Will Self

Psychogeography 105

Oliver Rackham, the magisterial historian of the English countryside, has several bees in his bonnet. One them concerns the word “forest”. If you believe Rackham, there’s no necessary connection between “trees” and “forests”. Forests are areas set aside for the hunting of wild game – deer, boar and suchlike – while wooded areas of country are, doh!, woods. Forests are characterised by their ancient laws and royal-appointed officers, while woods feature toadstools, crapping bears, fairy rings and farouche child abusers.

I love Rackham’s writing on the countryside. To read his accounts of woodland management, the structure of field systems and even soil drainage, is to have the godlike sensation that when it’s all tarmaced over and there’s a Tesco Metro where every copse used to be, one could simply reconstruct the whole palimpsest of our biota, using Rackham as a set of instructions. My friend Con has slightly disabused me concerning the omniscience of Rackham. He too is a disciple, and once made a pilgrimage to the great seer of the bucolic at Corpus Christi, his Cambridge college. It transpired that Rackham obviously took his agenda from what he could see from the window of his rooms; and that his masterwork: “The History of the Countryside”, should really be called: “The History of the Bit of Countryside I can See from my Window”.

If I animadvert on Rackham it’s because of what happened to Mr & Mrs Ralph this week. They awoke during the night to the sound of a loud crash echoing through the vastness of Steadman Towers. On arising they found a trail of bite marks and paw prints leading through the elegant chambers and along the marble colonnades. A large, silk-covered ottoman had been reduced to a tatter-medallion, a turd had been deposited in the toilet. Eventually they cornered the interloper in the kitchen. How a fox cub had had the wit to become housetrained after only that very night entering a house for the first time is a source of wonder to us all.

Now, Rackham’s take on foxes is sanguine to say the least; given that he views the two cataclysmic events in the English countryside to have happened during the Iron Age, and then in the late nineteenth century. The first was the clearing of the primary woodland, and the second was the turning over of whatever little spinneys remained to the intensive rearing of game birds. Set beside these awesome reductions in biodiversity, the artificial preservation of the fox in order that it may be hunted stands as an amusing little appendix. And preserved it has been. Rackham’s hunch is that it would have been extinct in the early-modern period were it not such good fun cornering it on horseback, then watching it torn to shreds by doggies.

The irony that the fox was preserved for so long that it managed to adapt to the growing urbanisation of England cannot be stressed enough. Over the last few years, during which this environmental appendix became so inflamed that it poisoned the body politic, it was hilarious to hear the fox-hunting lobby bleat on about how they had to hunt foxes in order to a) keep their numbers down b) keep countryside folks’ numbers up. In essence this was the same as a talking hamster tell you that it was essential he kept running round and round in order to preserve his wheel.

Looked at from the point of view of the parasitic fox, the redcoats were a good survival strategy. However, now that you can’t walk down a London street without seeing an insouciant fox strolling towards you it’s clear that it must be foxes themselves that were behind the whole mad convulsion. While hunting was essential for their survival they happily ripped chickens to pieces and ran amok in the farmyard. But a few years ago a top-flight delegation approached the late Roald Dahl and got him to write “Fantastic Mr Fox” as the first in a string of clever propaganda tricks aimed at ensuring their long-term niche in the human-dominated ecosystem.

Most of the time I feel fairly well disposed to foxes. We often get up in the morning to see two or three of them sunning themselves on the tops of the garden sheds in back of our house. Granted their shit smells dreadful, they rip bin bags open, and their sexual behaviour – even by South London standards – is both violent and rambunctious. Still, I saw no need to have them culled for this until the fox got into Ralph’s house. After all, to follow Rackham on this, why there may be no necessary connection between forests and trees, the prospect of one’s kitchen becoming a game preserve is not a comfortable one. Mark my words, it’ll begin with the odd fox breaking it, but before you know it you’ll be transported to Australia for laying a hand on one of the Queen’s dinosaur-shaped turkey nuggets.

