Will Self

Psychogeography 12

Los Angeles, again. Sitting in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont on Sunset, I listen idly to the beautiful native Angeleno as she tells me what she and her boyfriend – an equally beautiful Spaniard – did last New Year’s Eve. “We drove all the way out to the Joshua Tree, man, and we did some ‘shrooms and we just let it all sink in.”

“Yeah,” puts in the Spaniard, who’s writing a doctoral thesis on deconstruction or construction – one or the other – “and we made love, amazing, fragile love. It was too much in a way. Much too much. There were shooting stars, and these ancient trees, and the coyotes and bobcats … and, well … I felt a little, y’know …” he laughs, embarrassed at his own psychic fragility, “… like bits of me were dropping off.”

“I know what you mean.” I try to sound avuncular as I puff on my pipe, somewhere between a drug counsellor and a keen stamp collector. Yards of tweed pleat into hairy mountains in my crotch. However, the tobacco I bought earlier in the day – Royal Vintage Matured Ribbon – is the rankest thing I’ve tasted since I last swigged a can of flat beer and fag butts, and the Angeleno is just a little too pulchritudinous for me to want to even hear that she’s been making love, let alone imagine it taking place in the Mojave Desert. Bits of me are dropping off as well – and it isn’t ‘shrooms that are to blame.

Still, down in the hotel car park, I have a sloppy General Motors coupe – a hire car for a hireling – and my flight out to London isn’t until late the following afternoon; perhaps I too will head for the Joshua Tree and commune there under its giant toilet- brush limbs? In fact – I must. Nothing hurts more than waiting in a vast and alien city for an intercontinental friction toy to whirr you into the stratosphere. The surly gravity of LA – pickled in its own nastiness of pollutants – drags you so that you feel like a grounded astronaut, each of your limbs subjected to 5Gs of thrust, as you struggle to make it to the minibar for $6.50’s worth of jelly beans.

Seven-thirty am on Sunday morning and I swing out on to Sunset, my tyres squealing as they slap the oil-stained concrete. In LA it is pointless to adopt any psychogeographic perspective that is unmediated by the automobile. Don’t walk or allow yourself to be driven, grasp the burning nettle of the 21st century and look at everything through a screen, or on one. This is not a city for the faint-hearted or for those who demand human scale, because it goes on and on and on. There are no featured players – only extras. By the time I reach the entrance ramp on to Highway 10, I feel as if I’ve done a good morning’s driving. I listen to the Phil Collins station, WMCPHIL, on the car radio, back-to-back plays of Phil’s greatest hits, segued with advertisements for colonic irrigation and
cryogenic preservation.

Chunk-a-clunka-chunk. Highway 10 rears and gallops through El Monte, Baldwin Park, West Covina, Pomona, Montclair, Ontario – the city is so big that it contains an entire fucking Canadian province within its boundless limits. Then, around Banning, on the edge of the desert, it finally loses its grip, mountains rear up, eagles replace aerials. “I can feel it coming in the air tonight …” Phil expostulates, and I can only join in “Oh Lord!”

I pull in to a rest stop and stroll over to where an immaculate California Highway Patrol car idles; for several long moments I look at the two tousled me’s in the mirrors of his sunglasses, before asking how far it is to the turn-off for the Park. “Route 62 is about a half-hour on, the Park entrance a half-hour after that.” He replies unfazed; although I note that like all Americans he now pronounces “route” to rhyme with “doubt”. This transformation occurred about 10 years ago in a mass act of strange Stalinist forgetting on the part of the people. Now, all Americans swear that they’ve always said “rout” not “root”. Even when you sing a few lines of “Route 66” and point out to them that it isn’t a song about the 66th time of putting an aggressor to flight, they still deny it.

These things trouble me, trouble me more than the fat, bourgeois weekender bikers who stream past me on the switchback road, more than the vast perimeter fence of the Twentynine Palms Marine base to the north of the road, wherein a thousand thousand jarheads are ironing their hair before church.

By the time I reach the Park I have only half an hour to crunch the sand, climb a rounded rock, breathe the cool, strained air, goggle at the leguminous toilet brushes. The Official Map and Guide is apologetic about the desert: “Some think it wretched and seemingly useless,” it says, as if describing a minor character in a play by Samuel Beckett. But it isn’t the Park that’s useless – it’s me. I’ve driven for eight hours to take a half-hour walk. I thought I was rolling with the Firestone go-round of LA life, but really I’m just another piece of tousled road kill.

