Will Self

I hope some of you, after you finish reading this column, will go straight to urbaneat.co.uk, where you can find out all about such “real food” as the “hand-crafted” red Thai chicken wrap I saw advertised in my local Costa clone yesterday. (Costa clones are coffee shops so lacking in self-esteem that they’re “proud to serve Costa coffee”.) This particular wrap was pictured apparently lying in the roadway of Benefits Street – or at any rate, somewhere gritty and urban – with a disproportionately small sign by it that had been amended to read “a tasty DIVERSION”. The wrap got me to wondering: is it only me who’s noticed the way that wraps have stealthily and relentlessly infiltrated our fast-food culture? I asked my wife when she was first aware of wraps and she said, “Oh, the early 1990s, I suppose – I mean, they came in with Pret a Manger, didn’t they?”

I found her answer admirable, twining together as it did two equally hazy recent timelines into one uchronic vision of happy Labour party activists wolfing down wraps while they waved Union Jacks and watched Tony and Cherie skip up the steps of No 10. I don’t buy it: there may have been a few wraps around in the mid-Nineties but this was only a small and unleavened beachhead: the main invasion force came later.

It’s much the same sort of phenomenon as rap. There was some rap music and related phenomena (hip-hopping, crack-smoking, ho-bashing, bling-flashing) around as early as the beginning of the 1980s but it wasn’t until this millennium that rap was completely wefted through the wider cultural warp.

The more I thought about this, the more it seemed to me that the coincidence between wraps and rap was nothing of the sort; both are, after all, syncretic phenomena. In rap’s case, this is a fusion of African-American soul and funk with the turntable-created percussive breaks and other sound effects pioneered by Jamaican dub musicians such as Lee “Scratch” Perry. The wrap, on the other hand, comes from the Mexican burrito, by way of other flatbread snacks long present in the Turkish, Kurdish and Iranian cuisines, to name but three.

And while rap music is made by black working-class men and largely listened to by white middle-class boys, wraps are mostly made by economic migrants on zero-hours contracts and eaten by middle-class office workers on the hoof. You can see what I’m driving at here: it was only a matter of time before the red Thai chicken wrap came into being; even if no one had ever made one, such is its culturally overdetermined character that it would have had to self-assemble. That it should also be “halal approved” goes without saying – but should instead be shouted, like the muezzin’s call, from the rooftops of mud-brick houses.

The wrap is still more fundamental to western Judaeo-Christian and Islamic culture than we perhaps care to acknowledge: beside its great antiquity, the sandwich is a mere parvenu, the hamburger a mayfly that’s soon to … die. In Exodus, the Lord pelts the Israelites first with quail (yum!) and then with flatbread (or “manna”, as they perversely name it). It’s not recorded whether any Bronze Age Heston Blumenthal had the smart idea of boning the quail and wrapping it in the manna together with a few herby sprigs but how else can we explain the sacerdotal role that manna henceforth had? No one’s going to place a few manky bits of bread in the Ark of the Covenant alongside the Mosaic tablets – but a quail wrap makes perfect sense.

This also explains why the latter-day wraps have had such an easy time converting our dyspeptically secular society: they slot right into the atavistic hunger that torments us when, like the Israelites, we find ourselves wandering for 40 minutes in some desert part of town devoid of fast-food outlets. We see, perhaps, the oasis of a petrol station and, stumbling in, heave a sigh of relief, for the Lord in his infinite wisdom has seen fit to stock the shelves with wraps – wraps such as the chicken Caesar, another of Urban Eat’s “real foods”; hand-crafted with xanthan gum, sorbic acid, diphosphates, acidity regulator, modified maize starch, sodium carbonates, malic acid, mono and diglycerides of fatty acids and – in case your appetite isn’t fully whetted – that ingredient beloved of the people of the book, locust bean gum. Thanks be to God.

It must have been in the late spring of 1982. I went down to London from Oxford, where I was at university, to buy a bag of marijuana from a friend of a friend who had a room in a squat immediately behind Brixton police station. “It’s a great gaff to deal out of,” the bespectacled little fellow said. “I mean, this is the last place they’d come looking – right by their back door.” Maybe he was right; after all, it was only a year since Brixton had been up in flames, the railway bridge was still black with soot and the premises to either side of the squat were boarded up. It seemed reasonable to think that the police might have had more serious things on their mind.

