Will Self

Crumbling the progesterone into Cyril’s Pedigree Chum worked, and a litter of Jack Russell puppies duly arrived. Staying with Cyril’s human “owners” in the Vale of Pershore, my 10-year-old got up early and spent the morning with the little bundles of joy. He battened on to the spunkiest one of the litter, a bite-sized doglet he dubbed Maglorian. Why Maglorian? Well, the child has a considerable – and in my view, misplaced – affection for the works of J K Rowling, and apparently there’s a centaur called Magorian that lives in the Magic Forest adjacent to Hogwarts. However, Magorian, he explained, “sounds too gory”, so the “L” was inserted so that “he can be ‘Glory’ for short”.

But I wasn’t willing to call anything Glory for short – it’s either too homoerotic, or too patriotic reminiscent either of the glory holes of Manhattan’s Mineshaft in the early Eighties, or else of “Land of Hope and Glory” either way, you won’t get me wandering round south-London parks shouting “Glory!” at the top of my voice – what do you think I am, a cabinet minister? Disputes about nomenclature set to one side there was no further let or hindrance to the beast pitching up, which, a few weeks later he did. Now, my resistance to canine culture is a matter of record: not for me the shit-picking, dull-walking two-step of the tethered promenade, nor the exorbitant veterinary bills to round up sheep with a beautifully trained collie, using only a whistle and a crook is one thing, but to lower your emotional horizon to the level of these urban pavement-crawlers, selectively bred to fulfil the furry baby fantasies of the frustrated and the barren, well, that suckles.

Still, it was pointed out me, quite forcibly, that small boys need dogs, and so there was Maglorian: an itty-bitty fait accompli with tan and cream markings. Then, horror of horrors, a dreadful thing happened, the Dog Instigator had to go away for a few days leaving me in sole charge of the puppy. Well, I may be a hardhearted bastard, but I’m not a robot, and an infant is an infant, even one with a muzzle and claws. What I’m scratching at here is that – in psychoanalytic jargon – Maglorian and I both
cathected. Of course, he has imprinted me radically differently to the way I have him: to him I am a noble pack leader, scouring the horizon for the next kill, and planning how to separate the vulnerable straggler from the herd then rip its throat out whereas, to me, Maglorian’s an itty-bitty … well, I think I’ll spare you any further nausea.

My dog ownership is gifting me some new insights into the patch of town I’ve been pissing in for the past decade there’s an entire stratum of local society that I’ve previously been excluded from: the nervy lady who looks like the late Dick Emery doing a drag act, and who punctually at 9.00am walks her miniature spaniel along our road the muscular six-foot clone in the bomber jacket with the short-haired Alsatian the elderly gent who has come, inexorably, to resemble his arthritic Airedale terrier – with all of them I am now on nodding terms. Actually, I’ve always been on nodding terms with them, but now the nod is just a fraction deeper, the chin tucked down to the chest in a submissive way as we mutually acknowledge the Suzerainty of the Hound. No, it’s not the local dog people that bother me it’s the ignorant masses who coo and bill over Maglorian wherever I take him. I swear, if another femme d’un certain age, or broody couple, comes waggling up to me, speaking in baby talk, and twittering away about how sweeeet he is, I’m going to puke. Have these people no shame? Of course, I understand that they don’t really want to have dog babies any more than I do, it’s just an atavistic impulse, of the same order that makes perfectly respectable stockbrokers put on three-piece tweed suits and shoot more pheasants than they could ever possibly eat.

Perversely, although we chose Maglorian on the grounds that a small dog was better for town, the Dog Instigator has been reading up on Jack Russells, and it turns out that they are regarded as “big dogs wearing little dog suits”. I thought as much, when the five-month-old pup happily trotted along behind me for a strenuous six-mile walk. This is no lapdog to be concealed in a feminine muff (or ruff, if you’re prudish), but a noble fox terrier, a working dog, capable of tearing Vulpes vulpes apart in seconds. Good thing too – since there are plenty of foxes in this neck of the woods. Yes, as soon is Maglorian is full grown I’m going to take him out into the Magic Forest and let him bring his near-namesake to bay. A horse with a man growing out of its back? Goddamn mutants shouldn’t be allowed.