Psychogeography 11

Slogging up through the woods and on to the main ridge of the Chilterns on a damp morning in late autumn, the joys of summer rambles seem long departed. Ah! If only I could recapture that fearless rapture with which I turned the golden key, wrenched open the door and ran laughing down the corridor into the Queen of Hearts’ rose garden. Dandelion days! Sweet scattered spore of youth! When to the sessions of sweet silent thought we summon up … and so on and so forth, jaw-jaw, bore-bloody-bore. No, the fact is that it’s pissing down and I’m a middle-class, middle-aged man making tea on a miniature gas stove in a tiny covert, while down the muddy track beside me ride upper-class, middle-aged women on chestnut stallions, exchanging the small change, the he-shagged, she-spat of hacking society.

But I’ve no time to get lost in such regrets; I’m on a mission. In my rucksack are enough uppers, downers, twisters and screamers to transmogrify the passive pheasants of these pleasant hills into the avian equivalent of suicide bombers. Strange Miles, my neuro-pharmacological consultant – who operates out of a light industrial estate near Princes Risborough – has been working on this gear all summer. He swears blind that if I leave enough of it in the feed bins scattered along the ridge, then come the first day of the shooting season, instead of doing the flying equivalent of ambling towards the wavering guns of a lot of tipsy City brokers, the fowl will
rise up and descend in a fluttering, bombinating horde, their
target: Chequers.

I only hope the Prime Minister himself will be in residence that weekend and get espaliered by a thousand tiny beaks, but if not, if he’s in Texas or Timbuktu, then I’m prepared to accept whatever fatalities may be caused by the drug-crazed birds. Strange Miles and I simply see this as collateral damage in our two-man war against the entrenched power of the state.

On I slog and slide, the rich clayey soil spattering my nylon flanks. But what’s this! Just past Cobblershill Farm I come across a folding table set up by the wayside. A number of clingfilm-wrapped placards enjoin me to sign a petition against the use of this bridleway by four-wheel-drive vehicles. Of course I should sign! Every fibre in my being cries out against the desecration of the countryside by these disgusting vehicles … and yet … and yet … if I’m entirely honest I cannot deny that I myself have done a fair bit of off-roading. In the early 1990s, when I found myself temporarily marooned in a small cottage in deepest Suffolk, the green lanes beckoned to me with their cushioned camber and their soft verges.

Few people realise quite how many green lanes there are in England, let alone that you’re allowed to drive cars along them. If I took the B-roads back from the Ship Inn at Dunwich, or The Bell in Walberswick, to my cottage outside Leiston, there was always the slim chance that I might encounter one of the two patrol cars that cover East Anglia. Not that I would’ve been over the limit you understand, it’s just that encounters with the authorities of any kind have always given my sensitive nerves a dreadful jangle. No, much better to slide out of Walberswick and then across the common on the sandy, rutted, potholed track past the haunted hippy house. In deepest darkest winter there was always a tremendous frisson when I reached the last outpost of civilisation and doused the headlights. Proceeding by the light of the stars at a stately 5mph, the wind battering the featherweight chassis of the little car, always made me feel that I’d stripped away all the useful accoutrements of motoring, to leave merely a locomotive residuum.

It helped that I was driving a Citroen Deux Chevaux. Yes, not for me the padded monstrosity of a Toyota Land Cruiser or the effortless functionality of a Land-Rover Discovery. Not for me the effortless traction of four massive tyres. What made my night-time, green-lane driving an acceptable form of transport, rather than a dubious kind of recreation, was that I allowed the countryside itself a fighting chance. True, the 2CV does perform impressively in the rough, but there was always a chance that I’d get myself bogged and end up having to slog home 12 miles on foot. It happened several times – and I felt good about it. But these bastards ploughing the Chilterns into a furrowed morass, they simply shouldn’t be allowed. I withdrew my tungsten-carbide ballpoint from its oiled leather sheath and signed the petition with a flourish, before plopping on towards Little Hampden.

