Will is going to appear on Comey Lab: Karl Pilkington — Satisfied Fool on Channel 4 on October 22, 11.05pm. “After disappointing exam results nineteen years ago, Karl Pilkington looks to find out if more intelligence and knowledge will make him happy by meeting some well-known intellectuals.”
Watch it here on YouTube.
Will writes about Damien Hirst’s £50 million diamond-encrusted skull
Will has written an essay focusing on celebrity and our uncomfortable relationship to it for Alison Jackson Confidential, published by Taschen, which has been reprinted in the Daily Telegraph.
Will is going to be doing a number of talks and readings with Ralph Steadman for their new book, published by Bloomsbury on October 22, in November and December
Will was talking about his forthcoming book, Psychogeography.
11.10.07
Norman Foster comes to me: “I’m sorry,” he moans pitifully, shaking the cuffs of his shirt as if he was Marley’s ghost and they were silken chains. “Sorry…?” I gag on mucous sleep. “What the hell for?”
“Stansted,” the architect wails. “I never should’ve designed it that way. True, it looked good on the back of the envelope — and elegant once my team had put it on the Cad system, but I now realise that it’s a monstrous wedge of a building, a static plane crash of a structure, forever ramming a humungous divot out of the living, beating heart of old England! Aaaargh! Euurgh! Oh woe is little me!”
“For Christ’s sake, man, get a grip on yourself!” I grab him by the padded lapels of his tunic-style jacket and several of his propelling pencils pierce my skin. “It’s just a bloody airport.”
He throws me back on to the pillows: “Nothing is just a bloody airport!” he cries. “And if I’d never built it, you wouldn’t find yourself in this dreadful situation, with … with … them … out there.” He gestures wildly to the window.
Pushing the Baron of Thames Bank aside, I rise and stalk across the room. Drawing up the blinds I see them: hundreds upon thousands of avocets, distinctive, black-and-white wading birds with long curved beaks. Except that they aren’t wading on the muddy foreshore of Essex, they’re roosting on the concrete walkways of the flats opposite my house, row upon row of them, burbling with a sinister intent.
“They’ve come for you,” Foster bleats, his snowy manicured hand on my bare arm. “They’ve come for you, because of what you said on the Today programme …”
And then I wake to find that it was all a dream — the birds, that is Lordling Norm’ is lying, bollock-naked across the bed, clearly replete after a night of feverish lovemaking. I tell him about the disturbing in-take to my filmic life, The Birds.
“Yes, well,” he says sympathetically, propping himself up one elbow. “You have to admit it was a mistake to say on national radio that the third London airport should’ve been sited in the Thames estuary because there were only a load of birds out there.”
And, of course, it was, but then it was 6.50am on a Saturday, and I was sitting in the weird confines of a BBC sound van outside my house, having just listened to Chris Mole, the MP for Ipswich, burble on (although the only bird he bears a resemblance to is the dodo) about an expanded Stansted airport being “a driver of economic activity”, enabling “hi-tech businesses to compete globally”. In such circumstances I could, perhaps, be forgiven — although probably not by an avocet.
It had turned into a weirder day still. I pedalled the fold-away bike across and over the river. London Bridge was closed for the Mayoral Thames Festival, and, weaving across three lanes in blinding sunlight, it seemed as if the neutron bomb had dropped, leaving only the gleaming buildings. There were people at Liverpool Street station, but they were only bronze statues of children fleeing Nazi persecution.
On the train I shared a carriage with the new Kindertransport: young Poles on their way back to Krakow after a hard week doing house conversions in West Ealing. At Stansted, I unfolded the bike and pedalled up ramps of Babylonian massivity and into the terminal, where I squatted in a little hut and did a shit. There’s nothing more calculated to diminish the pretensions of High Modernism than taking a train to an international air hub, crapping there, then cycling away.
Of course, I was nearly killed on the approach roads, but I made it the three miles to Hatfield Forest, where I spent a happy couple of hours in the company of the honest burghers of the Stop Stansted Expansion Campaign, on their annual beating of the threatened bounds of this millennium-old managed woodland. Deer flashed through the covets, there was coppicing and pollarding aplenty, and the occasional easyJet burbling overhead seemed as inoffensive — if not as monochromatic — as an avocet.
At the end of the morning, I found myself in conversation with Ade, the National Trust’s man on the spot. He told me that during the last big foot and mouth crisis, the forest was closed and the resident deer herd massively proliferated: “There were so many, and they grew so bold, that you’d see hundreds sunning themselves in clearings.” It was with this image of a pandemic-induced, Chernobyl-style singularity that I pedalled away across country. As ever, mistaking my Ordnance Survey map for the territory, I failed to factor-in the ghastly new four-lane A120, and ended up lugging the bike up its autogeddon berm.
Back at Stansted, Norman was waiting for me. He was still sorry — but what good are regrets?
29.09.07
“I went to a barber’s shop in Greek Street, Soho, about a month ago and realised that it was only the third time I have been to one in my entire life. In the mean old brilliantined days, small boys were forced to sit on a plank placed across the arms of the barber’s chair, and this, I contend, made them scowl, because they were the objects of ridicule. Consequently, I refused to go to a barber and preferred to cut off my own hair when necessary.
