Will Self

Baudelaire writes, “Mainte fleur épanche á regret/Son parfum doux comme un secret/Dans les solitudes profondes.” And George Dillon translates, “Many a flower has bloomed and spent/The secret of its passionate scent/Upon the wilderness profound.” I stand outside La Belle Équipe on the corner of the rue Faidherbe and the rue de Charonne staring down at the great tattered mess of handmade cards, poesies, rotting bouquets wrapped in cellophane and hundreds of little aluminium sockets that once held the stumps of tea lights. A fortnight ago, at about 9.30pm, two gunmen opened fire on the people who were sitting and drinking on the café’s terrace. When they stopped, 19 were dead and nine more were critically injured.

I’m with a small group of postgraduate students from the University of London’s Paris conservatoire; they are doing a Master’s that takes as its subject matter the city itself, and my sessions alternate between the seminar room and themed promenades. Before 13 November the plan had been to examine the traces of political violence in the city’s built environment by walking the sites of the May 1968 événements – the area around the Sorbonne, the rue Saint-Jacques and rue des Écoles – where students tore up the cobbles to throw at the police, thereby discovering the beach beneath the street. Obviously there had been some soul-searching after the attacks: to pretend they hadn’t taken place would be absurd; yet might it not be crass, exploitative even, to shoehorn them into our syllabus?

I stand ready to be corrected, but I don’t remember these bricolage shrines being assembled in the years before Diana Spencer’s death in August 1997. The evening after it happened I joined the silent crowds shuffling through Kensington Gardens and watched, awed, as great barricades of blooms, cards and stuffed animals shivered into being. Ever since, all kinds of fatalities – accidental and malicious, multiple and singular – have been so honoured. It’s as if we have decided, collectively yet tacitly, to confound Baudelaire’s gloomy aperçu. The flower stands as an obvious symbol of the transitory nature of human life; yet by ranging them thus, in their thousands, we seek to defy the wilderness of our own extinction, and our sense of insignificance in the paved deserts and concrete canyons of the city. For is it not the case, that whether we’re sitting on the terrace of La Belle Équipe or powering through the Pont de l’Alma underpass, we are no more substantial than the shadows thrown by the overarching buildings?

Even so, the scent of some flowers lingers longer than others; in the days following the Paris shootings a few voices were raised in the British press – voices that had the temerity to observe: no, this wasn’t the worst massacre on the streets of Paris since the Second World War. That dubious distinction belongs to the estimated 200 Algerians who were rounded up by the police on 17 October 1961 and beaten to death. Some were despatched on the streets where they had been protesting against arbitrary arrest and torture; others were killed at police stations, or in the sports arenas where they had been taken. Many of their bound corpses were thrown unceremoniously into the Seine.

Crowds form and swell and march and shout and scream; crowds stream and course and cataract through the streets; crowds irrigate the great tree of state and the red rose of revolution alike. Paris is a city built in concentric rings, each one another defensive barrier against the marauding hordes from without; the ninth and last of them is the Périphérique, where Diana died. Paris is also a city where town planning has been enacted as a form of state security, so beset have successive regimes been by the maddened mob. Haussmann’s boulevards, either radial or forming grids, were devised with the express aim of making it possible to maintain the city in a state of emergency, and under martial law.

This has now come to pass. In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx compared the dictator unflatteringly to his uncle: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” De Gaulle, tragically, brought back the Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon to command the Paris police in the years leading up to the massacre of the Algerians; farcically, since 13 November, the M’sieur Hulot who now tenants the Élysée Palace has unleashed his own jet-powered dogs of war to scent-mark a territory contested from time out of mind.

I’m still standing outside La Belle Équipe – still looking at the terminal and flowery moraine. Later that afternoon, we took a lift to the panoramic terrace of the Institut du Monde Arabe and gazed out over the rumpled roofscape of inner-city Paris, and it appeared to me like a great tattered mess of handmade cards, poesies, rotting bouquets wrapped in cellophane and hundreds of little aluminium sockets that once held the stumps of tea lights. Only the teams we support are beautiful; only the results of their matches are worth remembering. The rest rot unrecalled.

