Will Self

Yup, you read me right: one of the “names” the Kellogg’s website actually suggested that punters might like to personalise their free cutlery with was . . . Butt Munch.

There was, for a while, a certain amount of tension; then it faded, as tension does. We’re all experimental animals, really, subject to vivisection by means of a scientific method we ourselves promulgate. The electric plate is charged, we yelp and try to struggle over the wall – but once we realise our struggles are futile we collapse, and lie whimpering as we’re subjected to shock after shock.

We collected the tokens assiduously, even though it entailed visiting several corner shops, often late at night, and rummaging through dusty shelves under the sleepy lenses of duff CCTV cameras. Why? Because such is the parsimony of the mighty Kellogg Corporation that it can afford to be capricious: an offer will be proffered – then, without warning, the free-gift-bearing hand will be retracted, as if it, too, has been subjected to an electric shock.

Anyway, at last we had the three tokens required and we sat down in front of the computer and logged on to the mandated site. I wrote in this column in May that my 13-year-old son and I had leapt at the Kellogg’s “personalised spoon” offer, our only desire to have a spoon engraved with the legend “WHICH ORIFICE? YOUR CHOICE”. But when we saw the options on offer we were dismayed; “personalising” turned out to mean branding your name on the eating iron, not using its steely surface as a sort of miniature toilet wall on to which you could graffito such off-colour remarks. We scrolled through the names on offer, hoping against hope we would find something that approached the sentiment we wished to convey – and then, miracle of miracles, there it was: Butt Munch.

Yup, you read me right: one of the “names” the Kellogg’s website actually suggested that punters might like to personalise their free cutlery with was . . . Butt Munch. My boy and I goggled at the screen until the pixels began to pop, crackle and snap before our eyes. Who in the mighty Kellogg Corporation had authorised this bizarrely subversive insertion, in between all the Keishas, Kellies and Kevins? We goggled at the screen some more, half expecting the letters to waver and dissolve into a sweet and milky sludge. Not a bit of it: Butt Munch remained on the table. So we selected it, entered our postal address, clicked the button, sat back, and waited.

And waited . . . and attended some more. My son was of the opinion that the Butt Munch was the work of computer hackers. After all, it was simply beyond belief that Kellogg’s, with its ethical roots sunk deep in the socially conservative soil of Seventh-Day Adventism, could sanction the idea of people munching on butts – let alone actively promote it. You’ll recall that even the tolerant and sexually adventurous Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, when awakened by her husband indulging in a little late-night butt-munching, is rather . . . shocked. It’s one thing for fictional characters to practise butt-munching in the privacy of their own home – quite another for breakfast cereal consumers to have such perversions urged on them from the handles of their spoons. Besides, Kellogg’s has its dietetic reputation to uphold. Seventh-Day Adventists are much preoccupied by the health of the “whole person”, and the company was established in part to disseminate notions of healthy eating. Now, even though butt-munching isn’t necessarily unhealthy, nor is it holistic: for that, you have to munch the “whole person”.

As we continued to wait for our subversive spoon – May ladled into June – still it didn’t come. I never thought it would, because whether the “Butt Munch” option was deliberately offered by a maverick employee, or maliciously by an infantile nerd wearing a V for Vendetta mask, there was no way several Kellogg’s staff were going to collude in making and despatching it. I set to one side the vision that had originally animated our quest: my descendants, many years in the future, staring bemusedly at the faint inscription on their inherited cutlery. I got on with my life – it was a disappointment, true, but no more of one than realising Ronald McDonald isn’t a really funny clown but a cynical advertising tool. I went to Australia and travelled deep into the Outback, visiting remote regions where few proper spoons, let alone personalised ones, are ever seen, and the sparse local population has to eat its Rice Bubbles with cumbersome, makeshift tools beaten out of bits of corrugated iron.

Then, upon my return, there it was! A visitation! A miracle! A beautiful red cardboard box with a transparent cellophane panel in it, through which could be seen the slim, shiny handle of a spoon – and on this handle the delightfully suggestive appellation “Butt Munch”. The packaging alone was a provocation to lust, resembling as it did silky, translucent lingerie. Soon enough I’d torn it off and was feverishly caressing my new spoon.

I grew still more fervid when I turned the insurrectionary implement over and saw “Kellogg’s®” engraved on the back of the handle. So there they are: a puerile invocation to sexual activity and a multinational snack-maker, united for ever in a spoon. What a joy it is to be alive in Jeremy Corbyn’s Britain.

