Will Self

It’s difficult, simply sitting alone in a small room in south London, really to get a feel for how mass human behaviour is affecting the world. But it’s too cold in late February to go out much, and besides, by this point in winter, my sense of autonomy has been so savagely eroded that I fear for what little sense of individuality I have – if I stand next to as few as two others I can sense myself being sucked into a maelstrom of the masses. So, this week, I have decided to trust to algorithms rather than observation and I offer you the top “lucky seven” maddened crowds as compiled on our behalf by Google News. It took 0.53 seconds for the HMRC-compliant search engine to come up with a humongous crowd of 91,600,000 results – so I hope you’re grateful I’m not doing the entire countdown.

OK, that’s right! Sit tight! In at number seven is someone called Adele; I’d never heard of her before, but apparently she’s a popular crooner. Anyway, this Adele woman performed a concert on 12 February in Los Angeles, and the “historic” Wiltern theatre was stacked with some 2,300 fans who, it seems, “knew the words of every song”. Adele charmed them all, remarking that she felt so hot, “I feel like my make-up’s about to slide off me face!” But the true insanity ensued when she revealed that it was at her own insistence that the ticket price had been held at $50. According to the Yahoo Music website, this drew “thunderous applause”. Of course it did! I remember attending a Martha Argerich recital at the Wigmore Hall where her ethereal rendition of Bach’s partitas was entirely drowned out by the drumming of elderly, bunion-ridden feet, as we noisily protested at having to pay over the odds.

A new entry at number six are the crowds who, crazed by Promethean scientific advance, flocked to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) near Hanford, Washington State, after it was announced that scientists there had detected the existence of the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein. Setting to one side the observation that there was absolutely nothing to see at all, we can still marvel at their marvelling.

Annette Cary reported in the Tri-City Herald that Jason Jones of Seattle had driven 200 miles to visit the observatory. “I’m in awe of the science that happened in this place,” he told Cary. “It could fundamentally change our view of reality.” This may be true, although so far it hasn’t had any effect on people nonsensically massing.

Number five is an old favourite that’s perennially re-released – a sports crowd kicking off. In this case, they were Corsican, so naturally they took their anger outside the ground, and to a . . . police station. About a hundred hardcore Bastia fans launched the attack, which followed another of their number being injured in a scuffle with police during Saturday’s away match in Rheims. I, for one, think this widening of footie fracas is a heartening development – perhaps West Ham’s so-called fans can take on the so-called Islamic State?

At number four is another crowd they might cheerfully lay into: the estimated 230,000 people who attended the National Multicultural Festival in Canberra over the weekend. Given that Canberra is a distinctly white and triumphantly dull city, this hardly surprises – last year 73 local people were killed attending the opening of a Tetra Pak carton.

Still, all power to those ockers – they’ve come a long way since they granted their own indigenous people citizenship in 1968, to embrace multiculturalism by keeping refugees in concentration camps.

Number three are the police in the Indian state of Haryana who’ve abandoned their rubber bullets and water cannon, and taken to subduing angry mobs with “specially designed” and locally manufactured slingshots that fire plastic balls full of chilli powder. But lest we imagine these followers of the Mahatma are becoming too non-violent, they’ve said they’ll catapult marbles if the chilli powder doesn’t work.

At number two is the ageing meerkat lookalike and tedious “raconteur” Garrison Keillor, who apparently addressed a crowd of more than 2,000 the other afternoon at the Holland Centre in Omaha, Nebraska. They were febrile to begin with but Keillor’s signature monotony soon pacified them, and several elderly audience members died when their hearts skipped too many beats. They should get out less.

And finally, at number one – for now, then, and for all eternity! Yes! That’s right! Sit tight! It’s the Supreme Father, His Holiness Pope Francis, who addressed a vast crowd in the Mexico City suburb of Ecatepec. Numbering around a third of a million, the flock of faithful was shepherded by some 10,000 armed police. The Pope told the adoring crowd: “With the devil, there is no dialogue . . . although I’m reliably informed he has the best tunes,” a reference to the drug-fuelled violence that has made Ecatepec one of the most dangerous ’hoods in the world – especially if you’re a woman. And if you’re a Mexican woman living in terror from a bunch of super-violent misogynistic bastards, where better to seek succour than from a cross-dressing celibate who hears voices?

