Will Self

Last year I walked from where I live now, to where I was born, to where I grew up, to where I was at school, to where I was at University: Stockwell — Charing Cross — the Hampstead Garden Suburb — Finchley — Oxford. Thus linking my life together with a physical chord, the music of my swishing thighs.

I was particularly looking forward to visiting the house on Brim Hill, London N2, where I grew up. I’d been back there the previous year, and on that occasion was plunged into a Proustian reverie, on seeing that the little paving-stone semicircle at the bottom of the drive was exactly as it had been when I was two or three, and played out there, scrabbling in the privet hedge and running my cars along the moss-filled runnels. This was a kinder era, when coal trucks still delivered oily, glistening sacks, paedophiles didn’t exist, car traffic was minimal, and the US Air Force — with the assistance of petroleum jelly — encouraged naked Vietnamese girls to go jogging.

But this time the drive, after 40 years, had been resurfaced, and my happy Lilliputian land was gone for ever. Tears pricking my eyes, I looked up to the suburban heavens, and saw there the towering forms of cumulus clouds, heavy and grey at their bases, while their nodose peaks had that particularly intense shade of white only ever matched by especially cheap ice-cream cones.

Now I was crying: recalling the dreadful revelation that also dated from my early childhood, when it finally dawned on me that I would never, ever be able to take a walk in the clouds. Up until that point — and join me, if you will, in this stroll into the inchoate world of those billions of neurons coalescing to form the human mind — light beams had been solid and within my control, and the cloudscape was a fully apprehended part of the world, mutable yet solid.

The adult world is one of objects that persist through time and space: duct tape, manhole covers, wheelie bins, a crass neighbour’s stupid car — they furnish the world, replete with their own monstrous quiddity. When we stop walking in the clouds, ascending their creamy gorges and planting our flags in their sweet summits, we are for ever condemned to this.

I suspect the impulse Jack the lad mountaineers have to climb up and up their ropey beanstalks, is really only an urge to walk in the clouds. As for mass air transit, what can we say of it, save that it destroys our most cherished childhood illusions again and again. To plunge through the clouds once, lancing into bright sunshine, the aluminium belly of the aircraft snuggled in the flocculent sward, may be a magical experience. But to do this again and again, while slurping Um Bongo and eating pistachios at £3 a pack, is unbelievably mundane magic.

I took the small boys up to Clapham Common to do some cloud spotting. It was a fresh June day, and the curve of the hill was clearly apprehensible. The formations were perfect: regularly spaced chunks of total amorphousness sailed across the sky, even from below they had a planiform that suggested the curvature of the globe itself. All creation was in these clouds, as they metamorphosed from moment to moment:

“That one’s like a man with a hairstyle!”

“There’s a volcano!”

“That one looks like a crocodile!”

“Look, a rabbit!”

These were some of the things we cried as we lay on our backs.

Or, rather, these are some of the things I cried. The boys soon got bored and began a play fight. Perhaps they were too old already to take the vaporous for the solid and walk among the clouds. Or maybe they wanted more nerdish cloud taxonomy. I wish I was the kind of father who could draw their attention to cirrocumulus stratiformis undulatus (that’s a mackerel sky to you and me), without driving them to distraction — but I’m not. Cloud spotting remains a matter of ducks and volcanoes with me, with the occasional quiet appreciation of the way the swags and drapes constitute a backdrop to a charming proscenium of landscape.

I did take a look on the Cloud Appreciation Society website started by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, author of the bestselling Cloudspotter’s Guide. This month’s top cloud shot — I urge you take a look — is of a distrail, the swathe chopped out of the cloud cover when an airplane’s exhaust fumes freeze the water vapour into ice. Distrails and contrails, ticks and crosses on the ledgers of the heavens, marking the progress of humanity towards the final, very public examination. Worse still, if you join the Cloudspotters’ club, you get a membership certificate — and a badge. I began to cry all over again — and I’m crying still.