A fortnight later, the PM stepped out on to the ha-ha of Chequers in the lemony light of a perfect autumn morning. The shotgun reports up on the ridge sounded like the doors of so many suburban semis being precipitately slammed by hurrying commuters – or so he thought in a rare moment of metaphoric insight. And that cloud up there, what could it be? So many airborne motes fusing into coherence and then fissioning into chaos, like thoughts in a disordered mind.

Psychogeography 10

This column began in the British Airways flight magazine – and I’m not knocking that. The good people at High Life gave Mr Steadman and I a full year of monthly excursions within which to impress upon its readership the psychogeographical way of proceeding, but inevitably we had to part. The editor’s pretext was a redesign, but in my heart of hearts I knew that it was one of those relationships where I was obscurely grateful to the other for having had the guts to end it.

After all, just how much can you meaningfully divulge to the commercial airline passenger about the discombobulation of space and time effected by modern transport? Sitting in orderly rows, twiddling the tiny clitorises of computer games toggles, or watching epic movies on screens the size of fag packets, as in a blueish haze of nicotine withdrawal they scream through the stratosphere, these frequent flyers are wholly credulous consumers of the Promethean charade, ever on their way to wrest the Calibri lighter of the gods from a duty-free shop in Dubai Airport.

When the last Concorde was withdrawn from commercial service there was much sentiment expended about how dreadful it was that this futuristic aircraft was to become a thing of the past (nostalgia for the future, now there’s a thing), but personally I couldn’t resist a throaty cheer. No longer would Joan Collins and a chemical toilet containing a dollop of her chocolate mousse excrement sonic-boom over my south London home of an evening; and no longer would we be compelled to think how amazing it was that you could land at JFK before you’d even taken off from Heathrow. Such a gross failure to appreciate the relativity of space and time could only afflict a culture senescent with its own sense of creaking determinism. After all, if Joan really did arrive in New York before she’d left London, wouldn’t it necessitate a radical rethink of her own approach to time zones?

You can imagine New York Joan (let’s call her JNY for convenience) witnessing via a simultaneous telecast the absurd anachronism that was London Joan (JL) arriving at the airport, her cheeks stapled behind her ears, her waist cinched so tight that designer names were incised on her flesh, her make-up as thick as Bakelite, and 22 pieces of matching Samsonite luggage strung out behind her like the very drogues of death. “Wow!” JNY, might well ejaculate, “I can’t go on pretending that I’m a young sex-pot, it’s undignified and absurd …” Whereupon JL would disappear in a puff of whales’ intestines, while JNY would find herself mysteriously embarked – older-looking and wiser – on a Saga holiday to Madeira.

I digress – but not much. Now Concorde is out of service there’s also the agonising question of what to do with the 0.33 scale model of it that stands on the roundabout outside Heathrow. Surely visitors to the busiest airport in Europe can’t be welcomed by a model of an obsolete aircraft? I agree. The best course would be to press Little Concorde into service itself as a kind of back-to-the-future theme park conveyance. Board Little Concorde outside Terminal 2 and a team of Shire horses will drag it – and you – to Legoland, where you can witness durable models, built in small, brightly coloured plastic bricks, of a happier Britain.

All of which is by way of saying that when Ralph and I flew the flag for BA we couldn’t mention any of this stuff. We couldn’t treat of any cynicism concerning the nation state, and we couldn’t even touch upon the vexed question of flying itself. The last thing people flying want to be reminded of is that they’re in the air. Everything about the whole flying experience – the yards of ultra-mundane corridors, the stockyard of the check-in, the prosaic poetry of the in-flight announcements – conspires to make the traveller believe that far from being propelled by mighty jet engines 35,000 feet above the earth, she is in fact sitting in the waiting room of a mildly upmarket dentist, awaiting a mildly uncomfortable procedure. The idea that one minute you might be reading a novel by Joan’s sister, and then the next your thigh bones would be entering your occiput as the vehicle plunges at 32 feet per second per second through the bottom of a reservoir near Staines, is too dramatic a reversal for even the psychically robust among us to contemplate.