The other day, I bought a chocolate-chip cookie from a little boy called Rocco who had set up a stall round the corner, stocked with all sorts of buns, muffins and other home-baked goodies, in order to raise money for SportsAid. “How sweet is that?” I thought, as I handed over my dosh – but when I passed by again a few hours later, I found that Rocco’s little stall had transmogrified into just one of the hundreds of branches of Rocco’s Patisserie, all of which were decorated like a pseudo-French café and were now serving ghastly, industrially produced sugary comestibles at inflated prices.

I have written before in this column about how deranging it is to see chain restaurants or cafés clink-clankingly metastasise across our greenish and bilious land. This week, I want to consider another egregious example: Patisserie Valerie. Once upon a time, if you were something of a Soho flâneur, after you’d picked up a few poppers behind Raymond Revuebar and visited one of the walk-ups (take note, Crispin!), you slaked the thirst your exertions had produced by downing a half-pint at the French House, or going for tea and a pastry at Maison Bertaux or Patisserie Valerie. Neither establishment was particularly good but both had the virtue of being long established and – more importantly – unique.

Maison Bertaux, which is still going, has the further cachet of being the older, having been established in 1871 (possibly by ex-communards fleeing the counter-revolution), but Patisserie Valerie was always more accommodating. It was opened in 1926 on Frith Street by the eponymous Madame Valerie, but moved round the corner to Old Compton Street after the Blitz hit the eclairs and a massive euphemistic explosion ensued. True, in 1987 the café was bought by the aptly named Scalzo brothers (what else are you going to do with a name like that except snaffle up Soho businesses?) but they only managed to open a further eight branches before selling the mini-chain to the man we must perforce call the Führer of mid-price British restaurant dining: Luke Johnson.

OK, OK, I realise that’s a little outré – I certainly don’t mean to suggest that Mr Johnson has any Hitlerish political opinions or personal traits, although the Johnson family (in common, it seems, with other prominent Johnsons) does hang to the right. Nevertheless, even Luke wouldn’t dispute that he is always seeking to expand and find more Feedingsraum; after all, this is the man who took Pizza Express from 12 outlets to 250 in a mere six years; the man who started Strada from scratch (it is now so ubiquitous that there is probably a Strada up your bum, dishing out great, steaming mounds of tagliatelle); and the man who took over Gail’s Artisan Bakery in 2011, since when it has become the synonym for yummy-bourgeois-mummyness.

At least with Johnson’s other enterprises, what you see is pretty much what you get, but Patisserie Valerie, shorn of its belle époque window-dressing, is nothing more than Costa-with-attitude. Yes, yes, the floors are brownish and woody-looking . . . Yes, yes, there’s a decal of the Eiffel Tower stuck to the ceiling . . . Yes, yes, the benighted members of staff have to wear stripy waistcoats . . . And yes, yes, there are signature French café furnishings: bentwood chairs, club ones with oxblood-leatherette seats. But a few bottles of syrup and a handful of macaroons doth not make for café society – or even a café where you would like to socialise.

At the counter, I admired the hat-shaped lampshades dangling overhead (so witty!), then ordered a pot of Earl Grey and a “lovingly handmade Belgian chocolate gluten-free brownie”. The nice serving woman told me to take a bentwood chair and, shortly afterwards, tea and titbit arrived: the former in a heavy china pot (excellent!), the latter in a plastic box (sucks dogshit – if I wanted a brownie in a box, I’d go to a petrol station). If I had ordered the full afternoon tea, I’d have been presented with a wrought-iron stand holding individual pots of conserves; and that has to be worth a premium price, doesn’t it? Well, no. It takes more than a pot of jam and some dangling bowler hats to conjure ambience, especially when there’s a harsh, neon, anti-insect lamp on the wall and a garish yellow “CLEANING IN PROGRESS” sign on the floor – easily the brightest thing on the premises.

I’ve no idea how Luke Johnson sees the future of Patisserie Valerie. He has taken the Scalzos’ nine outlets and added a cool 115 more in nine short years. At this rate, he’ll have a millefeuille in every British suburban cul-de-sac by the turn of the next century. And, as with so many other high-flying business types, one wonders: what’s in it for him? Can he get that much satisfaction from stuffing ever more food in our faces? His employees don’t seem to be getting much – the nice woman on the till at one branch told me that, as a manager, she was obliged to do up to 10 hours a week of unpaid overtime. As for the ordinary staff: “It’s so quiet at the moment, I sometimes have to send them home.”

