Will Self

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.

Psychogeography 104

There are people in this world who possess an innate sense of the theatrical — and then there’s my friend Adam Wildi. Theatrical people strike attitudes and make entrances; they cannot see a situation without making a stage of it — then occupying its centre. Clothes are their costumes, furnishings their scenery, other people their supporting cast and their conscience their understudy. But for Adam the very world itself is a stand-in for a provincial playhouse; hills and rivers are his scenery; humungous stadia his “flattage”. His casts run into thousands — his audiences into billions. He must consider the wind, the sun and the moon when it comes to contriving his son et lumiere effects.

For Adam is the technical director for some of the world’s biggest celebratory events. Last year he was responsible for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Athens Olympic Games; he is currently involved in a bid to do the same job for Beijing in 2008. In 1997 he was the presiding spirit for the theatrics which announced the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese, and in between he spends his time dealing with the small change of global drama, the G8s and other international summits which constitute the marketing plan for the world’s kleptocracies.

Adam’s professional illness is a kind of mega-theatricality — he cannot see a city without wondering how it would look tidied up, revitalised, lit and mic’ed, then refracted through the lenses of an thousand thousand television cameras. He goes away and lies on beaches, only to be haunted by the delayed echo of ghostly tannoys in his inner ear, and the play of searchlights on the cloud scape. Adam is Oz, manipulating levers and buttons from behind a curtain, while out front we see the mighty Prometheus of technical progress fused with physical excellence.

Well, that’s my take on it at any rate — you’ll be reassured to know that Adam’s is both more down to earth and resolutely pragmatic: “When we arrived in Hong Kong to do the handover,” he told me over shredded duck in Soho “I was taken to the site and shown a heap of rubble which had been flogged to a developer. The rain was torrential. I had to climb over a fence to look at it, and then I was up to my neck in water — it was insane!” The same gargantuan scenery problems faced him in Athens: “I pitched up to look at the stadium, I had 700 people on my staff ready to go, and there was no roof on it — no roof at all! Even when we got the roof on the architect — Calatrava Santiago — didn’t want to us hang lighting rigs from it. So far as he was concerned it was a sculptural form rather than a structural necessity. Still,” he muttered into his roast fowl, “he was an amazing man to work with. Astonishingly creative.”

My own take on the olympiad is as jaundiced as George Best’s secondhand liver. I well remember cycling around the defunct remains of the Montreal Olympics in the late 1970s. It was only a lustrum since the Games had taken place, and yet here were crumbling velodromes and weedy rowing lakes. The whole shemozzle had just about bankrupted the city. Adam is, however, an incurable as well as a theatrical meliorist: “It’s true that the Games cost Athens a shit-load of money, and there are now quite a lot of sports facilities they can’t use, but you have to balance that against the city being revolutionised. They built a new airport, eight new metro lines, the pump-priming to the national economy — largely through EU grants — has been phenomenal.”

Adam’s quite as gung-ho about London in 2012. He was responsible for organising the media centre for the G8 summit in Gleneagles, so when the news of London’s successful bid came in he was standing by Tony Blair’s Armani shoulder pad. It was a cruel irony — we agreed — that there was Blair, punching the air, and twelve hours later getting fulsomely punched in the gut by news of the London bombings. Still, Adam was, presumably, already deep in a fugue involving the Lea Valley transforming into a simulacrum of ancient Delphi.

“Look!” he exhorted me, “the world needs its celebrations. It needs the sense of shared purpose that these things provide. Not, you understand,” he continued more sotto, “that I have anything to do with these decisions — I’m just the technical guy. With Athens we did a stop-motion DVD of the whole gig, from when we started work, through the opening ceremony, the Games themselves, the closing ceremony and the breaking of the set. Let me tell you, if you ever feel disposed to doubt the limitlessness of human madness and folly it’s worth taking a look at it fast-forwarding.”

Sadly, Adam, there are no limits to my belief in that limitlessness. None whatsoever.