The atmosphere in the Red Ochre Grill is distinctly chilly – not exactly what you would expect in the middle of a desert. There was an early-bird discount of 20 per cent for guests of the attached hotel, if you booked before 6pm for a table before 7pm; but we screwed up by 15 minutes and the maître d’ was emphatic: we’d have to pay full whack. Now I’ve been sitting over the remains of my kangaroo and macadamia salad for a full half-hour, waiting to pay the inflated bill, and my temperature has been plummeting the while. There’s nothing more real than this sort of tourist gouging – and Alice Springs is a tourist town, among other things. A tourist town serviced by tourists: mostly backpackers, most of whom in turn are from Britain.

Last night in Casa Nostra, a Calabrian restaurant sited on the parched banks of the Todd river (it flows about once in an average lifetime), we were served by a nice young man from Aberdeen, and the many miles between the Grey City and the Red Centre were eliminated by his opening remark: “I read something you wrote recently about Scots independence. I myself am not in favour.” Then this morning, at a café in the mall, he popped up again – working a second job, this time with his Edinburghian girlfriend, so they can gather a sufficient sum to keep on truckin’.

All down the Stuart Highway (known colloquially as “The Track”) from Darwin, we’ve been waited on by young folk from East Grinstead and Letterkenny, Dewsbury and Great Malvern. They come on working visas, not available to the nationals of countries that aren’t either historic (Britain) or contemporary (United States) overlords of Australia, and work these jobs out in the back of Bourke, where young Australians are loath to go. To the backpackers the Outback is a mythic realm suffused with wonder, presided over by an ancient people steeped in sorcery who are also wizard at graphic arts – but to most young Australians it’s too much of nothing, while their largely deracinated and welfare-dependent Aboriginal fellow citizens are a source of perplexity, shame and ignorance.

All this is running through my mind as I ask the waitress where she’s from. “Israel,” she replies.

“Ah,” I say, “I didn’t know you could get a working visa for Australia on an Israeli passport.”

“You can’t,” she says, “but my parents are American and I also have a US passport.” Of course it’s not this young woman’s fault in any way, but there is still something slightly nauseating about this: the Americans have a spy base outside Alice, called Pine Gap. So it is that geostrategic “considerations” and neoliberal “economics” vibrate through the rudaceous rocks of the MacDonnell Ranges as our elders sing up a nightmarish dreamtime.

“Ah, well,” I say, “you must be used to desert country, then.”

“Ye-es,” the Israeli waitress bridles a little, “but Israel isn’t as desert as here.”

One of the many great things about Australia – where I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years, my first sojourn being on a working visa exactly like the waitress’s – is a genuine, if slightly abrasive egalitarianism: the original Digger mentality of mateship suffuses even the 21st-century globalised food industry, such that tipping is frowned on as shameless evidence of a de haut en bas attitude. These young folk are being paid adequately by the establishment, but that’s the problem: they have no incentive to get the tucker to the table quickly, and they aren’t trained. Thus my long wait for the undiscounted bill has become tangled up in my mind with all the world’s woes, and I snap back: “I’ll thank you not to lecture me on geography, young lady. Your state has been snaffling up deserts throughout my lifetime, beginning with the Sinai. Granted, its most recent acquisitions have been relatively piecemeal ones on the West Bank of the Jordan, and only semi-arid, but still . . .”

Later on, my eldest takes me to task for this solecism, bringing the misfortunes of the Middle East into the heart of the great southern continent, but I am unrepentant. True, the parallels aren’t exact, but both Israel/Palestine and Australia are polities that have pursued the old colonialist agenda under modern dispensations; both are states in which there’s a grotesque disparity between the conditions in which the indigenous people survive and those that the expropriating incomers enjoy. The Red Ochre Grill, with its pseudo-gourmet dishes confected out of “native” ingredients (emu, kangaroo and camel meat mostly), is a perfect instance of this phenomenon, a sort of gustatory colonialism, if you will.

Outback of the restaurant, in the sandy slough of the Todd river’s bed, the “Long Grass people” – Aboriginals bushed by the grog – stand in for benighted Palestinians. The rates of alcoholism among them are eclipsed only by those of diabetes. An old Australian friend in Darwin put it to me thus: “As you drive south to the Alice you’re travelling along a broad highway of renal failure.”

True, from time out of mind all sorts of holidays have been taken in other people’s misery. Yet there is something particularly queasy about whites working away in the well-appointed restaurant while, out in the darkness, welfare-dependent blacks are killing themselves with Coca-Cola.