19.01.08

On a recent plane flight from Heathrow Airport, London, to Glasgow, I entered into a typical – but for all that grindingly depressing – altercation. I had been assigned the window seat, while the aisle was occupied by a man two decades younger and a head-and-a-half shorter than myself. I pointed this out to him and suggested that he might have some compassion for his elder, taller, better but he demurred, saying that he wanted to “get out quickly” at our destination. “What are you,” I snapped irritably, “a bloody brain surgeon?”

Of course, he wasn’t – he was a runner for Endemol, the TV production company responsible for such gems as Can Fat Teens Hunt? And to confirm that I was in a purgatorial transit, he and his little colleague in the middle seat spent the rest of the flight yakking nonsense, while slurping kiddie drinks – vodka and lemonade, the alcopops of a criminally extended teenage. However, in a way they did me a favour, because they forced me to contemplate: first my own weird hypocrisy – here was I, a fearless psychogeographer, ever-determined to assault the conventions of mass-transit systems, yet still falling prey to the most blinkered of herd instincts – and then, latterly, the view from the window.

It was a night flight, but even by day viewing the British Isles from the air can be a problematic endeavour: they’re too damn small, and more often than not covered in cloud, like an ancient dessert submerged in whipped cream that’s going off. At least, that’s what I like to tell myself. When I grope back through the frayed card index of my memory, I do come across startling prospects I’ve experienced from the air: the west of Ireland, spread out below, a green counterpane bejewelled with tiny lochs, the snow-bound Orkney Islands, streaked black-and-white like killer whales in the hammered lead of the Pentland Firth.

But what marks these sights out is their singularity – they are not what you expect of Britain, and especially England, its unmade bed of a landscape cluttered with human leftovers. Moreover, they are views I experienced when I – if not the world – was still young. Still, there I was, and rather than listen to the he-wank, she-wank talk of my travelling companions, I decided to garner what I could from the darkling empyrean, the bejewelled cities of the plain – like inversions of the Milky Way – and the metropolises along our route: Birmingham, Manchester, then Glasgow itself, which seemed like transparent jellyfish, sparking with unknowable sentience.

What is it about flying? Why is it that what must, by any reasonable estimation, be the most exciting and extreme, technologically mediated experience any of us are ever likely to have – apart, that is, from radical surgery – is hedged round with such ineffable tedium vitae? Getting into a titanium tube? Being hurled by vast jet engines six miles high, then impelled down an Aeolian slalom into another time zone? Why not squabble over the aisle seat, bury yourself in Grisham wood pulp, goggle at the pixellated manikins cavorting on the back of the seat in front of you, or plug your ears with soft rock – do anything, in short, to avoid being fully conscious of this revolutionary, quintessentially Modernist experience: the 600mph, hundreds of miles wide vantage of a superhero – or a god.

My hunch is that the way in which every aspect of air travel is trammelled by the ineffably dull – tedious airport architecture, monotonous muzak, anodyne announcements, superfluous consumer opportunities – is the result of an unconscious collective denial. After all, if flight crew wore winged helmets, and “The Ride of the Valkyries” came blasting over the PA as the plane picked up speed on the runway, then, when the oily behemoth slipped the surly bonds of gravity, the captain cried: “Weeeee!”, the latent anxieties of every passenger would be unleashed. Even if we survived the flight, we’d probably land determined never to do it again: “Flying? What a trip! Once is enough for me.” And the whole go-round of work-consume-travel-die would grind to a halt.

As it is, plane flight is the most intense juxtaposition of the banal and the sublime available to humanity: we sit, belted in, eating dry-roasted peanuts, and veering between contemplating our own unavoidable mortality, and the bad karma of the person sitting next to us – it’s bad enough to be working on Can Fat Teens Hunt? but to die working on it, that, like, sucks. We sit, cramped (and in my case, thanks to the teeny-rotters, with my knees pressed into my eye sockets), while just beyond two layers of Plexiglas the very curvature of the earth can be glimpsed.

It’s all enough to make anyone philosophic – except, that is, a bloody brain surgeon.

