Will Self

It’s the time of year when we forego the pleasures of the beach in order to visit Dr Thurm Angstrom, in his claustrophobic office at Reading University’s Department of Comparative Environmental Science. Regular readers of this column will be familiar with Dr Angstrom, whose laughable excursus, Sweaty Hearth: Transliterating Domestic Space in the Age of Climate Change, was one of the great publishing failures of last year. An initial print run of 100,000 copies, printed on non-biodegradable polyurethane sheeting, were instantly remaindered then dumped off the coast of Cornwall by the psychotically depressed publisher.

The reef of Sweaty Hearths subsequently distorted the ocean currents so catastrophically that a freak tsunami engulfed Rick Stein’s famous fish restaurant in Padstow, and swept it out into the Atlantic, where it was harpooned by an illegal Japanese whaler. The first I heard about it was when a distraught Ms Billings wrote to me to say that her elderly parents — together with several other middle-class English couples — had recently appeared as an entry on the menu of an exclusive Osaka restaurant, right underneath sushi made from the notoriously poisonous fugu blowfish.

But the crazed Dr Angstrom didn’t want to talk about this: he’d summoned me to discuss the Russian territorial claim to the Arctic seabed. “I’m 100 per cent behind the Russians,” were his opening words. “This is a bold new day for humankind!” I ignored the lack of any politesse — Angstrom is not a Jane Austen character — and focused instead on the changes in the man: gone was the penis sheath and lean nudity of the previous year instead, he was sporting a full set of furs suitable for subzero temperatures.

“I’m only wearing these,” the deranged climate scientist told me, “because soon they won’t be a sartorial option at all the polar icecap is shrinking, and calving ice floes the size of Reading every 24 hours! Under such circumstances the Russians are doing the only sensible thing.”

“But surely,” I objected, taking a seat upon a pile of bound proofs of Angstrom’s latest tome, Cold Hearth: Igloo Cities in the Age of Global Warming, “there’s a distinctly savage irony implied here: the Russians have their eye on the gas and oil reserves beneath the Arctic seabed, and if they then exploit them it will only increase carbon emissions, speeding the entire go-round of civilisation’s destruction!”

He fixed me with a roving eye that recalled that of Nanook of the North: “Some,” he chose his words judiciously, “might regard it as a virtuous circle; after all, more warming, less ice. Less ice — more access to the mineral deposits!”

“My God, man!” I expostulated. “You’re behaving as if global warming is a good thing!”

“Isn’t it?” Angstrom rose, picked up a narwhal tusk and climbed on to his paper-cluttered desk. Here he began to dance a fierce jig, conducting himself with the tusk, while singing: “Burn, baby, burn, global inferno! Burn, baby, burn… ” He halted abruptly. “No,” he resumed, tapping a wall map of the Arctic with the end of the tusk, “you cannot combat the inevitable, you can only go with the floe!

“Consider Roald Amundsen, he deliberately sought out the pack ice with his ship the Fram – which, incidentally, means ‘forward’ in Norwegian – then remained there, trapped for a year, in order to discover the secrets of survival in those climes.”

“Um,” I interjected, “Dr Angstrom, I don’t know if I’m just being obtuse, but where’s all this leading?”

“It’s absurdly simple,” he said, tapping the edge of the icecap with his tusk. “Here, in the south-east of England we have a critical shortage in the availability of greenfield building land, while up here in the Arctic, an iron-hard level surface the size of Reading becomes available every day! By my calculations, each of these floe-cities — if they are built — can be reinforced and provided with integrated freezer units that will keep them viable for at least 99 years. During this time, the New Readings will slowly float down through the North Atlantic, then the Irish Sea, eventually coming ashore here,” the tusk tapped lower, “at Aberystwyth on the coast of Wales. As Amundsen would say: Forward!”

“B-but,” it was a feeble objection to these delusions of icy grandeur — but the best I could manage — “what if the Russians, despite dropping their flag on to the seabed, don’t succeed with their claim?”

“Well,” Angstrom looked stricken, “then, I have to concede, we’re sunk. A Canadian Arctic seabed would be problematic — an American one catastrophic.”

“How so?”

