Will Self

I’ve been toying with a short story of this title for years, ever since hearing — or thinking I heard — a Radio 3 announcer say, with predictably risible stuffiness: “During the winter of 1772, Haydn, then resident in London, found himself unable to compose, so troubled was he by a nasal polyp.” There was something about the notion of Haydn’s nasal polyp — rather like Flaubert’s parrot, or Lenin’s brain, or Churchill’s black dog — that seemed almost purpose-built for a story title. Not that I really wanted to write anything serious about Haydn: this was going to be more a piss-take of that particular strain in contemporary letters, perhaps exemplified by the titles above, that seeks out profundity by yoking a mundane, or curious, thing — parrot, brain, polyp — to a great name.

My story (I’m definitely going to write it) will focus on the effects of the polyp on Haydn’s sense of his own musicality. I think it will revisit some of the torments I visited on Simon Dykes in my story Chest (collected in Grey Area). Anyway, I wrote it on a Post-it note, this title, and stuck it on my wall, as is my wont. It’s now been there for years, unremarked on by anyone until Ian Rankin came to film a short interview with me for a documentary he’d been making on Stephenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde.

On seeing the projected short-story title, Rankin expostulated: “Haydn’s nasal polyp! That’s uncanny! Why have you got it written up on your wall?” I explained, and he told me in turn that he and his crew had just been to the Hunterian Museum (named after the celebrated anatomist and surgeon, John Hunter), where they had been told the story of Haydn’s nasal polyp by the curator. For, it transpired, Hunter, as well as being the real-life model for Dr Jekyll, was also called upon to operate on the offending polyp.

I offer this to you all as an example of the merest literary coincidence.

At Marrocco’s on the front at Hove there is a queue of ice-cream malcontents, of whom we are five: my friend the photographer Polly Borland and I, together with three of our children. A bank of sea mist that’s been hovering offshore all afternoon is beginning to dip and sway in towards us; ahead of it comes a premonition of immemorial dankness, a Dickensian pong. I shouldn’t be surprised if, when it lifted, a prison hulk were revealed, its rotting spars piercing the shoreline of Worthing.

I used to come here in puberty, scampering along the Celesteville esplanade, then up the tiled stairs to the salt-water swimming baths at the King Alfred Leisure Centre. “No Petting” the signs said on the poolside — an injunction they no longer make. “No chance” I would wearily, sebaceously acknowledge. No sex in my life then, only Player’s Navy Cut and barley wine, rasp and head spin.

There’s a kerfuffle inside the ice-cream bar, followed by the arcade-game sirens of converging police cars coming towards us. Two estate cars pull up with the bilious chequerboard of the Sussex Constabulary spread across their flanks. One, two, three … eight cops in all debouch and ram their way into Marrocco’s. Polly — purely on an ice-cream errand, checking flavours and such — follows on after them. Then comes back again in high dudgeon.

“They’ve bloody handcuffed them!” She expostulates in the rain-on-galvanised-iron accents of her native Melbourne. “Two 13-year-old kids and they’ve bloody handcuffed them! I had to say: ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ I had to — but they didn’t pay me any mind.” I find this a little hard to credit; personally, if I were Sir Ian Blair himself I’d stop and pay attention to Polly, who is a formidable presence. I’ve been on assignments with her in the ghettos of South Central LA and never seen her bat an eyelid.

Naturally, Mrs Daily Mail is ahead of us in the queue and rounds on Polly: “They won’t do it again, then,” she opines. “This’ll teach them a lesson.”

“Madame,” I rejoin “are you able to see into the future?” She ignores this, but continues instead: “I’m glad the police have cuffed them, I wish they’d handcuff the little bleeders who steal off my girl at school, that’ll teach them a lesson as well.”

And doubtless she would’ve gone on, had she not become aware that I was passionately ignoring her. There are some people who won’t rest easy until either they’re in their graves — or a lot of other people are.

Then the cops came out, one each side of the two handcuffed malefactors. The kids were bat-eared, T-shirted; Polly had another go at the cops. One of the kids turned and said: “That’s just what I’ve been telling them, but they wouldn’t listen.” Then he was squashed down into one of the cars. The queue collectively tut-tutted — some for the kids, some for the cops. And now comes the most pathetic detail: once Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were safely in the meat wagon, one of the cops came back and fetched their BMXs, which were propped up by the doorway. He walked off carrying them in either hand, then put them in the boot of the car, as if he were a uniformed dad; which I suppose in a way, he was.

For once I’m tending more towards conspiracy rather than cock-up. Mostly I view conspiracy theorists as the anoraks of the secularised world — seeking for shadowy, omnipotent forces to revere in a postlapsarian world of disturbing chaos. But the recent debacle in Forest Gate, whereby 200 armed, chemically suited policemen stormed a house and maimed an innocent man — who just happened to be a Muslim — have got me thinking.

A couple of days after the shooting, when it became apparent that the “hot” intelligence the Met had trumpeted was nothing more than hearsay, I ran into Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, outside his office in Soho. After some acquaintance-style chitchat, I averred that the whole Forest Gate debacle smacked to high-heaven of the kind of inter-agency conflict bruited about by John Le Carré in his Cold War thrillers, and that I wouldn’t be surprised if MI5 had set the coppers up. Far from disabusing me of this, Ian all but concurred: “Funnily enough,” he said “Francis Wheen was making precisely the same point just now in our editorial meeting.”

