Will Self

Psychogeography 1

I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography. So this isn’t walking for leisure – that would be merely frivolous – or even for exercise, which would be tedious. No, to underscore the seriousness of my project, I like a walk that takes me to a meeting or an assignment; that way I can drag other people into my eotechnical world view. “How was your journey?” they say. “Not bad,” I reply. “Take long?” they enquire. “About 10 hours,” I admit. “I walked here.” My interlocutor goggles at me; if he took 10 hours to get here – they’re undoubtedly thinking – will the meeting have to go on for 20? As Emile Durkheim observed, a society’s space-time perceptions are a function of its social rhythm and its territory. So, by walking to the meeting I have disrupted it just as surely as if I’d appeared stark naked with a peacock’s tail fanning out from my buttocks while mouthing Symbolist poetry.

My publishers were holding a sales conference in Eastbourne and I agreed to go along and address the bourgeforce. I decided to entrain from Victoria to Lewes and then walk the South Downs Way for the final 22 miles. This would be a nostalgic walk, putting myself securely back in my father’s world of pipe-smoking, grey flannel trousers, chalk downlands, Harvey’s bitter, Bertie Russell, nudism, the Peace Pledge Union … Gah! Christ! … I can’t breathe in this interwar period … I’d better come up for air. Even though, nominally, I was born in 1961, my father made sure that I too was raised in the interwar period, and we roamed the South Downs a great deal together during my childhood. “It seemed perfectly natural,” said the minicab driver who took me from Lewes station to the start of the walk, speaking of his own ambulatory upbringing … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

As I consulted maps and timetables at my desk in London, I found myself faced with a dilemma. On the day, should I wait for the branch-line train from Lewes to Southease, where I could join the South Downs Way, or should I gain a half-hour by taking a cab there? I dislike cars more than trains – they con their autopilots with the illusion of freedom – but half an hour is significant when you’re pushed for walking time. I thought about the options for two long days, then called Talking Pages.

Talking Pages had been absorbed into the great telephone-answering gulag known only as “118”, so doubtless my call was answered by a Mongolian former yak herder, deep in the Altai Mountains. I pictured the call centre wedged like a corrugated spacecraft in some dusty gully. Inside, bandy- legged men in traditional dress slouched about on leather cushions, watching antediluvian videotapes of Police Five, in order to assimilate the social mores of telephone-banking customers in the Potteries. A once-proud nomad, doing a passable imitation of a Staffs accent, gave me a choice of three minicab companies that served the Lewes area.

Naturally, the first two I called turned out to be located in Brighton, despite their Lewes exchange numbers. And no, they couldn’t answer my distinctly local enquiry about the time it takes to drive to Southease. The third company was different. They were located right inside Lewes station, and yes they knew the area intimately. The Controller spoke as if every one of his drivers had – like some humanoid nematode – filtered the very earth of Sussex through their bodies. The Controller assured me the drive would take mere minutes, so I booked the cab.

The next morning was bright and clear. Sunlight flashed off the braces of orthodontically challenged teenagers who boarded the train at Plumpton on their way to school in Lewes. After detraining, I was so high with anticipation that it wasn’t until the cab had gone about 200 yards in the wrong direction out of Lewes that I pointed it out to the driver: “I want to be on the east side of the Ouse, at Southease Station.”

“No problem,” he breezed. “I’ll drop you down a track on this side and you can cross the river on the swing bridge.” Then he went on about his childhood, engendering such a warm feeling of mateyness in me that I over-tipped the sly fellow.

In fact, he’d dropped me outside Rodmell, over two miles from where I wanted to be. As I puffed along the track, my pipe sending up great clouds of smoke from the Presbyterian tobacco stuffed in it (a blend introduced to Stanley Baldwin in 1923 by the future Moderator of the Church of Scotland), I saw in the mid-distance the little two-carriage train stopping at Southease station. Now, no matter how hard I walked for the rest of the long day, I would still be lagging behind. The sinuous Downs, the soaring Seven Sisters, the majestic Beachy Head, all suddenly concertinaed into the space between two low-firing synapses in the lazy minicab driver’s mind. Machine Matrix – one, Psychogeographers – nil. I could hear Durkheim’s low and evil laughter in my inner ear; not a pretty sound.