“Well,” he sighed deeply. “The whole plan is tightly calibrated with the continued rise in British house prices — hence the 99-year time period. In the USA there are these bloody sub-prime mortgages, not at all the sort of borrowing we want. Buying one of our properties with that kind of financing… well, it would be like sinking the foundations in… in…”

“Water?”

“Quite so.”

01.09.07

“Today I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which is not improperly called Ventosum. My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer. I have had the expedition in mind for many years …” So begins Petrarch’s justly celebrated account of his ascent of Mont Ventoux, a peak at the west end of the Luberon massif in Provence.

Luberon. Mmm … The very region sounds lubricious, to me. It makes me think of dallying with libidinous Cathars in valleys rather than climbing up 2,000 metres of bare limestone-capped mountain. But then Petrarch was made of sterner stuff. “Remorseless toil,” he observed, “conquers all.” He claimed that his 1336 hike was the first taken since antiquity purely in order to admire the view. Others have disputed this — as well they might. Founding father of Humanism Petrarch may have been — Norris McWhirter he wasn’t.

Besides, his account is studded with spiritual exhortations you can’t imagine Janet Street-Porter coming out with: “The life we call blessed is sought for in a high eminence, and straight is the way that leads to it.” Nor, I imagine, do most of us always have a copy of Augustine’s Confessions on hand when we go hill walking, to liberally quote from should we feel the impulse.

Still, there I was, in the Luberon, and while climbing Mont Ventoux seemed a little de trop, I still had an urge to get out in that maquis and deprive Jean of his source (or is it Manon?). Why shouldn’t I scale the Petit Luberon, a lesser limestone escarpment to the south of Mont Ventoux? And why not provide myself with a motivation to match Petrarch’s own lack of one?

The village of Lacoste suggested itself as a starting point (suggested … it always strikes me as such a suggestible word), because the Marquis de Sade lived here, and his castle still stands on the hilltop, a suitably medieval-looking ruin, in this landscape fractured by religious schism: Protestant against Catholic, Catholic against Protestant, and everyone against the libidinous Cathars.

True, daytime temperatures were hitting 37C, and August isn’t really the month for strenuous exertion in this part of the world. Not that the locals see it that way: the day before I set out, a cycle race climbed the zigzag road to Lacoste, its Lycra-clad, tight-shirted contestants looking — from behind — more than ready to embark on 120 days of Sodom. Poor Tommy Simpson, the English cyclist, was done for by the heat when he pumped his way towards the top of Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France. Granted, there were amphetamines and alcohol found in his bloodstream, but who among us can honestly claim that we’ve never cycled up a mountain pissed and speeding? Besides, when it comes to the Tour, I say, plus ça change.

I elected — like Petrarch — to leave before dawn, and by the time the sunlight was streaming down through the trees I was already high up on the Petit Luberon, with De Sade’s castle well below and behind me. At the top of the escarpment the rocky path levelled out and I entered the mysterious Foret des Cadres. Actually, there was nothing mysterious about this at all — it was a forest of cedars: big, shaggy trees, their foliage trailing on the ground. It seemed I’d narrowly missed out on a herd of Eeyores, because all over the forest were rude shelters constructed from fallen boughs.

Then, as I reached the far side of the plateau, and the massif fell away from me in successive lower peaks carpeted with thorny scrub, it hit me: I would devise a latter-day perversion to match any ever dreamed of by Donatien Alphonse-François de Sade. It was this that would provide my motivation as my feet stumbled on the sharp limestone outcrops, this noble pursuit that would be my trailblazer as I joined the Grande Randonee down into the valley.

It worked: meditating hard on what I might get up to, given two cyclists, a copy of Augustine’s Confessions and a large saucisson sec, I motored past the lonely “Peak of the Eagles” and down towards the turning point of my trek, Le Tapis. I checked to see if there were any children down the well, then turned back, marvelling at the way the escarpment high overhead had been eroded by run-off into fantastical arches, spires, and an exact likeness of Gerard Depardieu.

