Will Self

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Blair’s ‘personalised’ email

February 23, 2007

Tony Blair should watch it: he was up late on Tuesday night sending out a “personalised” email to the 1.8 million car drivers who added their signatures to the petition against road pricing on No 10’s website. I can’t help feeling that the PM will leave us with one, peculiarly “Blairite” legacy: namely, a political process in which protesting is either ineffectual or electronic, which amounts to the same thing.

Decoupled from the engine of trade-union power, and no longer relying on personalised bonds forged in the workplace or the committee room, never before have so many protested against so much to such little effect. On the one hand we have mass demonstrations, such as those mounted by the Countryside Alliance or the Stop the War movement. Neither the ban on foxhunting nor the invasion of Iraq was seriously affected for a second. Both lobbies were full of people who, were they not marching in roughly the same direction, would have happily trampled all over each other.

On the other hand we have the anti-road-pricing petition, the campaign against “Tescoisation”, and the latest consumer-driven mass protest – this time against excessive charging by the Big Four high-street banks. These are also “single issues”, but the only principles involved are individual rights to drive, shop locally and extract cash from holes in walls. Moreover, the very medium by which these campaigns are pursued – the internet – undermines the very possibility of their succeeding.

For, the internet, while it may spread a dissenting view with viral alacrity, completely fails to marry it to any sustained or consistent position. Tapping on a keyboard is an isolated affair, and no matter how colourful a VDU may be, it’s no substitute for the infinite nuance provided by face-to-face communication. If the anti-road-pricing lobby really want to get Tony Blair worried, rather than sending him emails, they’ll have to get in their precious cars, drive somewhere and hold one of those quaint anachronistic things called a meeting.

At the back of all this lies the tremendous success of this old New Labour government in promoting a society in which individual choice – whether for consumer goods, public services or political commitments – is seen as far more valuable than any concept of collective welfare.

It’s a paradox that it should have been a nominally “social-democratic” government that hardened these ethical arteries, just as it’s a paradox that a more individualist society should prove so inimical to genuine contact between real people. Still, I don’t think you’d better spend too much time contemplating these conundrums, send someone an email instead: it’s what your leaders would want you to do.

22.02.07

Will’s diary

February 12, 2007

Will is going to be taking up a two-week residency on the Isle of Jura in May.
Read what Will thinks about the residency,
Listen to Will talking about it

Will is due to attend the Flip literary festival in Brazil in July and will also be at the Edinburgh Festival, which runs from August 10 to September 2.

Will is going to be talking to Philip Hensher on Tuesday February 27 at the Parker Moot Room, Amory Building, University of Exeter from 7pm to 8.30pm, £8/£4 concessions, 01392 667080.

There will be a reading tour and other events to coincide with the publication of the paperback edition of The Book of Dave, published March 1 2007. These are the confirmed dates so far:

Wednesday March 14
Will reads from The Book of Dave at Warwick Arts Centre, University of Warwick at 8pm

Tuesday March 20
Reading, Oxford Literary Festival at the Marquee, Christ Church, Oxford University

Saturday March 24
An Audience with Will Self, Queens Hall Arts, Hexham, 01434 652477

Thursday April 5
National Media Museum, Bradford (formerly the National Museum of Film and Photography). Contact Paula Truman, Bradford Libraries, 01274 433915, for more information

Thursday April 26
Aberystwyth Arts Centre, 8pm, or call 01970 623232

Waterstone’s Cambridge
Thursday March 22 2007, 6:30PM – 8:00PM
Tickets £3, available from the branch

Waterstone’s Glasgow Sauchieha
Monday March 26 2007, 6:00PM – 7:30PM
Tickets £3, available from the branch

Waterstone’s Bristol Galleries
Thursday March 29 2007, 7:30PM – 9:00PM

Charing Cross Hospital

February 12, 2007

It matters where you are born. Not only the country or the city, the burg or the hamlet – but the precise location, its height above terra firma, its positioning in the welter of the world; for this is the still point at the exact centre of the ever expanding shock wave of your life.

