Will Self

We’re hoping that our friends’ Jack Russell, Cyril, will have a litter of puppies, because then we’ll adopt a couple of them. But I saw Cyril the other weekend, and to be frank, she looks way too skinny and nervy to be pregnant. Cyril is named after my friend’s father, whom her own children never knew. That’s why the kids wanted the dog to have his name — the revelations about her sex came later. Perhaps Cyril’s failure to get knocked up — despite being covered by the very spunky Jack Russell belonging to a local theatrical impresario — is a result of this masculine naming. I always make the point of calling her “Cyrille”, which everyone else thinks quite silly.

I’ve resisted having a dog for some time now. For a start, there are the bad dog-owning experiences of the past: the family dog who was pensioned off to my old nanny in Nazeing, Essex, the Lurcher who went feral in the Oxfordshire countryside, the whippet who shivered itself into psychiatric treatment. Then there’s the way urban dog walking forces you into an almost cosmically depressing go-round, from this piss-mark, to that shit-spot, off the lead, on the lead, and home again, the damp coat shaken in the hall stippling the skirting board with grey blotches.

I’ve spent a goodly portion of my life in London’s open spaces, parks and playgrounds. To begin with, as a child, I knew no better. Then, in the 1980s, I worked for the old GLC as a play leader, and so, for me, the city became mediated by its parks. Then came children of my own and the push-me, pull-you of swings and roundabouts. Initially, I found children to be poor dog substitutes. They didn’t come when you called them, and they were very slow — particularly the males — to be house trained.

Of course, this was before the plastic-bag-gloved hand became a mandatory canine accessory. After the legislation, human babies began to look positively continent — what with their neat little absorbent poo-pads — compared with these hairy shitters. Indeed, the whole notion of being responsible for a creature that requires me to pick up its excrement seems a curious inversion of what I always understood about the interspecies relationship.

I thought dogs were domesticated by humans, and that over many millennia we selectively bred them as hunting companions, guards, herders and so forth. We fed them and in return they did our bidding. There was no doubt about which was the subordinate species. The shit thing has completely altered my perspective. It now seems that far from us selectively breeding them, it’s been the other way round. Over many millennia, dogs, by providing human dog lovers with an adaptive advantage (the ability to take dull walks whatever the weather, the gumption to open fiddly tin cans, the capacity to pay exorbitant vets’ bills), have been selectively breeding us.

Think not of alsatians, King Charles spaniels, pekinese etc as sub-species of dog, cunningly fashioned by their human overlords, but rather, regard the inhabitants of Alsace, Salisbury and the Eternal City in this light. They look different because they are “owned” by different dogs. Let’s face it, any creature smart enough to get another animal to pick up its excreta, wrap it lovingly in a Sainsbury’s bag, and deposit it in a bin that has been specially constructed for precisely that purpose, is a lot cannier than we gave it credit for.

It’s also worth noting, that when human civilisations collapse — which they inevitably, eventually do — dogs speedily revert to their feral condition, and in the burnt-out and shattered remains of shopping malls and government offices, hunting packs roam, the dandy dinmont with the chihuahua, the St Bernard with the scottie.

So, when you see some innocuous little dog, supine in front of the fireplace, whimpering its way through a dream, don’t make the mistake of assuming it to be a reverie of happily mindless rabbit pursuit. Oh no. Rather, the sinister, furry fifth columnist is biding its time, playing the long game, and in its formidable brain, it’s envisaging the human ant heap kicked to bits, relishing the child-flesh that has become carrion.

Oh yes, the dogs are playing a long game, but some of them are becoming impatient. I arrived back in south London the other day, and walking from the Tube fell in behind a pit bull hybrid that had specially bred a human in a tracksuit to look after it. The dog languorously, arrogantly shat in the very middle of the pavement — and its human parasite did nothing whatsoever. I tell you, people, we are living in the end of days, and Sirius is in the ascendant.

Come to think of it, dubbing Cyril “Cyrille” is insufficient. I’m going to start crumbling progesterone into her Pedigree Chum.

