Will Self

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Walking The Dog

January 12, 2006

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.

Tully, Northern Queensland, Australia

January 12, 2006

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.

Rabbits

January 12, 2006

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?”

Parklife

January 12, 2006

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.

Olympian Pursuits

January 12, 2006

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.

Singapore

January 5, 2006

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.

Cultural Bling

January 5, 2006

Cultural Bling

The news that the daughter of Hans Rausching, the Tetra-Pak tycoon and Europe’s richest man, has bought the esteemed literary magazine Granta can come as no surprise. For a certain kind of wealthy person, owning a literary mag amounts to a kind of cultural bling. While others wish to have a bracelet of diamonds around their wrist, these types want to be encircled by a costly little coterie of waspish intellectuals.

With her millions, Ms Rausching can afford to run Granta as an extravagant loss leader – which these magazines always are. Hell, the Rausching fortune is so large that she could even make some bold, literary experiments. Why not, for example, actually print the magazine on milk cartons? How much more likely it is that Andrew Motion’s limpid verse will be staggered through by the ordinary reader, if it’s poised strategically next to the sugar bowl.

Alternatively, she could commission Nicholson Baker, the doyenne of literary minimalism, to write a monograph about Tetra-Paks, to be published on them. Baker’s definitely the man for the job: he once wrote an entire novel about a man’s lunchbreak which included lengthy passages on Velcro and matchbooks. Perhaps he could tell us why it is that Tetra-Paks have taken a step back in design terms? They used to have handy cardboard spills that hardly ever spilt. Now my breakfast is dominated by the intense annoyance of little cardboard loops which invariably snap, leaving me to open the milk with a knife.

The Japanese turned their back on firearms for 300 years, the Tasmanian aboriginals gave up fishing, the West has had an awful decline in milk cartons – while all their heir can do is play the bluestocking. Clearly the barbarians are at the gates!

Radical Steps

It’s difficult for those of us who enjoy recreational walking above all things not to feel a sneaking admiration for Lance Dyer, the man who recently walked through the Channel Tunnel to France in flip-flops. Sadly, Mr Dyer is not in the best of mental health, while the other man who’s performed this astonishing feat, was also a bit flaky. He was a Russian who claimed to be on his way to join the Foreign Legion, and after his 32-mile trek in 1998 the tunnel people swore blind they’d tighten their security to a point where such jaunts were impossible.

What everyone wants to stop, naturally, is the ugly prospect of hordes of poor people from the south braving annihilation by high-speed trains to take up lucrative posts in the British burger-flipping industry. But what I say is that such considerations shouldn’t prevent the tunnel being opened up once a year, so that those of us with the right bona fides have the opportunity to walk to the continent. I can think of nothing more likely to promote European unity than the resurrection of this land bridge; and I’m sure the sight of us British walkers emerging, blinking into the Normandy sunlight, clad in our attractive shorts and cagoules, will warm the hearts of even the most chilly Gaullist.

Infantile Mess

Babyshambles by name – babyish shambles by nature. What an hysterical circus that surrounds that pied-piper of dissolution Pete Doherty. Desperate fans in Brixton scaled barbed wire in order to hear Doherty and his band strum their ditties of adolescent angst at the academy. Nothing wrong with that I say – what’s being a teenager without a few anti-establishment antics? Why, I remember my own happy youth, in thrall to Sid Vicious, another smacked-out nihilist with a nice bass line. No, the only trouble with Doherty, so far as I can see, is that the only thing he wishes to destroy is himself. C’mon, Pete – have a go at Tony Blair if you think you’re hard enough.

Compassion Fatigue

Since the terrible earthquake struck Pakistan and Afghanistan on the weekend there has been a predictable course of events. I say predictable, because the past couple of years have been defined by a steady, horrific beat of major natural disasters, much in the way that the 1970s were defined by aviation disasters. The Asian tsunami, the Bam earthquake, Hurricane Katrina – if anyone is predisposed to believe in “Acts of God”, than this deity must be a sinister, cold-hearted entity to crush so many lives, and leave so many sentient beings writhing in agony.

Then the appeals begin, the Disasters Emergency Committee reconfigures, pledges are made by governments, international bodies and wealthy private individuals. Then comes the negativity. Some say the infrastructure of Kashmir – the worst affected region – is incapable of supporting the relief effort, because of neglect by the Pakistan government; others opine that the money pledged won’t be delivered. Cynics suggest that US and British aid is a function of political considerations – a need to woo the Muslim world. Still more worry that the very private individuals who the charities appeal to over the heads of their governments, are suffering from compassion fatigue. They’ve given too much – and don’t believe their maxed-out credit cards are truly making the difference.

I don’t think anyone capable of feeling compassion ever truly suffers from compassion fatigue. What we in the affluent West really suffer from is an increasing realism about what we can do. Natural disasters get us to dig deeper than manmade ones, because we recognise that there’s more chance of non-partisan responses in non-political situations. We feel removed from the places where these things are happening, and the procession of harrowing media images enhances our sense of moral dislocation. We begin to entertain the suspicion that giving is to do with making us feel better about ourselves, rather than helping to save lives.