By the time I was heading once more down the rocky track towards Lacoste (as Petrarch would have it: “a heavy body weighed down by members”), my own salacious feverishness was greater than the air temperature. Someone had told me that De Sade’s castle was now the property of the octogenarian designer Pierre Cardin, and he was in the process of transforming it into a comfy bourgeois home. Perhaps cardinism was the perversion I sought? And what is cardinism, I hear you ask. Simple: sexual relief obtained by castle conversions. True, this may be an expensive way of getting your jollies, but with the housing market the way it is …

25.08.07

Let me offer you my latest peregrinations, which consisted of a 15,000-mile sweep through the Americas, north and south, that produced a series of giant carbon footprints, while giving me hardly any opportunity to stretch my legs. I blame the kids: two small boys are a sufficient drogue to brake any possibility of sustained walking, unless it’s on a treadmill facing a marathon screening of all the Harry Potter movies.

Walk 1. Sao Paulo Airport. Distance: 260m. Time: 2.5 hours.

Don’t be fooled by the comparatively short distances and level terrain into thinking that this will be an easy hike. Consisting of four separate stages — Domestic Transfers Check-in Desk, TAM ticketing desk, TAM Check-in, and Security — the walk, or “queue” as it is colloquially known, can become especially arduous if you undertake it, as we did, in the immediate aftermath of a strike by Brazilian air-traffic controllers. We flew in at 6.30am in a daze, but after “walking” for three hours, we knew where we were. Purgatory. Still, we didn’t have it as bad as those who flew in to Sao Paulo’s domestic airport a fortnight later — their destination was altogether final.

Walk 2. From the head of the funicular to the base of the statue of Christ the Redeemer. Distance: 200m.
Time: 1 hour (including refreshment stop).

Everyone, just everyone, has to visit this huge statue when they come to Rio. It’s just so huge, and the views from the top of the mountain are superb. At least, they are on clear days. On the one we attempted our trek, it was so cloudy we could see neither up nor down. The youngest of our party did exclaim “Oh my God!” when he saw the vast Redeemer looming out of the mist, but while this may have been apt, he is also — being five — utterly credulous.

Walk 3. Copacabana to Ipanema. Distance: 1.5km.
Time: 2 hours.

Put all thoughts of Astrud Gilberto and the eponymous girl out of your mind. Beachfront Rio may no longer have been quite as minatory as when I was last here, in the early 1990s (see Psychogeography passim), but being winter it was still a misty, chilly, slightly scuzzy prospect, as the author’s wife never ceased to remind him.

The boys liked to walk up the beach — which, to be fair, is pristine — then back down the Avenida Atlantica, time after time after time. Eventually, I persuaded them to divert up the Rua Francesco Otaviano to Ipanema, past a scary Catholic iconostasis (life-size plaster figures of leprous-looking saints). It was dark by the time we turned into the Avenida Francesco Behring, and there was absolutely no one on the beach at all. The breakers rolled in from the Atlantic, and the lights of the hilly suburbs to the south mounted up as if Christ the Redeemer were developing the empyrean itself.

Towards the end of the point was the Parcque Garota. The author’s wife felt that its dark shrubbery, and sinister-sounding appellation disqualified it as a location for family rambling, but I pointed out that “garota” is in fact “girl” in Portuguese, and the park was named after the eponymous one. “In that case,” Mrs Self snapped, “why is it full of single men lurking in the bushes?”

Walk 4. Paraty, Brazil. Round trip from the Marquesa Hotel. Distance: 2kms. Time: 1.5 hours.

If you visit the charming seaside resort of Paraty — 3.5 hours drive north of Rio — be sure to tour its famously uneven, large-cobbled streets on foot. The grid-pattern of boxy, whitewashed houses will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a spaghetti western.

Abandoning the boys at the hotel, I acquired sturdy walking companions, to whit: the entire staff of the British Council office in Rio de Janeiro, together with a journalist from Il Globo, his photographer, and the Jeep they’d all hired.

I asked them why they were on my case; they explained that they’d paid my plane fare to the literary festival that was being held in Paraty, and they wanted their face time. This was all news to me. I don’t like having anything to do with the Council, which is an adjunct of the Foreign Office, charged with converting the heathen to reruns of The Vicar of Dibley. They wanted to go for a drive — I insisted on walking. I prevailed, and we set out for the kilometre or so to the jetty where the pleasure boats are hired, the whole media cavalcade stringing along behind.

