Will’s Standard column this week.
The Black Death: An Intimate History
My favourite television series when I was growing up in the 1970s was Survivors, set in the near-future, in an England devastated by a deadly plague that had been released, inadvertently, from a germ-warfare laboratory. In my usual perverse way I liked the idea of a society reeling from such a disaster, and took a particular joy in imagining the freedoms I might enjoy in a world so turned upside down.
Judging from the mass hysteria that the very hint of such pestilence can summon up, even in such phlegmatic people as ourselves, it would seem that I’m not alone in my grim fascination. Think Sars, think Ebola, think bird flu yet behind them all, knocking on the rear door of collective unconscious, lurks the daddy of all plagues, the Black Death itself, which halved the population of England in three short months of 1349. There had been previous plagues, and more were to follow, but this was the big one.
John Hatcher, a professor of economic and social history, has taught the Black Death for more than 20 years, and in this book he has tried to do something unique. There are many first-hand accounts of the plague extant but they are mostly foreign and urban: one thinks of the introduction to Boccaccio’s Decameron, or Petrarch’s descriptions of the impact of the epidemic in papal Avignon.
Conversely, the manorial and ecclesiastical records of the Suffolk farming communities during the plague are particularly rich in the kind of detail Professor Hatcher excels in analysing, while actual testimony of what it was like to survive the Black Death is lacking.
So, why not join the two together to create a vivid and as factually accurate possible account of what it was like to experience the Black Death? If you like, a 14th-century version of Survivors.
It’s an arresting notion, and Professor Hatcher’s set-up is promising: short, objective sections prefacing each chapter, in which the epidemiology, aetiology and course of the plague are limned in while the social, political and economic institutions of England are discussed in relation to religious faith and agricultural practice. But the body of the book is a narrative of the plague that, while written in Modern English, is in many ways a convincing portrayal of the worldview of a contemporary member of the educated elite, presumably an ecclesiastic.
Professor Hatcher cannot be faulted on his devotion to the detail, or his convincing portrayal of the village of Walsham, a straggling farming community of a couple of thousand in the hinterland of Bury St Edmunds. Individual men and women are painstakingly described.
Peasants like Agnes Chapman, who witnesses her husband’s horrific death, festering with buboes, or the pious vicar, Master John, who, while privately affected by doubts, continues to encourage his congregation to repent of their sins more fully so as to avoid God’s wrath.
The local squire, Edmund de Welles, resorts to a prophylactic of his own devising: inhaling the contents of his chamber pot to protect him from the noxious vapours that it was believed along with sight transmitted the disease.
Moreover, unlike more discursive works, The Black Death conveys with great effectiveness the intensity of medieval English devotions and their deep preoccupation with the business of dying. Reading this book I was reminded time and again of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and of other peasant societies in which life and death are commingled in spirituality.
Sadly, but perhaps inevitably, Professor Hatcher lacks the novelist’s touch and his details tend to be exhaustive, repetitive, and even a little dull. Not something anyone associates with Armageddon.
The Black Death: An Intimate History by John Hatcher (Weidenfeld, £20)
09.06.08
My old man: a voyage around our fathers
This was published to celebrate Father’s Day, June 15 2008:
Will Self was born in 1961 and raised in an ‘effortlessly dull’ north London suburb. His father, Peter, held the chair in public administration at the London School of Economics. Self’s parents divorced when he was 18. He worked as a copywriter and a New Statesman cartoonist before his first collection of short stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity, was published to critical and popular acclaim in 1991. Doris Lessing said of Quantity …, ‘absurdity unfurls logically from absurdity, but always as a mirror of what we are living in — and wish we didn’t.’