Last year I bought a copy of JG Ballard’s last novel, Kingdom Come, a dystopic tale of the near future in which bored suburbanites descend into anomic violence as they retreat inside a giant shopping mall. Predictably, I bought my copy at the Bluewater shopping mall in north Kent, on the outskirts of London. Bluewater held the title of Britain’s biggest shopping mall for a number of years and it is surpassing large: a huge circular corridor that has become a destination. I asked a police officer where the Waterstones was and discovered she was a good old-fashioned bobby-on-the-beat – her beat having been, for seven years, to walk slowly around and around . . . Bluewater.

But I wasn’t fettered by Bluewater’s surly gravity, any more than I was galvanised by rampant consumerism. Novel purchased, I took a cab over the soaring Queen Elizabeth II bridge to Essex, where I alighted at Bluewater’s twin establishment: the Lakeside shopping mall in West Thurrock. I headed for the Lakeside branch of Waterstones, where I . . . well, you guessed it: I returned my copy of Kingdom Come. This surreal little exercise was undertaken for the BBC Radio 4 documentary Malled: Sixty Years of Undercover Shopping, and I’ve detailed it here purely in order to illustrate this point: I have more than a passing interest in shopping malls.

This is why the events of a fortnight ago, when Family Self went up to Manchester for what is termed, I believe, a “city break”, seemed quite so bizarre. My wife had booked us all in to a showing of the latest Bond film at the Imax cinema at the Trafford Centre. “Why the Trafford Centre?” I taxed her. “It’s in Trafford, which is five miles from the city centre.” She looked at me as if I were a complete ass, but refused to enlighten me. My revelation came later, when we were wandering the rococo halls of the Trafford Centre, marvelling at the lashings of gold leaf applied to the serried columns as our soles slapped on the Italian marble flooring. My wife couldn’t believe that one such as I, obsessed by what the French philosopher Marc Augé has named “non-places”, didn’t know about the Trafford Centre.

But I didn’t – it was a 207,000-square-metre hole in my map of the world. I knew nothing of the bitter and protracted wrangling that attended its inception, as successive planning applications were rejected by ever higher authorities, until our Noble Lords had to step in to ensure future generations will be able to buy their schmutter at TK Maxx and then sip their lattes at Starbucks without having to brave the harsh Lancashire elements. Did I feel small as my savvier spouse led me through these storied halls? You bet your waddling, wobbling, standing-still-on-the-travelator bum I did. How could I not have known about the great central dome of the Trafford mall, which is bigger – and statelier – than that of St Paul’s? How could I have been unaware of the Orient, Europe’s largest food court, with its seating for 1,800 diners, served by a plethora of exciting outlets including Harry Ramsden’s, Carluccio’s and those piquant bun-pushers, McDonald’s?

Actually, the Orient completely bowled me over. The Trafford Centre’s imagineers point to the nearby Manchester Ship Canal as influencing this wholly novel and utterly weird space, which is formed by a sort of Möbius strip of 1930s ocean-liner design, being at once superstructure – railings, funnels, tables arranged to simulate the deckchairs on a sun deck – and interior. However, nothing like this ever cruised by Runcorn. Not that I object to this, any more than I objected to the cluttered corridor full of orientalism – noodle bars, sushi joints, all-you-can-eat Chinese barbecues – that debouched from it and led us back into the weirdly glistering main retail areas, with their ornamental griffins and neoclassical columns bodged up out of medium-density fibreboard.

The Trafford Centre’s imagineers also make great play of design features – such as the aforementioned griffins – that are meant to tie the humongous mall to its hinterland (these are the heraldic symbols of the de Traffords, who used to own hereabouts), and to the north-east’s proud industrial heritage. But this is all ornamental balls; the truth is that the Trafford Centre’s ambience is so sumptuously wacky, it could quite reasonably be twinned with Las Vegas.

While the rest of the family went in search of retail opportunities, I watched the Mancunians process. It occurred to me that if there were any influences at work here – besides the Baudrillardian ones of hyperreality and simulation that underpin so much of the present-day built environment – it was the presence of a large British Asian community. The only people who didn’t look out of both place and time, wandering about among all the gilded pomp and crystalline circumstance, were women wearing saris, shalwar kameez and burqas. Tracksuit bottoms and hoodies just didn’t cut it – although, I concede, come the breakdown in civil society anticipated in Kingdom Come, this pseudo-sportswear will come into its own as the perfect pillaging outfit.