Poor bastards. But at least at home you can have a cup of tea for free and one of Rocco’s very reasonably priced and charitable cookies.

That we always kill the thing we love may be a tedious truism, but that can’t make us feel any better when the warm body that we once cuddled and cooed to is lying on the ground at our feet while our hands are bathed in its warm red blood. Last week, the head of the UN World Tourism Organisation, Taleb Rifai, spoke out, saying that travel as “a celebration of life” is under threat. Rifai, of course, was referring to tourism, rather than a broad idea of travel.

Apparently, global tourism rates have been rising faster than expected – there was a 4.4 per cent increase in 2015, the sixth consecutive year in which the numbers of people wearing garishly patterned shirts that don’t suit them went up. And what is the world total of tourists? A whopping 1.18 billion – which represents a hell of a lot of Germans lunging for the sunlounger ahead of you. If, that is, they aren’t stuck at home being bombed, shot, stabbed or sexually molested by the refugee cuckoos they’ve allowed into their gemütlich nests.

Rifai’s concern is just this: that the security measures taken by governments in response to the perceived terrorist threat will have a severe impact on an industry that accounts for one in every 11 jobs. (Yes, that’s right, one in 11! I was just as surprised as you to learn that one out of every 11 people I pass in the street very likely keeps a hot caramelised peanut stall.) But while we’re chewing over the statistics let’s just bite down a bit more on that 1.18 billion figure. It’s the equivalent of the world’s entire population in 1850 packing bucket and spade, shouldering their cumbersome Fox Talbot photographic apparatuses and buggering right off for a fortnight. Which rather suggests the question, who sold them their hot caramelised peanuts – aliens?

Look, I don’t want to piss on anybody’s parade (unless it’s the ghastly fake kind you find at Disneyland, complete with drum-twirling majorettes and Uncle Sam on stilts), and I appreciate it’s the time of year when hard-pressed workers of all stripes are making their holiday bookings, but isn’t the notion of a global economy substantially – if not primarily – dependent on vast hordes of tourists maddening by definition?

Currently, 9 per cent of global GDP comes from tourism, which accounts for a whopping 30 per cent of the world’s service industries. Western aid donors don’t like to allocate funds to tourism in the developing world but Rifai believes this is short-sighted, given that investment in such projects can have a multiplier effect as overall infrastructure, personnel training and other services improve.

I don’t want to come over all Paddy Leigh Fermor on you, but is a two-week package tour to some benighted Middle Eastern country really a “celebration of life”? I remember when the British tourists were all stuck in Sharm el-Sheikh last year, how flabbergasted – not to say outraged – some of them were. “How could such a thing have happened to us?” they wailed, as if it were some sort of human right to be allowed to sip sugar water and paddle in the Red Sea at the tip of a peninsula that’s been the site of a savage insurgency for well over a decade. Left to me, if I’d been given the job of sorting self-aware sheep from gormless goats, I’d have made sure anyone who complained never got home.

Years ago, JG Ballard wrote a short story predicated on just this idea: the thousands of Brit tourists sunning themselves in the Med receive a communication from HMG informing them that they are surplus to requirements and are being let go of. Far from being enraged by this summary curtailment of their citizenship, the doughty holidaymakers create a bizarre sort of “ribbon territory”, thousands of miles long, incredibly squiggly, but only a beach deep – then they declare unilateral independence.

Of course, with Europe’s Mediterranean beaches now becoming de facto Bantustans for Syrian, Afghan and all manner of other exiles, they are looking a lot less attractive as sunlounger locations. Still, I don’t imagine this will badly dent the numbers of tourists heading there for their hols, because the organising principle of tourism is, as Rifai makes clear, perception.

It is one thing to share a sable strand with a few washed-up beggars – the hyper-rich do it all the time in the Caribbean – but quite another to touch down in a country where every waiter and water-ski instructor nurtures a deep and burning desire to exterminate the infidel and establish Allah’s kingdom on earth. The only problem for the dumb and ovine tourists is that while they’re away in Tunisia or Egypt or Turkey enjoying a cheap holiday in someone else’s failing state, flying columns of refugees are occupying their own homeland.