A while back I found myself staying with friends outside Lyme Regis. Looking out along the beach at Charmouth, where the 12-year-old Mary Anning, out fossicking in 1811, discovered the remains of an ichthyosaur, and so began the revolution in natural history that would culminate in Darwinism, a strange intimation descended on me: yes, I had been here before, although not for many years. In fact, not since I, too, was 12. I had come to Lyme Regis with my father but what really impinged on me was that we had walked there, from Taunton, a distance of more than 20 miles. From Charmouth we had gone on, via Bridport, to Cerne Abbas, where, after lying about on the celebrated Giant, we’d sat up late in a pub discussing the future of socialism with some holidaying miners. I couldn’t recall where the walking tour ended but I did remember long, hot days and many precocious half-pints of shandy (my father had a total disregard for licensing laws).
Ours was an ambulatory, ludic and pedagogic relationship. My mother and father separated when I was nine, and although my father ambled back to the family home from time to time, over the next eight years, until I went to university, we mostly met either at his club, the Reform on Pall Mall, where we played endless games of snooker and billiards or else took walking tours together.
I’m saddened, now, by the extent to which the animosity of my parents towards each other influenced my perception of my father. I tended to take my mother’s view of him: he was solipsistic, criminally self-absorbed, and incapable of true sympathy. He was a male chauvinist, and, despite his left-leaning politics, an unreconstructed upper-middle-class snob. Moreover, he was a cosseted mummy’s boy (my grandmother didn’t die until she was 96). But the truth was that I loved the long, gloomy afternoons at the Reform, and loved even more the walking tours. In fact, even though I couldn’t acknowledge it at the time, I loved my father.
He was a natural teacher — possibly a great one. He held the chair in public administration at the London School of Economics but his interests were wide-ranging: from metaphysics and political theory to urban planning and back again, and on those tramps he inculcated me with both his own analytic rigour and his love of happy disputation.
He was also a storyteller. When my brother and I were small, and would climb into his bed in the morning, he kept us enthralled with a saga about a giant called Edward who lived in a house on Hampstead Heath and worked as a consulting private detective. My father was the presiding spirit of something called the Carr Society (named after the crime writer John Dickson Carr), a group of like-minded men who pub-crawled across the Chilterns, telling each other detective stories they’d made up. When I grew older I went on one or two Carr Society walks and was called upon to spontaneously compose a story of my own — excellent training for a writer.
Growing up in the 1970s, I couldn’t help but be conscious of my father’s whiff of anachronism. He once announced that he would be taking me to Muswell Hill ‘to buy some dancing pumps’. He often called upon me to put on my ‘little jerkin’. He himself habitually wore grey flannel Oxford bags, tweed jackets and gabardine macs — no cagoule ever got near him. He was 42 when I was born so I only ever knew him in middle age, and his own character had been formed in the 1930s.
As I grew older — and wilder — my anger towards, and rejection of, my father increased. He could never understand my proclivity for drink and drugs. As I said, he had no time for licensing laws, and never objected to my drinking and smoking — both of which he enjoyed. ‘But,’ he would counsel me, ‘you should exercise moderation in all things.’ He himself had an unflappable and distinctly phlegmatic manner (although within seethed a distinctly Romantic nature). The strange thing is that while I recall violently arguing with him, and feeling enormous animosity when he was absent, right up until his death, aged 79 in 1999, we enjoyed each other’s company.
Not that we saw each other a great deal. My father emigrated to Australia in 1980. For a seemingly slow and orotund man he had a tremendous work ethic, and rather than take retirement in the UK he took up a new academic post at the Australian National University in Canberra. He was teaching up until 12 weeks before his death, and his last book, Rolling Back the Market , a critique of the slavish belief in free-market economics, was published posthumously.
When I went out to see him in Australia, or he visited England, our relationship always resumed its walking and talking course. He was a somewhat distant, but for all that loving, grandfather to the three of my children whom he knew, and one of the last recollections I have of him being in the house where I’m writing this was of him picking up his youngest grandchild. No mean feat.