To the Cereal Killer Café on Brick Lane in Shoreditch – at the very epicentre of London’s hipsterville. Yes, yes, I know, I probably should have hied me hither a few weeks ago, immediately after the establishment had been subjected to an all-out attack by two hundred anarchist rioters wearing pig masks and carrying flaming brands, who threw paint and, err . . . cereal at the whacky eatery. I hung fire because I suspected the cereal riot might be the beginning of a widespread revolt against foodie absurdity, and why waste ink and pixels on such a sideshow when Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay would soon be flambéed at the stake in Trafalgar Square?

True, there was a subsequent riot on Hallowe’en closer to my own home; but these ravers were fighting for their right to party rather than against hipsters’ right to chow down on bowls of cereal at four quid a pop. Still, I think we can confidently assert that both civil disturbances are the beginning of a tendency long since identified – in numerous of his novels and stories – by the late JG Ballard; namely, a hunger for civil disorder not as a function of state oppression, or economic disadvantage, but simply in order to get out of the house and avoid the next series of The Great British Bake Off.

Of course, I don’t mean to deny the pernicious effects of hipsterfication on the old East End: there’s no doubt that the bearded poltroons are acting as the kulturkampf wing of the class cleansing directed by Gauleiter Osborne et al, yet I, too, question whether razing Rice Krispie eaters really is the way forward. After all, I’ve probably written more about cereal than any other kind of food in this column, and, as regular readers can’t help but be aware, I’m the proud owner of a Kellogg’s cereal spoon personalised with the teasing ascription “Butt Munch”. On these grounds alone, it behove me to check out the purveyor of Chex. (This is a particularly grim breakfast comestible, notable only for its graticular form.)

A gloomy and moist Saturday afternoon in November seemed perfect for off-piste crunching, so I shouted to my youngest, “Go east, young man!” and we set off. Now I had a 14-year-old as an alibi . . . but everyone else in the Cereal Killer queue was at least biologically mature. (You read me right: the word “queue” is in the preceding sentence – but I must stress: the queue was from the door to the counter; if it had been outside the game would have been over before the milk was poured. I’ve been on assignment in the bandit country of South Armagh and the mean streets of South Central LA; I’ve stood on the “road of death” beside Chernobyl and I’ve weathered a force-ten storm in the North Atlantic, but I would never – I stress, never – queue to eat at a cereal café, even if it meant reneging on my commitment to fearless reportage.)

The walls of the Cereal Killer Café were plastered with cereal posters, a kite depicting the Honey Monster, two pictures of notorious serial killers, created using myriad Cheerios, shelves bearing many boxes of cereal, displays of fridge magnets in the shape of little cereal boxes, and a pegboard menu advertising all the different cereals, milks – almond, soy, utterly vomitous – and fruitily gloopy toppings. My alibi went down to check out the basement seating area and came back with the intelligence that it featured the same worn floorboards, mismatched chairs, wonky Formica-topped tables and old kitchen units, plus a video monitor showing reruns of 1980s and 1990s cartoons.

We stayed upstairs, our brimming bowls propped on a ledge in front of the misted-up window. The boy tucked in to his Cap’n Crunch – a venerable American cereal developed in the early 1960s by a “flavourist” called Pamela Low. Low’s aim was to re-create a snack her grandmother had concocted out of rice, brown sugar and butter, thereby effecting what she termed “want-more-ishness”. According to my son, the signal feature of these particular gobbets was their texture – “Like cheesy Wotsits,” he said through a mouthful – and I wondered: “Could there be any higher praise?” My own cereal, Fruity Pebbles, was advertised as “rocking your whole mouth”, and the box featured Fred Flintstone making free with handfuls of “pebbles” (really fruit-flavoured “crisp rice cereal bits”).

Fruity Pebbles are almost as venerable as Cap’n Crunch, dating from the early 1970s. They were also the first breakfast cereal to have their own “spokestoon” (a coinage that, were it not to exist, really wouldn’t need to be invented). I found them suitably sickly, tasting as they did like Starburst chews rendered mysteriously crunchy.

And it was while munching on this metamorphic food that the full truth about the Cereal Killer Café dawned on me: with its grotty decor and its febrile, hyperglycaemic ambience, it was exactly like the squats where I used to hang out in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In those days I often had only crap cereal to eat until the next Giro cheque or parental handout. But then, as the Cereal Killer Café rioters undoubtedly know (assiduous students of Marx that they are), history all too often repeats itself; the first time it’s a tragedy, the second a frosted farce.