For years it mattered to me that I had been born in the Charing Cross Hospital. Not, you understand, Ralph Tubbs’s air terminal for the pathologically grounded on the Fulham Palace Road, but the old Charing Cross Hospital, slap-bang in the middle of London. Here, I fondly felt, I was ushered, expelled into life but paces from the Strand, the high-tension cable that connects the financial and regal powers of the land. Here, I considered, I was within dandling distance of the eight, fake statues of Queen Eleanor that mark the spot where – Dr Johnson averred – “The full tide of human existence is to be met.” Here, I was convinced, on a clear day of profound stillness, Bow Bells might be heard, their brassy clanging hammering me into the shape of a Cockney.

It pleased me to believe that Benjamin Golding’s hospital, founded in 1818 in Suffolk Street, and transliterated a few years later to 28 Villiers Street, was my fount. I liked even more the vile Terry Farrell development the Thatcher era shat down atop Charing Cross Station, and which I felt certain obscured my very origins with its lumps of concrete, curvilinear steel and smoked glass. Liked it, not least because I ascended the windy decks while it was under construction, in my then capacity as a lowly corporate puffer, and looked out on the bend of Thames, pewter under a leaden winter sky.

How wrong I was – about everything. It wasn’t until I set out to discover precisely where I was born that I found out the painful truth: far from old Charing Cross Hospital being razed, it has instead been transmogrified … into a police station. I was propelled into the world two hundred yards north of where I had thought – and so the wonky trajectory of my life was amply explained. I identified the building from a photograph in the Museum of London archive. It occupies the triangle formed by Agar Street, William the Fourth Street and Chandos Place, and is now separated from the hubbub of the Strand by a scarified, paved area. Designed by Decimus Burton, the foundation stone of the new old Charing Cross Hospital was lain in 1831. Decimus Burton, purveyor of sculpted blocks of hard cream to the Regency and then the Victorians. Decimus Burton, whose fantasias on the neoclassical stud Regents Park and line the margins of Hyde Park. Decimus Burton – the Terry Farrell of his day.

I suppose there is a niceness to this disappearance: pioneering healthcare replaced by paranoid law enforcement; blind birth giving way to the blinkered investigation of death. There’s a niceness also about the way that the new Charing Cross Hospital compromises the debatable land of Fulham and Hammersmith, dragging the centre of town out there, only for it to be Dead on Arrival. The new Charing Cross Hospital is a very nice hospital: it has hundreds of bed, it treats all comers. It has a pioneering transgender clinic – but no facilities for examining its own metamorphosis.

I went to see the old hospital, and cycling along Exeter Street I was honked loudly from behind then shouldered into the kerb by a monstrous American SUV. “What the fuck d’you think you’re doing!” I bawled at the driver, and he, not understanding that this was a rhetorical question, halted with a squeal, got out, came over to where I was struggling to dismount, said “Who d’jew fink I am, some fucking punk!” Then hit me in the face. Salt blood and toothy fragments filled my mouth. A stagehand from the theatre on the left was shouting – a mobile phoner outside the restaurant on the right was shouting as well. The anti-sophist was already back in his shooting brake and squealing around the corner. I had received a natal blow and was breathing heavily. I stood in the ever expanding shock wave of my own life, and, since the stagehand had got the licence number – I called the police. After all, it’s not that often you get the opportunity to summon help from your birthplace.

A day later I went to speak to the Detective Constable in charge of the case. She wanted to get photographs of my extremely minor injuries and flesh-out my statement. Being in the lobby of the police station felt like a homecoming. I could imagine my father, that quintessential interwar man, striding up and down this stage-shaped space, under the smoked-glass sconces, while waiting for news of my arrival. Behind the duty desk there was a board full of missing persons notices and appeals for assistance in murder inquiries: Camilla Gordon last seen alive leaving the Blue Bunny. Do You Recognise This Man? (Yes, of course I do, he looks exactly like a forensic pathologist’s reconstruction of a decomposed murder victim – I’d recognise him anywhere.) But there was no flyer reading: Charing Cross Hospital, last seen leaving Charing Cross in a westerly direction. In the corner a revolving strip of pinprick red lights made the slogan: IF YOU HAVE BEEN THE VICTIM OF A THEFT WHERE FORCE HAS BEEN USED TO STEAL YOUR PROPERTY PLEASE INFORM THE STATION OFFICER YOU HAVE PRIORITY OVER OTHER CALLERS.

