Will Self

I’m in Orkney again: it’s a micro-society up here off the north coast of Scotland, where the preoccupations are farming, fishing and the sort of intense human interactions that often occur when folk are compelled to rub along together a little too vigorously. True, there is the annual “Ba”, or town football game, wherein a benighted bit of leather is fought the length of Kirkwall’s main street by snorting, roiling gangs of islanders, but overall these sparsely populated islands are not where you would expect to find evidence of the odd delusions that grip humanity en masse.

Except that when I first came here in the early 1990s, Orkney was at the centre of a particularly virulent example of just this. For younger readers, the satanic ritual abuse (SRA) panic of the early 1990s may seem bizarre: over a period of two or three years large numbers of people – mostly here and in the US, although also worldwide – became convinced that there was a network of satanist cults operating among us. In many cases the leaders of these evil organisations were local worthies – priests, doctors, teachers – who put on horned headdresses in order to conduct unspeakable rites. When described by victims, these rites proved remarkably similar: nude dancing in a circle around bonfires, accompanied by ceremonies involving “broodmares”, young girls and women who had been impregnated by the cult leaders and forced to bear babies that were then sacrificed horribly.

The evidence for SRA was threefold: the direct testimony of children who had been abused; the “recovered memories” of adult victims who had been subjected to hypno- or regression therapy; and – in Britain at least – the application of something called the “reflex anal dilatation” test, a method of establishing that a child had been anally penetrated that I don’t need to describe here in detail because it’s all in the name. The SRA panic spoke to deep-seated anxieties that we all possess: the idea that society as it appears to be constituted is in fact a grotesque sham, and that power of a sinister sort is being wielded behind the scenes, is the staple fare of every conspiracy theorist. The specifics of SRA – the child abuse, the devil-worshipping – in my view, articulated very real disjunctions between what we can think of, synthesising Freudian and Jungian terminology, as the latent and the manifest content of the collective unconscious.

In Orkney, social workers took 15 children of the “W” family off the island and into care; nine children from four other families were later removed from their homes. Tests were done, statements taken. The picture emerged of a cult operating on South Ronaldsay that held ceremonies in an abandoned quarry. These allegations got out and became grist to the panicky rumour mill, catalysing with the unsettling tales of adults throughout the land who, on the couch, realised that the parents they had thought of as loving had in fact subjected them to grotesque abuse when they were small.

The idea that we might be the repositories of buried traumatic memories is integral to psychoanalysis – so the SRA panic had a ready-made audience in people primed to accept notions of repression and catharsis. For a while, we were all wandering around wondering whether our own histories of abuse were about to bob up from the murky depths of our psyches; it became quite common to have conversations of the form: “I think I might’ve been abused as a child . . .” as a background explanation for whichever current neurotic behaviour was plaguing us.

The bromides that calmed the whole frenzy down were, when they came, quite prosaic: the reflex anal dilatation test was discredited (most anuses dilate when a speculum is pressed against them); both professionals and abuse victims came forward to nix the idea that such memories were repressed – they recalled every element of their suffering; and in the particular case of Orkney, it was pointed out that certain critical elements of the children’s testimony were impossibilities. South Ronaldsay is a notably exposed island; there really isn’t anywhere you could hold a Walpurgisnacht-style gig without it being noticeable from everywhere else.

A local woman told me that some of the children of the “W” family had indeed been abused physically. But any satanic components of most stories by victims of child abuse in general are very obviously confabulated from horror movies they’ve seen. This tallies with something that the person at the NSPCC responsible for investigating child sex abuse tells me: it is, he says, far more widespread than we fear, but the ritual component is always vanishingly small.

So, with the curse of hindsight, it is now possible to view the whole SRA panic as part of the first tentative steps society was taking towards acknowledgement of two distinct but not unrelated phenomena: widespread sexual abuse being perpetrated on children both in institutional settings and in the home by allegedly responsible adults; and a burgeoning culture of febrile emotional lability, stimulated by cod-psychotherapy and hyperreal depictions of sex and violence in film.

In a world in which the old verities are ever crumbling before our eyes, it’s nice to be able to validate an old adage: there is indeed no smoke without fire.