30.06.07

Monday morning, May 21. I’m on the Hebridean island of Jura, lost in reveries of farouche glen and pellucid sea, when an email from Ralph drags me back to south-east London: “News of the fire on the Cutty Sark jogged my Sixties’ memory and I dug out a drawing I did of the ship during my student days, when for two or three days a week I attended the London College of Printing and Graphic Arts on Back Hill in Clerkenwell. There were more drawings, but this is the only one that I could find. My art teacher, Leslie Richardson, had saved them all these years and returned them to me about six months ago. All grubby yet surprisingly good…”

Ah, modesty, my collaborator’s besetting shortcoming — but he’s right, of course, the drawing is elegant, while conveying a strong sense of the Cutty Sark’s capacity for speed: it seems to strain against its dry dock, yearning to break through the concrete pack-ice and coast downstream on the ebb tide, heading for the open sea.

I can’t honestly say that the news of many London landmarks being destroyed by fire would affect me so strongly. The Houses of Parliament up in smoke? No big deal — it’s happened before, and the London mob held an impromptu party, standing round and toasting the flames. Buck House? Undoubtedly, also a cause for celebration. Yet the Cutty Sark was different. Many childhood trips to Greenwich seemed consumed by the flames, both my own and those of my children.

Granted, the romance of the sea never exactly gripped me, but the romance of going to Greenwich hasn’t ever palled. It’s enough to take one of the tourist boats down from Westminster Pier, and listen, yet again, to the commentary of one of the pre-Canary Wharf deckhands, rancorously relating the extinction of the London Docks, for me to feel swept away beneath a bellying acreage of canvas.

The Cutty Sark, the National Maritime Museum, Sir Francis Chichester’s Gypsy Moth, the Greenwich Observatory, the very fact of the Greenwich meridian itself — nowhere else in the city could you find such a tight grouping of structures devoted to the notion of travel and human orientation. To be in Greenwich was — and one hopes, still is — to be on the cusp of omnipresence, the event horizon dipping tumultuously beneath one’s own, albeit metaphorical, event horizon.

I walked this way with Iain Sinclair, the mage of Hackney, last summer. We crossed on the Woolwich Ferry and made our way up through the Charlton parks — leaping from green island to island across the reddish-grey waves of London’s urban sea — until we stood by the Observatory, looking across at the lyre-shaped Isle of Dogs. Sinclair, who sort-of believes in lines of psychic energy, pointed out to me the alignment of One Canada Square with Bow Bells and the Meridian — or some such gobbledegook — then averred that all the shit that had gone down in the city since the Reichmanns built the Lego edifice, could be ascribed to this bad feng shui.

I’m not so sure — this maladroit situation certainly can’t explain the torching of the fleetest tea clipper of them all, unless, that is, you think that arson is an opportunistic crime, for which the victim is partly to blame: “She was asking for it, dressed like that in her flimsy rigging … ” Strange, though, when one comes to consider it: these ships, that have travelled so far and with such despatch, ending up marooned in sarf London.

Of course, the Cutty Sark was already a refurbished thing, the earliest example of ship restoration that our nation boasted. Now, let’s hope, it becomes the first example of doubly successful recreation: a restored restoration. Naturally, my first thoughts on hearing of the fire were of my own work. In my latest novel, The Book of Dave, my cab-driving protagonist sights the rigging of the Cutty Sark as he’s snarled up in traffic on the A206 Trafalgar Road. It was one of the few instances of London knowledge that my friend Harry — Hackney cabbing consultant (licensed for up to five writers) — queried, saying: “I’m not sure you’d actually be able to see it from there.” The passage was rightly emended.

But the most flagrant disorientation attending the Cutty Sark conflagration was that of the Emergency Services. Allegedly, when the operator was called, she was unable to despatch a fire engine until given the name of the road the ship was floating on — its own illustrious name was insufficient. Makes you fink, dunnit? I mean, the crew of the Cutty Sark sailed her round the Horn in force 11 gales using only sexton, chronometer and compass, but her position in the heart of the most populous city in Europe could only be established with a battery of computers and an orbiting satellite.