Now, a fortnight since, the fact that these two men have been released without charge, and that the police clearly did cock up (even if their actions were the result of someone else’s conspiracy), is steadily being buried beneath a lava flow of bureaucratic “inquiry”: the truth entombed, only to be accessible millennia hence by the disputatious political archaeologists of a future era.

That the Met, MI6, MI5 and heaven knows what other shadowy “security agencies” (what a choice euphemism this remains), should be engaged in a turf war, using the terrorist threat as a weapon with which to smite each other, should come as no surprise. There’s an easy comfort — much cleaved to at all levels of society — that this kind of carry-on imploded along with the collapse of the Berlin Wall; after all, with no enemy to defect to, how could all those spooks and plods exercise their undoubted capacity for treachery? But this is nonsense, the whole farrago of the Kelly suicide — and its aftermath — exposed the extent to which the political class try to ride the bucking bronco of “intelligence”, ever fearful that the damn nag will toss them off.

Ever since 9/11 we’ve been admonished that there is a real, present and even grotesque threat to the welfare of each and every one of us. The police and the powers-that-be regularly inform us that this or that terrorist threat has been thwarted, and that for sound “operational” reasons we cannot be allowed to know the details. Yet when we get to actually hear about this Bin Laden-busting, it almost always turns out to have been a cock-up. Now, with the end of the Blair regime in sight, there’s little reason for those cloak ‘n dagger horseys to go on being bridled. With the knives already out for “Sir” Ian Blair at the Met, can it be long before a fair few are plunged between the “Sir” Paul Smith-suited shoulders of our un-beloved leader?

Watch this space.

Will Self, 29 June 2006

At 42 the Calls – a proto-boutique hotel in Leeds, which I’ve been frequenting for a decade or more on book tours – I am upgraded to a suite. And what a suite! This is no aircraft hangar, like the suite-with-gymnasium at the Hotel de Vin in Brum, but a charming collection of rooms: bedroom, bathroom, sitting room, tastefully rendered in white plaster and featuring low, rough-hewn wooden beams. However, the sitting room is dominated by an oval black table, complete with six high-backed chairs, and a wide-screen interactive television. It’s as if Anne Hathaway’s cottage had been impregnated by the Starship Enterprise and produced bastard offspring, all interior and no surface.

The interactive television is the focus of my attention because I have to file some copy late that evening, after I’ve given my reading at the local Waterstone’s. The receptionist assured me on the phone that morning, when I called from London to enquire, that this gizmo would enable me to send and receive email. I took her at her word, and didn’t hump along my laptop, because the following day I was intent on some major hill walking in the Peak District.

Late that evening I settled down on the bridge of the Starship Wattle and Daub, and started faffing around with the interactive TV. The approved list of email servers didn’t include my own, when I logged on to the web and plugged in its URL, the dratted interactive TV didn’t respond either. Nice Tim, the manager, had already been up once to sort out the infrared keyboard — which wasn’t working — now he came back up to faff alongside me. Suddenly I noticed we’d been faffing for over an hour and it was past 11pm. “Jesus!” I keened, like a fishwife who’s lost her husband and five sons off Dogger Bank, I’ll never manage to get to my bed in time to be up at 6.30 at this rate!”

Tim invited me down to the office to use the computer there. He even said no one would mind if I smoked my Hoyo de Monterrey petit robusto. We went down, I logged on to my server and began typing my observations on the woeful progress of John “Castrate All Sex Offenders” Reid at the Home Office. And typed. And typed. And then, after about an hour, hit “send”, only to be told by the server that my “time had expired”. My copy had, naturally, been consigned to the ether. And no, I hadn’t saved it.

I moaned and spat expletives like a man whose testicles have been shot off in the front line of a bitter and yet strangely useless counter-insurgency operation. I considered — seriously, coldly, with great deliberation — laying waste to human civilisation, to a point at which it would take many thousands of years before technological advancement resulted in the re-emergence of electronic data transmission. I swore some more. I apologised to the night manager (it was by now that late) for my histrionics. Then, like Sisyphus, I put my weight to the plastic boulder, and began pushing it back up the hill with finger stroke after finger stroke.

Every hotel room with a sufficiently big mirror reduces a man to the level of Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. The urge to order up scotch, do nude kung-fu and smash the mirror is almost insurmountable. It takes iron self-control to watch News 24 and then attempt sleep. At the Hotel de Vin in Birmingham all the suites are named after famous vintages and there’s even a vinous tinge to the wall coverings and the furniture. Last time I stayed here, I arrived at about midnight, and the old geezer on the desk said: ‘We have upgraded you, Mr Self, to the Ruinart Suite.’ ‘Oh, that’s awfully nice of you,’ I replied. ‘Yes,’ he leant forward conspiratorially ‘it has a gym.’ And it did: three Tunturi machines, a wet room, a power shower. The bed itself was about ten foot square, and would’ve happily accommodated an Eastern European volleyball team, pumped up on steroids and ready for anything. The trouble was, I was utterly exhausted. Nevertheless, I bent to the will of Barton Fink, the God of hotel chains, and exercised all night long.

This time I haven’t been upgraded. I sliced the top of my toe off on the sharp bed leg while voyaging to the toilet. Burgundy blood dripped on to the winey carpet. On the television, community leaders in Forest Gate, East London, remark to Jeremy Paxman how astonishingly alienating it is to have large squads of armed policemen – some of them in chemical protections suits – smashing into neighbourhood houses. Mark my words: given the speed with which the IPCC has acted on the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting, it will take about 150 years for the truth to emerge on this one.

Now on to Lichfield, birthplace of Dr Johnson. Who says England isn’t a fascinating place?