Books do indeed furnish a room – but tobacco smoke gives it volume, substance and an aroma. The decline in smoking has important consequences for our perception of space and place. When I was a young man I’d meet my father at his club, the Reform in Pall Mall, and we’d sit on the balcony smoking cigars and blowing long, pungent plumes into the cloistral atmosphere of the main hall. The calibration of lung capacity with exhalation length was, I think, akin to the automatic calculation we make in order to focus on objects; by means of it I related my own internal airspace to these much larger external volumes. If you like, smoking in a space is a physical version of the Cartesian cogito: I fill this with smoke, therefore I am in it. Another way of considering the matter is to observe that, by puffing away in a room, we remake it in the image of Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures: the smoke flows into all the fiddly little interstices and creates an evanescent – but for all that, real – cast of what is forever not.

I have no axe to grind about the ban on smoking in public places, nor do I resist the shift in social mores that nowadays makes it, oftentimes, a solecism to light up in a private home. Nonetheless I miss smoke; it draped a decent veil across interior vulgarities, while softening our loved ones’ hateful features. Moreover, it was something to look at: its chiffon convolutions and tulle thunderheads made perfectly dull places seem excitingly mysterious. I don’t think the NHS’s smoking cessation schemes make enough of this: what we smokers need to help us kick this obnoxious addiction is a portable son et lumière, not a packet of nicotine gum. Nicotine gum is in fact the spatial inversion of smoking: the gum-chewer, instead of looking out, as the smoker does, on a roiling boiling atmosphere, has his attention driven entirely inward to a dark and claustrophobic space where giant teeth clash and clash again.

One of the first things we all noticed when the smoking ban came in was how many smokers came out: almost overnight the streets were full of hurrying puffers, striding along, filling their necrotic lungs with toxins even as they exercised their way to the next rendezvous. Indeed, the thoroughfares of British cities can now be seen purely in terms of al fresco tobacco consumption, no office building, restaurant or pub being without its little gaggle of vampiric starvelings, huddled in the downdraft and sucking up their bloody habituation.

I wish that the exiled became more attuned to the built environment; after all, standing beside wheelie bins, or near delivery entrances, or under the warm air from ventilation ducts, they’re in a perfect position to consider the relations between form, function and finance that define the modern cityscape. But I’m afraid this simply doesn’t happen: going out for a fag is a duty and a chore; the smoker tries to imagine herself as some houri, reclining on cushions in a seraglio of the mind and breathing out perfumed smoke from her chibouk, yet she knows only too well that the reality is a low-tar Silk Cut sucked down in the loading bay.

I avoid al fresco smoking, whether walking or static. It’s a miserable business – and never more miserable than when the contagion is confined to a demarcated area, or even a booth. Is there any more disgusting or morally Stygian realm than one of those glassed-in airport cubicles where smokers congregate? The acrid stench, the nervous and lippy perseveration, the heavy atmosphere of shame – all these make such “zones” and “areas” quite insupportable. In the US, when the first public bans came in, some proprietors actually erected glass-walled rooms inside their restaurants. I remember eating at a seafood joint near Times Square and having the distinct sensation that I was a sort of lobster, floating in a tank full of smoke, and that if I remained in there long enough one of the other diners would point to me, then I’d be flung in a pot full of boiling water.

In Britain we’ve never applied much design ingenuity to the problem. Some establishments will have a few space heaters outside, and maybe a demi-pavilion to keep off the rain. Elsewhere they’re more inventive – I’ve been to quite a few Dublin restaurants that have had entire adjoining pseudo-rooms constructed, in the form of carpeted marquees equipped with their own tables, chairs and heaters, where people can smoke quite happily so long as they ignore one thing: that the space they inhabit possesses its unique characteristics purely because of their own weakness. It won’t surprise you to learn that I find these spatial compromises quite as irksome as going without.

“Poor Old Fred Smoked in Bed”, was the slogan on novelty ashtrays when I was a boy – painted across the headstone-cum-headboard beneath which reposed poor Fred’s annealed and besmirched skeleton. Needless to say, as the noose of prohibition has tightened around my oesophagus, I, too, have taken to smoking in bed. I lie there, funnelling my blue spume up at the ceiling, acutely aware of how all things must pass eventually, though I will probably quit the stage rather more expeditiously.

To die in one’s own bed, whatever the cause, is accorded a blessing. It’s dying in a designated smoking area that would be the real tragedy.

