Will Self

For the past fortnight or so, I have been much exercised by the handsome “personalised spoon offer” that Kellogg’s has had blazoned on its Rice Krispies boxes. My youngest and I decided we very much wanted a spoon with our own slogan engraved on it and he began working on the words while I set about eating enough of the desiccated little blebs to justify buying the two further boxes we needed to obtain the “secret code numbers” required to unlock the spoon trove. On the back of these boxes are winsome pictures of happy new spoon-owners – but we were dismayed at their lack of ­imagination. All their spoons were simply personalised with their names (Carol, Keisha, Tarquin, et al) and the Kellogg’s cartoon brand mascots, whereas we were thinking of something surreal and subversive, such as: “Which orifice? Your choice.”

Actually, when I saw quite how innocent the other spoon-personalisers had been – how untainted by corrosive irony – I wondered at the depths of my psyche. What is it about cutlery that spoons up from my unconscious such anatomically perverse thoughts? I meditated on my childhood. Our American mother often used to remind us of her childhood in the Great Depression and used this early experience of privation to justify her habit of nicking cutlery from hotels, restaurants and even transatlantic liners: for years, we stirred our hot chocolate with some particularly chunky Queen Mary-monogrammed teaspoons.

My father brought different cutlery to the table (what a pleasure it is for once to use this expression both metaphorically and literally). An epigone, he entered the marriage with several canteens of old family silver. As a child, I was fascinated by these polished, hardwood boxes, with their green-velvet-lined interiors in which lay odd-shaped fish knives, pinioned in rows, and spoons personalised with family crests. But he – and therefore we – were on the social down escalator, so there were few occasions that merited the deployment of the entire shiny complement: knives, forks and spoons arranged in descending order of size so as to parenthesise the placemats. In truth, such was the queered problematic of my mother’s snobbery that she regarded certain forms of tableware as hopelessly non-U, reserving the full weight of her contempt for those petit-bourgeois families that cinched their serviettes (“napkins” is the acceptable term) with personalised rings.

Hmm, personalised rings . . . I feel rather like the young Freud – the Freud of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life who discovered such rich seams of suppressed psychic content hidden beneath quotidian tongue-slips and semantic glitches. It would be a simple enough spoonoanalysis were I to have grown up intent on repairing the fortunes of the House of Self so that once more, as in days of yore, a quince spoon was required at every meal – but I didn’t. True, I am a reader of Private Eye’s Me and My Spoon column and I also have a fascination with sporks, the liminal status of which is a constant reproof to our collective obsession with cookie-cutter categorisation, but as regular readers of this column will be only too aware, the last thing I want is an amuse-bouche served in a china spoon.

What I do like is the thought that the ancestral cutlery will continue to tinkle and clank down through generations of Selfs and that, at some point in the distant future, one of my descendants will peer wonderingly at the faint letters incised in the handle of a spoon they’ve known since birth but never properly examined; and with the assistance, perhaps, of some late-21st-century optical technology of which we can have no ken, painstakingly decipher: “Which orifice? Your choice.” I would further like it if my hypothetical descendant was then visited with a similar epiphany to Shelley’s “traveller from an antique land”, so apprehending the folly of not just personalised spoons but all human endeavour.

It is a factoid oft retold that the flimsy fork is a comparatively late addition to the solid British table. Right up until the early-modern era, even the highest in the land were perfectly happy to eat with knife, spoon and fingers-in-lieu-of-tines. Were William Burroughs to have written Naked Lunch during this period, he would presumably have chosen a different title for it, given that this one was inspired by Jack Kerouac’s insight that a naked lunch is “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork”. Forks are evil instruments, stabbing weapons composed of four or five épées welded together. Knives are often the subject of amnesties but a spoon amnesty would be whimsical. As for fingers, there’s no telling what they might get up to.

No, when it to comes to putting stuff in your mouth, only the spoon will do. Only the spoon is rounded and smooth and often brimming with milk like a lactating breast. Only a spoon will nurture you and care for you and love you unconditionally. So there’s nothing in the least surreal or subversive about our personalising slogan, because that’s the thing about a spoon: it doesn’t judge you, it accepts you for who you are unreservedly and equally it accepts whatever it is you want to do with it. Which is just as well, because I for one take a dim view of extra-cutlery relationships. Running off with a dish . . . ? Hey diddle-diddle, Spoony, what are you like . . .?