Here’s how Louis-Ferdinand Céline characterises travel in his trippy 1932 novel, Journey to the End of the Night: “An infinity opens up just for you – a laughable little infinity; and you fall into it.” Maybe so, yet sometimes – just sometimes – the falling into that laughable infinity is enough to justify all the very grindingly finite journeys we take in our lives; for if one thing seems beyond dispute, it is that no sooner has the circumnavigation of the kitchen table been completed than the man-haul to the kettle begins.

I went to Ukraine in 2011 to write a piece about the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. I had done a fair amount of research, but it was all concerned with the reactor, its meltdown, the aftermath: I’d given absolutely no thought whatsoever to what lay between the airport and the exclusion zone. By which I mean to say that although I was booked to stay in Kyiv for a few days and do some interviews, I had scarcely any mental picture of the city at all. A photo of a mini-Kremlin basilica snipped from a National Geographic of yore, the hazy spatial analogue of reading Gogol’s Taras Bulba and Bulgakov’s The White Guard – that was about it.

I did have the impulse to find out more; and, in my experience, the surest way of not engaging with a new city is to hale a cab, because with one swoop of the arm you hire a local’s expertise and abrogate your own responsibility for orientation. So I took a bus from the airport to the nearest underground stop, reflecting on how quite diverse cultures display a marked uniformity when it comes to the failure to integrate air and ground transport effectively . . . (Yes, it really is like this in my inner life: the personae Pinteresque and vapid, the atmosphere prosaic yet hectoring) . . . And was still reflecting on it as the train – which was foursquare, boxy, red-painted and liberally plastered with ads – burrowed its way from overground unremarkability (standard-issue warehouses, industrial parks and rusty gasometers) into a tunnel. Switching lines at a central interchange, I jostled through marble halls and marvelled at hefty bronze uplights cast in the shape of caryatids. This had to be the same neoclassical people’s palace shtick as the Moscow Metro, a Babylonian public works project courtesy of God-King Joe.

Reaching my stop, I mounted the escalator and stood, legs and arms akimbo, dangling in space. I could have gathered Kyiv was hilly from The White Guard alone – and from the signature atrocity of the Nazis in Ukraine: the mass shootings at Babi Yar, which took place in a ravine or rocky defile which was itself in . . . Kyiv. In dead time, head heavy with dark thoughts – bonemeal and blood-mortar – I ascended the escalator, and went up it still more.

When I was a child there was something called a paternoster lift at my dad’s work; this was a continuous belt of open-sided lift compartments that revolved non-stop. You simply leapt on and off at your chosen floor; or, blissfully, you could stay in your compartment and go over the top and under the bottom of the entire Heath Robinson contraption. I don’t believe I have ever been happier, the paternoster uniting the lift’s vertiginous elitism with the escalator’s trudging egalitarianism in a way today’s corporatised systems cannot abide. True, limbs were lost – but this was the London School of Economics in the 1970s, and young people – especially young social scientists – recover from serious trauma quickly.

And ascended . . . As I squinted into the Ukrainian lower depths, the bottom of the escalator seemed further off than my mental picture of the escalators at Tottenham Court Road Tube station in London, which I think of as “pretty deep”. (I appreciate it’s not a convincingly objective measure.) Then I peered up, and saw through the bat-black night that there was still about twice as far as this to go before the wood, steel and rubber Sisyphus, ever rolling up the hill, disgorged me on to its brow. The escalator ride to heaven in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death bears close kinship to that Kyivan shaft, not only by reason of its vast extent, but also because both escaliers mécaniques fundamentally alter their riders’ terms of existence. Granted, I don’t imagine every commuter debouching at Arsenalna is plunged into existential crisis as she is winched up each morning: even so, I think Kyiv could make a lot more of having the deepest underground station in the world.

The third-deepest one is in Moscow – but it is hardly likely the disputes between the two nations will be settled by a bout of competitive Tube shaft-sinking. Nor can the Kyiv Tourist Board engineer the sort of pit-and-pendulum experience I had, coming upon their kilometre-long escalator completely unawares. Nevertheless, there should be some way of apprehending the wondrousness of even our most banal transports, for the alternative is an everyday murderousness. We’ll leave the last word, too, to Céline: “At least a hundred people must want you dead in the course of an average day – the ones behind you at the ticket window in the Métro.”

You can find Will Self’s latest New Statesman column here.