02.06.07

I’m still in Belfast, staying at the Merchant Hotel, which predictably used to be a bank, yet is now asserting itself as an enclave of Parisian luxury in the heart of Antrim: the Crillon with soda-bread canapes and Guinness cocktails. Even more predictably, I loathe it. No fault of the hotel, you understand, it’s just that as the years go by the theatre of temporary rented accommodation seems more and more threadbare to me: no turn-down service can prettify the thousands of cold sex acts performed between these sheets; no marble tiling can convince me that it’s a proscenium arch, within which my taking a shit becomes a command performance.

And then there are the two double beds, as high and snowy as alpine peaks. Who checks into a hotel and asks for a room with two double beds? Homely swingers, who intersperse bouts of orifice-swapping with cups of tea and crossword clues? Surely not. Still, I don’t have to hang out in the Merchant much — I have a real play to go to —or rather, four temporary theatres. My friend Carlo Gebler’s play Henry & Harriet is being put on in the Cathedral Quarter of the city, as part of the annual Arts Festival, and performed in an unusual way. The audience assemble outside the Northern Whig public house and are then led from shop to shop — four in all — by the actor playing Henry Surphlis, the protagonist.

I’m initially a little wary of this unusual stratagem. At the best of times, as a professional suspender, I find it hard to suspend disbelief. It’s never Goneril for me — always a girl who went to Rada. I heard Fiona Shaw say on the radio the other night that theatre audiences have an essential willingness to make believe anything. I can understand this, because with the bulk of theatre you have to make believe that it’s any good whatsoever.

In fact, the theatrical promenade works wonderfully. I and my fellow playgoers are issued with luggage labels and ushered into a travel agent’s on Donegall Street, where we sit along the counter, scrutinising adverts for Jamaica. Then the actors enter and a rapid-fire dialogue begins about the steamer tickets that Henry has dishonestly acquired tickets that will secure him and his true love, Harriet, a berth on the Titanic, which is due to sail from Southampton for New York, on 10 April.

Yes, it’s 1912, and Henry is dressed in a suitably fustian, mismatched suit — material to the plot. The problem of life — or one of them, at any rate — is always mistaking the map for the territory; by playing out this drama in the same place as it might actually have taken place, but transposing it into a different era, Carlo and the Kabosh Theatre Company have winched my disbelief out of sight.

The scene finishes, and Henry leads us out on to Donegall Street and around the corner to Langford’s shoe shop on North Street, all the while offering us asides on Belfast lore: Donegall Street used to be known as Pauper Street, because at one end there was the bank (now the Merchant) and at the other the poor house. Over there is where the inventor of milk of magnesia lived (or was it worked? I picture him crushing up chalk).

At the end of the scene in the shoe shop, the woman sitting next to me points out an inconsistency in the text, a text she’s been reading as the actors speak their lines. I want to hit her. It’s one thing to extemporise incredulity — it’s quite another to go equipped for it. Still, nothing can seriously dampen my mood as we follow Henry to his next frenzied instalment, at Suitor Menswear on Rosemary Street. It helps that the shop is one of those male outfitters permanently mired in the 1950s, where Viyella shirts clash with tweed jackets. There’s plenty for the eye to rove over as the action hots up, and no need for the embarrassment of audience participation (which is really only the condition of life writ small), because, after all, we’re sitting in a shop.

It’s the same at Cash Converters on the High Street, where the drama reaches its crescendo. Here the “stage” is piled up with boxes of knock-down DVD players, while the flats comprise glass cabinets full of Royal Doulton china figurines, and sad stacks of unutterably bad oil paintings. Best of all, when the denouement has come, there’s no opportunity for applause: seamlessly, we file out of 1912 and back into 2007. Doctor Who couldn’t have done better. In a world in which we’re pinioned at the heart of a murderous mechanism of our own devising, pedalling furiously to power-up with the sweat of our brows a delusional virtuality, Henry & Harriet is the real thing.

Carlo Gebler’s play Henry & Harriet is published by the Lagan Press, ££7.99

26.05.07

The Wagon Wheels packet crushed into the damp grass on the slopes of Black Mountain bore a faded illustration of a covered wagon travelling at speed, together with the slogan: “Size Matters!” Indeed, it does. I was making my way gingerly down this steep hill, which, along with the rest of the massif — from Divis Mountain to Cave Hill — was imagined by Jonathan Swift to be a giant, recumbent figure. Some say that this was his inspiration for the distortions in scale with which he opened Gulliver’s Travels.

