Will Self

It is a cliche much beloved of the ­British that all things American are bigger. Of course this gee-whizzery doesn’t apply to every standardised object, and ever since the oil crisis of the 1970s there have been plenty of dinky little hatchbacks on US roads. Even so, there are occasions when even I – a demi-American – am stunned by its embrace of the gargantuan. One such occurred last summer, when Family Self arrived in Los Angeles. I had reserved a standard rental car, but as we waited, bleary-eyed, in the Alamo queue, I reflected on the huge amount of freeway driving I’d be doing and thought, sod it … when in Rome … so I requested an upgrade to an SUV.

“Will that be a standard SUV?” the Alamo woman asked. I concurred, and five minutes later the biggest thing I’d ever seen on wheels not transporting a Saturn V rocket was driven on to the lot.

Observing my amazement, the Alamo woman said, “It’s a Chevy Suburban. They’re real popular.”

“Suburban!” I expostulated. “That thing’s big enough to contain an entire suburb!” Needless to say, I sent it back. (Either that or, given the Chevy Suburban’s enormous mass, it could be we managed to achieve the velocity necessary to escape its surly gravity.) Anyway, this incident gave me cause to reflect once more on the plague of vast private vehicles now afflicting our cities. Not so long ago, even in LA, I wouldn’t have dreamed of driving an SUV (or four-wheel drive, as they’re confusingly called on this side of the Atlantic water feature); I passionately concurred with the view that these hypertrophied hunks of death metal were the dernier cri of a civilisation choking on its own tailpipe.

Don’t you remember how they were nicknamed “Chelsea tractors” and their headscarved and gilet-wearing, yummy-mummy drivers were excoriated as pluto­cratic planet-despoilers? The grim joke was that the only reason they were driving these behemoths was so little Barnaby and Charlotte wouldn’t be jolted by the newly introduced speed bumps. I recall quite continent pundits arguing like the crustiest ecowarriors that right-thinking folk should feel no compunction about running an ignition key along the glossy flanks of these big beasts in an effort to drive them from our tarmac pastures.

A decade on, no one so much as raises an eyebrow when they see a Humvee inching its way into a city-centre parking place – while we share our twisting and ancient thoroughfares with a bewildering array of VW Touaregs, Porsche Cayennes and Volvo XC90s. Indeed, no major car marque is now without its model engorgement, and the British, who usually are among the highest spenders on car flesh worldwide, have embraced them enthusiastically.

Embraced in particular the model that’s the grandaddy of them all: the Land Rover. Once upon a time, a Land Rover was a mud-caked, boxy object full of threadbare Barbour jackets, spittle-streaked collies and rolls of wire fencing, to be found only securely off-road. That all began changing with the launch of the Range Rover in 1970; since then, and throughout many iterations, the Range Rover has transmogrified into a vehicle that resembles nothing so much as the gun wagon of a Mexican cocaine cartel. I see them round my way all the time: severe militaristic body; matt-black paint job; tinted black windows; black wire mesh over head- and tail lights; bonnet slightly humped like the nacelles of an aircraft; carburettor intake like the steely gills of a predatory shark. The overall impression conveyed is one of extreme menace and imminent danger.

Which is why I never cease to be flummoxed when, upon squinting through their glass darkly, I see dear little kiddies in their car seats, and perfectly ordinary-looking mummies driving them to school. There are all sorts of ways we externalise the anxieties we are prey to yet can’t accept: we starve and scratch and medicate and exercise obsessively; we booze and fornicate and gamble and count the cracks in the pavement to ward off the bears – but surely these suburban armoured personnel carriers are the strangest reification of our fears there has ever been. Or, rather, the strangest reification of the terrors we inflict on others.

Because when I said they resembled gangsters’ wheels, I wasn’t being strictly accurate; what they actually look like are Special Forces vehicles that have been adapted for nefarious civilian use. Yes, their most obvious design affinity is with Predator drones or stealth fighters, and if the average Iraqi or Afghan were to see one come cruising down their way they’d probably leap for cover.

What crazed and febrile people we are! Like the biblical Nebuchadnezzar, we reduce other nations to dungheaps – but then, terrified by our own deathly potency, we pop out to the shops in cars suitable for a war zone. I doubt the average Range Rover Evoque owner would admit to this (not without a little gentle waterboarding, that is), but at least there’s one True Brit who is prepared to speak his truth. As Jeremy Clarkson is on record as saying that the Range Rover TDV8 Vogue is “the best car in the world”, we can only conclude that it’s the best car for menacing those folk Clarkson has a proven antipathy to. People who – for instance – have the wrong sort of paint job, and who are woefully underpowered.