I’ve said it before — and I’ll say it again: it always seems to me that we come to know our same-sex parents through the bodily and the involuntary through a kind of fossicking of our own physical strata. As we come to resemble our fathers, so we re-encounter the individual who reared us. I turned 42 four years after my father died. Since then, with each succeeding year I feel I’ve come to know him better and better: I feel him in my habits of mind and my physical quirks. I sense him in my capacity for companionable solitude — both writing and musing — and, naturally, I am aware of his presence, both within and beside me, as I set off on yet another long walk.
15.06.08
God’s own country
I knew it was going to be a great day out when I got to Halesworth Station: for a start, the sun was shining, and I like that. I’m not one of those brooding types who goes in for the pathetic fallacy of saying, “Ooh, I love cold, rainy weather”, as if this somehow confirms the dank seriousness of their own inner life. No, give me May sunshine, and a trip to a small Suffolk terminus with a museum in the old ticket office, and I’m as happy as a sandy beach boy. And what a museum! Complete with Iron Age artefacts, and a lady at a desk who looked at me suspiciously when I asked her where the public toilets were, presumably because she herself hadn’t had a bodily function since the coronation.
I detoured into the centre of town to perform my offices, then retraced my revolutions — I was on the fold-away bike — and headed for Holton, a mile distant. I’ve known the seaward part of this area since childhood, but I’d never been to Halesworth before. I think of east Suffolk as a landscape of repose and ingress: the lion shall drink Adnams, then lie down in an osier bed and sleep for a decade. It’s not overly oppressive like the breckland of Norfolk, or the fens of Lincolnshire, but gently rolling like the lightly rumpled duvet of a snoozing Ceres. Church spires and the sails of windmills loom above the fields, so that over miles you can orient yourself by the twin — and immemorial — poles of English rural life: God and bread.
The particularly fine windmill at Holton beckoned me into the village, and shortly thereafter I was cycling up the track towards St Peter’s Church — flint-knapped, round-towered, 11th century at a guess — where, in the vicarage, my purchasers were waiting for me. Yes, it was that time of the year again when I spent a day with the successful bidder in The Independent’s Christmas charity auction. This year the Reverend Liz Cannon had bought me, ably assisted by her husband, David, a retired systems analyst, who — among other talents — has internet auctions down to a fine art.
Liz — as did David — grew up in Norwich, and it was to there — after spells in Lowestoft, Ipswich and London — that she returned after her first husband died, in order to raise her son and daughter. She was raised a Methodist, worked in education, and always had a strong faith. However, Anglicanism, like her vocation, seemed to have rather crept up on her: a slow-burning conviction of the universality of God’s love, and the need for her to convey it. She was ordained as an Anglican priest at Norwich cathedral almost 12 years ago.
And after a curacy in Norfolk, during which she and David met and married, they moved to a parish at Cross Roads near Keighley in West Yorkshire. The parish abutted the Brontë’s Howarth, but it was more the experience of working in a hilly, and ethnically mixed community, that struck the couple. That, and the way the position crept up on Liz: “Initially I found the moors very claustrophobic, and the town looked very dour. The Archdeacon said I should take as long as I wanted to think about it, and when we came back again it all seemed completely different.” They stayed for six years. “I remember being at the big anti-war demonstration in Bradford, and feeling quite intimidated by all the chanting, but then thinking to myself: we’re all on the same side here, we’re part of a community.”
Eventually, however, Liz and David returned to East Anglia, and I could understand why as we left the vicarage and strolled down paths, past apple orchards, to the old Southwold railway line, which we followed into Halesworth. Over the Millennium Green (“It was quickly established,” David told me, “to stop Tesco grabbing it for a superstore”) came the sound of St Mary’s Church bells, a carillon being rung — I was told — in my honour.
Well, things don’t get much better than that — but they did: I got to meet the bell ringers, and then, after lunch at the Angel, the three of us strolled back to Holton. Talk had been eclectic: from the Archbishop of Canterbury (Liz’s employer), to Bernard Matthews (a big local employer, until his turkey-processing plant went down with bird flu). And we’d also discussed my pet notion that the places we end up staying in choose us, rather than vice versa.