Psychogeography: 106

We stood next to a London cab on the forecourt of the Elizabeth apartments in the fast-falling dusk of south-east Asia. It was the latest model, a bulbous TX2. Roland Soh, the cabbie, was regarding his vehicle with a certain weary affection. “This,” he told me, “is one of the most expensive cabs in the world.” He ran me through the bill for it: $30K for the car certificate, 120% import tax, it all adds up to a cool 120K Singaporean dollars. “I’m going to sell it next year,” he avers, “and get a people carrier.”

We fell in with Mr Soh at Changi airport; and his London cab, complete with British Lung Foundation sticker on its glass hatch, helped to make landfall that much more uncanny. Singapore struck me immediately as Basingstoke force-fed with a pituitary gland. The island is low-lying, greenish and tricked out with corporate bypass architecture: skyscrapers like humungous conservatories hollowed out by truly hideous atriums.

At the Elizabeth Apartments, where we put up, we looked up from the lobby into a vertiginous cloudscape of 30-odd concrete balconies: the sky was a mirror, the vending machine offered soft drinks flavoured with chrysanthemums. The apartment itself was all tiled surfaces and heavyset armoires, the TV served up a state-sanctioned diet of Murdochian pap: mobile-phone commercials masquerading as news bulletins.

Still, we weren’t really in Singapore at all, only stopping over for 24 hours. Enough time to crank the kids’ body clocks halfway round, so that when they reached the fatal shore they weren’t bouncing off the walls with jet-lag. Singapore understands its own status as a 300-square-mile holding bay, an entrepot, a people-dock. The majority Chinese population throng the streets with their notorious orderliness, while in the lea of the skyscrapers dwarfish Malays in pyjamas sweep up very little.

Mr Soh explained to me the intricacies of the car certificate. Apparently, the government controls exactly how many cars there are at any given time on the island. In order for a new car to be born – an old one must die. It strikes me that this is a policy inflected by Confucianism: the orbital road of life whispering on through the eras, symbol and reality interfused. I said as much and Mr Soh smiled in a satisfied way. “There’s more to Singapore,” he told me, “than meets the eye.”

What does meet the eye is the Merlion: half-lion, half-fish. A chimerical symbol for a chimerical state. The Merlion is everywhere. There are Merlion cruets and mobile-phone covers, newel posts and carpet figures. Down at Merlion Park, where the Singapore River meets the sea, a giant Merlion squirted a jet of water into the gloopy atmosphere, while out in the grey bay the ocean-going equivalents of Singapore’s skyscrapers oozed along the horizon.

Hungry for the anchor of the past in this rudderless vessel of modernity, we headed for Chinatown. Along Smith Street there were reassuring, carved house fronts, the city hunching down to a human scale. Atop the Sri Mariamman temple a mosh pit of Hindu deities rose into the drizzle in a tangle of garish concrete limbs. Further down the street, gongs resounded outside the Buddhist temple, where great stooks of fake currency were being consumed by fire. It was easy to understand how the rogue bond trader Nick Leeson – who was based in Singapore – got the idea that money was worthless paper, mere vouchers to be shovelled into the incandescent belly of capitalism.

We ate at the Maxwell Road Food Centre, where all the old Chinese street vendors have been corralled under a cast-iron roof. Down aisles of tripe and along transepts of glazed chicken we strolled: little dumplings of humanity peristalsised by the stomachs of pigs. Full up, we were evacuated and headed for the Lucky Centre so the kids could buy many, many cheap wristwatches.

I retailed all of this to Mr Soh as we stood waiting for the rest of the family to join us in the cab and head back to Changi. He was keen to explain the commercial slabs along Orchard Road to me in terms that undercut psychogeography with more ancient and arcane concepts. “You see the Hyatt Hotel,” he pointed at a liverish porphyry dolmen, “they built it without consulting the geomancer. The reception desk was at the wrong angle, the entrance was set too far back from the road. It cost them millions in lost revenue before they gave in and had the entire building remodelled. I could give you tens of other examples…” He trailed off. It wasn’t clear to me whether Mr Soh was expressing credulousness or its opposite. Whether he thought bad feng shui was a function of people’s perception or a genuine ulterior reality.

As one we reached out to touch the black hide of the cab, so that it could reassure us both with its $180,000 bulk.