Then, when we’ve weighed up all the arguments and ground to a halt, we reach for the phone and the credit card and we give anyway; because we already have a cashmere woolly, while in Kashmir they’re freezing to death.

12.10.05

Travesties

January 5, 2006

Travesties

To Wyndham’s theatre for the all-star cast, all-star audience opening night of Heroes, a French comedy translated by Tom Stoppard. I was in high anticipation. Stoppard was my theatrical inspiration as a teenager. I saw the first runs of Travesties, with John Wood starring, and Jumpers with Michael Hordern. I even put on a performance of Stoppard’s radio play Albert’s Bridge at my school. I associate Stoppard with delirious absurdism, razor-sharp dialogue and consummate ability to marry the transient with the eternal. Sadly, Gerald Sibleyras’s play had none of these attributes. Stoppard said that he translated it because he wanted to do something different, but as a motivation for bringing to the London stage a play about a trio of war veterans this is pretty lame. As lame as the character of Henri, played by Richard Griffiths. Watching Griffiths, together with alpha actors John Hurt and Ken Stott, bring life to a beautifully paced but ultimately trivial Stoppard script, was like listening to Daniel Barenboim play Chopsticks on a Casio electronic organ.

Arcadia

My late cousin Cynthia belonged to a religious sect called the Christadelphians, who believed that the only part of the world to survive the apocalypse would be Cheltenham. If she was right, and the apocalypse happened to have come during the week of the Cheltenham festival (both of which, I concede, are pretty improbable), then the survivors would at least have had a world-class architect on hand for the global reconstruction programme. Daniel Libeskind was speaking at the town hall on Saturday morning, and a strange mixture of vaulting ambition and giggling ingenuousness he turned out to be. Expatiating on his late start as an actual fabricator of the built environment he said: “Before I won the prize for the Jewish Museum in Berlin I hadn’t built so much as a garage!”. Given Libeskind’s propensity for twisting anything rectilinear into the most outrageous shapes, this is just as well. The only kind of car you could get into a Libeskind-designed building would be one that had been written off in a headlong collision.

The Real Thing

It seems like only yesterday that Richard Branson was pushing his new Pendolino trains at us like a demented little boy. Now it turns out that the billionaire entrepreneur’s ambitions for the British rail network are shrinking to Hornby size. The transport secretary, Alastair Darling, has announced that Virgin’s CrossCountry franchise is to be curtailed in 2007, five years earlier than its existing contract. Far from transforming rail travel, Branson has ended up having to be bailed out by the public purse to the tune of £420m in the last three years.

To be fair to Branson – and God knows that hurts – he, like everyone else in the rail industry from Stephen Byers on up, has been dogged by the madness of separating track and stock in the original privatisation plan. Now the West Coast route, which is on a fixed-management contract allowing for a 1% profit, will be retained by Virgin, while the old CrossCountry will absorb some of the currently inefficient Central services. Two new franchises are also to come into being in the Midlands. Sounds simple doesn’t it? A real way out of the current mess. Well, no, not at all. And while the likes of Branson are looking to quit on rail because they can’t make the margins they want, other potential operators are queuing up to have a crack at it, confident in the knowledge that if they cock up too much they’ll be bailed out by the public purse as well.

When will this government – or any other – take on board the simple fact that large-scale infrastructural investment is best handled on a – doh! – large scale. It doesn’t matter how many ways they cut up the operating cake, there still won’t be any icing on it for the existing passengers, and no incentive for our car-addicted, road-freighting masses to let the train take the strain. Believe me, if a ballooning capitalist of Branson’s canniness is getting out, then rail privatisation truly is punctured.

Jumpers

The London left-liberal chattering classes are rallying behind David Cameron’s tilt for the Tory leadership, their hearts softened by his disabled child, their blood stirred by his trendy wife, and their minds dulled by his soft line on cannabis. None of them has bothered to look too hard at what the wunderkind actually says about the most important issue affecting middle-class people who believe in social inclusion: education.

If they’d troubled to read this paper on Tuesday they would’ve had Cameron’s vision on education straight from the horse’s mouth. And what daft, un-thought through combination of buzzwords and unworkable policy it was. Cameron hangs on to the prime minister’s frayed shirttail, saying that “Tony Blair has got it at last” by recognising that schools should have more autonomy and parents more choice. He not only endorses the government’s P-P-Privatisation by stealth of the state education system, but actually thinks that business should be allowed a still freer rein when it comes to managing schools.

This is Cameron’s “modern, compassionate Conservatism”, more of the same mad philosophy that says that because entrepreneurs are good at flogging widgets, they must be able to churn out cultured and happy individuals. More of the same harping on about “choice”, when it’s precisely the “choice” offered by the independent sector in the face of failing London state schools, which has seen 25% of pupils drain away in the past decade, as any parent who has the money puts them into private schooling.

Yes, we’ve all rethought our attitude to the “comprehensive ideal” of the 1970s in the past few years and realised that it ain’t working. But the reason is because it was an ideal, looking forward to a fully inclusive and egalitarian society. Instead we have a society in which there’s very little manufacturing industry, the middling tradesmen are from Gdansk, the doctors from Africa, and bright local kids want to be media tarts, while inner-city poor kids end up as crack whores. Nothing Cameron proposes will change this one jot; proof positive that an Eton and Oxford education still propels utter mediocrities into positions of power and influence.