“Then I shaved off all my hair as part of some daft bet when I attended life classes at East Ham Tech College. This was nearly fifty years ago, long before the style became fashionable, and it never really grew back properly again. When I first encountered a skinhead, in Carshalton, Surrey, in 1969, he said, ‘All right, geezer,’ then did a double-take.
“I believed that I had made my hair feel unwanted, but in fact the exact opposite was my heart’s desire. Hence the nature of the trio’s detached hairstyle and the oddness of their bearing. The hand in the ear is a cry for help, the conch my listening for wisdom and my whole life’s autobiographical stance. I was brought up in a 3rd-floor council flat on the North Wales coast, an evacuee from Wallasey — not even Liverpool! From my attic bedroom skylight window all I could hear was the sea and a seagull. No real birdsong.”
I worry when Ralph talks like this: with a tone of haunted and valedictory reminiscence. Worry, because he isn’t here. Not only isn’t he here — there’s no one else here either, unless you count the businessman in the blue-and-white check shirt sitting opposite me preparing a Power-Point presentation on his laptop. But I don’t count him, because I see him bloody everywhere, and if I started counting him and his doppelgangers I wouldn’t know when to stop.
No, not only isn’t Ralph talking, but I’m also listening to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, played by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, so if Ralph were to be speaking of his childhood as an evacuee on the North Wales coast (incidentally, the “not even Liverpool”, struck a particularly affecting note, yes?) then it might well represent the breakthrough into either operatic acceptance for him, or full-blown psychosis for me.
I’m on a train from Manchester, putting this column together out of curls and cuttings of personal hair-story. I too have gone slap-head (as they say in the city Ralph doesn’t hail from). Someone told me the visual content of your dreams massively increases if you either shave your head, or wear a woolly hat to bed. I tried them both. I thought I’d look like a Buddhist monk, all lean and ascetic but I more closely resembled the wrestler Big Daddy, and elderly women ran screaming from me as I strolled through the streets of Oxford, a town that ever afterwards has been associated with alopecia for me. “Beliefs are ideas going bald,” a remark credited variously to Andre Breton, Lautreamont, Leonard Cohen and Big Daddy, but which I claim as my own.
Baldness is a touchy subject in our family. Both my brothers lost their hair at an early age — one of them never really gained any. And being a nasty little tyke, I guyed them mercilessly about this. A couple of years ago, still being the proud possessor of a crowning glory that some have dubbed “the Koh-i-Noor Diamond of coifs”, I resolved to make amends. For eight whole seasons I gave Keith — my redoubtable hair man, who shears at World’s End in Chelsea — the swerve. If I saw him in the King’s Road I looked straight through him and said, “I do not know you.” Whereupon he stared at me and replied, “I don’t know you either, mate, but you could do with a barnet.”
Eventually, I had enough locks for any old lusty prince to bust into my tower. Keith gave me the chop, and I had the clippings made into two absolutely beautiful wigs, which I presented to my aggrieved siblings. Were they grateful? Were they fuck. The threw the toupees back in my face, crying out that this was the cruellest taunt of them all. I don’t know, there’s just no pleasing some people.
In conclusion then: Ralph may have thought he was drawing three of his own personae, but, in the grand tradition of the Surrealists, he unwittingly ended up depicting my brothers and myself, reunited in the afterlife, all with great hair. The symbolism of the clockwork mechanism, the conch shell and hand poking out of one of our ears is also easy to explain. But what any of this has to do with geography is utterly beyond me. I may have to ask the man sitting opposite.
06.10.07
Standing in the offie last night I witnessed a happy interchange between the proprietor, who I assumed to be from Pakistan, and three, blonde, giggling customers who I assumed to be Polish. The proprietor had very little English and the Polish girls hardly any at all, yet they all seemed to get along just fine. Of course, I doubt these are the kind of “skilled workers” who, the Prime Minister announced yesterday at the TUC conference, will henceforth have to learn English before they’re allowed to permanently settle in Britain. For a start, the new rules only apply to those from outside Europe, and I doubt the offie proprietor pitched up at immigration with a business plan in broken English: he’s somebody’s son, father or husband.
The Government is touting its new rules as what’s needed to avoid “ethnic polarisation”. Jacqui Smith putting a more mumsie face on the new rules has said they will help migrants to both integrate and benefit Britain. But at root I think she and her boss are playing to Middle England, which is the only thing Gordon Brown really understands by his much-touted “Britishness”.
Since from now on low-skilled migrants are not going to be allowed to settle, I suspect the actual impact on numbers will be slight. No, this is about playing to the white gallery in the shires, while attempting to construct an immigration policy that will seem all things to all shades of colour and opinion — an impossible chimera.
Here in sarf London we only have to go to the offie to see how complex the reality of immigration is on the ground. I completely agree that speaking English is the best way for newcomers to integrate in our city, but in my neighbourhood, known as “Little Portugal”, the worst monoglots to maintain a bigoted, clannish outlook aren’t the East Africans or the East Europeans but the Portuguese, and possibly even the native English, white or black.