“To get up in the morning, in the fullness of youth, and eat a Pot Noodle – now that’s what I call vicious.” So Nietzsche wrote in 1889, shortly before his complete mental breakdown. Some scholars have attributed the collapse to the philosopher’s aggressive consumption of this instant snack food. He had already condemned the German people – in Ecce Homo, his crazed “memoir” – as bovine consumers of beer and sausages from whom no refinement of thought or feeling could be expected, and his move to Italy had been driven by a love as much of pasta as Palestrina. Still other scholars have pointed out this glaring anachronism: 19th-century gentlemen of Nietzsche’s class would have regarded it as an unforgivable solecism actually to get up in the morning themselves – that’s what you had a manservant for.

Oh, and there’s the Pot Noodle thing – Golden Wonder didn’t actually launch the brand for another 88 years, which means that I for one would still favour the syphilis explanation. However, I agree it is hard to reconcile this with the many references to Pot Noodles throughout Nietzsche’s work, including four stanzas of Thus Spake Zarathustra wholly concerned with pouring the boiling water into the pot. No less an authority than Walter Kaufmann has hypothesised that these references were a “time capsule”, sent by the philosopher to his future readers, so that when the brand was launched in 1977, they’d realise he was right all along about eternal recurrence and the circularity of history.

With Pot Noodle, it’s certainly the case that what goes around, comes around. I mean to say, it has long been regarded as the Millwall FC of comestibles (“No one likes us! No one likes us! No one likes us AND WE DON’T CARE!”), a status confirmed by a 2004 survey, which identified it as the most loathed brand in Britain. Advertising that played ironically to this negative perception, such as the “slag of all snacks” campaign of 2002 (see below), hardly achieved what the marketers probably wished for: a fast food so pestilential and bad that it became sort of good and hip. Nevertheless, Thatcher is dead, Tony Blair’s gone grey, and yet Pot Noodle not only remains but 155 million of the pots are manufactured every year in Caerphilly. Walking into my local sub-post office this morning (we 21st-century gentlemen are up with the lark), I saw a file of them standing to my attention on a fusty shelf and in a moment of pure Nietzschean will-to-power I snatched up a Beef & Tomato flavour one, stalked to the till and handed over my £1.09.

“You better watch it,” said the man I choose to regard as my postmaster: “some people say that stuff can lead to fascism.”
“What?” I was incredulous: “You mean Pot Noodle?”
“No,” he wearied back at me, “Nietzsche’s philosophy.”

Back at home I scrutinised the writing on the pot. The slogan on the foil lid read “NO Artificial Colours OR Preservatives” – I started to sweat with anxiety and pathetic ressentiment, but then I saw all my old favourites still listed in the ingredients and sighed with relief; after all, what would a Pot Noodle be without lashings of monosodium glutamate, disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate? After that it was all plain sailing as I followed the instructions to the letter; “IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE,” read another cheery slogan on the pot, and indeed it wasn’t. Nevertheless, concocting a Pot Noodle snack is so very simple that as I tore off the foil lid, removed the sachet of tomato sauce and then poured in the boiling water my head began to spin with fervid possibilities. Why not customise my Pot Noodle? I could add porcini and truffle oil – I might fricassee some lamb sweetmeats and chuck them into the mix; I could do just about anything, in short, to further water down this dish, which sat on my desktop looking so very sickeningly real.

It’s still sitting there as I type this – albeit looking a little clotted and malevolent, like the surface of some alien planet. I know the concept behind this column is that I eat the sort of stuff that we all eat and then comment on it, but there are limits – I haven’t actually supped a Pot Noodle since the late 1970s, when they were a key element of my student diet. So key, in fact, that due to overzealous Pot Noodle consumption, contracted while poring over Nietzsche, I developed an allergy to monosodium glutamate which stayed with me for over a decade. It’s gone now, but like the good Nietzschean I am, I believe in the eternal and Grecian verities, such as don’t tempt fate.

In 2005, Unilever (which had acquired the brand from Golden Wonder) launched a new ad campaign for Pot Noodle with the slogan: “Have you got the Pot Noodle horn?” Many complained about this crass association between sexual arousal and instant noodles. In one of its more enlightened judgements the Advertising Standards Authority rejected these complaints on the grounds that because Pot Noodle was so closely associated with Nietzsche, and it was well known the philosopher had in fact died of syphilis, there could be no snack food more likely to lead to detumescence.