“What used to freak me out about the repasts they prepared was their meaty mimicry: bean burgers, nut roasts and – worst of all – pizzas decorated with roundels of aubergine cut and cooked to resemble slices of pepperoni.”

I have become a vegetarian – inadvertently. Here’s what happened: I went away last weekend to stay with people who eat not the flesh of the kine, so from Friday to Monday neither did I. Then on Monday I came down with a severe stomach bug, so although I haven’t eaten any meat for the rest of the week, nor have I eaten much of anything else either. Granted, this sort of vegetarianism by reason of necessity hardly counts: at least not if you believe that such a diet should be ethically enjoined. It has occurred to me over the past four days that I’ve had some sort of pacific revenge inflicted on me, my herbivorous hosts having detected – although I never said anything – that my belief in their lifestyle choice was less than wholehearted. “Why not,” I imagine them saying to each other, “give the rotten old carnivore a bad case of the trots with a dodgy mushroom? That’ll teach him to ridicule us.”

But I didn’t! I didn’t ridicule you! Don’t you remember? I snaffled up the nasturtiums and the polenta and the cracked wheat and the quinoa as if it were all going out of style. I earnestly engaged with the whys and wherefores of gut flora . . . I helped shell the peas, for Christ’s sake! Actually, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned the C-word, because in my experience ethical vegetarians are seldom Christian; which is understandable, as the central ceremony of this religion involves either symbolic or actual cannibalism. Anyway, now I’ve become a vegetarian I think I’m free to say what the hell I like about the practice, much in the manner Jews are allowed to crack anti-Semitic jokes (a privilege I frequently avail myself of) and black people to say nigger.

I remember in the early Eighties sharing a house with a bunch of fellow students, most of whom were of the herbal persuasion. What used to freak me out about the repasts they prepared was their meaty mimicry: bean burgers, nut roasts and – worst of all – pizzas decorated with roundels of aubergine cut and cooked to resemble slices of pepperoni. There are many disappointments in life, and things are often not what they seem, but to bite into a pizza and get a mouthful of roasted aubergine is enough ironic reversal for any one lifetime. Naturally, I used to debate with these veggies; haven’t we all? It’s a never-ending topic, one calculated to rise on a methane-rich afflatus at any mixed gathering of ham-heads and Brussels sprouts brains.

If the contention is that our present methods of meat production are a disgusting abuse of our fellow creatures, you’d have to be a purblind idiot not to concur. If the contention, further, is that these methods are not environmentally sustainable, and that if we wish to feed a world population which (contra all neoliberal Panglosses) continues to rise, universal vegetarianism is the only workable option, then I say: “Fine! Right!” Because we’ve done brilliantly with encouraging sustainability in all other areas of consumption, now haven’t we? And people are so less greedy when it comes to food than, say, fossil fuels, aren’t they? No, no, such dreams of a brave new meat-free future are just that: dreams. Equally dreamy are those influenced by eastern mysticism who imagine we are entirely what we eat, so that a human species full of arugula would, of necessity, be altruistic. To them there is, was and always will be a one-word riposte – Hitler.

But we mustn’t caricature vegetarians (of whom, I think I may have mentioned, I am one). For the most part the perspicacious muesli-munchers I know accept that human beings are omnivorous garbage-heads by nature. One of the best ways to understand who we are, in fact, is to imagine what it would be like if rats were the apex predators. They also accept that in our hunting and gathering past we evolved a complex belief system that honoured rather than despoiled the ecosystems on which we depended. Indeed, the fashion for organic and free-range meat attempts to replicate this belief system within the context of market capitalism. How many times have you read a screed of this form on a packet of dry-cured Wiltshire bacon: “At Sunnybrook Farm our piglets all have names and their own comfy room, and receive a prep-school education before, aged three, being flown club class to Zurich for assisted suicide. We believe this gives their meat a special flavour of reverence. We enjoy it, and hope you will, too.”

And yes, the bacon brought in at Sunny­brook Farm is tasty – but it will never be tasty enough to mask the evil taint of all those de-beaked and de-clawed chickens pumped full of antibiotics, or the veal calves kept penned up in the dark until the poleaxe falls. No, the only possible course for the ethical meat-eater is to accept that our diet, in common with so many other of our lifestyle choices, is a matter of what we feel comfortable with, and to leave it at that. My brother became a vegetarian when he set up a company producing high-end dog food. He told me he was so revolted by visiting abattoirs that he threw away his steak knives. That he continues to manufacture dog food in increasing quantities is a ­testimony to his utter irrationality – and to ours.