07.04.07

I was walking with my friend Con the other day, when we fell into conversation about radiation. That has a nice lilt to it, doesn’t it? Anyway, I was saying how dreadful it is, that nowadays you can’t get a watch that glows properly in the dark, so paranoid is everyone about radiation. Con was assented to this, and told me how he’d been having dinner with an ancient uncle in Vienna, shortly after the Chernobyl meltdown, when the waiter told them the asparagus was off on account of the fallout on Austrian market gardens. It took quite a while for Con to get across to his valetudinarian relative that radiation was now generally considered to be toxic, because the uncle suddenly exclaimed: “When I was in the Urals, before the War, we used to have radiation baths for our health!”

Indeed. And when we were kids we used to have our feet X-rayed when we were buying shoes — and I don’t remember the sales assistants putting on lead aprons. Nothing better demonstrates our banjaxed relationship with the space-time continuum than our schizophrenic incorporation of radioactive isotopes. On the one hand you can’t tell the time in the dark, while on the other £20bn of tax payers’ money is about to be spunked off on a vast fleet of Armageddon-inducing intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Poor Pierre and Marie Curie, mashing up pitchblende in their bathtub, a little home cooking that led to the isolation of radium. In later life, Marie was appalled by the way cosmetics manufacturers used radioactive materials without precautions, but she herself carried test tubes full of them in her pockets. She died, in 1934, near Sallanches, from aplastic anaemia, almost certainly due to radiation poisoning. Her life, dedicated to the medical application of these wondrous, fissionable compounds, encapsulates the whole bizarre paradox of 20th-century physics.

Of course, Marie Curie did have the compensation of having been twice awarded the Nobel Prize, a signal honour — if a little bizarre. After all, if the vast fortune assembled by a dynamite manufacturer was used to honour those who — wittingly, or not — contributed to the creation of far more destructive technologies, then what comes next? Surely there should now be Teller, Bohr or Oppenheimer prizes, and they should be given to those who invent warheads capable of turning entire galaxies into the stellar equivalent of a hot fudge sundae.

I digress. On the one hand, the Trident “deterrent” and all the other ICBMs rattling in the silos of the superpowers abolish distance more effectively than any other technology. It makes no difference if you’re in Hiroshima or Harrogate when you can be reduced to a smear of ash on a smoking wall, within minutes of an ex-public schoolboy pressing a button. Yet, by the same measure, nothing thrusts one place further away from another than the vast fosses of paranoia and revetments of anxiety conjured up by the spectre of the acquisition of these “deterrents” by “irresponsible” regimes.

Until North Korea tested its “dirty bomb”, it was merely an isolated country, now it might as well be on Mars. The same goes for Iran, which until fairly recently was located squarely in the Middle East. Now, so alien have its mad, atomic ayatollahs become, that I wouldn’t be surprised if some astronomical wonk, squinting through the Hubble telescope, were to see Tehran orbiting Betelgeuse.

At the risk of boring you (a fate worse by far than radiation poisoning), I’d like to reiterate the maxim of this column: changes of scale invariably sacrifice the sensible in favour of the intelligible. And what could be a more extreme alteration in scale than the development of nuclear technology? For the past 60 years the entire planet has been held to ransom by a few kilos of plutonium. What can we understand by this? Either that our aspirations, as a species, possess astonishing grandeur, or, alternatively, that they have all the significance of quite liking new season asparagus. It won’t surprise you to learn that I incline to the latter view.

That being noted, I by no means think any of us should lie down in the face of the nuclear juggernaut. One of the chief things to recommend our homegrown protests is that they usually involve walking, and even – in the case of the longstanding Greenham campaign – camping. You know me, any excuse for a ramble. My late mother often used to visit the Greenham Peace Camp, although she couldn’t quite commit to spending a night under canvas. Fair enough, in the early 1980s her health was in decline, and despite generous doses of radium she died of cancer in 1988. The irony of this would not have been lost on her, besides we are all sitting in the dark, listening to the steady tick, yet unable to discover what time it is.