I’m not so sure, because wasn’t this the same Nietzsche who presciently aphorised: “Love and hatred are not blind but sickened by the Pot Noodle they bear with them”? Answers on a pot, please.

I take my commitment to public education and to presenting my work in new digital formats extremely seriously, which is why, from now on, each instalment of On Location will be accompanied by a riveting and informative film. The first of these, Will Self’s Alley, can now be viewed on YouTube.

It’s a five-minute film, shot in real time and unedited, which shows my point of view as I take a 35-yard walk along an alley near my house, the camera bobbing, weaving and corkscrewing down into the tangles of ivy and other shrubbery wreathing the chain-link fence to discover exciting pieces of detritus. After about three minutes, a woman and her child pass by – you don’t see them but you can hear them commenting on my dog (the child refers to Maglorian as a puppy; in reality, he’s seven years old but on the small side, even for a Jack Russell); at around four minutes in, I call the dog, and about 30 seconds later I remark on how absorbing it is to film rubbish strewn along an alley. Apart from these interjections, the film is without commentary and silent, other than my slightly laboured breathing and the scrape of my sensible Clarks shoes on damp tarmacadam.

What’s not to admire about this film? In succession we are introduced to the following: the corpse of an Argos catalogue bloated with rainwater; an upended plastic flowerpot; waxed-paper coffee cups; Guinness and other beer cans; apple juice cartons and a paradoxically static McFlurry container; a turkey baster perhaps abandoned after some strange act of artificial insemination (particularly strange because the alley runs alongside a small Catholic church); a Ribena carton and the serendipitous sequence of two empty Polish beer cans – Lech followed by Tyskie – which suggests sexual incontinence followed by an admonition. This is by no means an exhaustive list; nor does it convey the subtlety of the film’s camera­work, as we nose in and out of the shrubbery, teasing apart leaves to expose shyly sheltering Jack Daniel’s miniatures.

I’d like to tell you that Will Self’s Alley was inspired by a recent hit BBC4 film, All Aboard! The Canal Trip, but I heard about this only after it was broadcast – its executive producer, Clare Paterson, was interviewed on the Today programme and she said she was indeed surprised that the two-hour film, shot entirely on a camera attached to the prow of a narrowboat travelling along the Kennet and Avon Canal, had drawn an audience of 600,000 viewers. I’m not surprised at all. We’re a nation of fat and lazy bastards – so fat and lazy that we’d rather slump at home watching the canal banks pass by at a soporific four miles per hour than go to the bother of actually slumping on a narrowboat and watching them pass by . . . live.

Ms Paterson said that her film had no soundtrack – only ambient splishes and ­sploshes – while information was confined to little gobbets of text that were digitally imprinted on passing lock gates or waterfowl. Will Self’s Alley is similarly bare-bones but it has the added virtue of any text portrayed being entirely aleatoric – so stick that in your pipe, Paterson. (Although don’t try smoking it, or the corporation will send you to rehab.)

What Paterson seemed wholly unaware of was the lineage of this sort of film. Patrick Keiller, the doyen of psychogeographic film-makers, has written about it at length in his collection of essays The View from the Train. So-called phantom rides, in which a camera was attached to the front of a train or a tram, were a staple of early cinema: the topographic selfies of the 1890s and 1900s which, as Keiller sagely remarks, paradoxically revealed to viewers the nature of their environment through a new technology that was itself transformative of that very milieu.

If you don’t think that film hugely alters our relationship to place, just consider the phantom ride of our own era. Instead of a single reel depicting the astonishing perspective afforded by wheeled vehicles in an urban context, our licence fees pay – in part – for two hours of lackadaisical nostalgia and lazy nature-gawping. The compelling feature of virtuality (as I’ve had cause to remark in these pages in the past) is that it renders subjective movement unnecessary. The world truly begins to revolve around us, confirming our utterly specious view that we are in control.

I used to think that the most depressing words in the English language were “rail replacement service” but I have come to believe “We are now approaching Staines” are even more dolorous. Yet it’s a misery that we should embrace, because the modern Britain we experience from day to day consists not of beautifully restored 18th-century canals (I’ve walked the Kennet and Avon and know just how bosky it can be) but of Staines and of alleys strewn with detritus. Paterson’s film is a ghostly cruise into a time and a place that never ­really existed (those lovely canals were dug by sweated and immiserated labourers), whereas mine is a walk on the wildly ordinary side. All Aboard! – no matter how utilitarian – will have entailed the expenditure of considerable time and money, whereas Will Self’s Alley cost nothing to make and costs nothing to view. So why not just do that and knock Paterson’s vaunted ratings into a hatted cock?