29.12.07

In July, when the ban on smoking in public buildings was introduced in England, I was in Brazil, a country where men are men (although often they have the secondary sexual characteristics of women), and they like to smoke cigars the size of Amazonian trees. They smoke them in restaurants, they smoke them in offices – they smoke them anywhere they damn well please. It’s as difficult to imagine a smoking ban in Brazil as it is a moratorium on commercial logging.

When I left Brazil, I went to the US, a country where a smoking ban has been in place for so long now that the inveterate nicotinistas have fully adapted. Setting to one side the – possibly apocryphal – tale of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg trying to have Keef Richards arrested for smoking on stage during a Rolling Stones gig at Madison Square Garden, you only have to wander the Manhattan streets for a few minutes to see the future of smoking – and how well it works. Purpose-built puffing booths, chatty, coughy colloquia at the foot of office blocks, trim uptown girls skipping along Fifth Avenue, a Hermes scarf over one shoulder, a smoky pashmina slung across the other. The American tobacco culture has rolled with the Puritanical punches, and survived.

Back in Blighty, I found a curiously unembattled smoking fraternity: we had seen the ban coming, and mostly made our peace with it. The powers-that-be had already launched trial blitzkriegs on Ireland – north and south – Scotland and Wales, so nobody was in any doubt about the consequences. I suspect the majority of smokers were like me, and accepted the ban as a fait accompli. After all, once the tipping point had been reached, and well over half the adult population no longer indulged, only a dumb bear squatting in the Forest (Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco) could reasonably expect them to put up with our shit-laden breath.

There were also those who, quite sensibly, looked to a ban as a means of assisting them to break off their affair with La Divina Nicotina once and for all. So there was little dissent, apart from the usual suspect “libertarians” banging on about their “rights”, and a few crypto-licensing agents, who inveigh against any measure that constrains an industry that derives the vast majority of its income from addicts. However, the trade had already been softened up by the timely introduction of 24-hour drinking, so, not much trouble from that quarter – and certainly no die-hard mavericks risking prosecution in order to preserve their establishments in the acrid mists of time.

The smoking ban was a quintessential Blairite policy – perhaps the signature legislation of an entire decade of government. It was a measure taken after the fact of its acceptance that nonetheless allowed the politicians involved to style themselves as the vanguard of a new health consciousness. It involved minor government spending for maximum effect, and it fitted perfectly into a hard utilitarian calculus, that sees the promotion of life – even if it’s a life endlessly prolonged in miserable sub-standard state “care homes” – as the pre-eminent moral good.

Opinions differ enormously as to whether the ban has actually achieved a decrease in English smoking. The statistics will be hard to crunch, given the porousness of our borders to cigarettes and rolling-tobacco-seeking asylum. Some opine that the ban has actually increased smoking, now that the hard-core element stop at home, chaining away, but I have my doubts. One thing is for sure: it’ll take a long time for the policy to filter through to any unequivocally positive health benefits, while the possibility remains – remote but real – that the ban may make smoking still more attractive to yoof seeking optimal transgression. Remember: nicotine is a drug.

For myself, while I never opposed the ban, I have to say that I find it a bit more of a drag than I thought I would. Perversely, although I’m a frantic gourmand when it comes to most means of intoxication, I always rather fancied myself as a tobacco gourmet. Not for me the bum-sucked Silk Cut, oh no. I always favoured the Hoyo de Monterey Epicure No 2, preferably ignited in the cosy confines of St John, my favourite London restaurant. Now that this gestalt of good food + good talk + great cigar has been blown away, I feel quite deprived. Not for me the whey-faced company who cluster beneath drenched awnings, nor the ambulatory injection of the required dosage. I have taken to nicotine substitutes in order to bridge the gulf of need that has opened up outside my own pipe- and humidor-lined study and I suspect that, fings not being wot they used to, I may soon abandon the fags altogether.

Still, what goes around comes around, and for all those triumphalist former health secretaries out there, basking in their success, it’s worth biting down on this: public smoking was banned in 17 US states in the 1870s, but when the peoples’ habits changed again, so did the legislation.

28.12.07