Will Self

Drive-In Saturday

Then to the Wolseley for an after-show supper. This was my first trip to this happening eatery – and how pleasingly daft it is. The decor looks as if the old car showroom has been remodelled as a cross between the Batcave and a fin-de-siecle Viennese coffee house. However, instead of caped crusaders the banquettes were stacked with the usual Footballers’ wives and nouveau riche provincials.

The food was goodish, excellent trimmings, including superb espresso, but my companion’s halibut came swimming in a sauce as thin and salty as the sea it had been pulled from. Worse still was the behaviour of the staff. When we arrived the Maitre D’ said “Please wait in the bar Mr Self until your table is ready.” But when that time came he stuck his head round the corner and cried “Come on, Will!”. While that sort of wanton familiarity may be all right with Privy Councillors – it’s anathema to me.

Scary Monsters

Like most London householders I deplore the rise of thuggish trick-or-treaters. Hulking young fellows turn up on your doorstep demanding sweets, their costumes consisting of little more than a hoodie pulled down over their eyes and a scarf wound round their mouths. If you were to refuse, they look well capable of “tricking” you with a few rounds from a Glock. Still, such antics do have their upside. I went out on Monday evening wearing nothing but my habitual Will Self horror mask, and came back a couple of hours later with my pockets stuffed with all manner of cachoux, truffles and other expensive bonbons.

Jean Genie

To the Criterion for the revival of Simon Gray’s 1975 satire on middle-class mores, Otherwise Engaged. Anthony Head and the other flared-jeans-wearing players were superb. The set was a delight – a perfect recreation of an echt Hampstead home during the Heath administration, right down to the Eames recliner, the Hockney print on the wall and the Habitat lampshade. The strange thing was that just as this modernist decor hadn’t dated at all over the past thirty years, nor had the Anglo-Saxon bourgeois attitudes so cleverly skewered by Gray.

Here was the same tedious preoccupation with the superiority of an Oxbridge education, the same fatuous remarks about literature and publishing, the same misogyny masquerading as permissiveness. The only line in the play that jibed at all was when one character – a public school teacher – remarked that soon private education and healthcare would be abolished.

How strange it is to recall a time when Britain seemed on the brink of a socialist dawn! And yet, if Otherwise Engaged demonstrated anything conclusively, it’s that despite Thatcher and Blair the metropolitan middle class have enjoyed – if that’s the right word – an era of unparalleled social stability.

Space Oddity

I don’t imagine there will be too much mourning today for the defunct ministerial career of David Blunkett. Only the prurient could wish this farceur to go on stumbling through Westminster with his trousers round his ankles. Only the deluded can imagine that his work on the pensions crisis would’ve averted it. Blunkett’s supporters say he was drawn into his dodgy DNA dealings by the need to pay for the court costs arising from his battle with Kimberley Quinn over access to their child William. More morally conservative types might say: tough titty, if you embark on an affair with a married woman you’ve got it coming. Slightly more liberal pundits would incline to the view that while adultery is understandable, inadequate contraception is not.

My feeling is that there’s something breathtakingly crass about having any dealings with a firm specialising in paternity testing, when you yourself have inflicted so much damage on so many people by an act of unthinking insemination. It’s impossible for anyone but Blunkett and Quinn to know the full extent to of their mutual acrimony – but I would argue that it’s also only they who can solve it, and make adequate provision, both emotional and financial, for their child.

Over the past 20 years an elaborate bureaucracy has been built up in this country, the aim of which is entirely to stop sundered parents from fighting with each other, and force them to put the needs of their offspring first. The Children and Family Court Advisory Support Service, the Child Support Agency, the Family Courts, the Lord Chancellor’s Department, umpteen family lawyers, family therapists and trained mediators have been hurled into the breach. Yet when all’s said and done – and more importantly spent – fathers don’t want to provide financial support for their children get away with it, and mothers who refuse to comply with court orders on access do as well.

I know of so many mucky and sad situations where legal interventions, far from bringing warring parents to their sense, have merely inflamed their passions and ushered them into a Bleak House of litigation. If Blunkett and Quinn, their affair over, had had the good sense to approach its aftermath as responsible and mature individuals, then perhaps the future happiness of their child would’ve been assured. Ministerial careers may only last a few years – sexual passion a few minutes, but relationships between parents always last a lifetime.