The Detective Constable I’d come to see pitched up and ushered me in. I followed her down a distempered corridor, coated with a carpet so flat and dun that it looked spread rather than lain. Doors opened off to the right, affording glimpses of offices full of obsolete computer equipment and paunchy administrators. Water-cooler tanks, blue, ribbed, plastic, lay on the floor like the discarded shell casings of a liquid bombardment. To the left there were windows; in their metal frames I saw the metallic mangle of police vehicles jumbled up in the triangular yard. We went upstairs.

In a tiny cubicle of a room as featureless as a desert, we were joined by the snapper. She wore a brown woolly and brown corduroy trousers; was she, I wondered, deliberately camouflaged? She encouraged me to roll back my lip and show my chipped tooth. The flashbulb exploded, and into the charged atmosphere I made the lighthearted remark, “I was born here y’know.” The snapper, the DC – they took it well. “There’s been a lot of smoking done in this room,” the cop said and I wondered: “Before or since?”

I wasn’t sorry to leave the nick – I never am. When I was born, in 1961, I had a congenital inguinal hernia. My mother wasn’t able to feed me – they had to put me on a drip. I lay for six weeks – or so she assured me – in “a little cage”, until I was old enough for them to operate. As I strode along the Strand I wondered what had happened to the little cage; had it, like the hospital, transmogrified? Or was it perhaps still here, being used by the Met to contain tiny offenders?

From London: City of Disappearances by Iain Sinclair

Union blues

January 22, 2007

For some time it has been my contention that every English person “gets” a Celtic country. By this I mean that he, or she, ends up in a tangled association either with Wales, Ireland or Scotland. I ended up in bed with Scotland. Literally, since I married a Scot.

But despite this, while I never had much difficulty learning to love its landscape, its culture, or its whisky, the Scots have, I confess, been more of an acquired taste. Perhaps the definitive modern remark on the English by the Scots is voiced in the film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s fine novel Trainspotting, when the hapless Edinburghian junkies seek to kick their habit with a healthy spot of hill walking. Against the frozen peaks of the Cairngorms, one of them remarks: “It’s not the English I mind so much. Sure, they’re wankers, but it’s being colonised by a nation of wankers that I really object to.”

It’s this objection that seems to be overtaking the 300th anniversary of the Act of Union. Instead of a Royal Tattoo or two, we’re being treated to the spectacle of a resurgent Scottish Nationalist Party. If the SNP gains a majority at Holyrood in the May elections, they will press for a referendum on the Union and if a majority of Scots vote for independence, then – according to the Scottish Secretary, Douglas Alexander – the Government will have no option but to honour their democratic right to secede.

It’s a prospect that appals the Labour Party – and not simply Brownite kings-in-waiting, who would see their new Prime Minister’s legitimacy cut from under him. Others on the Left recoil from an independent England, for it would very likely turn a darker shade of blue. Of course, the majority of English Right-wingers are also opposed to Scottish independence. With the Scots gone – and presumably, like Ireland, likely to embrace the euro – what future for our own isolationism?

But I say: bring it on. No considerations of short-term ideological advantage should prevent a revision of the current antidemocratic state of affairs. The West Lothian question is not trivial. It isn’t that Gordon Brown, John Reid and Douglas Alexander are Scots that troubles me when they formulate legislation that applies exclusively to England it’s that they haven’t been elected by voters in these constituencies. If we wish to live in a proper democracy, a fair electoral system must have primacy. As I see it, Scottish independence is of a piece with proportional representation, a written constitution, a non-hereditary head of state and an elected second chamber.

To those in the north who bleat about regional English assemblies I say: forget it. If there’s any case for a federalised British Isles, it’s within the context of a federal Europe. Far from Scottish independence increasing what ill feeling there is between our two peoples, my suspicion is that it will dissolve it. Who knows, once the Scots stop feeling colonised, they may even feel better about us.