Psychogeography 103

“Walking the dog! Walking the dog! If you don’t know how to do it, I’ll show you how to walk the dog.” This is a song lyric that I have always taken literally – because, truth to tell, I’ve never known how to walk the dog. I want to leave the dog lying on the floor, after all, is there any creature in creation more deliciously reposeful than a slumbering hound. But no: the dog must be walked; this clever species, which has parasitised on humans now for thirty-odd thousand years, understands how to rouse us up, force us to clip ourselves on to their lead, and then let them lead us about cheerless suburbia for an hour or two. How pleasing it is to think that as soon as civilisation crumbles, dogs will be out together again, the Borzoi and the Poodle, reunited in a quest for carrion.

The family dog belonged to my brother. She arrived together with a litter, in a basket brought by the RSPCA. Those were the days – any weirdo could ask to have a dog and a whole bunch of them would be pitched into your house. Now you probably have to be assessed by social services for months before they let you get your hands on a vulnerable puppy. The litter was tumultuous, and as I recall they stayed with for a day or so, so that my brother could choose the one he wanted.

Naturally my brother – a gentle soul – picked the sixth, the runt; a brownish, canine scrap, which had remained lodged under the sofa throughout the trial. In fairness to him, Brownie – as she became known – was the perfect dog for our family. It’s hard to say whether nature was trumped by nurture in her case – or only augmented, but within months she’d become a neurotic, people-pleaser of an animal. We fought over every aspect of her care: feeding, walking, worming, petting – she was the passive victim of an unloving tug.

We did know how to look after dogs – we were a very doggy household. Not my father – who was largely absent, and not my mother either. She spent much of her time upstairs in bed, reclining on a bolster full of benzodiazepines, the victim of a savage pincer movement enacted by depression and migraine. During her down times my brother and I were disciplined – and the word is most appropriate – by Alison, a redoubtable, warm woman, whose principal occupation was the obedience training of dogs.

Alison didn’t just any old mutts to heel – she trained Alsatians. She trained Alsatians for the Metropolitan Police – and one of her dogs, Katie, scooped a third in her class at Crufts. Alison didn’t just know how to walk the dog, she knew how to get a dog to jump over a bench, go round a tree, track an armed assailant by scent alone, and then bring him down unharmed. When I was little I went on a lot of dog walks with Alison, Katie and the others; so many that I began to feel like one of the pack: the tense exhilaration as the woods finally hove into view, the surge of adrenaline as the back doors of the little station wagon were opened, the first glorious bounds through the sweet-smelling leaf fall, the near-orgasmic joy of treeing a squirrel.

You would’ve thought that with all this training I’d have become a very capable dog walker indeed. Not so. As the family fragmented, so poor Brownie became more and more distrait, until eventually, she had to be pensioned off to Alison in Essex. For the remainder of his life my father paid Alison a modest allowance, and referred to Brownie, gloomily, as “the stipendiary dog”.
I didn’t have anything much to do with dogs again, until years later, in Northern Australia, I found myself in charge of a Doberman pinscher belonging to a friend who’d gone on holiday. Presumably from his pet, for to call Boysie “frisky” would have been a grotesque understatement: he was a massive beast with a great, stilted, lolloping gait, who could run down a beach jogger in the twinkling of an eye. When I’d run up puffing, drag Boysie off the hapless runner and attach the leash to his choke collar, the terrified prey would almost always bellow: “˜Can’t you keep your bloody dog under control?” To which I was forced to reply: “Keep him under control? I can’t even keep myself under control!”

I should’ve learnt the important lesson by then, that if you can’t have a healthy relationship with a dog, you’re unlikely to have one with a human being. Sadly, a lot more humans – and quite a number of dogs – had to be sacrificed before the truth dawned on me, that I was better off lying asleep on the floor of the bar, than racing around making trouble.