As we looked round St Peter’s, David said to me, “You know, I’ve been thinking about your idea that places choose people, and I think there’s a lot to it. When I was a boy my parents often drove down this way to get to Southwold, and when Liz and I were first together we did the same thing. I never paid much attention to the area, but perhaps it was choosing us after all.”
That’s east Suffolk for you, a broad landscape of ingress and repose, not unlike the Anglican Communion.
To see Ralph Steadman’s artwork, visit here
31.05.08
Boris’s Tube ban won’t be enough to cure our hangovers
The fact that Saturday’s Facebook-advertised party on the Circle line to mark the Mayor’s new ban on drinking on London’s public transport got out of hand was achingly predictable; but that it should’ve been organised by a City go-getter, miffed that his pal lost her job when the previous incumbent, Ken Livingstone, lost his, is almost too good to be true. Yet there was Alexandre Graham, the 26-year-old RBS banker, popping a bottle of bubbly in a Tube carriage, while all around him tipsy high spirits condensed into pissed bad vibes.
In a way Graham and his actions sum up contemporary London far better than Boris Johnson could ever hope to: London’s anarchy, its irrationalism and its hedonism, but most especially its centuries-old tradition of street theatre, whereby the mob itself struts upon the stage of power. That the mob should also be drunk goes without saying.
I’m not making a case for unfettered public drinking being a good thing – I find crapulent teenagers and twentysomethings quite as noxious as any other sober grump – but in a week that sees an increasingly tired and emotional Government lashing out with still more legislation aimed at curbing the menace of drunken teens, you have to ask yourself: isn’t the law already a herd of asses when it comes to boozing? And hypocritical asses to boot, thrusting the bottle at the British with one hand, while trying to yank it away with the other.
The new legislation is aimed at criminalising under-18s who “persistently” drink in public, while also criminalising parents who let their under-12s drink at home. At the same time, the Government is to issue a guide to exactly how many units are suitable for younger drinkers. Naturally, the hedonists cry that all this betokens a ghastly nanny state. They’re dead right: they have abrogated the responsibility for teaching our kids how to drink in a socially acceptable way and the Government has taken it on.
My view is that the only way to avoid a nanny state is to have a parental one. The home and family-based social gatherings are where young people should learn how to drink alcohol responsibly; the wider society should only tacitly enforce – through general disapproval – what’s already deemed unacceptable. Of course there are going to be young people who “persistently” drink in public and indulge in antisocial behaviour, but my hunch is that they’re either nascent alcoholics or have other severe problems: further criminalisation is not the way to deal with them either.
Funny old Boris Johnson, who won the mayoralty on a “he knows how to have a good time” ticket, is now in danger of seeming like just the sort of numbing killjoy that New Labour has been brewing for a decade now. Frankly, I’ve never been troubled by people drinking on the Tube, but as for people scoffing fried chicken out of boxes – string ’em up, Boris.
03.06.08
Barking mad
To paraphrase Oscar: “Some people come to resemble their pets, that is their tragedy some people don’t come to resemble their pets, that is theirs.” I think in this context of the German woman I have met twice now walking her Leonbergers down the road near Clapham Junction where the boys and I wait to get the bus on the way back from school. The woman is frowsty with a leonine head of pink, dyed hair, thick round the middle – she’s only 5ft 2in, or thereabouts, and must weigh getting on for 10 stone – and as for the dogs… well, they’re not called Leonbergers for nothing. This is the nearest thing you get to lion that’s still canine. Their dotty owner – who snapped “Leonberger!” at me, when I asked what breed they were (as if it were entirely obvious) – must have to go out with a shovel to pick up their dung.