I myself couldn’t see it. When I’d flown into Northern Ireland three days previously, my flight into Aldergrove skimmed past Black Mountain to the north, and the day before I’d driven back into town from Fermanagh over a spur of Cave Hill (the supposed nose of the giant). Then, this afternoon, I’d quit my hotel in the centre of town and walked west along the Falls Road. The whole way up this artery — which is imprinted in the national consciousness as the very circulatory system of terror — the landmass loomed above me, its flanks dappled with heather and pitted with old quarry workings. Big it may have been — but anthropoid, not at all.

The last time I was in Belfast it was only shortly after the Easter Accords had been signed, and I walked this way with my friend, the writer Carlo Gebler, then we stomped back into town via the equally notorious Loyalist artery, the Shankhill Road. The time before that it was the early 1990s, and I went up the Falls to visit the Sinn Fein HQ and interview its then press officer, Mitchel McLaughlin, who now sits as the Member for South Antrim in the Legislative Assembly.

On neither of those previous occasions do I remember feeling any great anxiety along the Falls, despite the Republican murals of H-block martyrs and gun-wielding paramilitaries the gun-toting RUC foot patrols and the armoured vehicles swishing past, hopeful Crimestoppers freephone numbers painted on their camouflaged sides. But this time it was the May Day bank holiday and the streets were empty I suspected that if I were to encounter loafing oafs they might well give me a casual, nonsectarian clump. Then, the potential violence was so extreme it was non-apprehensible, now the kids smashing traffic lights with their hurly sticks suggested merely workaday beatings.

At Milltown Cemetery I diverted to visit the IRA plot. It was here, in 1988, that UDA man Michael Stone shot three Republican mourners at a funeral. Three days later two British Army corporals, who accidentally ran into the funeral for one of these victims, were dragged from their car, beaten by the crowd and then summarily executed. So the Troubles eked themselves out in grotesque dribs and drabs of human life, adding up to 3,500 in all.

Even on a bright day, with sun and showers alternating, there remained something minatory about Milltown. A couple of tight-faced street drinkers loitered among the overgrown Victorian graves. The IRA plot is like an ancient chamber tomb: the volunteers’ black marble markers arranged in a boat shaped compound, while at the prow the declaration of the 1916 Easter Rising is carved in stone.

I turned my back on the city and trudged up the Monagh Bypass, then past the travellers’ camp and along the Upper Springfield Road. Finally I reached open ground and headed on up to the ridge. Public access to the Black Mountain has only been possible for the past couple of years. Before that the British Army held sway up here: they still have a huge listening post on the summit of Divis. The evening before I’d met a warden for the new park that’s being created here, and he told me that the hills were becoming well-used by the city’s inhabitants.

This didn’t accord with my experience: as the wind soughed over the heather I saw only a posse of traveller kids coursing for hares, their tracksuits flapping as they ran after their lurchers. And the heather itself was burnt to a crisp, while fresh yellow blades of grass speared between the scorched roots. The same warden had told me that the kids set fire to the heather every year, and that really it wasn’t such a bad thing, since it provided one of the few remaining habitats suitable for the red grouse to nest in. It was beautiful up on the hills, with achingly long views southwest to Strangford Lough, and more than 30 miles south to the conical Mountains of Mourne. In the near distance, on the far side of town, I could make out the pale stone monstrosity of Stormont: a Brobdingnagian parliament built for politicians all too often fit only for Lilliput. The following day would see Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern descend on Stormont to celebrate the new devolved Government of the Democratic Unionists and Sinn Fein with plenty of mutual back-slapping. But the arrival of these giants lay in the future for the meantime it was I who was slapping the back of the mighty hill with my boots. Immediately below me I could see the enclaves of Ballymurphy and Springmartin, still separated by 30ft-high “peace walls” topped by razor wire, and I wondered, which one would it be safer to walk through, the Big or the Little Endians’?