Psychogeography 102

Tully, Northern Queensland, Australia. The sugar mill belches smoke as thick and flocculent as candy floss. Along Highway 1 from Innisfail, the narrow gauge tracks incise the bluey tarmac and serpentine trains heavy with the sweetness of cut cane, trundle through the endless fields. Sugar cane – the humanity’s biggest crop, weightier than rice and wheat combined. Strange that a world dedicated to producing so much sweetness should nevertheless seem so sour.

And seldom sourer than in Tully, which, to be frank, is a dump. The old 1950s storefronts are warped and mildewed, the tiny grid of commercial premises feels mired in desuetude. Within a few blocks the Queensland equivalents of pound shops and greasy spoons have given way to overgrown subdivisions and clapboard houses on knock-kneed stilts. Obese, hydrocephalic types crawl along the sidewalks, looking as if they’re on their way to audition for a remake of Deliverance.

The only tourist attractions in Tully are the sugar mill – which does a tour – and the Big Boot. The Big Boot is the same height as the flood waters which covered Tully during the early 1970s, and from its 6 metre summit there are commanding views of… the sugar mill. I’m all for the sugar mill tour but the adolescents are revolting – they want to go white water rafting. You can see their point, beyond Tully the Walter Hill range of mountains pushes a 1000 metres up into the cloudy skies, rocky summits draped in rainforest, vertiginous gorges, tumultuous cataracts – a vast wilderness of adrenaline.

I don’t want to go white water rafting. I’m not scared – I can’t even get close to being scared; it’s just that I’d sooner have my penis severed, varnished and put on sale in a provincial gift shop than entrust my frail form to a tiny rubber boat bouncing down the Tully River, which, given that this is the wettest dry season Northern Queensland has ever seen, is approaching full spate. Still – it’s not about me, is it? So we go white water rafting.

We’re issued with wet suits and crash helmets and climb into bus which jolts us through the cane fields and then up a winding road that coils between dripping trees festooned with lianas. The guides are all limber fellows with plenty of piercings and pigtails, they keep up a running commentary the whole way there: if you fall in stay on your back so that if you hit anything it’ll be your bottom that takes the impact; choose yourselves a team and get acquainted – your lives will depend upon each other; you must listen to the guide in your boat and do what he says – again, your lives depend upon it. This isn’t, it occurs to me, recreation at all, it’s survival.

Our team is me, my three adolescents, and a mismatched couple from Brisbane: Kurt and Pauline. Kurt is a rugged, good looking chap. As we carry our raft over the rocks to the river he tells me that the choice was between this and parasailing. Pauline, on the other hand, is so frail, pretty and anaemic, that her choices – which manifestly were ignored – must have been between a well-heated art gallery and dabbing eau de cologne on her blue-veined temples.

Our raft guide, a Kiwi called Dan with bleached bits in his hair, urges us to pick a name for our team. “Somethin’ rousing!” He enjoins us “So that when we’ve shot a rapids we can shout it out.” “Er, how about Deliverance.” I suggest in a desultory fashion, and Kurt, to my considerable relief, sniggers appreciatively. “Yeah, OK,” says Dan “although what I had in mind was, like, ‘Doggy Style’. So that I could shout out ‘How d’you like to do it?’ – and youse guys would all clash your paddles and shout ‘Oooh-ooh! Doggy style!'”. As we slip in the brown-and-white, sinewy embrace of the Tully River, I don’t exactly feel that Dan and I are on the same wavelength. But realistically it’s too late for a meeting of minds, because we’re in the raft, floating towards the rapids and he’s telling me what to do not only for my own survival – but to stop the rest of the team from being dashed to pieces on the rocks.

The strange thing is that it works – the team that is. We paddle when Dan shouts “Paddle!” we back-paddle when he shouts that. We shift from side to side of the raft, and as it teeters then plunges over falls we get down in it with our paddles held to attention. At the rapid called ‘Wet & Moisty’ I fall out of the raft – and the team gets me back in. At ‘Double D-Cup’ my daughter falls out midway through the cataract and yet is hauled to safety. Whatever our differences concerning nomenclature – it’s clear that Dan has the measure of the Tully Gorge.

