Will Self

A friend of a friend comes by to pick up some fags I’ve obtained for him – Gauloises filters. Global markets being what they are, you can buy cocaine (DOC Colombia) and heroin (DOC Afghanistan) on the street corners of almost any British city, but when it comes to child-murdering nicotine, certain varieties are tightly contrôlés, in particular those whose denominated origin is that faraway land of which we know so little: France. I picked up a carton for him at La Cave au Tabac by the Gare du Nord in Paris, because his normal supply line was being disrupted by “hordes” of migrants and asylum-seekers trying to board lorries and trains bound for the Channel Tunnel.

The one time I took a trip to Booze Alley, the strip of hypermarkets outside Calais where Brits stock up on cheap(er) plonk and snout, I made a side-excursion to the bidonville that had sprung up beyond the razor-wire-topped fences surrounding the Tunnel infrastructure. This would have been at least a decade ago and the migrants were only (!) in the hundreds, yet the situation was already accorded a national disgrace – the problem being to identify which nation’s face should have been empurpled by embarrassment. Now the benighted are in their thousands, yet Hollande, Cameron et al continue to kick the political football back and forth across the Channel with an ease envied by all those who – from committed smokers and long-distance hauliers to the shanty-dwellers themselves – are suffering from new restriction on their movements.

The late Paul Fussell was that rare thing: a literary critic who’d also been a professional soldier. In his marvellous book The Great War and Modern Memory, he advances the theory that the first few months of the First World War represented an ironic reversal of unprecedented sharpness – more like an ironic handbrake-turn, in fact. In August 1914 the troops marched off to victory, gaily caparisoned, flutes a-tootling, drums a-thrumming, and within months they were bogged down in the hell-hole of the trenches. For Fussell, this was the wellspring from which the blackly absurdist bile of Beckett in due course bubbled, but I wonder: isn’t the current impasse de Calais of a similar ironic cast? In August, when London and Paris feel crumpled and vacuous, so much of the population having been squeezed out of them, one becomes conscious of the great migratory flows of the lesser-spotted bourgeoisie. They all head off gaily caparisoned, iPhones a-tootling, stomachs a-rumbling for French grub; meanwhile, the Syrians and the Sudanese, the Libyans and the Baluchis are trapped in the hell-hole of a shanty town that can be seen clearly through the tinted windows of your southbound SUV.

What can we do to help the poor migrants? The answer is: we’re doing all we can by taking our holidays as near to their immiserated homelands as we dare, in the hope that some of our safe and prudent sterling will seep sideways into their economies. We’re doing all we can by descending on retail opportunities in our hordes, because, savvy types that we are, we know things will only get better once they are bought in larger quantities. There’s a JG Ballard story in which all the northern European holidaymakers basking on Mediterranean beaches are simultaneously informed that their services are no longer required at home, but nor can they return. Happily, if fantastically, the exiled hedonists form themselves into a new nation, whose territory is enormously elongated but only a few sunlounger-lengths deep.

Perhaps the solution to the migrant crisis is of a similar order. Rather than attempting to discourage others from following them by treating those already here like shit, the government should strip our most egregious vacationers of their citizenship, starting with Labour MPs hanging out in honey-coloured Tuscan villas. The many central London properties left vacant can be easily adapted to act as hostels for the incomers; one well-appointed study could be easily partitioned to house, say, 40 or 50 Eritreans. I know this seems harsh, but you have to consider the facts: at this point in the political calendar, apart from working tirelessly to have themselves elected as leader or deputy leader, most Labour MPs are woefully economically unproductive, and many of them are ageing. Some, such as Chukka Umunna, wouldn’t even make the effort to campaign. By contrast, the Calais migrants have a proven record of initiative, daring and hard work. They are youthful, determined and – contra right-wing slurs – passionately committed to the free market.

I don’t mean to suggest it’s Labour MPs alone who should be swapped for migrants; I’ll happily declare Tories, Scots Nats and entire marauding phalanxes of Pilates instructors stateless as well. As for those hauliers parked up on the M20, they can stay put – there’s far too much heavy-goods traffic on British roads; forcing them to settle in their thousands actually on the motorway will kill thousands of birds with a little bit of gravel. As for my mate’s mate, we didn’t develop this sophisticated transport infrastructure just so he could buy cheap fags; so I suggest we do away with it altogether. He can buy his Gauloises filters from the hauliers, who undoubtedly have whole container-loads of them – certainly sufficient, given the epidemiology of lung cancer, arterial sclerosis and respiratory disease, to last him the residuum of his life.

‘Instead of checking their privilege, these .99-calibre twerps are more likely to check their wing mirror and overtake at speed, chortling all the while.’