There would be a sort of poetic justice in this if it really were to become a systematic scheme, whereby those whose work is deemed unproductive or irrelevant were simply swapped for the doctors, dentists and accountants who are now shivering to death in the waters off Lesbos.

I speak fearlessly about such penultimate solutions because I understand full well that the British economy can do without the product of my labours down t’word-pit; so I’m ready to celebrate life to the full. Are you?

The academic requirement for the psychogeography module that I teach at Brunel University London is in two parts. First, there’s a fairly straightforward essay question that gives students an opportunity to display their erudition when it comes to the antics of the surrealists and situationists, or the high-flown ramblings of the English Romantics. Then there’s a special project. The idea for this is that the students undertake their own version of a dérive – the aimless drift through the city that is the raison d’être of seriously flippant flâneurs – and document it in any way they please.

They can film themselves, take still images and put them together with words in PowerPoint, or give us words alone. I’ve had students who have conveyed their dérive using immersive installations, others who have painted pictures or drawn cartoons. I tell them: there’s no bar on any mode of expression but the important thing to remember is that I want you to take me by the hand and lead me into this milieu.

That’s exactly what they have done. I enjoy every aspect of teaching the module – which is mostly done on foot, in the manner of the Stoics – but the special project presentations are the highlight. This year, I had a student who filmed himself rapping about his alienated and deracinated childhood while walking down the interminable stairwell of the high-rise that he grew up in.

The child of refugees from Afghanistan, this young man ended up neglected and running wild in London. He intercut his rapping selfie with recordings of interviews that he had done with his teachers at primary school in which they spoke frankly about his delinquency and what they had done to help him. The presentation was emotionally moving – but it was also literally moving, impelling you to think about the impact of these jagged transitions on a child’s psyche.

Then there was a young woman who grew up in Staines, on the wrong side of the M4, who had decided to cross over it and walk through Eton to Windsor. She had been to Windsor many times before; however, the act of uniting these disparate but proximate places physically, with her own body, brought home to her the depth of the contrast. She experienced Windsor not as quaint, but as contrived, and laughed out loud when her eyes alighted on the last thing that any plenipotentiary might see before his limousine was whisked through the bombastic castle’s main gateway: a branch of McDonald’s in full regalia.

Our student body is majority ethnic minority (if such a thing is possible), so, unsurprisingly, we had quite a lot of project work that tried to articulate the forms of alienation that are experienced by first-, second- and third-generation immigrants. Another young woman, from a British Muslim background, decided for her dérive first to traverse the notorious Jungle encampment outside Calais and then to replicate the walk she took over there in central London – where, instead of peering into shattered lives, she stared through plate glass.

She filmed both journeys using a GoPro camera fixed to her head and edited the footage to juxtapose speeded-up sequences of listless refugees with images of frenzied consumers.

Many of the students simply used the cameras in their phones to record their dérives. The resulting films have a distinctive, hand-held jitteriness that, to my way of thinking, perfectly conveys the oxymoronic cocktail of the contemporary British built environment: one part excitement to several parts ennui. Last year, two of my students were working on a project together when they fell out. One of them then filmed herself walking along a desolate arterial road by night, weeping and inveighing against the other – a shockingly intimate portrayal of wild distress in a context of ineffable dullness.

Her ex-partner, by contrast, took us on a journey through “her” Stratford, the poor district of London where she and her family had been housed when they arrived from Africa as refugees, before heading to the other Stratford – the brave new world of the Westfield shopping mall and the Olympic Park.

Some of the students undertook virtual rather than actual dérives. A young man who is studying games design took us for a wander around the world of Fallout 4. He had created his own rules for this exercise: his avatar had to keep moving, couldn’t re-up any supplies, had to avoid being killed and was forbidden to attack any other avatars. In essence, he had created an anti-gaming game.

Another games designer took us though Google Maps. The whole group became a random-decision generator as to which way we would wander. Within seconds, we ended up somewhere none of us had ever been, nor even considered going.

Over the past four years, I’ve sat through scores of these presentations and each was a revelation – revelatory not just of how students engage with place and space individually but of a collective refusal to do just this. Despite selecting the module, many of the students tell me that they had never before taken a walk like this, let alone spent 10 minutes telling someone else about it.