19.05.07

This week’s issue of the Independent magazine is on the theme of France, which is why Ralph has created this beautiful picture of a statue of Charles de Gaulle, or “Charles the Wall”, as he should more properly be known. The name apparently derives from the German for “wall” and even the “de” is suspect, being not — as you undoubtedly assumed — a nobiliary particle. But then that’s you all over, isn’t it, always assuming things are nobiliary particles without any cause? You probably thought the “la” in Danny la Rue was one, let alone the “de” in Chris de Burgh. Poltroon.

Still, enough of this nobiliary particle badinage (as De Gaulle himself doubtless often had to say), let’s press on. When it comes to De Gaulle what’s not to like? Here you have a man called wall, who behaved like a veritable rampart throughout most of his political and military career, repelling the barbarian invasions. Is it any surprise he ended up with plazas, boulevards and even an airport named after him? The man was the very essence of solidity and probity, no matter what one feels about his ideological colouration.

I mean, you can’t go calling an airport after just any old individual, because the name is bound to affect the way it’s perceived by those volatile characters: incoming airline pilots. The minute they begin their descent into Charles de Gaulle Airport — or Roissy, as it is colloquially known among the joystick fraternity — airline pilots instinctively square their shoulders and buff up the peaks of their caps. They begin to look longer, leaner and more confident.

And when they request permission to land at Charles de Gaulle, they are immediately visited with a strong psychic impression of the airport’s namesake, an impression that contains all of the following: the De Gaulle family’s principled support for Dreyfus, even though they were the sort of blue-blood Catholic nationalists you would’ve expected to behave altogether differently; De Gaulle’s courage in the First World War, severely wounded at Verdun and then captured by the Boche; his five attempts to escape, even though they resulted in him being banged-up in solitary confinement; his far-sighted support for mobile armoured warfare during the difficult interwar period; his refusal to accept either capitulation to — or co-option by — the Nazis; his brave flight from Bordeaux, carrying 100,000 gold francs sewn into his underpants; his masterly rallying of the Free French in the North African colonies; his triumphant return to Paris to lead the provisional government; his graceful withdrawal from power when he could not agree with the constitutional settlement of the Fourth Republic; his return to power by popular demand when the Algerian crisis threatened civil war; his establishment of the Fifth Republic; his brilliantly successful economic dirigisme that ushered in the “30 glorious years” of economic growth; his brave solution of the Algerian crisis; his evasion of the assassins’ bullets — even though his lovely Citroen DS got it; his strong espousal of the European Union and of a policy of detente towards the USSR; his assertion that “it is the whole of Europe that will decide the destiny of the world”; his provoking the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to make the asinine statement: “I’d rather vote for God” (go on, Jean-Paul, see if we care, get back to your attitudinising and your oysters at La Coupole); his entirely sensible refusal to allow Britain to join the EU, on two occasions, on the basis that not only would the Brits not abide by the rules (amply borne out by events), but that also we would continue to hearken to our master’s voice; crying out from across the Atlantic his notably astute pursuit of an evolved nuclear power industry in France, which means that — were it not for the aforementioned Citroens — France would be well on the way to being carbon neutral; his principled attack on the US atrocities committed in Indochina; his strange withdrawal to Baden-Baden during the height of the 1968 evenements; his honourable retirement to the little village of Colombey-les-deux-eglises and the final revelation, after his death, that far from having lined his pockets like virtually every political leader one can think of (that means you, T Blair), De Gaulle died bankrupt, and refused all the pomp of state funeral, preferring to be carried to his grave in a rubbish bag thrown in the back of a humble Citroen Deux Chevaux.

What a guy! I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s best that airline pilots have this running through their heads when they bring 650 flatulent, frowsty travellers into land. I mean, what would it be like if an airport were named after some crazed acid-head, who spent the great majority of his adult life addicted to drugs and driven by strange and incomprehensible phobias? Oops, sorry, Liverpool.