And let’s face it, none of us are that robust anymore. After September 11, when the rot really set in for international travel, all those downed aircraft became the very reification of our inability anymore to suspend our disbelief in the hocus-pocus of consumerism. Somewhere out in the Mojave Desert there’s a great parking lot full of 747s, aisle after aisle of the idle behemoths. If only we could be allowed to wander amongst them, marvelling at their obsolescence, and occasionally reading illustrated columns in their glossy, on-ground magazines, then perhaps people would no longer need to fly the flag?

Psychogeography 8

My zest for the seemingly more adventurous forms of travel has been in decline for decades now. When I visited India in my early twenties, it took me about three months to get over the culture shock; nowadays it takes me about three months to acclimatise to a weekend in Wiltshire, a development that makes the country-house party – so beloved of the English upper-middle and upper classes – pretty much anathema to me.

But if I can’t be arsed to visit that humungous euphemism “the developing world” (developing into what exactly? A banana? A moth?), at least I know some people who can. Jon Wealleans, an architect of my acquaintance, has made a couple of pilgrimages to the ancient city of Hampi in the central Indian province of Karnataka. Jon, as well as drawing buildings that have yet to be constructed, takes a fierce delight in producing exactingly realistic renditions of Hampi in oils. Over liver and bacon in The Stockpot restaurant in London, Jon waxed lyrical about the unique character of Hampi, a city at its zenith during the Golden Age of India, when Hindus and Muslims cohabited amid opulent, many-pillared temples.

I had an idea: since Jon’s paintings were, he assured me, slavishly like the real thing, I could walk from my house in Stockwell to his house hard by Borough Market, and thus encounter the Subcontinent without leaving my own immediate purlieus. I set off in bright autumnal sunlight that was soon palled by the mighty sooty bulk of St John the Divine, Kennington. This is the sort of Victorian neogothic church that should have been dropped – in a friendly fashion – on John Betjeman. John Ruskin Street, which is flanked on both sides by vast estates of high rises, led me to the Walworth Road. In Spring Street market, a long nave of knickers, mobile-phone covers and pigs’ trotters, I had a sharp exchange with a stallholder.

“I want a big black cap,” I said.

“A big black cap just like that?” the man snapped back. “I’ve only small blue caps.”

“No good,” I stressed. “But I’ll be back.”

Jon and his partner Natalie live in a c1650 house full of things that might well be on sale in the so-called Thieves Market across the road. The apartments are roomy and wood-panelled; Jon works in a studio on the first floor. The Hampi paintings were all I could’ve hoped for, like oblongs of half a world away, radiating painful lemon dawn, reeking of untreated sewage, cardamon and chai. The temples had the magisterial appearance of ruins that have yet to be scaled by a recreational multitude, and indeed, as Jon described the 22-hour cab ride from Goa, followed by the coracle ride across the river required to reach them, I felt wholly vindicated by my desire to merely stroll across town in order to visit them.

Jon himself is no stranger to the banjaxed world view. He’s currently working on the building that will enclose “Dickens’ World” at Chatham, a structure he cheerfully describes as “a big black cube”, broken up only by those points where “the rides” emerge. He was also responsible for Madame Tussaud’s in Las Vegas, a tricky commission which saw Jon implanting huge airconditioning units into the portico to prevent the waxwork of Don King – which played the role of greeter – from melting away. He has long eschewed the practicalities of his profession – site visits, meetings, etc – in favour of just drawing; so that quite often he rounds an unfamiliar corner in a familiar city only to find himself face-to-face with a building he himself designed, but which he’s never seen in the flesh.

But the Hampi paintings are the reverse of this. Like all realist painters, Jon attempts to make things look like they ought to do in photographs, but actually can’t. In place of the unified focal length of the photographic image,

Jon substitutes the saccades of the human eye as it surveys a prospect, zooming in and out, panning continually. Of course, this is quite like an analog of memory itself, as it ranges over space and time,

and the Hampi paintings, while at first glance fairly straightforward, on closer inspection suck you into their golden glow of
be-here-nowness.

Still, unfortunately for Jon – who takes aeons to paint them – his dealer, Francis Kyle, has been less than supportive. “I’ve shown these paintings to Indians who’ve been there,” he told the artist, “and even they didn’t like them.” So now, in a drive to actually make a little money, Jon has turned his attention to meticulously rendering little corners of overcrowded English gardens. I’m sure they’ll be a great hit with Francis Kyle’s clientele, but personally I shan’t be going to the private view; unless, that is, it’s held in Hampi.