During the Kosovo crisis in the late 1990s, the sight of Tony Blair’s snake hips, cinched by the waistband of his black Levi’s 501s and wiggling their way between displaced Kosovans, impacted on me in much the way the ordinance dropped by USAF bombers did Slobodan Milosevic. He was forced out of office: I dropped my trousers. Up until that point, I had considered black jeans a reasonable bridge between the dandiacal excesses of my youth and the soberer sartorial realities of middle age, but Blair eradicated my false consciousness. Indeed, looking back, I am hard-pressed to think of any more significant “legacy” of the Blair years than this: from that day on I’ve been unable to contemplate such strides without nausea and uncontrollable shivering.

Perhaps only Jeremy Clarkson has had a comparable effect on my wardrobe. I say “Clarkson”, but of course I really mean the trinity of Clarkson, Richard “Hamster” Hammond and James May. Between them, the three erstwhile Top Gear presenters embody the worst a middle-aged man can get: flowery-patterned shirts worn either loose and smock-like or tucked into jeans; an orphaned suit jacket or skimpy “bomber”; sensible Cornish pasty shoes or daft ankle boots. It has been said in the press that Clarkson’s adoption of denim as a second skin (including on occasion the hideous “double-denim” solecism) has single-handedly brought the fabric into disrepute.

I’m sure I’ll never wear black jeans again, but I have continued to affect the blue variety. I have also gone on driving cars although I haven’t actually owned one for almost a decade. I don’t live in the Cotswolds, nor am I a multimillionaire; and while I may have the occasional meltdown, I like to think I behave in an open-hearted and egalitarian way towards people I work with, regardless of their status or seniority. As for the weird racist dog-whistle Clarkson has blown repeatedly over the years, well, words fail me: this behaviour is so unbelievably crass and revolting, it calls into question all our assumptions about what it is to be a Briton in the 21st century.

I say “a Briton”, but what I mean is that moiety of modern Britons who find in Clarkson, whether willingly or with revulsion, aspects of ourselves writ large. Very large. Yes, I mean it: Jeremy Clarkson, like it or not, is the archetypal middle-aged, middle-class, white British man: the John Bull de nos jours; and his success as a journalist and TV presenter is almost wholly a function of this capacity he has to personify a great, indigo-legged mass of privileged pricks, many of whom labour under the delusion, as Clarkson does, that they’re an embattled minority. Instead of checking their privilege, these .99-calibre twerps are more likely to check their wing mirror and overtake at speed, chortling all the while.

In our fervid nightmares, Clarkson is the Little Englander who smirks at us from behind his vast leylandii hedge; the sexist pest who seems to think your name is either “darling” or “love”; the saloon-bar bore trumpeting “Land of Hope and Glory” with nary a care for those who always, always will be slaves. Together with Nigel Farage and Richard Littlejohn, Clarkson forms a triumvirate of British bullocks who seem always to have reigned over us. But where Clarkson differs from Farage and Littlejohn is that he’s both a lot smarter and, I suspect, rather more handy. I once did a radio programme with Littlejohn and when things inevitably grew heated, the sad skinny bigot began quivering with fear lest I give him a clump. As for Farage, having laboured through his political memoir The Purple Revolution (don’t worry, I was paid), I can assure you: what you see is indeed what those around him also get.

But Clarkson’s newspaper columns are invariably witty and well written: back in the 1990s my wife used to edit him, and she reports that he was a delight to work with: always filing on time, his copy letter-perfect. Moreover, on screen his blokeish persona is, gulp, distinctly engaging. Even I have been known to watch the occasional episode of Top Gear, despite not giving a tinker’s fart about whether one car is “better” than another. It would be nice to imagine that Clarkson’s petrol-filled head is sloshing with suppressed homosexuality, which is often the case with men who prefer the company of their own, but I fear this isn’t the case. Nor can we comfort ourselves by imagining him to be deluded, suffering from a denim false consciousness akin to my own. No, Clarkson is comfortable in his skin, comfortable in his arrogant bellicosity, comfortable in stinking up the atmosphere with his self-promotional hot air, and most of all he’s intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich so long as those people are him, May and Hammond.

Was anyone surprised when they clicked on the Amazon icon and saw the Three Whizzing Men swim into being? I wasn’t: after all, they’ve driven cars in some of the most exotic and inhospitable environments on earth. After that, the cruise up the broad brown concourse of Jeff Bezos’s back passage was always going to be (as Clarkson might well put it) a doddle.

To celebrate the new car show by Clarkson, Hammond and May on Amazon Prime, Will Self has uploaded the first episode of his own new car show, “Bottom Gear”, to YouTube.