Let’s Dance

Apparently a survey has revealed that 67% of children believe that their mothers are the adult in the family who “wears the trousers”. My only surprise is that it’s not 100%. Where are these third of fathers who effortlessly juggle the work/life balance? Who remember recorder lessons and gym kit while dealing with an office crisis? Who know instinctively when the carrot and the stick should be deployed? I don’t see them on television, I don’t read their top-tips in the magazines. I suspect these children are deluded and that in our metrosexual age they’ve simply mistaken one trouser wearer for another.

05.11.05

Congratulations to Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell who’s had the guts to admit that the Government are considering ‘social engineering’ policies to ensure that more state school pupils enter university. A predictable tirade of abuse has followed from educationalists in the so-called ‘independent’ sector. These people aren’t independent from anything – they represent nothing more or less than long-entrenched privilege: the privilege of money, the privilege of class and nepotism. Up until twenty years ago great swathes of places at Oxbridge were ‘tied scholarships’ open only to public school students, and in my day it was commonplace to see these chinless thickos toppling over outside their colleges because they were unable to tie their own shoelaces.

People seem to forget that the whole reason we live in a remotely egalitarian society is because of the introduction of universal, competitive examinations to universities and the civil service. The last bastions of privilege, whereby hugely disproportionate numbers of mediocre young people are promoted above their intelligence and ability, need to be engaged with forcibly by any Government in the social democratic tradition.

Still, what a pity Mr Rammell and his colleagues don’t also have the courage to apply social engineering where it’s really needed. I’ve got a couple of radical ideas that might help to level the higher education playing field. One of them is ‘grants’ – these would be a universal, free benefit available to anyone going to university. The ‘grants’ would be allocated on the basis of need with the parents of students being means tested. Crazy, huh? Another idea is ‘social housing’, this is low-cost housing built at a local level with central government finance. An adequate provision of this means that disadvantaged families can nurture the university students of tomorrow without being in hock to interest rates.

I’ve got other, wild ideas as well – like a properly enforced ‘minimum wage’, which means that menial jobs aren’t done by economic migrants, in turn driving down the wages of other working people. Oh, and there are these things called ‘apprenticeships’, which some countries, I understand, have in great numbers. Because, Mr Rammell, the mere possession of a degree in Media Studies from the University of Former-Poly doesn’t guarantee anyone a middle class lifestyle with all the bells and whistles. Unless we want an entire nation of unemployed advertising copywriters, unable to pay off their student loans, there needs to be other forms of social engineering besides jiggling the goalposts for tertiary education. Unfortunately such policies would nudge ‘social’ back towards ‘ism’. Not a happy suffix, eh Bill?

The Island of Doctor Moreau

There can be few more revolting sights than the trestle table plastered with lurid photographs of vivisected animals which invariably gets put up in street markets all over London on a Saturday morning. I can’t understand why more people aren’t outraged by the “animal activists” and their emotive pornography of interspecies violence – I often stop and give them a row – but mostly they’re unmolested. There is something peculiarly nutty about attacking humans in orders to save animals – as the Animal Liberation Front have this week: a fire bomb at the home of the corporate controller of GlaxoSmithKline; another device at an Oxford University sports pavilion; and a third at the home of a broker who had merely invested in one of the contractors building the new University primate research laboratory.

Nutty – but effective. The contractor has pulled out, and such is the terror generated in the heart of Big Pharma, that the New York Stock Exchange is unwilling to list companies involved in animal experimentation. Meanwhile, Darley Oaks guinea pig farm – which has been the object of a vicious and sustained campaign – has announced that it will close by the end of the year. It was the theft of the remains of the mother-in-law of the Farm’s owner from a Staffordshire graveyard which highlighted the grotesque lengths the ALF will go to, to put animal breeders out of business.

But really the ALF would be better off getting hold of a time machine, because then they could go back a few thousand years and firebomb the ancient Peruvians who were responsible for domesticating guinea pigs in the first place. In truth, the relationship between humans and guinea pigs – like that between all settled populations and their domesticated animals – has element of circularity about it. The guinea pig is particularly useful to researchers establishing diagnostic tests for tuberculosis, because of their low resistance to the tubercle bacillus, yet tuberculosis itself is a disease humans have acquired from cows.