19.10.05

Puff the Magic Dragon

January 5, 2006

Puff the Magic Dragon

What a ridiculous and toxic miasma obscures the current debate on smoking. Yesterday, the government’s Health Improvement Bill, which sets out its proposals for a ban, was delayed. Apparently the prohibitionists – health secretary Patricia Hewitt and her ally Tessa Jowell – are being dogged by “Doc” John Reid and Jack “˜Man o” Straw, who wish to engineer a compromise allowing for “smoking pubs” that don’t serve food.

Some cynics suggest that Reid – an ex-health secretary himself – wants the issue fudged because he’s worried Labour would lose working-class votes with a ban. This from the man who said: “˜People in lower socio-economic categories have very few pleasures in life and one is smoking.” A statement worthy of a duchess contemplating the “˜plebs” through the wrong end of her lorgnette.

Or maybe Reid is still creeping out to the Houses of Parliament bike sheds for a quick drag, and feels it would be hypocritical and against his own proclivities to back a total ban. Whatever. The truth is that on this issue the government is sucking wearily on a fag end. The tipping point has been reached in England, and whatever the tobacco industry and various, so-called “˜libertarians” say, a blanket ban on smoking in public places would be generally supported and universally accepted.

The majority of adults now don’t smoke, and of the remainder who do, many would gratefully seize on the opportunity a public ban afforded to give up. The ban has worked in Ireland – in Italy too. If Reid thinks sealed “smoking rooms” on licensed premises will keep smokers ticking his box, then he’s never been in one. I have in New York, and after emerging I felt like a smoked whelk.

I myself am still a smoker. I smoke cigarettes, I smoke large Havana cigars, I smoke calabashes loaded with the strongest shags I can lay my yellowing fingers on. So long as the government aren’t going to ban me from lighting up in the street or the privacy of my own home I support a total ban. Drug laws – and nicotine is a drug – should be based on what people actually want to do, not on what politicians want them to do. Most people neither want to smoke in pubs and restaurants, nor breathe other people’s smoke. Go figure, Doctor John.

Bird Brained

Blanket bans on bird imports, warnings on cooking poultry and eating raw eggs. Stockpiling of vaccines and the dithering of ministers as the avian flu epidemic begins to take on the lineaments of true disaster. How reminiscent of the run-up to Foot and Mouth and BSE it all seems. In neither of those earlier crises was the government’s response seen as anything but an unmitigated disaster: animals were needlessly slaughtered, farmers went to the wall. The FaM outbreak wasn’t contained at all – and the repercussions of BSE are still being played out. And those were diseases that only affected animals! Think how much worse it will be with a virus whose true goal in life is pullulating through human lungs. I’m intentionally personifying HN15 (or its erstwhile variants), because viruses are creatures too, and this particular virus hasn’t evolved, yet, so that it can be transmitted between human carriers. As things stand, all the stockpiling of antiviral drugs does is push up the share prices of Big Pharma. While all the control measures are doing is to slow down the rate of mutation at tremendous cost.

I have another strategy: do nothing. Let it rip. The strain of HN15 that is human-transmissible may not be as lethal as feared. Indeed, all the measures aimed at blocking it may only make it wilier. Once the new flu strain emerges we can concentrate resources on ameliorating its symptoms and creating an effective vaccine – until it exists, we should do nothing. As the medics have been quick to point out, these flu pandemics normally travel around the world as regularly as Tony Blair. And if he and his political pals can’t even abolish a glaring human problem like global poverty, how the hell are they going to defeat an enemy they can’t even see?

Tres Chic

To Paris for the weekend, where I have to counter the demands of my two companions: a four-year-old and a 15-year-old. The little boy is satisfied by a toy bought in the Gallerie Lafayette and a trip to the Jardin D’Acclimatation, a rather cosy theme park in the Bois de Boulogne. The big boy is a rather trickier proposition. No, the Musee D’Orsay doesn’t enthuse him – nor does Rodin’s sculpture garden. He’ll submit to a trot around Sacre Coeur and Les Invalides – but it doesn’t exactly float his boat. No, it transpires that what he considers the height of cool, is sitting on the terrace of the Café Flor, sipping a naughty demi pression, and watching the chic crowds troll along the Boulevard Saint Germain. And you know what – he’s absolutely right.

Come il Faut

To Home House for the launch of Peter York’s new book, ˜Dictators’ Homes. The club itself is irrefutably tasteful, the chattering guests are witty and well-turned out. I asked York, the avatar of all style pundits, whether any of the dictators in the book had good taste, and he conceded that Hitler’s Berghof – the Nazi leader’s mountain retreat in the Austrian Alps – was surprisingly so, albeit in an inflated, kitschy manner. In truth, York’s book struck me as a little too tasteful: well written, beautifully designed. The subject really demands a collaboration between the art director of Zoo magazine and Andrew Morton.

26.10.05

Paris

January 4, 2006

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.

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