature in this week’s Standard column, which you can read here.
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