14.04.07

Why has the annual Easter Egg hunt become such a trial to me? Is it because with each succeeding year I become stronger, fitter, better read and more chillingly orientated? I think this must be so. I remember the Easter Egg hunts of my childhood, which seldom involved more than rooting around a flower bed or worming beneath my parents’ bed, to emerge, dust devils like crazy battle honours on my woolly, the foiled goods melting in my hot little hands. But nowadays the hunt can last for days, cross entire counties and involve me in feats of close reasoning that make a chess game between Big Blue and Kasparov look like a very facile Suduko indeed.

This year’s extravaganza began in the early hours of March 24. My first clue, delivered to me in London, said simply: “I’m off the Wall but not under the fog.” I realised after some hours of examining maps and gazetteers that this could only refer to Hexham, Northumberland so I hied me to that beautiful town as fast as GNER could carry me. But where in Hexham was the next clue to be found? I needn’t have worried; it was served to me in a kipper in the breakfast room of my hotel at 7am the following day, and said: “A hut is a great place for a debate.”

Nobody’s fool, I, so I almost immediately grasped that this meant the fell walkers’ hut on the northern flank of the Cheviot, on the saddle between that majestic 800m peak and the queer eminence known as the Schill. I engaged a sturdy minicabman, Mr Roberts, and he drove me north up the roller-coaster of the A68, then into the fells beyond Otterburn.

The long valleys leading up to the eponymous Windy Gyle were sun-dappled and sheltered, but when I reached the long distance path itself the wind became bitter. Christ! It was a cold and lonely walk, besides which I developed a vicious head cold, and had to pause every few yards and eject a great stream of infective matter from one nostril or the other. By the time I reached the hut I was feeling very sick indeed. In the walkers’ log I found the following entry: “Alice et Tomas Lapin, Rue de Montaigne, Paris VII.”

Three hours later, in Kirk Yetholm, at the end of the Pennine Way, I prevailed upon the lady running the B&B to let me use her computer and began searching the net for chocolatiers in Paris. Dawn the next day saw me en route by minicab to Berwick-upon-Tweed. “I don’t believe in mobile phones,” said Mr McAllum, the dour highlander who was driving me. “I can assure you,” I replied, “they really do exist.”

Train to King’s Cross, tube across town, Eurostar to the Gare du Nord. March 28 saw me beating the boulevards, knocking up confectioner after confectioner, searching for the elusive Tomas. I understood full well that the “Alice” was only a blind referring to her own, fictional pursuit of the white rabbit. I found him at last, cowering in caf? in Montmartre. He didn’t want to spill the beans, but instead gave me a small piece of rice paper upon which was written the single word “Unashamedly”.

A less ruminative fellow than myself might have been stymied by this – but not I. So it was back to the Gare du Nord, back to Waterloo, back across London to King’s Cross and back up the east coast line. On the train I mused on the “Unashamedly”. Clearly, it was part of the phrase: “Unashamedly White Rose”, so beloved of Yorkshire folk, and it asked me to consider what was the psychological and geographic epicentre of this, the queen of English counties.

I spent the next 10 days wandering from the dunes of Spurn Head to the crags above Swaledale. I left no stone unturned and spared no opportunity to speak with anyone who didn’t cross the road to avoid me. The morning of Easter Day found me pursuing a ghastly chimera up the rocky watercourse of the River Nidd. It was half old photo of Gracie Fields, half giant rabbit, and as it lolloped along it taunted me in a broad Yorkshire accent: “Thou aren’t no puzzler, lad, thou art a bloody fool.”

Eventually I cornered the ghastly thing under the huge retaining wall of the Scar House Reservoir and advanced on it, menacingly. Only to have it advance menacingly on me, and with fervent paws peel off first my hair and then my scalp, before biting into the hard white shell of my skull …

I awoke, screaming, in the small hours of Bank Holiday Monday. I’d done it again: spent too long hill walking in the north, then eaten far too much chocolate while looking at Ralph Steadman pictures. Only nightmares could ensue.