Psychogeography 7

I arrived in Varanasi by minibus, a stubby little eight-seater that clumped and bumped along the straight and rutted roads of Uttar Pradesh from the Nepalese border. It took three interminable and baking days – days I spent sitting opposite an Australian hippy wearing a Victorian nightdress. Having no humanity or fellow feeling whatsoever he read aloud from Shakespeare’s sonnets the whole way. Frankly, I’ll never compare anyone to a summer’s day as long as I live; not after that.

Other passengers included an immaculate family of diminutive Indians. The pocket paterfamilias wore a white shirt, string vest, pressed trousers and shined shoes; the mini-matriarch was sandalwood-scented in a silk sari; the young princeling sported an Aertex shirt, grey shorts, old-fashioned school sandals. They never seemed to sweat this family, the flies never alighted on them. They took chapatis from one Tupperware box and scooped up dahl from another, yet no grease was left on their nimble fingers. Were they perhaps – I idly considered – coated in transparent Teflon?

The nights we spent in wayside caravanserai, where I sweated and boinged on unstrung charpoys. Grey dawn would find me as fatalistic as any native, and shamelessly shitting at the side of a field. The landscape was so unfinished and yet so used up, like a vast kitchen in which no one had troubled to do the washing up for several millennia. By the time we reached the Holy City I’d just about had enough of travelling. I booked into the government tourist bungalow and took to my bed. The room was an upended stone shoebox with nothing in it besides a mattress and a bare lightbulb. Outside there was an ox park. All day long an untouchable woman scraped up the dung and mounded it into a compact ziggurat which abutted the exterior wall of my room. When night came she lay down on top of it and we slept within arm’s reach of one another.

After three days I felt well enough to venture out. I’d met an excitable Ukranian while sucking on tall bottles of Stag Ale in the bungalow’s restaurant. He told me that he was in exile, his father – a high Soviet official – had sent him abroad to escape military service in Afghanistan. He believed in every single conspiracy theory going: the Jews controlled the US and the USSR, while in turn themselves being controlled by Venusians whose spacecraft was moored in the Bermuda Triangle. You could spot the aliens, he said, by their propensity for baldness and driving convertible Mercedes.

We went to the railway station, so that I could buy a ticket for the Himigri-Howra Express, a mighty Aryan iron-horse that would drag me clear across the north of the Subcontinent to Chandigarh. I got a chitty from Window A and took it for authorisation to Window B. At Window B I received a second chitty and took it to the Sales Booth. Every single step had to be taken through a dense thicket of humanity, thorny limbs pricked me, twiggy fingers scratched me. I emerged blinking and bedevilled into the harsh light of the maidan. The Ukranian examined my ticket and pointed out that I’d mistakenly bought one for the service that departed in eight days’ time, rather than on the morrow. I considered the hour-long battle that would be required to change the ticket, and taking my lead from the ideas of astrological propitiousness embodied in Indian culture, rather than the cult of horological precipitateness enshrined in my own, I determined to stay the extra seven days in the Holy City.

Another kulfi-headache dawn. I’d linked up with a Canadian Buddhist – the very worst kind. He propped me on the handlebars of his Supercomet bike and pedalled us both down to the bathing ghats. Downriver I could see smoke rising from the death barbecue: long-pig griddling for breakfast. The Buddhist knelt and prayed angrily, while I shared a chillum with a crusty sadhu. There was grit in the air, grit on my eyes, grit in my retinal afterimages. The terracing of temples and shrines, the lapping brown limbs of the goddess Ganga – for some hazy, hashy reason it all reminded me of Brighton. So it seemed like a perfectly logical step to strip, wind a lungi around my snaky hips, and descend into the natal flow. Half-way across I collided with the corpse of a cow, which, bloated to four times its life size, revolved slowly in the viral current. I spluttered, coughed, and went under while ingurgitating spirochaetes to last me a lifetime.

All this happened 20 years ago, and I’d like to say that it seems like yesterday, but it doesn’t: it seems like 20 years ago. Nowadays I’m a much older, less adventurous and less stoned man. Nowadays I would change my ticket. Although, come to think of it, since my ultimate destination was Kashmir, I probably wouldn’t be travelling there at all. The past is another country – and the frontier is
always closed.