18.01.07

Cold comfort

January 16, 2007

I wrote this short gobbet for my regular London Evening Standard column on December 27. My editor there spiked it, I can only assume out of some knee-jerky patriotism that was banging around her brain. Nothing commands English attitudes more than the great, dying, effete behemoth that was Edwardian British Imperialism. I forgot about my gobbet for a couple of weeks, until the news that some new gang of idiots were traipsing off across Antarctica, valiantly “man-hauling” their equipment. So, in a spirit of futility, I’d like to share it with you:

“Many commiserations are due to the four-man Polar Quest team who have become the first British military expedition to reach the South Pole since Captain Scott’s men in 1912. The plan is for the combined Royal Navy and Marines personnel to hold a small remembrance service at the Pole, in honour of their fallen hero, before hauling their 20-stone sledges back to the Patriot Hills on the perimeter of the continent. But if they really want to succeed in emulating Scott, there’s only one course open to them: holing up in a tent, in a blizzard, while starving and freezing to death. When it comes to replicating one of the great, incompetent follies of British imperialism, their colleagues in the RAF Southern Reach team, have already outperformed Polar Quest by not getting to the Pole at all. These icy airmen should feel nothing but stupefying pride at their heroic — and very British — feat of failure.”

Kerb our enthusiasm

January 12, 2007

You would have to be a very foolish environmental campaigner indeed not to grasp that it’s exactly the kind of privilege represented by the private car that most people aspire to. Peter Roberts, the account manager from Telford, who is leading the campaign against the Government’s proposed road-pricing scheme, undoubtedly understands this. More than 160,000 people have already signed the petition against road pricing that he has put up on the Downing Street website and at this rate, by the time it comes down on February 20, there will be 500,000 signatures.

The objectors come under many different umbrellas: some claim the fitting of “black boxes” to monitor cars and charge drivers is in breach of their human rights. Others voice concern about the impact of such schemes on poorly paid key workers such as nurses. Still more point out there’s no obvious benefit to the car driver from road pricing. The Tories’ transport spokesman, Chris Grayling, argues for a virtuous circle of specific road pricing, where the revenues are used to finance – you guessed it – more roads, but argues spiritedly against a national strategy he describes as “untested” and “unwise”.

As Londoners we can afford to be a little blasé about all this: we’ve had a road-pricing scheme for nearly four years, and haven’t ended up in an automotive Guantanamo Bay. Nor is the congestion charge to blame for our declining local health services. However much people like to kick Ken (me included), the Mayor has made sure road pricing goes hand-in-hand with improvements in public transport. Any national scheme must do the same, ensuring those priced out of driving have an alternative.

This isn’t as hard as it sounds: research shows that the bulk of driving undertaken by lower-income groups is to predetermined destinations for leisure and shopping. But for those signing the petition, a car is the most legitimate of possessions, and anyone who puts them beyond the reach of the less-well-off has a heart as hard as bitumen.

Yes, preventing congestion on Britain’s roads and reducing pollution will require curbing our demand for driving. And if road-pricing schemes charge more for gas-guzzling cars, as three London boroughs now intend to do, it will hit upwardly mobile petrol heads hard, while the very rich will just keep on cruising.

Is this unfair? Yes – but then any society that allows massive income inequality is unfair. Does it breach drivers’ rights? No, because along with rights come responsibilities, and as things are, drivers are taking none for the broader environment.

Peter Roberts admits to a seemingly paradoxical set of beliefs: opposing road pricing but believing public transport should be publicly owned. In fact, there’s no conflict here if only Roberts could do joined-up thinking, he’d understand that a coordinated transport policy, involving both subsidised public transport and road pricing, is the best possible form of joined-up government.
11.01.07

Blogstipation

January 12, 2007

Happy New Year. What to say about my inability to blog? My blogstipation — if you will. Here, in London, the pissed old farts who run the print media have, belatedly and half-assedly, realised the significance of this new literary form. It’s true, guys, we’re all going down, or rather, the prints are going to fold. However, Marshall McLuhan was wrong, the medium is not the message; or rather, the idea that user-generated content is going to supplant the need for a caste of professional scribes is nonsense. Something like the newspaper will endure — but on the web. In the meantime, hacks on the London Guardian are required to enter the blogosphere, and, since their email addresses are also at the bottom of their print columns, engage in lengthy discussions with the iPod-heads. Those at the Telegraph even have to do their stuff as podcasts. Thank Nike the editors I work for haven’t sicked on to this. Yet.