31.03.07

We’re eating at a restaurant in the ‘burbs to the east of Santiago, which has been recommended to us as distinctively Chilean. We were driven out here by one of the plush hotel cars, and swishing over overpasses, and swooping through underpasses, we might have been anywhere in the developed world. Still, I’ve read my stats — I know that while the average income here is around $12,000 per annum, perhaps 40 per cent of the population remain below the United Nations poverty line. Even so, if Chile is the England of South America, Santiago is doing a remarkably good job of looking like its Basingstoke.

And if Santiago is Basingstoke, then this restaurant is its Angus Steakhouse. Perhaps this is a distinctively Chilean eating experience, these acres of empty, red-and-white check, plastic tablecloths, the warm breeze soughing in the rustic, thatched trellises that overarch them. I try to tell myself this, as a bullish waiter comes, erratically charging out from the faux-Bavarian-bodega of the restaurant’s interior, but I’m not convinced: it’s Saturday night, and we’re the only customers.

It gets more Basingstoke by the second, because the menu has photographs of the available dishes. Despite this, we still manage to balls-up the ordering — or possibly not. We get a pig product platter to start: slices of thick, fatty ham, smoked ham, chunks of pork pate, circlets of compressed pig’s head — with sections of brain and skull.

Next up is an enormous fist of a fillet steak, with two orangey knuckles of fried egg. It’s garnished with a Jenga tower of chips, and comes with a dish of pulped corn wrapped in a cornhusk. This food isn’t heavy — it’s ballast. This is food to take on board before you cast off from Chile’s elongated coastline and head out into the turbid swell of the Pacific.

An hour later, the driver picks us spheroids up and rolls us back into town. Swishing along the Basingstoke bypass he brakes by the entrance to a dubious establishment with two flaming torches by its entrance.

“You gentlemen want to go to the nightclub?” He calls over his shoulder. I can see two burly bouncers, and the name of the club in neon letters: “WOMN”. The absence of the crucial vowel suggests an ambience beyond the sordid. I picture leering satyrs, with botched chimeras from the island of Dr Moreau gyrating inches above their big top laps.

“Er, no,” my companion, Marc, says. “I think we’ll pass on that one.” Indeed, even if our porky flesh were remotely willing, it’s difficult to imagine me cutting it in Chilean clubland, what with my cagoule, jeans and walking boots. I’m well aware that the men who frequent these establishments fantasise about walking all over the womn who work in them; still, I doubt they go quite so obviously attired for it.

The next day the home-from-home vibe persists: a dream of England strained through the grey mist that’s blown down from the Andes. Marc and I never have any truck with guides when we’re abroad, oh no. We’re cool traveller types, not snap-happy tourist ignoramuses. However, we were offered a guide and we’ve only half a day to cover a lot of ground, so we accepted him.

I’m glad. Ivan Bustamante turns out to be urbane and almost preternaturally wised-up. Besides having the same first name as my second son, he also spent his formative years in Clapham, south London. I kid you not. The Bustamante parents were refugees from Pinochet’s regime who ended up living a mile away from my London home. Between 1981 and 1986, Ivan attended Lilian Baylis, one of the local schools that the Conservative MP, Oliver Letwin, said he’d rather beg than send his child to.

Clearly, Chilean exiles are made of sterner stuff than Tory politicos, because Ivan has turned out very well indeed, leaving school to study music at Croydon College, before returning to Santiago in the late 1990s. He tells us he took the job as a city guide so that he could continue with his studies in classical guitar, which isn’t any more of an earner in South America than it is in south London.

So, it’s off to town, with Ivan discoursing on everything from constitutional reform to 19th-century urban planning, via detailed statistics of Chilean copper and nitrate production. Squint a little, put my fingers half in my ears, and I could be sitting in an Angus Steakhouse, listening to the Member for Basingstoke. Could’ve been, except for one thing: on returning to England, I checked up on Mrs Maria Miller. Judging from her Hansard entries, she’s a perfectly conscientious Conservative MP, but doesn’t to my ear display half the eloquence of my new-found Chilean friend. Vote Bustamante! I say.