How much more appealing is the equally dotty woman I’ve encountered by night in Battersea Park, her white perm flaring around her pretty face, her retrousse nose questing the night air. Around her ankles bounce five creatures that closely resemble Japanese Manga comic creatures, or vaguely canine Teletubbies. They are, it transpires, Bichon Frisees, and she loves them to bits. Loves them so much, that when she told me her husband had said he’d leave her if she got any more, I detected a distinct froideur in her tone. This is one fellow who may come home one night to discover that the dogs have eaten his dinner, his house, and half of his income for the foreseeable future.
I swore that I wouldn’t become one of those dog owners who anthropomorphise their pets, and attribute to them all sorts of qualities they manifestly don’t possess, the sort of Jilly Cooperesque twerp who puts up monuments to the animals who died in two world wars, incised with the words “They Had No Choice”. Of course they had no fucking choice – and they had no say in your bloody memorial either. But then there’s Maglorian, my Jack Russell, who isn’t so much a dog as … a furry baby. There was a piece in The Daily Telegraph a few weeks ago saying that people who sleep with their pets in the bed are laying themselves open to diseases however, at the end it was conceded that you’re far more likely to contract something nasty from your kids.
Same diff’ chez Self, where dogs, children, whatever – they all end up in the big duvet tent. No doubt much like the home life of our dear new London Mayor. Still, dogs have it over children in all sorts of other ways: they don’t ask continuous – and impossible-to-answer – questions they never grow up and, better still, they really like going for walks.
But this being confessed, I have a ruthless streak when it comes to Maglorian. I had him up that vet to get his balls scythed off as soon as I could. I wanted him docile, I wanted him to be a homebody, I favoured the idea that he would become a superb counter-tenor barker, as against him shtupping every little waggle-tailed slapper in the neighbourhood. Also, it means that when he goes after balls in the park – which he does all the time, under the signal delusion that he can play football – it means I can quip: “He wants your ball … because he hasn’t got any of his own.”
Ah, park life. I thought I’d done it to death, I thought I’d covered the pondfront, what with working in parks for the Greater London Council in my twenties, followed by nearly two decades of having children under eight. How wrong I was with Maglorian to be walked three times a day the intensity of my relationship with parks – and their habitues – has deepened inexorably. And where there are parks, there are other dog owners, which in our part of sarf’ London means owners of huge savage-looking dogs with studded collars, straining on the end of their leashes while some character with tattoos/gold teeth/gold bracelets/gold necklace/ sidearm (delete where appropriate) says, “Back! Fang/Blood/Bruvver (also delete where appropriate) – and frankly, such is the ire that these playlets of male impotence masked by canine potency induce in me, that I’d happily put the Staffordshire Bull Terrier/Bullmastiff cross’s owner to sleep.
Until, that is, you begin talking to the buggers, and they turn out to be perfectly mellow fellows, with nothing but sweet, cuddly, loveable things to say about their furry babies: “Nah, nah, mate – ‘e’s not a fightin’ dog, ‘e’s great wiv kids – blinding, really.” Blinding indeed, and bark-stripping as well – the trees in the local park look as if an incendiary bomb has been let off in the vicinity, a nice conceit, given that before the Blitz this open space was covered in terraces.
The only question is, is it the man who’s taught the dog its parenting skills, or vice versa? Oscar would know.
24.05.08
To see Ralph Steadman’s accompanying artwork, go here
Outtakes from The Word
Further to an interview with Will in the May edition of The Word magazine, here are some extra bits
The Butt review
Michael Bywater reviews The Butt in The Independent.
Boomtown stats
Last time I was in Dublin, Vivian drove me round in a big black Merc; this time it’s a still bigger and blacker Chrysler. “I should’ve bought a cement truck,” he observes, as we ooze past the Point, a massive new shopping-cum-entertainment complex that’s sprouting a small forest of large cranes. “I’d be coining it now.” Last time I was in Dublin, the old city seemed teetering on the edge of being metropolitan – now it’s fallen over. Last time I was in Dublin, the joke was the group of three pyramidical office blocks on the bank of the Liffey that were known locally as “Canary Dwarf”; now it’s them that have been dwarfed – or, at any rate, flanked by acre upon acre of plate glass and steel.
