Will Self

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

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

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

The Ebony Tower

There seems, at last, to be a replacement for the “Passion from Protein” man who for so many years promenaded the West End inveighing against the sexual depravity provoked by eggs and cheese. Nowadays I often see an elderly Afro-Caribbean man on Oxford Street, who declaims his own brand of Christian gospel using a curious portable PA system: a tiny speaker hung round his neck like sonic bling, a microphone rasped by his mobile lips. On Saturday this peripatetic preacher came towards me through massed crowds of frenzied consumers: “Life is but a dream!” he squawked with a Jamaican inflection. “An’ dis is not your real ‘ome!” How sage, I thought, how just. “In the midst of life,” he continued, “we are in debt!” Sometimes, I reflected, the truest revelations are quite unintentional.

The Collector

A curious phenomenon in Trafalgar Square needs remarking on. Since the installation of Marc Quinn’s monumental statue of the nude and pregnant disabled woman Alison Lapper, there’s been an avian redistribution. Formerly General Napier, Sir Henry Havelock, George IV, and even the Big N himself, all had an even share of the available pigeons and seagulls. However, these bronzed oldies cannot compete with the cool marble form of youthful Ms Lapper, and the birds, doubtless mistaking her for some particularly cuddly looking cliff, have deserted their old perches. Now the Dead White Males stand alone, while the defiantly alive and considerably whiter Ms Lapper has an entire flock clustered in her rounded lap. It’s an arresting image, and further confirmation — if any were needed — of why Quinn’s statue was such a great choice for the fourth plinth.

The Magus

To the Barbican for the Michael Clark Company’s production of O, a ballet that reworks Balanchine and Stravinsky in radical and entrancing ways. Clark remains the doyenne of modern British choreographers — his work leaps from the prissy precincts and strikes bold poses which all can appreciate. Certainly the audience were as diverse a bunch as it was possible to imagine in a London theatre. Sitting in front of me were a couple of dumpy punks, sporting so much face-metal that I was amazed they could keep their heads upright. But they could, and this meant that I saw the op-art set through the pinkish haze of a couple of brightly dyed mohican tufts. Meanwhile, next to me were a pair of fearsomely erect ladies of a certain age, who looked as if they might once have shared a barre with Margot Fonteyn. Clark’s company features non-standard body types as well — tall women dancers and squat men — so audience and performers were engaged in an arresting pas-de-deux.

Axon tangle

Sue Axon, a Mancunian mother of two teenage daughters, is taking on the Government in the High Court over its guidance allowing doctors to provide confidential abortion advice and contraception to young people under 16 without their parents’ knowledge. At first glance there seems reasonable grounds for her challenge: surely every parent has a right to know what is happening to their children, especially when it’s a vital health issue of this kind? Mrs Axon is basing her case on the Human Rights charter, which in the last few years has become a versatile stick in the hands of protesting litigants. She claims breach of her human rights — while lawyers on behalf of the Department of Health will argue that breaking the children’s patient confidentiality would be in breach of theirs.

The case is essentially “Gillick Lite”: a rerun of the Christian campaigner’s unsuccessful move, 20 years ago, to prevent underage girls being prescribed the pill without parental consent. But whereas Victoria Gillick demanded consent, Sue Axon only wishes knowledge. I don’t wish to impugn Mrs Axon’s motives, although her own guilt and regret over an abortion she once had seem a poor basis on which to pressure for a change in the law.

The truth is that the current guidelines have sufficient flexibility for doctors and health professionals to breach patient confidentiality where there is a serious threat to a child’s health. Any 15-year-old girl seeking an abortion will be encouraged to speak to their parents about it, and if she absolutely refuses the doctor must make every effort to help her find an adult mentor to offer support. As things stand, the large majority of underage girls seeking abortions do tell their parents in advance.

It’s tough for the Mrs Axons of this world to take it on board, but for young people having sex is something they don’t want their parents to know too much about. Curiously young people take very much the same view of parental sex! Our sex lives are conducted for the most part in private, and regardless of our age that’s the way we like to keep it. The problem is that this quite reasonable need for privacy shades imperceptibly into the secrecy surrounding self-destructive and high-risk behaviour among the young, whether that be drink, drugs or sex. But the harsh facts are that if a child substantially under 16 engages in unprotected sex it is almost certainly too late for her parents to reimpose control — especially through the agency of a nanny state.

Britain currently has the highest proportion of teenage pregnancies in Europe. The Mrs Axons of the world seem to believe that this is because of our enlightened and child-centred approach to the consequences of underage sex. Instead they should concentrate their efforts on the social, cultural and emotional pressures which lead girls — and boys — to such precocious rutting. If Mrs Axon did so she might be surprised by the common ground she shares with her ostensible opponents.