03.03.07

The Santiago Metro could make any other mass urban-transit system feel like a raddled old whore. I’m staying in a flashy hotel in the upmarket El Golf district, and from the 10th floor this teeming, Latin American capital appears cluttered with the banal forms of mirror-shiny buildings. They transform the city into a desktop covered with modular trays: are there office workers in that one, or paperclips? But the Metro, now there’s a thing. I’ve never come across a subway station with its own preserved-fruit shop and lending library. There are also oil paintings on the platforms, and how clean is that? They’re big, well-lit canvases of seaside views and rural farms, perhaps a little neo-realist for my taste — but you can’t have everything. Hell, in Santiago, if you so desire, you can ride smoothly into the centre of town, while reading a Spanish translation of Ken Follett, and stuffing yourself with peaches in syrup. Moscow, eat your dark heart out.

Downtown, the Torre Entel looms over all. It’s homey to be in a country where a monopolistic telecommunications company has planted a 200-metre-high concrete caber in the ground, then stuck a steely yoghurt pot on top. Perhaps the Torre explains why Chileans are called “the English of Latin America”? It could be this, or it could be the riot-control trucks, complete with rotating water cannons, that patrol the streets around the old presidential palace in the Plaza de Armas. Mmm, so A la recherche de Falls Road.

They have a cosy yet threatening look, these battered, brown, bullet-dimpled trucks. Wire mesh has been artfully shaped over their windscreens and wing mirrors, they circle the square under the blank, granite facades of 1930s office blocks that are also pockmarked by gunfire, on one of which hangs a banner showing a handshake and the one-word slogan: “Mediacion”.

Funny old Chile, eh? The Latin American country that works. The Chileans are sober, industrious then in 1973 they went bonkers, the air force strafed and bombed the presidential place, while inside, the incumbent, Salvador Allende, topped himself. Even now, Santiago feels like a decapitated capital, with the Head of State floating in a jar of preserved fruit.

During the Pinochet years, the Plaza de Armas was tunnelled under to create a paranoid network of dictatorial bunkers, but in recent years there’s been a democratic dividend, and instead of the nation’s history being connived at underground, some of the bunkers have been turned into a Museum of National History.

Decorticated, the presidential palace was rebuilt — but only as a theme park version of itself. Now, through its off-white-walled courtyards, past the plashing fountains, their epaulettes tickled by palm fronds, come marching, astonishing squads of girl-soldiers wearing Ruritanian uniforms: shiny-peaked caps, figure-hugging, off-white tunics, olive-green breeches with satin stripes down the side, blanco-ed bandoliers, patent-leather knee boots with spurs. They’re as yummy-looking as chocolate soldiers, while their male counterparts in the Presidential Guard seem freakishly elongated.

Allende himself is commemorated by a sculpture in front of the Palace, which is of such overpowering ugliness it’s difficult not to conclude that the Chileans revile him with a passion. The once mild and professorial socialist leader is depicted with a horse-brush moustache and spectacles as thick-rimmed as welder’s goggles. He strides forward on his plinth, the sharp lines of his double-breasted suit blurred by a strange, thick membrane, which I stared at for some minutes, before realising that it was meant to be the Chilean flag.

Ah, Santiago! With your quaint old stationers, with your little carts selling motte con huesillo, a traditional soft drink compounded from boiled corn and peach juice, while, in the next precinct, global goths munch flame-grilled Whoppers to the “pop-pop-pop” of automated pedestrian crossings.

At the Church of San Francisco there’s a terrifying shrine. In a gold-framed glass cabinet sits Our Saviour, chopped off at the waist, his hair human, his stigmata spray-painted, and bracketed by mad flower arrangements. Poor Jesus, he looks like a mechanical model at the end of the pier of faith. Put a penny in his box and he’ll start to lick his wounds.

Back at the hotel it’s time for me to feel acute self-pity. The turn-down service has come, and besides ensuring that there are 34 large white pillows on the bed, on top of a white chocolate, they’ve re-enacted a scene from The Shining in the bathroom: five inches of bloody, perfumed bathwater have been drawn, a candle lit on the tile surround, and beside this has been placed a glass of red wine. I’m sure this is meant to be the acme of good service, but instead of feeling pampered I feel freaked out and embattled. The fighter-bombers are strafing the plastic tray, and it’s time for me to fall on my paperclip.

24.02.07