Psychogeography 6

My friend and colleague Nick Papadimitriou has long coveted an oblong of woodland tucked behind some rich villas on a hilltop in north London. Nick knows about woodlands – he’s been a conservation worker; he knows about ecology – he’s written scientific reports on the subject; he knows more about the topography of London than anyone I’ve ever met, and, naturally, he also speaks Polish, having spent a couple of years teaching English literature and language to naval officers in Gdansk. All in all, Nick’s psychogeographic credentials piss on mine from the height of Angel Falls, so when he says “Jump!” I politely request: “Broad?
Triple? High?”

We rendezvous in a pub car park about a half mile from the wood. “We won’t actually be able to get in,” Nick warns me. “I’ve walked right round the perimeter roads; there’s no possible access.”

“But Nick,” I remind him, “you don’t have the Superplan.” The Superplan is a 1:5,000 Ordnance Survey map, and I have one for the hilltop. “This thing is so detailed,” I tell him as we set off, “that I can see a boil on the arse of a woman in an upstairs bedroom of that house over there.”

“Well, in that case, can you see us as we walk along this road?”

“No, no, now you’re being fanciful. Moving maps – you’ve been reading too much Harry-fucking-Potter.”

It’s a damp autumn morning and we scoff dried fruit as we walk past the opulent detached villas. The best of them are late arts and crafts, all masonry mullions and heavy on the red brick, but the worst are early-1970s neoclassical, featuring wholly un-ironic ionic columns, two storeys high and gilded. Both Nick and I grew up within a couple of miles of this arriviste enclave, but in our youth it was mostly Jewish; now I notice a strong Asian and Nigerian presence. Really, it occurs to me, the nouveau riche – like the black-backed gull – are what zoologists term “a ring species”: they circle the entire globe, but while adjacent populations can mate and produce fertile young, those on the opposite sides of the earth are not so compatible.

My Superplan shows a narrow alleyway stretching down between two garden hedges. We locate it, but instead of it being overgrown – as I suspected – the grass is freshly mown. At the far end, 20 metres away, there’s a padlocked, six-foot-high gate. Beyond it mature-growth trees – hornbeams, elders and sessile oaks (or so Nick tells me) – stand, massy and stately. A vast flock of woodpigeon lifts off from the trees and wheels in the sky, ecru on grey. It’s a weekday midmorning, and we’re about to break into a secret six-acre wood, a fragment of the original Great Middlesex Forest which belongs to these wealthy swine the way their Bentleys and Bulgari do.
Total bliss, property is theft, trespassing is recovering stolen
natural goods.

Once inside we move crunchily through the undergrowth, heading uphill along the backs of the gardens. When I was a kid our school run passed by the wood and the playground myth was that a leprous child lived in one of the big houses. Furthermore, her parents were so rich that they’d had two swimming pools built, one for the little leper and one for their other progeny. My Superplan shows that one of the houses does indeed have a largish pond in its grounds, but swimming pools of any kind – despite my arrogant bullshitting – aren’t marked.

Nick isn’t too bothered with any of this, he discourses elegantly on the character of the woodland, identifying different plants, commenting on the depth of the humus, and how the soil changes along with the gradient from Bagshot sand to London clay. He points out holly, rhododendron, bracken – balancing keystone against indicator species.

The wood is big enough to pretend that we’ve lost ourselves in it. But everywhere we tramp there is evidence of careful husbanding: piles of cordwood, areas of clearance. Yet none of it has that indefinable – and yet oh so concrete – feel of the municipal. Neither Nick nor I can figure out who owns the wood. Is it the richies, and if so do they employ their own urbane back-garden woodsman? Over bottled water and a sticky bun I phone the local council. No, it isn’t theirs, and nor do they believe it belongs to the Corporation of London who manage the adjacent parkland. For a delirious moment I entertain the notion that this arboreal refuge might – through some unprecedented glitch – belong to no one at all; that it might be a fragment of terra nullis lost in the terrible city which surrounds it for mile after mile. Nick and I should go native here, rogue males living off berries and tubers, emerging from tree cover only to bag the occasional international financier and drag him back to our lair.