Granted, the only circumstances under which I’d run a marathon would be if I had to deliver news of a great victory by the Greeks over the Persians and there was no other transport available, but nevertheless I’m not against other people running them. My old mate Nick did the London Marathon some years ago to celebrate getting his breath back following decades of heavy smoking. I asked him what it was like, but he said that after 15 very odd miles, things became a bit of a blur. Certainly, walking through Parliament Square the other Sunday and encountering the closing stages of the great race, I was struck by how blurred the runners were: canalised between steel barricades and overseen by thousands of cheering, screeching loved ones, they paced, staggered and limped towards the finishing line, their features pulpy with exhaustion.

No, I’m not agin’ marathon-running, although I do slightly wonder what it’s all about. A sense of sheer physical achievement, some say, and I can see that: the vast majority of us spend most of our lives in oddly cramped conditions, our bodies hemmed in and constrained by technologies that, though designed to free us from the sordid business of exertion, have locked us up in a sort of padded cell, one in which everything is soft and yielding and renders self-propulsion quite unnecessary.

Technologies become invisible to us once we have integrated them seamlessly into our lives – their automation becomes an aspect of our automaticity, so that while we know something is definitely missing (the wind in our hair, the sweat on our brow), we can’t quite recall what it is. Getting up at the crack of dawn to run around suburban streets isn’t simply training for running round suburban streets with a multitude. It’s a way of recapturing the fierce rapture of our physical being. Because even pain can be a benison: our sedentary, cosseted lifestyle makes us all puling and delicate little flowers, unaccustomed to fluctuations in ambient temperature, chafed even by the warm leatherette of our couches as we angle our potato heads towards gleaming screens. What a relief it is to experience at last the abrasiveness of sole on tarmac, the true ache of well-used muscles and the lancing pain of a busted hamstring or pulled muscle.

There is also the solidarity of marathon-running: you’re all in it together. For weeks and months beforehand, everyone has been jerking about in isolation and now all these revivified bodies are brought blinking into the daylight. Such embarrassment as there is soon dispels in the febrile atmosphere – besides, it’s impossible to feel squeamish about your fat arse/thighs/belly when the runner next to you is dressed as the Honey Monster. It is this charming elision between competitive sport and the carnivalesque that so typifies the big city marathons – an atmosphere caught delightfully by Chris Morris in his film Four Lions, in which police marksmen end up shooting a number of gaily caparisoned runners as they attempt to neutralise a suicide bomber at the London Marathon who is disguised as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

All right, that was facetious – and possibly uncalled for. Morris’s satire was released in 2010 and only three years later real jihadists were killing people at the Boston Marathon. It can be posited that the 9/11 attacks, besides being mass murder, were a spectacular assault on the west’s supreme value of effortless mobility. What does this imply when it comes to the Boston Marathon outrage? Surely, that the Tsarnaev brothers, in some twisted little corner of their f***ed-up minds, wished to trounce another of our cherished values, namely our glorification of purposeless effort. At any rate, having negotiated the packed tunnels of Westminster Tube station in order to re-emerge on the far side of the people stream, I was treated to this spectacle: scores of finishers being assisted by relatives and friends to hobble up Whitehall. Blind, halt and lame with fatigue, the marathon runners staggered past the Cenotaph and the other memorials to the glorious dead.

It was difficult, observing this, not to reflect on the changing character of our existential enemies. Once, it was the Nazis who threatened to enslave us and destroy every vestige of our culture. Now, it’s the jihadists, who want to bore us to death in airport security queues and destroy every vestige of our fun runs.

Not that the runners looked like they’d had much fun. I suspect that, as with my mate Nick, it had all become a bit of a blur for the poor souls. For the rest of that afternoon, I saw them sitting outside chain coffee stores slurping down fruit juices, stunned by the enormity of what they had done – and possibly by its futility. Because although the battle had been joined (the blue-and-white pennants of Cancer Research UK, the London Marathon’s “official charity”, fluttered everywhere), the crab had not been kicked to death by 100,000 running shoes.

Yet that may not have been the only reason these doughty pacers looked so down in the mouth: it was a cold day for April and at the finishing line the marathon’s official sponsors had thoughtfully laid on a huge supply of silvery-red space blankets blazoned with their own logo. I mean to say, it’s one thing to bust a gut running 26 miles – but to end up a walking advertisement for Virgin Money seems like adding injury to injury.