09.11.05

The Strong Arm of the Law

I’ve given Sir Ian Blair the benefit of the doubt since he became Commissioner of the Met. I’ve liked his insistence on community policing and his zero tolerance for racism and homophobia in the force. However, the fact that he’s thick as thieves with his namesake should really have alerted me to his true colours. As last night’s Reith Lecture displayed, Sir Ian is that most curious of creatures – a wholly political animal who understands little of politics.

I daresay the prestigious lecture – the first to be given by a senior policeman for 30 years – was fixed up before the Government’s defeat on 90-day detention for terror suspects, but I’m equally certain that Sir Ian saw it as another tactical move in his masterplan. Knocked back on this massive arrogation of police powers, Sir Ian remains unrepentant about proposing and then lobbying for it. He muses that it’s the public’s responsibility to launch a debate on the “shoot-to-kill” guidelines, which led to the death of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell tube station in July. He asks us Londoners whether we want a July 6 police force – 90% unarmed, on the beat – or a July 7 police force – hi-tech untouchables who will zap the baddies.

Such apparent openness by Britain’s senior police officer is just that: apparent. On the very day that it was disclosed that de Menezes was shot with dum-dum bullets (ordinance so lethal it’s outlawed under the Geneva Convention), it’s a little crass for the head of the Met to tell the public we’re failing in our civic duty. The truth is that no one knew anything about the shoot-to-kill policy before July 22 except the police themselves. And while we’re at it, why is it taking so long for the IPCC inquiry into this killing? On the one hand Sir Ian asks Parliament for three months to browbeat terrorist suspects, while on the other he can’t get his own officers to ‘fess up in four.

No, Sir Ian may have our best interests at heart but he also has a steely grip on his own. He wants to be good cop and bad cop at the same time. He’ll play to whichever gallery he’s facing in his drive for more arrogation of power. With the upcoming reorganisation of constabularies, the Met more than ever will be the leader of the police pack, and its top dog will be that much closer to heading some kind of national force. The only kind of transparency Sir Ian is promoting is entirely inadvertent: we can see his motives crystal-clear.

Defeater of the Flux

According to the Queen – or at any rate her speech writer – the Christian Church speaks “uniquely” to our need for meaning in an uncertain world. Opening the General Synod this week, the Queen gave a rousing defence of her position as Supreme Governor of the established Church, striking down those who feel such a status is incompatible with being the Head of State of a multi-faith society. So far as I can see, the established Church has had nigh on half a millennium to convince us of its unique insight. In 16th century London less than 30% of the population were churchgoers – despite nonattendance being fineable – and now this incentive has been removed hardly anyone wants to go at all. Far from representing timeless verities, if the Church of England has any virtue it’s that it’s cut its moral garb to suit the times. It’s changed its creed, rewritten its Bible, and moved to accept female and gay priests. At the rate it’s going it’ll have to disestablish itself on moral grounds alone, and the sooner this happens the better.

Destroyer of Stereotypes

On Tuesday I had a brief but intense conversation about Christianity in fifth-century North Africa. No, I wasn’t at the General Synod along with the Queen, but at Goldsmiths College in New Cross. And this wasn’t a gathering of learned divines, but a celebration of the work of an astonishing project called Open Book. Set up by Joe Baden four years ago, Open Book aims to get people from offending, mental health and addiction backgrounds into further education. So far they’ve managed to do just this with almost 100 students. The man who told me he was boning up on Medieval Latin so he could do a doctoral thesis on St Augustine had been a drug addict for 30 years, in and out of jail. I also spoke to a former armed robber who’s doing a sociology degree and a playwright on day release from HMP Ford whose work has been commended by the Royal Court Theatre. I wish that the people who are so blinkered about the possibility of rehabilitating offenders could see the work organisations such as Open Book do. Yes, of course criminals need to be punished – but by educating ex-offenders we help them earn a living, pay their debt to society, and stop them from creating more victims.

Nurse! The screens!

To the Almeida, where the statuesque Ronni Ancona, together with a fine cast of British comedy actors, brought tremendous vigour to Moliere’s The Hypochondriac. This was high farce played with low cunning, and Moliere’s satire on the credulousness of patients and the finagling of their doctors felt as fresh today as when it was bottled 250-odd years ago. Not so fresh was the set, which consisted in part of some 40 jars of preserved excreta. On television or in an art gallery such a display would have doubtless provoked outrage, but us theatregoers are above all that – especially in the circle.

16.11.05