Personally, I see no real moral distinction between testing lifesaving drugs on guinea pigs, cutting up chimpanzees to examine their brains in the name of “pure” science, or dripping shampoo into puppy dogs’ eyes so we can have shinier coifs. It’s all part and parcel of way humans use other animals for our own ends. When people talk of “humane vivisection”, whether in terms of its ends or its means, they’re really referring to making people feel better about this ruthless exploitation.

Indeed, all epidemic diseases – just like hair care products – are a result of the settled lifestyle of humans, so if we want to eliminate animal experimentation our best possible option is to abandon civilisation and become nomadic. I suspect this is what the ALF would like to do – and good luck to them; if they find anywhere salubrious I’ll happily join them. Of course, by abandoning the cities we’ll be sealing the death warrant for viruses that require dense populations of human hosts – and surely viruses have rights too? I’ll become a supporter of the ALF when they become the Virus Liberation Front as well.

The Valley of the Blind

To the Greater London Assembly where the Mayor’s Women’s Affairs Advisor had thoughtfully arranged for a memorial to be held for the great American feminist writer Andrea Dworkin. It was an event at once thought-provoking and emotional. Looking out through the pregnant belly of the building’s facade at the phallic towers of the City, we heard extracts read from Dworkin’s devastating and eloquent attacks on pornography, sexual violence and misogyny in all its forms.

It was uncomfortable listening for the men in the audience – but then so far as I could make out there were only about three of us. The vast majority of the 200-odd present were women – and not just any old women, these were mostly radical, lesbian separatists who eschewed so-called “feminine” fripperies and furbelows. Speakers poured as much scorn on “liberal feminists” as they did on the hated “patriarchs”. How curious it was therefore to observe that these women in their neutral trousers and jackets, sporting short hair cuts and only the most discrete jewellery, looked so much like, well, like men. It was as strange as if communist revolutionaries rallied wearing black tie and smoking Havanas, or antifascists donned Nazi uniforms.

War of the Worlds

What is with the Met and their sirens? During the July terrorist incidents there wasn’t five minutes of the day when a siren couldn’t be heard, rising and falling like a demented whippoorwill, from the room in Stockwell where I work. Now things have calmed down a little, and the constabulary don’t seem to feel that the only way they can prove to the populace that they’re hot on the trail of malefactors is by advertising it to the world. Nevertheless, on Saturday night we were hopelessly snarled in traffic running down Earlham Street from Seven Dials to Cambridge Circus, when a police car started up its siren and left it on for a full ten minutes. There was no possibility of them gaining and advantage by this – the press of cabs, cars, rickshaws and revellers simply couldn’t budge. They’d have been better off getting out of their car, strolling up to the window of each of the jammed vehicles in turn and politely asking us to move as soon as we were able – a bit like Dixon of Dock Green.

28.09.05

Hogging the Limelight

As one of the curmudgeons who viewed London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympics with as much enthusiasm as a plague of locusts, it gives me nothing but pleasure to report that builders working on the site of the Games in East London are facing a similar infestation. The Lower Lea Valley is – as any keen London walker could’ve told them – home to large areas of Caucasian Giant Hogweed and Japanese Knotweed.

The Knotweed is a bizarre plant which reproduces by cloning itself – not unlike International Olympic Association bureaucrats – and getting it out of soil is an exhausting business. It can cost ££50,000 to clear an area the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Giant Hogweed, by contrast, is a 20-foot-high relative of cow parsley, the hairy stems of which impregnate human skin with a photo-active chemical, so that when its victims are exposed to sunlight they suffer terrible burns. Rather poetically, Giant Hogweed is thus a kind of anti-celebrity triffid – reminding athletes of the perils of over exposure. That these, two alien invaders should have to be grubbed-up to make way for many thousands of others is yet another example of Olympian folly.