I was talking to a small crowd of doctors a while back and came out with one of my favourite headlines from the US satirical magazine the Onion, which reads: “World death rate holding steady at 100 per cent”. Most of the medics dutifully chuckled at this evidence of their own lack of omnipotence – but one of them objected. “Strictly speaking, that isn’t true,” said the stethoscope-toting pedant. “Given that all the people currently alive constitute half of those who have ever lived, we can only confidently assert that the death rate is 50 per cent.”

I thought about this the other day because, walking into the 3Arena in Dublin, I came upon a sizeable cohort of these potential immortals, and I have to say they weren’t in terrific shape. Making our way to our seats, we had to ask several of them to stand and I’m afraid they made pretty heavy weather of it: palsied hands clutched canes and ineffectually gripped seat backs, jowls twitched with the effort, and at least one pair of bifocals clattered to the floor. Meanwhile, on stage, Messrs Daltrey and Townshend belted out the line that more than any other in recent memory has come to exemplify shutting the stable door after the valetudinarian nag has bolted: “I hope I die before I get old.”

Yes, we were at the Arena for one of the gigs on the Who’s 50th-anniversary tour, and while the old boys on stage seemed pretty spry, their fans were … Well, frankly, we’re getting on a bit, and many of us share at least some of Tommy’s disabilities – although, unlike the deaf, blind and dumb kid, we’re no longer capable of playing a mean pinball. For us baby boomers, whose culture of aggressive juvenescence came to dominate the burgeoning global population over the past half-century, the spectacle of an aged crowd is deranging to the point of … well, dementia. And it would have been deranging at any previous point in history, given those damned statistics.

To Daltrey’s and Townshend’s credit, they neither tried to avoid the reality of the situation nor made too much of it. The stage backdrop was – as is so often the case at gigs nowadays – an enormous screen, and throughout the set images were projected on to it of the lads when they were indeed lads.

The impression was that they were jamming with their younger selves: one confirmed by the presence on drums of Ringo’s boy Zak Starkey. (At least superficially; the intergenerational shtick doesn’t quite hold up when you realise that Zak himself is about to turn 50 and could theoretically be the grandfather of the skinny young pill-popping mods in the videos.) I must confess that, some time before I reached my own half-century, amplified electric music became an anathema to me and I began hanging out at the Wigmore Hall instead of the Wembley Arena.

The great advantage of rocking out to the Schubert Ensemble, or getting your rocks off over Matthias Goerne singing Schumann’s Dichterliebe, is that even if you’re a year or two older than Ringo’s boy you’ll still feel refreshingly youthful compared with the rest of the audience. Actually, I felt refreshingly youthful compared with the Who’s audience as well, but while they were equipped with hearing aids, I had opted for earplugs. These made the experience seem a little muffled – as if my ears had been tucked firmly into a tartan rug – but I could still see all the horrors going on around me: the bingo wings flapping in time, the myriad chins wagging like metronomes, the liver spots caught in the spotlights, and the grey hairs being whipped into a blur synchronous with Townshend’s wildly revolving arm as he crashed out the chords.

When I reflected on the gig later, it occurred to me that the only possible summation would be a paraphrase of Dr Johnson’s infamous remarks about female preachers, which is to say, I was amazed not so much by the Who playing well, as that they were capable of playing at all. The two surviving members of the original line-up are septuagenarians, and come September it will have been 37 years since Keith Moon popped his clogs. At 53, I barely have the stamina to sit still listening to the band – but these Freedom Pass-holders were belting it out like there was no tomorrow. (Which indeed, given the Who’s demographics, might well be the case.) True, Daltrey’s corybantic excesses have been somewhat curtailed along the darkening passage of time: at one point, in lieu of dancing, he did a little jog around the stage, as if to demonstrate there was life in the old dog yet.

But of course scenes such as this are only likely to become more common as humanity “advances” towards mass senescence. The median age in Britain hit 40 this year, which means the archetypal Briton is one among a vast crowd of middle-aged folk. It remains to be seen what the consequences of this will be for our collective behaviour. Arguably, an older crowd is a less febrile and suggestible one. Moreover, it’s difficult to stampede when most of you need a Zimmer frame to walk.

But I wouldn’t bet on it. The hoary old ­adage has it that you’re as young as you feel – and although I have been feeling like Methuselah since the early 2000s, all the evidence is that my contemporaries side with the number-crunching physician. Good luck to them, I say.