Psychogeography 101

Consider the rabbit, for in the arc of its lollop is described the rolling landscape of lowland Britain. Consider the rabbit, for was it not an immigrant to our shores, brought here by the Romans? Consider the rabbit, once banged up in massive coney enclosures – the walls of which penetrated feet into the soil – and farmed by weirdo monks. Consider the rabbit, which went hippety-hoppety in lockstep with the expansion of western civilisation, from its native lands of the Iberian Peninsula, across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and eventually to Australia where it meets its viral nemesis.

Oh yes, consider the rabbit – for is it not doomed to be viewed as inconsiderable? True, it’s right tasty eating. Hippy Bob shot them with his air rifle, or even scraped myxomatotic road kill of the hot tarmac. He skinned them (no trickier than taking off a tiny wet suit once you get the hang of it); jointed them; added stock, samphire, and sliced puffballs. He put the whole gubbins in a biscuit tin, buried it in the ground and then lit a fire on top. These ‘earth ovens’ are slow cooking and by the time the tin was dug up and opened the bunny’s flesh was as succulent as a ripe fig.

True, you find rabbit on the menus of upscale eateries fairly often – but you never exactly consider it. Rabbit is a faut de mieux kind of dish, not to be ordered as a first option. It’s the same with its fur – common as muck, suitable only muffs. I daresay it’s the same for the vivisectionists, they probably feel rather disappointed when another gross of these breeding machines are carted up from the depths of the lab, and can’t wait to get their rubber gloves on rats, or beagles, or just about any other mammal who’s dying for a fag and a shampooed eyeball.

No one has ever said “As sagacious as a rabbit”, or “as wily as a rabbit”. No, “fucking like rabbits” is what we say, while the cuddly worms bore into loose and sandy soils, eroding banks and dykes, contributing to the vermiculation of the ground. When I lived up in Suffolk there was Council bounty of 25p for a rabbit tail and the thing to do was go lamping for them. I went out once with a local farmer and it bothered me less than I thought it would. For a start there was the monster truck off-roading involved in getting the pickup in position. Then, when the light went on the rabbits, mute and curious, come nosing into the killing cone.

My accomplice handled his shotgun with studious, unflashy movements: aiming, firing, breaking, ejecting, reloading – a piece worker on a cat food production line. The rabbits’ eyes coruscated in the big wattage, the gun reported, the dust and cordite smoke cleared to reveal another brown lump. We packed it in at close to three in the morning, the back of the pickup bobbled with little corpses. But then East Anglia is rabbit country the way Montana is cattle country. There’s something about the shaven turf, bedizened with little black balls, surrounded by crazy palisades of desiccated furze, that seems lapine to the core. In certain East Anglian pubs it is de rigeur to wear at least two or three coneys dangling from the poachers’ hooks inside your jacket; I remember that my landlord’s welcome when I moved into my cottage was a brace of corpses casually chucked on to the doorstep.

Yet consider the rabbit – for will he not have his revenge? He’s already made his mark. In Australia there’s a rabbit-proof fence running clear across the country for thousands of kilometres – a pest-control measure that’s visible from space! I should imagine that rats, locusts and all manner of other vermin look upon this thing with savage envy, much in the way that certain US politicians regard Middle Eastern oil reserves. Then there’s myxomatosis – it’s not every animal that gets a disease purpose-developed to eradicate it, and then (Ha! Ha!) manages to outflank it with immunity.

One month’s gestation, three litters a year, up to ten cuddly bunnies in each litter. Speedily, inexorably, the rabbit bores through the world, they’ve done in two millennia what it took us a hundred and fifty. Those of us who view the future that’s hotting up with a certain fatalism, like to think that Gaia will replace humans as Top Species with the cockroach. To be beaten by a creature vastly older and radically different to ourselves is somehow acceptable. How much more galling it would be if it was the rabbit who ground us down beneath its paw? And if we were to expire to the loony tune of its nibbling, as the hateful anthropomorphism echoed in our ears: “Eee, wassup Doc?”