Psychogeography 110

You left me last week in a playground on the esplanade at Cairns in Northern Queensland. I say that with some authority, but the truth is that I left you sitting at your kitchen table reading about me and my four-year-old swinging in the antipodes, whereas in fact I was in frosty south London. I still am – that’s psychogeography for you. Like some bizarre typing bee, I like to store up my memories of hotter, sunnier climes so that I can write about them through the long, crepuscular winter days.

Although it was none too bright in Queensland last August. That close to the tropics there are only two seasons: wet and dry. But displaying an unrivalled flair for the holiday cock-up, we’d managed to decamp around the world only to find ourselves sloshing about in the wettest dry season on record. Not that the Australians were perturbed by this climatological anomaly; they chose to see it as just that, rather than sinister evidence of global warming.

One night, sitting on our dripping verandah, we were lectured by a local science teacher on the vast span of the continent’s geological history. He told us how an ocean once separated the eastern and western halves of Australia, while a land bridge connected the northern coast to New Guinea. To listen to him talk – discoursing on antediluvian inundations and prelapsarian droughts – I got the impression that he himself had been present in the Jurassic, wandering the rainforests of Gondwanaland, a rampant bore in pursuit of tiny-brained diplodocuses.

We, on the other hand, couldn’t help but see the shitty weather as a timely smack delivered by Mother Nature. We should never have squandered our carbon allowance for the next 20 years, jetting 12,000 miles to see the Great Barrier Reef and in the process helping to speed its destruction. We only managed to get out to the reef once, and even then the wind-tossed waves had churned up too much sand for us to see much besides the flapping fins of the snorkeller in front. True, from the dive boat on the trip back to shore we did see migrating humpback whales, but their tail fins looked to me like two massive fingers stuck up in our general direction.

After a week or so of this Australian water torture we could take it no more. We loaded up the people carrier with little people and set off for the Atherton Tableland. Beyond these mossy green hills, the great semi-arid plain of Central Australia opened out. There would be sun, there would be heat, all our illusions would be burnt away and we would face the true and authentic Australia. Up we wound through dripping, lush farmsteads, where the Friesian cattle grazed incongruously beside palms and tree ferns. We stopped for a damp sandwich at Milla Milla Falls and then headed on, the windshield wipers carving slices of bitumen out of the greenish blur.

We were a few clicks past Revenhoe and heading downhill on the Kennedy Highway when it happened all at once: the rain ceased, and the convolvulus of the rainforest – which had been retreating for a while – was replaced by the regular stippling of eucalyptus, row upon row of straight trunks shading the dips and runoffs of the semi-arid landscape like charcoal marks. The metalled road stuttered then gave out, to be replaced by a corrugated track of red dust; and there, lumbering towards us like a dinosaur of the carboniferous era, was our first road train.

As soon as it had pummelled past I slewed the people carrier over to the side of the track and rousted the family out. “This is it!” I cried. “This is the true and authentic Australia! Look at that,” I gestured at the too much of wilderness, “it spreads from here all the way to West Australian, thousands of miles! It goes on forever!”

“You go on forever,” snapped a surly adolescent, before replacing his earphones and crawling back into the car.

We ended up that evening sleeping in a defunct railway carriage which had been converted into a tourist chalet. This was at something called the Undara Experience, a faux “bush camp” sighted on the edge of the Undara Volcanic National Park. We had dinner at Fettler’s Iron Pot Bistro, and the breakfast the following day at the Ringers’ Camp. It was all deliriously inauthentic, from the “billabong-style” swimming pool to the grotesque didgeridoo class held by some inner-city refugee the following evening. Even the wallabies and kangaroos lolloping through the bush were there under sufferance; on any real cattle station they’d have been shot on sight.

But I didn’t care, I kept dragging the kids hither and thither, thrusting their pimply snouts into the illimitable, as if I could somehow get them to consume this vast hinterland. After a while they did begin to appreciate it – all except the four-year-old that is. He said he’d rather go to the playground again, even if it meant getting chomped by a saltie.