“From a distance we must, I think, resemble a particularly duff channel ident for BBC1 – this slow-revolving blur of sluggish human animals”

We are practising mindful walking on the shore of Holy Isle: a group of 30 or so, mostly in our fifties and sixties, we have formed a large and ragged circle. “Lift, raise, lower, touch,” our leader instructs us; and so we do, foot after foot planted on the sheep-shot-bedizened turf where the person in front has just lifted hers. From a distance we must, I think, resemble a particularly duff channel ident for BBC1 – this slow-revolving blur of sluggish human animals. And we are being viewed from a distance: a side-wheel paddle steamer of antique vintage is sailing down the sound between Holy Isle and Arran; there are passengers on deck waving and shouting at us, but we pay them no attention at all, being mindful only of lift, raise, lower and touch – an interior communion between body and locale.

Not many people realise how strong Buddhism is in Scotland today, or that arguably the reason for this is topographic as much as spiritual. Refugee Tibetan lamas were invited to a Buddhist centre that had been started in a house near Eskdalemuir in Dumfries and Galloway in the mid-Sixties. Over the years they transformed Johnstone House into a thriving community and study centre; pupils have included such cultural luminaries as David Bowie and Leonard Cohen. A cynic might suggest that the affinity the Scots have for Buddhism is born of negative character traits: full of anger and deeply sexually repressed, they are obviously ripe for a credo that makes pacifism mandatory and abnegates fleshly desire. A more charitable view is that the connection between Tibet and Scotland was cemented through northern India.

Exiled in 1959 after the Chinese invasion, many Tibetan Buddhist clergy fled initially to Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, where they found a landscape not dissimilar from their own lost horizons – a hilly one of ­coniferous woodland, rhododendrons and isolated tarns. No wonder the lamas who got as far as Scotland felt right at home, inasmuch as any being who has transcended the bounds of earthly existence can feel at home anywhere. (Or possibly this is the whole point: they feel at home anywhere.)

The Samye Ling Monastery in the Borders (ling means “place” in Tibetan) established this outlier community on Holy Isle in the early Nineties, opening their Peace Centre in 2003. Their aim is to make Holy Isle into Europe’s biggest spiritual sanctuary, and to that end they have become enthusiastic curators of the island’s biodiversity. The Peace Centre occupies an old farmhouse, the orchard and gardens of which have been fully renovated and planted with native species; the old stone dykes have been repaired and the community’s water comes from natural springs; electric power is drawn in part from the sun; sewage is disposed of through a natural reed-bed filtration system. All visitors to the island are asked to follow the Five Golden Rules of Buddhism, one of which is to refrain from taking any life.

So it is that herds of wild Saanen goats and ancient Soay sheep remain running wild on Holy Isle while they’ve disappeared from Arran just across the sound. True, no one has morally instructed the Eriskay ponies – a herd of which is also in residence – and during my stay I heard dark mutterings about the corpses of males forced off the cliffs on the uninhabited west side of the island during very un-Buddhistic battles over mating rights. Still, the lack of wanton human predation is palpable as soon as you arrive on the Island: oystercatchers nest on the rocky foreshore and swifts flit over the bracken – up in the skies the upthrust wings of peregrines can be seen turning and turning in a widening gyre over the peak of Mullach Mor (“Big Top”), the 313-metre ­summit of the three-kilometre-long island.

I expect regular readers know I’m not the sort of fellow easily swayed by the irenic – but I have to say Holy Isle soothed my troubled psyche more than anywhere I have been in recent years. The sheer profusion of life in the gardens and open spaces around the Peace Centre banished all gnawing anxieties about ageing and death; the meditation practice ensured that I stayed resolutely in the here and now, rather than drifting away to either that “other country”, the past, or another island that is yet to erupt volcanically from the turbid present: the future. Should I have been surprised by this? After all, Holy Isle has been so called for a very long time – in the 7th century it was home to Saint Molaise, who meditated in a well-appointed cave halfway along the eastern coast. Thus the Celtic Christian tradition of isolated anchorites has mutated organically into the modern Buddhist way, because the Peace Centre has its own outlier cohort of monks and nuns who undertake long, silent retreats in sequestrated cells.

I was so chilled that I didn’t recover myself until I was chugging along on the train from Ardrossan Harbour back to Glasgow Central. I was sharing the compartment with a middle-aged Scots Buddhist nun whom I’d seen wandering about Holy Isle looking very striking, what with her slaphead and her dark orange robes. To begin with, we sat in contemplative silence – but soon enough we began arguing (albeit gently) about independence.