Most weekday mornings I get up and make pancakes for the two of my children who still live at home. I can cook a passable Irish stew or lasagne – I’ve been known to attempt a ribollita or caldo verde (the peasant soup is a particular love of mine, of which more later) – but most parties agree that I excel at pancakes. I’m not talking about the big thin pancakes the English sprinkle sugar on and douse with lemon juice – these, the floppy wafers of the Anglican Communion, are quite alien to me. No, the pancakes I make are American ones: about five inches in diameter, nicely browned, and almost fluffy in consistency. These are served with maple syrup or strawberry jam, and accompanied by grilled bacon.

When I was a child and friends came to our house and were served with pancakes by my American mother, they’d wrinkle up their little noses and say, “Ooh, drop scones” or, “Aren’t those Scots pancakes?” Either response infuriated me, and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” would swell in my inner ear as I rounded on them: “These are American pancakes!” Now, of course, such is the mid-Atlantic character of our cuisine that you can feast on a stack of the things in your local chain café, but it remains the case that if I make any oath of allegiance at all it’s to the American pancake, not the president. Shortly before my mother died, I got her to pass the recipe on, and while she never lived to see her grandchildren, I like to think of her as being constantly reincarnated for them in the form of these tasty discs.

The recipe is perfectly simple: self-raising flour, eggs, milk, water, sugar, salt, melted butter. I’ve no idea about precise quantities – having long since learned to mix the batter by eye – but my cooking really has nothing ad hoc about it. Each stage of the process is perfectly integrated with the morning routine: while the butter is melting in the frying pan I pour the flour into the mixing bowl; once the first batch is cooking I take the time before turning them to clear the plate dryer, or set the table; as I add to finished pancakes heating in the oven, so I perform other necessary tasks; and when the boys begin eating I start on the washing-up – my aim is to be seamless, so that the whole business is done with shortly after they finish eating.

I suspect my love of pancake breakfast has as much to do with this production line as it does with any desire to nurture my offspring, or culinary atavism: making pancakes in the morning makes me feel like part of the common weal, just another spatula-wielder trying to add to the great mound of steaming growth necessary to fuel our resurgent economy.

Indeed, such is my enthusiasm for this cod-utility that I usually make too many of the damn things. “You’ve beaten me,” one or other of the boys will often groan, looking despairingly at the pile still in front of him while clutching his bulging tummy. “Are you sure?” I’ll chivvy him, looking manically from pan to mouth and wondering whether I can shoot another batter-puck in there while he’s distracted.

My mother wasn’t exactly a versatile cook, but she tried hard. She also battled with her weight for the last 20-odd (very odd) years of her life. I remember her standing in front of the mirror in a slip when I was a small child and chanting in a despairing mantra: “Fat and old, fat and old . . .”; sometimes I wonder if that’s what I’m trying to do to her grandchildren: pump them so full of pancakes that they, too, will be fat and old. She also had a somewhat conflicted relationship with her ethnicity, believing – on no basis whatsoever as far as I could see – that no one really knew she was Jewish. Even if this were the case, she was forever blowing her cover by cooking up steamy heaps of faecal-
seeming chopped liver, or frying potato latkes, or boiling enormous vats of – yes, you guessed it – chicken soup.

Mother tended towards stereotypy in her belief that most of the world’s ills could be cured by a bowl or three of chicken soup. She made a great chicken soup: the broth clear but oily, while floating in this were bits of carrot, celery and fowl, as down below a shingle of pearl barley shifted. When she began dying I looked at her incredulously: surely anyone who’d supped such a catholicon for a lifetime couldn’t actually expire? But expire she did, and before I’d got her recipe off her. Really it would be a lot better if I could feed the whelps chicken soup – all of that flour is propelling them speedily on their way to fashionable wheat intolerance, and as for the sugar and salt, it’s shameful. But given that I have just the one hand-me-down recipe, I keep on following it, as if it were a culinary transcriptase that had to be written into the next generation.

Last Shrove Tuesday, the boys’ older sister asked me for the recipe and I relayed it over the phone to her while she mixed the batter in her student flat. I asked her later if the pancakes had gone down well and she said they had, but her friends said they weren’t proper pancakes – only drop scones.

I’m whisking in my grave – and I’m not even dead yet.