21.04.07

Ralph sends the attached picture [of a shark] — why? I’ve never known him to go scuba diving and the closest he’s come to a shark — so far as I’m aware — is a euphemism, namely a sharkskin suit that he wore when dancing at the Hot Club de Jazz with Josephine Baker in the 1920s (or was it Chet Baker in the 1950s? I forget). It makes you wonder what goes on in the Steadman imagination. Presumably, in the small hours of the night, the dread horn-honking of minor chords disturbs his repose the tempo quickening, Ralph thrashes in the sweat-damp duvet as if it were the salty sea itself.

“Humph-humph! Humph-humph! Humph-humph!” Ralph’s legs begin to bicycle frenetically, anticipating the slice of those double rows of razor-sharp teeth, and still the tempo quickens: “Hmph-hmph!! Hmphhmph!! Hmph-hmph!!!” As the dream-shark hits, the venerable artist shoots upright with a great moan, then slides, jerkily, out of the bed.

“What is it, dear?” asks Mrs S.

“Oh, nothing … nothing …” he mutters, putting on his dressing gown. Then he limps across to the studio, snaps on the lights, sits down at his drawing board, and commits his vision to paper. In the long, dark night of the soul, the relentless psyche is always being fed.

I, too, have never been anywhere near a shark — but I know a man who has: my old partner in grimy needlework, Sebastian Horsley, flaneur, painter, homme des hommes, and all-round eccentric. Sebastian’s peregrinations — which include going to the Philippines in order to be crucified in a local folk ritual — always start life as a quest for the hyper-realistic inspiration his big, oily canvases demand. So it was with the sharks. I quote here from his own memoir, Dandy in the Underworld, to be published this autumn: “The great white was one of my first muses along with sunflowers and Marc Bolan. It is what one yearns to be — it has such extraordinary charisma — the ability to persuade without the use of logic. It leads a life of imperious solitude. It is apart, feared, respected, untameable. Here is a force entirely indifferent to our desires. Fear made flesh. Where beauty and death merge.

“Here was a subject that obsessed me — something I could hang my feelings on — and yet I couldn’t paint it. I came to my conclusion. I had to meet this creature … ”

Um. Yeah, sure — if that’s what floats your boat, mate. Off Sebastian went to Adelaide in South Australia, where he took ship with a character called Rodney Fox, who was the shark advisor (advising about sharks, obviously, not consulting with them) on the film of Jaws. Fox himself had been attacked by a shark, and so badly masticated that only his wetsuit kept him intact. Naturally, when he recovered, he decided to dedicate his life to studying this elusive and mysterious creature. Wouldn’t you?

Survivor of 400 million years of evolution, the great white shark remains an enigma with a pronounced overbite. Almost nothing is known about it: where it goes, how it mates, whether it can read. It’s impossible to keep in captivity, because it has to move relentlessly forward. It never sleeps: it simply kills and eats (and possibly reads). It is top of the food chain, and never pays a bill.

Sebastian was going to be lowered in a cage into the sea, there to disport himself with the great whites, who were summoned by chucking chum (this is a puree of blood and offal, not the dog food, that’s capitalised, thus: Chum) into the water. The sharks are so creepily attuned that they can detect a heartbeat in the water from miles off, and smell the blood. Arguably, this is a kind of sensitivity, but these creatures are also so rapacious that they’ll devour their siblings in the womb.

The very place names on the fatal shore of the Southern Ocean bear the impress of shark-dread: Coffin Bay, Memory Cove, Cape Catastrophe, and the hunting ground where our man was headed, the reassuringly named Dangerous Reef. Needless to say, Sebastian got on rather well with the great whites, despite the fact that even after weeks in his cage he still couldn’t manage the mechanism required to winch it to the surface.

He was impressed by the enormous girth of the sharks, their surprisingly expressive eyes, and their habit of sneaking up on him from behind. All in all, they sound not dissimilar to some of the more louche denizens of Sebastian’s other thrashing ground: Soho. On his last day at Dangerous Reef, the painter went down in the gloom: “I felt giddy with desire to undo the hatch of the cage, to swim free and melt into that holy chasm. To float away and stop hurting.” You mean, start hurting, Sebastian – even Ralph knows that sharks bite, and he’s never been near one.

05.05.07