One of the more bizarre changes I’ve witnessed over the past 20 years or so has been the vast increase in the numbers of Indian rose-ringed parakeets on my manor. Commonly referred to as the ring-neck parakeet, Psittacula krameri manillensis is a bird of such raucousness that were I to get my hands on one, I would cheerfully wring its neck.

I first noticed them when walking to the west of London in the late 1990s – at that time there were already flocks numbering in their thousands around Kingston. The urban myth is that the British-based parakeets weren’t economic migrants, nor asylum-seekers, but bona fide immigrants with jobs to go to as extras for the filming of The African Queen at Isleworth Studios in 1951. Once their decorative role was done, the parakeets escaped into the adjacent and bosky ’burbs. Not that this is an exclusively metropolitan phenomenon – there are colonies of ring-necks established as far afield as Sefton Park in Liverpool, and south Manchester.

Actually, the parakeets are quite handsome birds, pale green in hue, with a distinctive dark-grey neck ring. In flight, their long, forked tails lend their appearance something – though not much – of our native swallow. At any rate, once they open their distinctively psittacine beaks (red and hooky) to give voice, you wonder if you’re not in Kingston any more, Dorothy. In some ways the ring-necks’ cry is reminiscent of any typically cheep-cheeping native British garden bird; yet there is no melody to it, while the timbre implies it cannot possibly be emanating from such a small bundle of feathers, but is rather issuing from a traffic cone being used as a “musical instrument” by a sozzled busker. It is also rather corvid, the ring-neck’s cry – suggestive of an intelligence more knowing than we expect from most birds.

But then the psittacidae and corvidae have this in common: both species are ridiculously clever. Crows know how to bluff their competitors while concealing food caches. As for parrots, recent research has established that when they talk they are genuinely speaking, rather than simply, um, parroting us. Naturally, ornithologists took a long while to detect this because they couldn’t believe any other sentient being was possessed of an ironic sensibility to match that of the British intelligentsia. (Think about it – think about being a captive in a tiny cage with some monstrous, Brobdingnagian face looming over you while a foghorn voice repeats, over and over again, “Pretty Polly, Pretty Polly.” Wouldn’t you “Pretty Polly” it right back?)

As the populations of ring-necks have expanded and expanded, so they’ve lent an unheimlich character to the urban environment; it was one thing to chance upon three or four of them while wandering on the outskirts of London, but to see a whole flock in tight formation doing a fly-past of the Houses of Parliament on a hot, wet January evening is to realise something is definitely afoot. And while I did say that I’d cheerfully wring an individual ring-neck’s neck, I don’t have anything at all against them en masse. Quite the contrary, in fact: I think ring-necks add great gaiety to British skies. Moreover, they’re far more in keeping with our rapidly transmogrifying climate than many of our native species, as they’re omnivorous and emphatically non-migratory.

But busybody birders fanatically wish to preserve those native species against the ring-necks’ deprivations – given that the newbies have a voracious appetite for all available forage, are invariably first to the feeder, and can beat off all other comers with one wing tied behind their enviable tail feathers. Anyway, when you consider that the origins of most escapee species lie either in the imperial project (rhododendrons, buddleia) or misguided attempts to establish a new source of food (rabbits, muntjac deer and so on), then the ring-necks’ filmic backstory makes them seem altogether more benign. Still, when you chance upon a big crowd of them, all chuckling and kraarking and cawing, it can be an intimidating sight.

The worry is that they’ll go mad. I’m never bothered about the average bird going mad, because it has never struck me that they have much of a grip on reality to begin with. But ring-neck parakeets are, as I think I’ve already made crystal-clear, immigrants; and epidemiological studies consistently confirm that immigrants – regardless of their ethnicity, or religion – always have substantially higher levels of mental illness than indigenes. Immigrants, almost by definition, are smart and enterprising – and their experience of diverse cultures makes it hard for them to suspend disbelief in arbitrary customs and social mores. If sanity is a kind of unquestioning conformity, then to be mad is to fly free as a bird. Unless, that is, you’re a bird already.

One ring-necked parakeet was roosting on my window ledge when I began writing this column. Since then another 30 or 40 have joined him. They’re tapping on the pane with their sharp beaks – soon enough they’ll be in the room. Still, I’m confident I’ll be able to talk my way out of getting pecked to death, so long as no one’s been stupid enough to teach them to … read.