We waited by the corner of the choir and the south transept; our guide needed to fetch something. She returned with a plasticised flip-book that was full of photographs of a smiling and slightly adipose middle-aged woman striking various attitudes: standing on narrow stone spiral stairs, squeezing between ancient walls, and crouching to negotiate low and knobbly ceilings. I didn’t want to look at the photographs – but our guide insisted. “It’s for our insurance,” she explained. “We have to inform people of the potential hazards.”

As regular readers of this column will know, I find such representational overload – whereby each location is both anticipated and apotheosised by images of it – to be the defining characteristic of our contemporary relationship with place. I would have happily spent the next hour discussing this weirdness with the guide; after all, we’d paid our money, and we were the only people signed up for the tour – but she took her job seriously and so, having undertaken her mandatory monitory duties, she led us on and up …

… into the upper levels of St Magnus Cathedral. I’ve been visiting cathedrals since shortly before the First Council of Nicaea (325CE), or at least it feels that way; and I’ve been visiting Orkney since 1992CE, but although I’m a great admirer of St Magnus’s it has never occurred to me to undertake a guided tour of this Romanesque hulk, which, besides being the most northerly cathedral in Britain, is also powerfully atmospheric, its red sandstone façade suggestive not of the Lord’s temple, but of Odin’s Valhalla. But that’s because when I’m in Orkney I like to get outside – what’s the point of visiting these whale-backed green islands, with their spectacular cliffs, if you’re only going to squat between four walls? True, even when August is blazing away down south it can still be rather, um, brisk in Orkney; however, that shouldn’t deter those who bear in mind the full weight of this odious maxim: there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.

Unfortunately, my mind hadn’t been bearing much at all when we left London. So it was that I’d found myself succumbing to hypothermia on the cruelly misnamed “sun deck” of the MV Pentalina, as it made the crossing from Gills Bay near John o’Groats to St Margaret’s Hope in Orkney. True, the air temperature was around 4C – but that air was travelling at about 60mph, with predictably chilling effects. I’d had to remain on the “sun deck” because the dog wasn’t allowed in any of the cabins, and if we leave him alone in the car he hotwires it and attempts to drive away. The ferry operators’ insistence that their insurance could be invalidated by a small terrier was a bitter foretaste of the cathedral guide’s unhealthy preoccupation with safety. Anyway, suffice to say that, after an hour standing in lashing rain as the catamaran slid over the glassy boils and anfractuous whirlpools of the Pentland Firth, I was left in no doubt as to the inappropriateness of my clothing.

My youngest son took against Orkney for the same reason and decided the only appropriate clothing for this boreal realm was four thick walls. However, he didn’t want those walls to be Neolithic ones; which is a shame, because besides the beautiful landscape, the doughtily mystical inhabitants and the superb beef, the reason most people visit these islands is to view their astonishing wealth of megaliths and ancient stone structures. I’m partial to a Neolithic tomb myself – there’s something about crouching in one of the stalls of a 5,000-year-old ossuary, reflecting on the vast span of time it encapsulates and the alien world-view of its builders, that makes it a little easier to bear the vast span of triviality modern society encapsulates and the alien world-view of its builders. My son’s view was rather more straightforward: “Those old tombs creep me out.”

So, barred from the truly ancient burial sites and exiled from the great outdoors, we were condemned to the cathedral tour. Standing up in the machicolated gallery, looking down into the disproportionately narrow nave, the guide explained the gravestones we could see lining the lower parts of the walls had been placed there when the tombs of the Orcadian nobs were removed from St Magnus’s to the graveyard without. The factoid logically arising from this was: “That’s the origin of the expression ‘stinking rich’, because when they were buried beneath the nave the congregation could smell them decomposing.” Being a kind and considerate father, I didn’t crow at my son, or observe that in the midst of life we are always in death – rather, I followed dutifully in the guide’s wake as she led us up another corkscrewing staircase.

And continued with her explication: apparently the coastguard often use the cathedral tower for exercises, negotiating its crooked defiles and vertiginous descents being an ideal training for evacuating seamen from stricken vessels. On hearing this, I wondered whether the tyro rescuers had to look at the book of photographs before they made their ascent – but said nothing to our guide, because I knew the answer already. It used to be said that the surest things in life were death and taxes, but insurance needs to be added to these inevitabilities, because you can’t go anywhere now without it.