Psychogeography 100

For much of the time the local park has a bad vibe. It’s bordered on one side by a narrow lane, along which are ranged a Baptist hall, an Anglican church rendered with snotty stone and a backpackers’ hostel lodged in a defunct, eleven storey office block. Late at night you can find truculent Scandinavians wandering the nearby streets, doubtless searching for a half-timbered, sixteenth century coaching inn.

The foot of the park – which has been landscaped with scraggy shrubbery and the shaved pubises of artificial hillocks – dabbles in a busy arterial road. The other two frontiers of this debatable land are defined by residential streets – although some of the houses are notably bizarre: an Edwardian pub converted into a glass origami penthouse; a simulacrum of an Italian villa, complete with burnt sienna paint job and finial cypresses; and a ramshackle dwelling which, despite being surrounded on three sides by the park, still endeavours to persevere, its paling fences seized in a convolvulus of barbed wire, the tops of its walls saw-toothed with broken glass embedded in mortar.

Broken glass – it’s everywhere in the park. Shards glint in the long grass, in the shrubbery, and on the defunct tennis courts. I wonder if the children who play here will forever find the crunch of rubber sole on shattered glass powerfully evocative of their childhoods? Perhaps that, of the febrile crack underfoot of the disposable insulin syringes which litter the brick paving beneath the crap loggia, by the drained ornamental pond, in which sits a single, enigmatic boulder.

In the playground the swings stand like gibbets, a few lengths of chain dangling from their rusty crossbars. The rubberised flooring – beloved of some safety-conscious bureaucrat – has long since been eroded by the scuffing of many thousands of feet, exposing the concrete and clay of the urban bedrock. The climbing frame is a pirate ship, with steel masts and bowsprit, there’s a chain ladder teeny buccaneers can employ to swarm aboard. They do, because there’s nothing else to do here, the roundabout is chained up, the sandpit covered and padlocked.

That rubberised matting! And those security cameras! Cameras which were, presumably, intended to lead to the arrest of whole rings of paedophiles – but instead are cloudy with the artificial eye equivalent of glaucoma. The idea that these safety measures could prevent injuries in a recreational area smeared with a thick impasto of dog shit and broken glass, and patrolled by marauding bands of giant adolescents stoned out of their heads from smoking a noxious combination of crack and mashed up pituitary gland is, frankly, rather droll. Especially when you consider that a couple of years ago the remains of a woman’s corpse were found smouldering on a bonfire near the outdoor exercise bars.

Still, I don’t want to gross you out with this stuff, the fact of the matter is that the park has its moments. The Portuguese who’ve taken over the old café have turned it into a lively focus of their unlikely community. Cut price Ricky Martins hang out in front of it, swigging cerveza and eating broad beans soused in olive oil, while listening to fada wailing from the dustbin-sized speakers of their dustbin-sized cars. On Sundays the whole polyglot cavalcade of this inner city area can be seen in the park, staking out a football pitch with sloughed off coils of clothing. An anthropologist could have a field day here, trying to establish on what basis the Afro-Caribbeans cede territory to the British Asians, or the graceful Somalians give ground to the galumphing Turkish Cypriots.

In rainy weather the park has an ambience at once dull and threatening – like a blunt knife wielded by a halfwit. But when the sun shines and the greenery shimmers all that is forgotten. The park! What an excellent place – let us go there and frolic. Let us fly our kite, or if we don’t have one, lash one of our skinnier kids to a couple of bin bags and see if we can haul him aloft! The park, you see, has friends – it even has Friends. The Friends of the Park have been in consultation with both the public and the local Development Partnership with a view to doing the place up.

This or that new feature or piece of park furniture has been proposed – as if the open space were room or a garden, that only needed the attentions of a television presenter to bring it out in telegenic bloom. The truth of the matter is that the park doesn’t need any one-off investment, but a long term commitment. The park needs someone whose prepared to stick with it night and day, to keep it as a fat, rich man in an Astrakhan coat might once have kept a thin ballerina. In a word, the park needs a keeper.