The journalist asked me questions, his snapper snapped away. The Head of the British Council and I chatted amiably enough. (It’s impossible to do anything else with them, as Holly Martins discovered in The Third Man, when he encountered the BC rep, Crabbin, memorably played by the late Wilfrid Hyde-White.) We made it to the jetty, and then, after further excruciating politeness, I managed to shake them off. Bliss.

11.08.07

Consider Doggerland, the landmass that before the end of the last Ice Age connected the British Isles with The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. My brother wised me up on Doggerland, sitting in the humid garden of his house in upstate New York: “When we think of Britain and the continent being connected, we obviously imagine an isthmus or land bridge,” he averred, “whereas the reality was an enormous plain. Archaeologists have discovered human artefacts and evidence of habitations from the Mesolithic in this area. Think of it! A tundra where the North Sea is now, teeming with game — lion, mammoth, hippo — criss-crossed by the hunting trails of sophisticated huntsmen.”

I thought on it flying home to London, besmirching the sky with more than my fair share of cosmic lamp blacking. Back in town, the rains came down like stair rods — except that no one under 40 was in a position to employ this simile, because they’ve never seen a stair rod in their lives.

A puddle formed in the back garden five feet across — this was unprecedented. The small boys’ school was closed due to flooding I went to pick them up on the bicycle, then, three-up, we toured the local wet spots. The low points of Silverthorne and Queenstown Roads were flooded: scuzzy meres with kerbstone banks and littorals defined by police incident tape.

The small boys were excited by this inversion of the normal state of things. You don’t spend two years of your young lives with your dad upstairs typing a futuristic, dystopic novel about flooded Britain for nothing. We discussed the possibilities of London being seriously inundated, and foolishly I gave it to them straight: Yes, I thought it was definitely rather than maybe, to adapt an album title from the aptly named beat combo, Oasis. Predictably, the small boys grew anxious, and began discussing among themselves what toys could be saved.

Returning home, I thought of my friends in the Vale of Pershore — we were due to go up for the weekend usually, we all indulge in a little wild water swimming in the Avon, but this water was going to be way too wild for that. It wasn’t long before the sewers of rolling TV began to back-up with the breaking flood news. My friends’ news was stark: “We’re cut off,” Charles said. “But the most bizarre thing is that Gabriel has been watching the Test at Lords all afternoon, where there’s bright sunshine.”

Yes, after all, the paradigm for the deluge remains Genesis, chapters 6-10. It’s a short tale — with a powerful resonance. The main facts are well known: God, an irascible super-being, prone to creating marvellous things, but afflicted with severe Attention-Deficit Disorder, gives life to humanity, but then gets quickly bored with it: “And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.”

The solution was obvious: lay on 40 days and 40 nights of stair rods (although the simile is questionable, since although “there were giants in the earth in those days” [Gen 6:4], they had yet to invent the stair carpet, or even the runner), then instruct a morally recondite sexcentenarian to build a fuck-off big boat in order to preserve breeding pairs of all genotypes (except insects, which were invented by Beelzebub in 1923).

The important thing here is that the standard account of the antediluvian — which every morally recondite son of the manse, such as our own Prime Minister well knows — is that the ignorant, the venal and the lazy get it in the neck (the water, that is), while the Good are saved, so that when the dove pitches up they’re in pole position to build enormous towers on the floodplains, and invest in the booming language-school business that soon comes into being. It’s obvious that the Prime Minister subscribes to this view. Touring Gloucester shortly after it went “glub-glub”, he referred time and again to the exceptional nature of the rainfall. If he didn’t have an overwhelmingly secular electorate, the words “Act of God” would’ve shot through his lips.

But from where I’m sitting it’s Britain’s Sodoms and Gomorrahs that remained high and dry, while the likes of my friend Charles had his livelihood all but trashed. His crops were washed away, his barns soaked, and the Poles who come every summer to do the picking (most of whom are professors of theology), ended up paddling. Still, what the tide brings in the tide takes out again. I expect there were seasonal workers in Doggerland (in the Mesolithic they favoured transhumance), and when it became impossible, due to rising sea levels, to walk home to Poland, they, too, took it personally.