The day I was in town, things looked to be going well for the egregious Bono, and his partner in development, the Edge. Their plans to have Norman Foster revamp their Clarence Hotel – also on the banks of Holy Liffey – were flowing through the planning board meeting, and despite some sour remarks from a local conservationist, Michael Smith, who described the proposed building as a “cannibalistic behemoth”, it looked as if they’d get the go-ahead.
I couldn’t get excited about the new hotel – but then, who can? Show me someone who’s excited about a new hotel, and I’ll show you a raving eejit with the soul of a shebeen-keeper. Vivian drove Cormac and I out to the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, not, you appreciate, because we were old soldiers who needed taking care of, but because the historic building (complete in 1684, two years before the Royal Hospital in Chelsea), is now home to the Irish Museum of Modern Art. We were going to see an exhibition of William Burroughs’ shotgun painting, bizarrely juxtaposed with examples of Hans Christian Andersen’s beau coupage. Hmm.
The paintings were shite, basically, any old junkie with a shotgun could’ve pulled it off, but more importantly there was one of Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s original “dream-catching” machines. The whirligigs of light and motion that the two writers believed put them in touch with the noumenal world. I’m already hot-wired to this, but Peter – who we’d picked up en route – was a tad dismissive: “It’s basically a Lava Lamp,” he said, but I came back at him, “What’s wrong with Lava Lamps? I love Lava Lamps; in fact, I love Lava Lamps more than I love people.” Incidentally, the Andersen cut-outs were quite pretty.
In the bowels of the ancient building, where James Connolly was held for a time after the Easter Rising until the Brits got round to executing him, we chanced upon a potent symbol of Ireland, old and new: a photo-real image of a man’s hands cradling a rugby ball made from the hide of a living cow, complete with several teats. “It makes me feel queasy just looking at it,” Cormac said, but I caught the hint of desire in his tone.
Last time I was in Dublin, the European Union heads of state were there; this time it was José Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission. Barroso was intent on selling the benefits of a new World Trade Agreement, but the Irish farming community weren’t so sure; they’d come up from the sticks in force, and as Cormac and I reached Heuston Station there they were, florid-faced men in tweed, their fingers itching to grab the teats on a living rugby ball.
This was to be the highpoint of my visit: last time I was in Dublin, the traffic was all snarled up because they were building the track for the new light railway, the Luas, but now it was done and we were to take a ride. “It wasn’t open two days,” Cormac said, “and they were calling it the Daniel Day.” The Daniel Day hove into view, all shiny and new, but still, unmistakably … “Look, Cormac,” I told him, “I don’t know how to break this to you, but that’s a tram.”
We rode the tram into Jervis, by the Four Courts, and then crossed the James Joyce Bridge to the other side of the Liffey. At least, I think it was the James Joyce Bridge; it could’ve been the Samuel Beckett Bridge, or the Jonathan Swift Bridge, or the Flann O’Brien Bridge. At the rate they’re going with these writerly Dublin bridges, they’ll have one for old Maeve Binchy ‘n’ all. Still, if they know how to honour their writers in Ireland, they also know how to honour their painters. After all, Francis Bacon’s London studio was painstakingly dismantled, crated, shipped, and then reassembled in a Dublin art gallery.
It’s the same with smoking. That night we dined in a small bistro where an outside area had been equally painstakingly contrived to look like a room, complete with walls, carpeted floor, and an almost ceiling. Space heaters kept us warm as we puffed, supped and munched. Last time I’d been in Dublin, it had been … exactly the same. Pure genius, indeed.
03.05.08
To see Ralph Steadman’s accompanying artwork, visit here
Guardian ‘Why I write’
An interview from May 9 2007
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