Whither the macaroon? I concede that, for those of you condemned to the provinces, this may not seem a pressing concern – unlike being forced to accept elected mayors with spurious powers so that the Chancellor of the Exchequer can burnish his credentials as a devolutionist. However, in this metropolis and many other cities besides, the worst has already happened in terms of local governance, while the bourgeoisie are ascending in a giddy, spiralling fugue-state of hyperglycaemia caused by overindulgence in small, almond-flavoured sweetmeats.

Time was when a macaroon was a perfectly sensible thing, roughly the size and shape of a large, home-baked biscuit; the consistency was a little chewy, there was a suggestion of almonds in the dough, with perhaps a sliver of one such nut pressed into its upper surface, and a disc of rice paper adhered to its underside. I cast the preceding sentence in the simple past rather than the present, because that is what we associate the macaroon with: an innocent era, when bat-eared boys rolled their hoops down the back alleys where bat-eared girls were being done to death by illegal abortionists. And everyone loved a nice Eccles cake, or a Bakewell tart, or a macaroon with a cup of tea so strong that if you were to draw 5ccs off with a hypodermic syringe and then inject them into Roger Bannister he’d run the mile in well under three minutes.

But these modern macaroons are quite a different matter, a ghastly Gallic import redolent of decadence, absolutism and maximum frou-frou. They’ve arrived in London piggybacking in the tote bags of French wanker-bankers come to luxuriate in our low-tax regime. Paul (which as we know is the French equivalent of Greggs) began stocking them first, and so ignorant was I that I thought they were miniature and brightly coloured hamburgers. Because that’s what they look like, although the “buns” are egg white mixed with sugar, and the “meat” is a dollop of some still sweeter goo, or “ganache” (which is what I believe goo is called nowadays).

I asked a French friend what he thought the origin of this macaroon madness was – because if it’s bad in London it’s way worse in Paris, where a new macaroon shop opens about every three minutes. (I envision Bannister sprinting from one to the next.) My informant didn’t hesitate: “It started after Sofia Coppola made that movie about Marie Antoinette. All the courtiers were eating macarons, and the Parisian bobos thought it looked cool.” Of course, there’s a long and illustrious tradition of eating macaroons in France; they get a mention from Rabelais in the early 1500s, and by the time Marie Antoinette’s head was being severed they were far more popular than cake among the bon ton.

Indeed, some culinary scholars believe the reason the throwaway line “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche . . .” became so very notorious is that the peasants already suffered very badly from irritable bowel syndrome and coeliac disease because of the vast amounts of cake they were eating; whereas the Versailles court dined exclusively on macarons, which are made without flour and hence are entirely gluten-free. I’ve no idea if this is true, but what I do know is that nowadays if you aren’t fashionably wheat-intolerant you have no business in public life on either side of the Channel.

George Osborne clearly has issues in this area. I’ve been observing him, and over the past few months he’s been losing weight steadily, while his features (never exactly generous to begin with) have puckered up and puckered up still more, until they resemble nothing so much as that portion of his anatomy that I suspect bothers him the most.

Poor George! His relentless drive for personal preferment and status . . . Sorry, I mean: his selfless labour on behalf of the commonweal . . . condemns him to factory tour after company visit, and at each and every canteen he’s obliged to choke down another greasy bacon sarnie stuffed with gluten, so becoming ever more bloated and flatulent. How he longs to get home to No 11 and the fragrant Frances, whose magnificent books – memoirs, novels, cookbooks – all contain plenty of macaroons. I like to imagine the entire Osborne family – George, Frances, Luke and little Liberty – tucking in to a supper of Pierre Hermé’s finest, which Harrods have just delivered. “Ooh, Daddy,” Liberty cries, “can I have the last white truffle and hazelnut one?” And George, ever the Solomon-like paterfamilias, gently teases apart the two toothsome hemispheres, hands one to each of the children, then sits back with a faintly constipated smile as they smear ganache on their downy cheeks.

I have often had cause to remark in these pages that there’s only one word for a culture that is as obsessed with what it puts in its mouth as this one – infantile. The macaroon is only the latest nursery nourriture to grab our febrile imaginations. Who knows, if things keep on this way, Britain may well become the sort of country where the outcome of a televised baking competition becomes a matter of high social and political importance. But then that could never happen; any more than Gideon Oliver Osborne becoming prime minister.