04.08.07

In Moulin Rouge, John Huston’s 1952 biopic of the French painter and absinthe-bucket Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, José Ferrer played the lead — entirely on his knees. The action begins in a Parisian bar, Toulouse-Lautrec sits supping his deathly green mouthwash — the barman polishes the glasses. Then the painter clambers down off his stool. Suddenly we’re in his point of view, looking up at the great zinc-topped escarpment of the counter the barman leans over, peers down at us, and speaks the first line of the movie: “So long, Toulouse!”

I resolved to walk to Toulouse in the spirit of Ferrer’s Oscar-winning performance by which I mean that for large portions of the journey I would be semi-recumbent on trains. First I would walk from my home in Stockwell, south London, to the Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo Station, then I’d entrain for the Gare du Nord. In Paris, I would stump across town to the Gare Montmartre and entrain once more for the far south.

In Toulouse, I would walk to my hotel, walk to the theatre where I was giving a reading with the chanteuse Marianne Faithful, walk to dinner, limp to bed, and in the morning I’d do the whole thing in reverse: a nice weekend’s stroll, covering some 1,300 miles. My wife, ever-sceptical of these peregrinations, always says the same thing: “Will you walk up and down the train?” She refuses to accept the musicality of my giant steps, their alternation of rhythmic striding and the fermata of the rail compartment.

The night before I left, I ran into Bobby. He got the walk to Toulouse. He grew up in Florida and used to water-ski across the Everglades, from lake to lake, his transit linking the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico (“We’d stop at amazing restaurants to eat fried chicken and gumbo”).

It was a dullish morning in London and rain threatened. Down by the Vauxhall railway arches the late-night revellers at Fire were punching the air, trying to KO the new day. Along the Albert Embankment, it was debatable that earth had not anything to show more fair. On the 6.37am train to Paris, the stewardess was chatty: they’re moving the terminal to King’s Cross and it’ll make her trip to the trip that’s work a grinding urban commute. It will render my walking tours of Paris equally unappealing, with all that London to march through before I reach the Boulevard de Magenta. The 50km through the Channel Tunnel has been walked, of course — by a Russian 36-year-old in 1998. But he was on his way to join the Foreign Legion and not officially sanctioned, a fugitive, on his knees — metaphorically — and what fun is that?

Aeolus was tossing buckets against the train windows in England — and then in France. But the drizzle was light as I strode away from the Gare du Nord, making for the Seine. I’d eschewed the map to give myself the delusion I knew my way around — or, perhaps to make the walk seem more like a Situationist’s aimless Dérive. I cut off Magenta before the Boulevard de Strasbourg and headed south down Rue du Faubourg-St Denis. As ever with these intermittent walks, the two cities had been kicked into one by my boots: London was exoticised — while making Paris seems ineffably mundane. I liked that. I liked the way the Porte Saint-Denis had all the historical resonance of a five-bar gate.Naturally I got lost around Les Halles, but then recovered myself to saunter across the Pont Neuf, through Saint Germain and up the Rue de Rennes. A swift espresso, priced at euro6, and it was into the uglification of the Gare Montmartre.

In Toulouse I left the station and headed along the Boulevard Pierre Sémard, which bordered a canal, then turned down the Allée Jean Jaurés, a wide, dull boulevard that debouched into the charming little Place Wilson, where I found a grandiose monument to the Occitan poet Pierre Goudouli. Ah, French urban place names! Where else in the world can you go from martyred Communist trade-union leader to socialist premier to US president, all within 40 minutes. From there I trod on the revolutionary Frenchman who was the US’s greatest friend — Rue Lafayette — until I reached the prosaic Place Capitole and checked into the Crown-Plaza.

That evening, at dinner in a brasserie on the Place Wilson, my friend François Ravard told me of the amazing sight he had witnessed that afternoon: a float of Gay Pride marchers being drawn through Toulouse by a melancholy French peasant sporting an Asterix moustache and driving a tractor. Meanwhile, another of our fellow diners informed us that the Charlemagne Regiment (a French division of the Waffen SS) were holding their annual reunion in a town an hour’s drive west of Toulouse. Such strange ambulatory antics! They made my own homage to José Ferrer seem positively banal.