Psychogeography 107

At the Trocadero, under the disconcertingly shabby, yellowing facade of the Palais de Chaillot, a group of demonstrators are coagulating into a clot of protest. They all have a certain monumentalism about them. Men and women alike are broad-cheeked with heavy-lidded eyes and jug heads. I suspect a tribal affinity. They’re carrying flimsy homemade placards: “Bas Gbagbo!” the slogans cry. A man hands me a flyer detailing President Gbagbo’s perfidy. As far as I can tell, he has hung on to office despite UN resolutions calling for him to step aside so that free and fair elections can be held. A large BMW comes stuttering round the roundabout and the anti-Gbagboists gather in its train. Bluey exhaust fumes lift and curl in the sparkling wine light. They head off down the Avenue Kleber towards the Arc de Triomphe.

I wonder if the Cote D’Ivoireans’ protest is going to make any waves in Sunday afternoon Paris? They’ve acquired a couple of police cars, and the drivers held up by their surprisingly chipper shuffle are, naturally, honking, but beyond this the city goes about its business of relaxation. On the terraces of cafes, tourists form cats’ cradles with the soft-cheese toppings of their indifferent onion soups. The steps down from the palais are the proscenium for an astonishing display of football control by a man in a Brazilian strip. A boom-box skitters and flumps as he flicks the leather globe on to the back of his neck, rolls it along his outstretched arms, whirls it into the air, and catches it on his boot.

The long, ramp-like roads that run down to the Seine are coursing with inline skaters, who wiggle in between a row of cones so fast that their legs blur like those of stridulating insects. Up ahead, the Eiffel Tower scoots into the sky. The closer we get to it the more preposterous it seems. I’ve been coming to Paris once or twice a year for a long time now, yet I haven’t stood beneath the tower since I was a child. It is, quite simply, too iconic to be neared. It has spawned a billion model knick-knacks – and so its scale is problematic. It isn’t until we’re right beneath its pantagruelian legs that I’m moved to consider quite how deliriously useless this jangle of steel is. This isn’t a signature building – it’s a signature coat tree or newel post. The Eiffel Tower pinions the map of Paris like a paperweight, preventing the pop-up apartment blocks from blowing clean away.

I’ve been tormenting the 15-year-old with an Oxford “mini-school” French dictionary. He’s a glutton for travel and style, so he couldn’t refuse a trip trans-Manche. “We’ll put up in Saint Germain,” I told him airily “and have cocktails each evening at the Café Flor, discussing existentialism and the semiotics of haute couture.” He looked at me as if I was a cafard – and I was driven deeper into one. True, we have done the Rive Gauche thing, but everywhere we’ve gone I’ve called upon him to translate signs, speak to waiters and even essay the leader articles of Le Monde.

He maintains that while French may be a beautiful language, it has little relevance to his MaciPod lifestyle, and that far from asking him to expatiate on Contre Sainte-Beuve in his GCSE oral exam, the questions will be more of the “Where did you go on your holidays?” type. He sees the French exam as a portal into the joyous and undifferentiated realm of the globalised monoglot, rather than a cultural milestone to be hugged to his breast.

I began the weekend determined to challenge his apathy. However, the more I’ve wielded the mini-school dictionary, the more disorientated I’ve become. Like many lackadaisical English Francophiles I labour under the delusion that I can “get by” in French. I’ve worked hard on my accent so that I can enunciate a few key phrases and demands with sufficient clarity for them to be heard. Beyond this, I now realise, my French consists of strings of nouns which I haphazardly combine. Basic grammar, verb tenses and even conjunctions are, in truth, quite beyond me. My France is a country jumbled up with things happening at once.

I’ve always been pleasantly surprised by how complementary the French are when I rip out their mother tongue. “All you have to do is make an effort,” I say, “and they aren’t in the least patronising or huffy.” Why the hell would they be? What can confirm someone in their innate superiority more than listening to a poltroon say: “Va. Boit. Bar. Train. Moi. Et. Vous. Avant?” No wonder they nod sagely, then reply in perfect English with a pleased expression.

By Sunday evening I’m considering letting the 15-year-old in on this devastating insight into paternal frailty, either that or sending him to the Ivory Coast.