Permission

November 10, 2006

Curious happenings surround the publication of the stage version of my short story “Scale”. Commissioned by the redoubtable young impresario Ian Osborne, the play — adverted on its title page as “a musical regression in five acts” — features snippets of some of the most ephemeral pop hits of 1992, sung onstage by what the directions describe as “a highly mannered soprano”. Brad Morrow, who publishes a literary journal called Conjunctions, out of Bard College in the States, expressed an interest in running the first act of “Scale”, but after the proofs arrived I realised that we had not sought permission for the use of such lyrical gems as “Rhythm is a Dancer” by that once-popular beat combo Snap.

You will, of course, recall the ditty, which has such lines as “Rhythm is a dancer / It’s a source companion / You can feel it everywhere”, as well as the marvellous simile “It’s as serious as cancer”. Approaches were duly made to the song’s publishers, but, while acknowledging that requests for the cancer riff had been made in the past, the permission for further use was rebuffed. I was somewhat gobsmacked: the entire lyric is freely available in this medium and Conjunctions, while not entirely recondite, has a circulation of a few thousand at best. Concerned for the forthcoming West End production of “Scale” (what would we do without “Rhythm is a Dancer”? It’s as if Shakespeare was refused permissions by Plutarch), I wrote to the music publishers again; and now, here’s the sting: a very kind person called Mikki Francis (male, female, Buffy fan?), did secure the Snap permission — however, irony of ironies, her email to me was “tucked” behind her previous one in what I later learned is called a “conversation thread”.

Somehow I’d managed to hit the button that activates this “facility” in my email programme. When I deactivated it, hundreds of unanswered emails came back to view: the fag-ends of exchanges, at the time misapprehended, that had led to injurious consequences. Indeed, the conversational-thread bollocks had been going for months, and had I not fallen victim to it, I wouldn’t be here, in a web shack in Spitzbergen, eating cloudberry jam, while a narwhal treats my fungus with his horn. I may never make it back for the play’s opening night, still, rhythm is a dancer…

Will in conversation with Iain Sinclair

October 30, 2006

Will is going to be discussing his relationship with London with the writer Iain Sinclair and others at the Tate Britain Auditorium in London this Friday, November 3. The event is free. For more details, visit www.tate.org.uk/britain/eventseducation/talks/6275.htm

Time Out interview

October 24, 2006

Cracking interview with Will from John O’Connell of Time Out magazine in London.

www.timeout.com/london/books/features/1565.html

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Will’s Latest Book

Will Self - Elaine
Will Self's latest book Elaine will be published in hardback by Grove on September 5 2024 in the UK and September 17 2024 in the USA.

You can pre-order at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com

Will’s Previous Books

Will Self - Will
Will
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  Will Self - Phone
Phone
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Shark
Shark
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  Umbrella
Umbrella
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The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Prawn Cracker
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being A Prawn Cracker
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  Walking To Hollywood
Walking To Hollywood
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The Butt
The Butt
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Amazon.com
  Grey Area
Grey Area
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Amazon.com
Junk Mail
Junk Mail
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  Great Apes
Great Apes
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Cock And Bull
Cock And Bull
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Amazon.com
  The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
The Quantity Theory Of Insanity
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Amazon.com
The Sweet Smell Of Psychosis
The Sweet Smell of Psychosis
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  My Idea Of Fun
My Idea Of Fun
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The Book Of Dave
The Book Of Dave
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  Psychogeography
Psychogeography
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Psycho Too
Psycho II
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  Liver
Liver
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How The Dead Live
How The Dead Live
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  Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys
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Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
Dr Mukti And Other Tales Of Woe
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  Dorian
Dorian
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Amazon.com
Feeding Frenzy
Feeding Frenzy
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  Sore Sites
Sore Sites
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Perfidious Man
Perfidious Man
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Amazon.com
  The Undivided Self
The Undivided Self
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