London, free of the bigoted girdle that constrains the provinces, and always a window on the world, has absorbed more migrants, more quickly, than any other region of the country. As global polls show that our city is regarded as second only to New York in the cool stakes (whatever they are), we Londoners understand that our receptivity to migrants is key to our economic expansion.
There’s a downside to this, of course. But it’s difficult to convince Londoners who know fine well there’s a vast black market of illegal migrants toiling away right in front of them that it’s the increased pressure on public services: most of the capital’s hospitals are run by migrants. No, the downside is inextricably mixed up with the upside: it’s sweat-shop labour and cheap drugs, ghettos and gangs, road congestion and exhaust fumes. But while the PM may be a skilled migrant from the far lands of the North, and his English may be fairly good, there are Poles and Pakistanis down my way who speak cockney better than he ever will.
11.09.07
A Q&A about Will’s home town, from the Evening Standard, 8.11.01
Glencoe. It’s late August but already there’s a hint of autumn in the air, along with the droplets of smirr and the midges dancing between them. Further south the heather is still in full flower, but up here in the central Highlands, the stark triangles of the mountains are at first tawny, then swathed in grey mist, then tawny again. I unload the car and pitch the tent, while the small boys head off to explore the riverbank. I want them to fetch firewood, but they return empty-handed: over the summer the campsite has been picked clean, bucolic louts have even hacked at the living alders and birches.
I head off downstream to where some large timber has been disgorged on to the stony bluffs. It’s too large: entire trees, their root systems embedded with rocks lie like stranded krakens. I wrench a couple of limbs off and drag them back, then gather a few handfuls of twigs and wager our last firelighters on stimulating a conflagration. Dusk and clouds are flowing down into the U-shaped glacial valley, the midges are getting fierce: We need smoke.
Then comes Colin. I’ve encountered him already, a portly, middle-aged man, in grey tracksuit bottoms and a check wool shirt. He has a regulation bald patch, and as I passed him on the path he wished me a cheery “Good evening” in a New World accent that I couldn’t place. Now he comes up to our fireplace and says, “I heard the kids’ voices and had to come over, I’m missing my own ones and dying for a little company,” then he giggles, a disagreeable cartoon chuckle. “I was sitting at home in Glasgow at six this morning, when I decided that I couldn’t stand the city anymore, so I got in the car and drove up here,” again the naughty giggle and a conspiratorial look. I came here to get away from all Colins, but this one has latched on effortlessly.
“I don’t think that’s gonna catch,” he says, gesturing at the fire. It’s true. The early promise of the firelighters has given way to a forlorn charring. “I’ve got some kindling and logs in the car, if your lad’ll give me a hand,” he gestures at my nine-year-old, selecting his volunteer, “I’ll go and get them.”
“Go on then, Ivan,” I say, but as he obediently trots off through the woodland behind Colin I am gripped by a dreadful anxiety: this Colin isn’t just some saddo loner with grating mannerisms, he’s a highly organised paedophile, who’s going to whip my son into the back of his car and drive him away … Glencoe will become the ominous backdrop for another bloody massacre … Then I check myself: Christ! I’m falling victim to just the free-ranging, stranger-danger paranoia I so despise in the commonality. I’m damning a man for being a pervert simply because he’s being friendly. I hunker down to the fire, trying to coax it back into life — but it’s no good, the anxious worm is boring through me, and I find myself scampering through the woodland in studiedly casual pursuit, only to encounter Colin and Ivan on their way back with the logs.
So, having falsely accused him, I’m condemned to Colin for the evening. Still suspicious, I draw him out. It’s a rule of meetings with unremarkable men that if you question them they’ll remain transfixed by their own incuriosity. So it is with Colin. While we get the fire going (and even with his logs, his coal and his kindling, it fails to properly ignite until he applies his electric air pump), and the boys toast their marshmallows and slurp their hot chocolate, I learn a lot about him, while he remains in total ignorance of us.
Colin’s parents emigrated to Canada when he was a kid. He grew up there, joined the Canadian Navy, trained as a radar plotter, then left and came back to his native Scotland in the early 1990s. He hasn’t worked properly since. He has a girlfriend and a couple of kids. He’s also got diabetes and has had five heart attacks. I’m shocked when he tells me he’s four years younger than me — he looks much older. He sits at home in Glasgow, growing hydroponic weed in his cupboard, which explains the giggling and the claustrophobia. Every so often he drives his Mondeo up north and squats in this campsite, staring out at the mountains he’s incapable of climbing.
As I pump Colin for his life story a sadness emerges that blankets Glencoe as thickly as the darkness. Even when he gets out the 12 million candle-power torch he bought at Argos for £29.99 it fails to dispel my gloom: this is just a cock-up of a man, no conspirator. Eventually, the small boys are asleep on their rug by the fire, and Colin takes his leave: “I’ve got my laptop in the tent,” he tells me proudly. “I’m gonna watch The Da Vinci Code.”
15.09.07
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