Crack Down on Fashion

I’m wholeheartedly in favour of Sir Ian Blair’s move to crack down on middle class drug users – but what about middle class fashion users? As any right thinking person knows, fashion is a dangerously addictive drug which drives both women and men alike to spend thousands of pounds on fleeting highs. The fashion habit gets going early; boys and girls begin with an occasional, social designer label or pair of flash trainers, but before long they’re desperate for pret a porter. Sadly, many will graduate to becoming full-scale haute couture users. As Sir Ian would doubtless observe, how can we send a robust anti-fashion message to the Tommy Hilfiger-sporting youths on council estates while permitting the middle classes to shamelessly parade in Prada?

Now we have London Fashion Week, and the disgusting spectacle of girls – some as young as sixteen – whose only crime is taking a little cocaine, and yet who are forced to march up and down draped with expensive clothing, in order to gratify the depraved tastes of fashionistas. As I write, all over Chelsea prefab booths are being erected within which these sordid “shows” take place – will no one put a stop to it?

Take Me to the River

It was the normal Sunday afternoon toddle down to the South Bank for the Self Family. But lo! What was this? For in among the stony hulks of culture, where the superannuated Marxists talk of video installations and the yoof skateboard, there was a mighty press of people. There were stalls selling all manner of nibbles: chicken a-jerking, pork a-noodling, veggies a-currying. There were Czechs strumming triangular guitars and ugly Hispanics doing the flamenco (why are all flamenco dancers ugly when you get up close?). In geodesic domes there were Indy guitar bands a-flicking of their greasy locks, while out front politically-correct children tried to slap Asbos on Punch, Judy and the Baby.

Yes, it was the Mayor’s “Festival of the Thames”, another of those bizarre attempts Ken makes to introduce new-old folkways to the London masses. He’s been at it since he was in County Hall in the mid-1980s, and while I don’t have a principled objection, the whole bang-shoot mostly seems like an excuse for stall holders to make a 200% profit on cans of coke. There’s that, and there’s also the poor old River itself, which on a gloomy afternoon presented the same miserable, face to the world. There was no trace of festivity on its grey waters – only the usual rusty rubbish barges lying at anchor. Get real Ken – next year call it the “Festival of the Thames Bank”.

Tessa Cohen That You Should be With Us Now!

Will nothing stop the remorseless expansion of Tesco which now has 30% of the supermarket sector in its grasp? Can no one prevent it’s gobbling up of old buildings – the Clapham Women’s Hospital was this week’s casualty – followed by their voiding in the form of yet another corporate barn full of clever merchandising? The short answer is no, because in the real world of consumer choice the sweeties are always – and I mean always – positioned right by the till.

Which came first, supermarkets or the global trade in foodstuffs which enables them to pile high and sell very cheap? The answer is that both arose at the same time, in a positive feedback process of the kind engineers term “autocatalytic”. Which came first, the stranglehold the big supermarket chains have on food distribution – and increasingly food production – or the government compliance in their relentless expansion? The answer is both, because governments are only weary parents, pushing the trolley of fiscal policy down the aisles of history, and desperate to quieten the fractious tax payers with yet more sweeties.

No, there’s no way back now – because to make the kind of choices that will keep small, local shops open, and favour low-intensive, organic farming methods, costs shoppers a great deal of money and time. If you take the long view, the move to supermarket shopping is analogous to the adoption of sedentary food production by hunter-gatherers 12,000 years ago. I’m serious, because all the evidence suggests that the hunter-gatherers had more free time and were better fed, and yet they ended up as overworked, malnourished farmers oppressed by god-kings and despotic bureaucracies.

Why was this? It was because the poor hunter-gatherers didn’t know what farming societies would be like – they had no experience of them. They adopted farming piecemeal, in much the same way that time-pressured consumers, with limited disposable income, start off shopping at supermarkets for a few convenience items and end up completely hooked on internet-ordered deliveries. The individual shopper doesn’t understand that she’s going to end up in a hideous Tesco nation – anymore than the hunter-gatherer saw Babylon on the horizon.

No, it’s all over bar the name change. Personally I think “Tesco” is a perfectly good name for Britain, reflecting our commitment to modernity and an economy dependent on ever increasing consumer demand. And I think Sir Terry Leahy, will make a just as good a head of state as he does a chief executive. After all, he understands the long view, when asked about Tesco’s current supremacy he said: “I remember when I started at the Co-op in 1979 – it had a 25% market share.” Yes, empires may rise and fall, but civilisation always progresses.

21.09.05