It was difficult to contain one’s emotions: after 42 years’ service, the Clerk of the House of Commons, Sir Robert Rogers, has retired. A fluffy-wigged and bearded presence who sat below the Speaker dispensing advice on procedural matters, and who heretofore made little or no impression on the wider world, Sir Robert was given a lengthy round of applause by MPs following the reading of his resignation letter. I say it was difficult to contain one’s emotions – but I wasn’t even particularly near the chamber; I was lying in bed in my house about two miles away, listening to this effusion on Radio 4’s Today in Parliament. True, during particularly rambunctious Commons sessions (when, for example, Sally Bercow has forgotten to wipe the banana cream from her husband’s mouth), I can quite clearly hear the baying of our representatives: it rises even above the demented wail of police sirens, and the chunter of jets on the Heathrow flight path. It used to be that MPs were required to live within the sound of the division bell; nowadays a reasonable test of proximity would be whether they’re capable of hearing their colleagues’ barracking when abed.

Sir Robert’s letter praised our members of parliament; he said if only the country understood the absolutely terrific and selfless work they did, and how their great integrity was all that stood between us and an unfettered executive, we’d cease our bleating about their expenses-fiddling, influence-peddling and general loutishness. This wasn’t what he said verbatim, but it was the gist of it, and it went down extremely well with the flattered – they moaned their reverent acclamation: “Hear! Hear!” they cried, exhorting us via the state broadcaster to pay attention to how absolutely fabulous they were – and then they got on with the hard democratic graft of behaving like a bunch of minor public school boys huffing amyl nitrate. I believe it’s called Prime Minister’s Questions.

The House of Commons is the suited, booted and largely expensively educated crowd of louts that rampages at the heart of our body politic. You could have no clearer example of the crazed doublethink that typifies British public life than to look objectively upon the disjunction between the bewigged pomp of parliamentary protocol and the hair-tearing ruckus that MPs believe is integral to their “oversight”. It is nothing of the sort, naturally; rather, PMQs and other set-piece “debates” are merely a showcase for dumb macho posturing – the political equivalent of gorillas chest-beating. The vast bulk of Commons business takes place in a green leatherette desert, but once a week when the media chip up in earnest, so does the heavy mob.

A largely male, drunken and angry crowd is a scary thing, but at least it has a certain honesty about it. The affront the Commons presents to the electorate is that it’s such a half-arsed crowd. The noises they make! The collective sniggering and group moaning, the massed joshing and choruses of sneering! To heckle in a context where to do so is to break a profound social taboo – well, that has a certain brio and bravery; but to heckle en masse is simply to sound like a flock of silly geese. Parliamentarians themselves, and plenty of others in the Westminster village, say the fowl honking is the very tocsin of liberty. “What do you want?” they cry. “The dull and emasculated legislatures we see on the Continent?” But this is just another example of the binary thinking characteristic of English conservatism, whereby there is only ever one alternative to the status quo. Change the first-past-the-post voting system? You must be mad: we’ll end up like the Belgians, with no government at all, so protracted will the debates be between the fissiparous parties. Inaugurate a written constitution? Are you spark-a-loco? That way lies the revolutionary Terror! And so, wearily on.

What’s most galling about listening to the bovine lowing and swinish squealing of our £70K-per-annum senators is quite how blissfully unaware of their behaviour they seem to be. Rather like small children who believe they can’t be seen so long as they cover their eyes, MPs seem to think they are de-individuated by the crowd of suiting and skirting surrounding them, and so they gibber and they groan, they throw feeble taunts and make feebler still ripostes.

It’s often said of the British parliament that it is the most exclusive club in the country; and, like all clubs, it fosters its sense of exclusiveness by subjecting new members to humiliating rituals in combination with outrageous benefits. It is this classic double bind, whereby you are allowed to behave like a fractious child while being accorded honorifics, which ensures that our so-called democracy operates according to the dynamic of any other dysfunctional family.

It is perfectly true that there are other areas of Commons business that are conducted with something like decorum, probity and efficiency. But you have to be a wonk of the first order to listen to the deliberations of the public accounts committee under its redoubtable chair, Margaret Hodge. Ms Hodge may well call warped bankers to account for selling off the Royal Mail for a mess of pottage to speculator pals of the Chancellor, but as long as mob rule is all that checks our electoral tyranny (and that for only 30 minutes a week), we have no recourse from the madness of the pinstriped crowd.