21.07.07

I write this to the jaunty strains of the West Jesmond Rhythm Kings’ platter Jubilee Stomp, courtesy of their trumpeter and vocalist, Mike Durham, who also happens to have been the highest bidder for my services in this year’s Independent Charity Auction. Or rather, his wife Patti snaffled me up as a present for Mike, who, as well as being a jazz musician and a sesquipedalian, manages to be a deep topographer of considerable intensity.

So it was that I detrained at Newcastle, unfolded the Brompton and set off to pedal the three miles up to the Durhams’ house in the leafy ‘burb of Jesmond. This was not most people’s vision of Tyneside: no smuts, flat caps, or whippets in sight, no fog on the river, no fishes on little dishes, only the long strip of Osborne Road, flanked by stony villas, into which had been sunk boreholes called things like The Billabong. Presumably the students who rent here often throw over their studies to go walkabout in the outback of intoxication.

Mike and Patti Durham have done their fair share of walking about too. Both of them haled originally from the south — Surrey and Sussex respectively — but they’ve been Oop North for more than 30 years now. Mike took a job with Procter & Gamble straight out of university, wooed Patti and swept her away to Northumbria. I suppose Tom Stoppard would say something arch about bringing Durhams to Newcastle — but then I’m not him.

Then they went walkabout. In the process of raising two children, the Durhams spent time in Cincinnati, Stockholm and Osaka, as Mike was posted hither and thither by soapocracy. The Durhams were remarkably insouciant about their globetrotting. Patti spoke of the squeaky cleanliness of the 1970s Swedish socialist paradise and how in Japan she and her blonde children were followed about by hair freaks. For Mike, Swedish was a doddle to pick up — “I walk, you walk, he walk — no declensions, see?” While in Osaka he and a fellow jazzman acquired a rhythm section by sauntering through the red-light district with their lugholes open.

Now retired, Mike has taken to sauntering the environs of Jesmond, arguably becoming rooted there in a way that only a transplanted growth can. He took me on a tour of his sacred sites, once he’d talked me through the highlights of his collection of 250-odd brass instruments. These glare-blared in immaculate glass cabinets: a synaesthetic cacophony.

We headed for the valley of the Ouseburn and the pleasure gardens of Jesmond Dene created by the pioneering engineer William — later Lord — Armstrong. After the Crimean War this was where the Armstrong breech-loading guns were tested, but later meadows, walkways and picturesque water features were conjured out of the newly post-industrial landscape. In the 1880s, Armstrong gave the gardens to the city.

On a summer’s weekday, Mike and I more or less had the place to ourselves, and we wandered down through the lush trees, stopping to examine the remains of the mills that used to grind here and the ruins of a 12th-century chapel connected by tunnel to the opulent banqueting house where Armstrong entertained his foreign clients. Now, this too is in ruins, another fine example of municipal desuetude. But that didn’t bother us. At least Armstrong’s Bridge is still here to admire: a wrought-iron tone poem of a thing, spanning the gorge 65ft up, its piers supported by their own weight on enormous iron rockers.

I haven’t the space to include all the sights Mike showed me but what I can say is that the valley of the Ouseburn was a more or less perfect rift through time and space: sundering prosperous Jesmond from the outer limits of Heaton and Byker, its wooded lips sewn together by Armstrong’s bridge and the A1058, which, in 1995, was sunk in an underpass, despite the efforts of migratory eco-warriors.

Patti joined us for lunch at Caffe Ti Amo in Jesmond Vale. Here we ate delicious clams and marvelled at the safety helmet that, having fallen off the back of a lorry three days earlier, was still outside on the pavement. The helmet was a nice symbol of the Lower Ouseburn Valley, which we strolled along after we’d eaten. In contrast to the Dene, this was a landscape that had fallen off the back of history’s lorry: a palimpsest of industrialisation, where coal wagons once rumbled, ore was crushed to extract white lead, and flax milled.

The Ouseburn was fed into a culvert in 1906, which emerges under the arches of three contrasting bridges: road, rail and metro. From here it was a hop and a skip down to the banks of the Tyne. Our walk ended beside beached, clinker-built boats. Former fishing boats, once hardworking craft, one of them was now dubbed Idler. How apt.

07.07.07