We took our bag – it was a big green dustbin one and contained about half a pound of weed – and sauntered off into the city. Even with this plastic-wrapped potential jail sentence dangling from my hand, I didn’t feel particularly paranoid – but then some things don’t change and, statistically speaking, we were the wrong colour to get stopped and searched by the Met.

My friend, who is now a thoroughly respectable provincial solicitor, suggested that we go up to Clapham Common and have a snooze with our grass on the grass, which we did. We then sauntered back down Clapham High Street, took the Tube to Victoria and got the coach back up to Oxford. The reason I vividly recall that day has nothing to do with the marijuana at all – obviously – and everything to do with Clapham High Street, because I remember thinking, as we trolled down it in the late afternoon sunlight, what a benighted and miserable stretch of road it was. It had none of the vigour and buzz of Brixton Road and on the way from the common to Clapham North Tube – where the commercial zone ends and the residential one begins – there can’t have been more than one or two restaurants and cafés and perhaps a boozer or two. As in Brixton, quite a few premises were boarded up, or their windows were fly-posted, and overall there was such an atmosphere of psychic despair that the rubbish drifting across the roadway reminded me of tumbleweed blowing through a western ghost town.

Fast-forward 32 years and here I am on Clapham High Street again. It’s not terribly surprising – I live down the road in Stockwell – and at least once a week I find myself metonymically riding the 88 bus and having all sorts of rather conventional opinions. On this occasion, it was the night bus, because we’d been to a late screening at the Picturehouse, and the opinion was . . . well, it wasn’t so much an opinion as an experience of profound shock: who the hell were all these people?! And what the devil were they doing – many of them half-naked – on Clapham High Street at 12.30am on a Sunday morning in January?!

I’m not so blinkered that I haven’t noticed the rising commercial tempo of Clapham – where there used to be a brace of hostelries, there are now scores of them. Indeed, along the stretch where once I toted my bag, it’s pretty much a continuous strip of tapas bars, pizza parlours, Belgian mussel shacks and Brazilian steakhouses; there are assorted themed bars and several clubs, including Infernos, which – rather suitably – suffered a fire a few years ago. I knew all that but what I couldn’t quite credit was that come Saturday night all these joints really would be jumping – but they were and there was no room on the pavements, either, so that the crowds spilled out into the road.

London barely went into recession after the 2007-2008 crash; last year, house prices in the capital rose by an average of £50,000, so that people who own property are, once again, earning more off it than they are from their employment. The visible evidence of this bunce is the crowds whooping it up in Clapham – Clapham!

While they swill their property bubbles and dance the night away, there are many other Londoners living in a permanent hangover. I’m not in the business of inciting revolution but a society that can become so crazed and decadent that it seriously considers Clapham a fit destination for a wild night out is clearly in need of a savage reality check. What next, the Balham carnival? Mardi Gras in Mitcham? As I sat on the top deck of the bus, it occurred to me that I’d become a one-man constabulary – after all, while I knew there was criminality like this going on, it had never occurred to me to look for it by my own back door.

No, I only put on my judgemental hat for a crowd of one nutter: Prince Harry. He set off for the South Pole in early December, accompanied by the obligatory entourage of limbless ex-servicemen (and women), the aim being to show that limbless ex-servicemen (and women), and lame unemployed princes, are all capable of inspirational levels of achievement. It’s difficult to know where to begin when it comes to unpicking this giant bezoar – or should I say pseudo-bezoar – that’s stuck in the British gastrointestinal tract.

In a country in which ex-servicemen (and women) – whether limbless or not – have disproportionately high levels of all the following: unemployment, mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness and familial breakdown, how on earth is the realisation that Prince Hal and pals have made it to the pole going to help one jot?

What these folk need are decent job prospects, homes at genuinely affordable rents and consistent welfare. What they get is the capricious compassion of charity and the example of “achievements” confabulated for them out of the most threadbare tropes of imperialist delusion. For the British loyalist the South Pole will always remain a proving ground: we was robbed – they still madly and impotently believe – by a gang of horn-heads who had the temerity to go properly equipped, using effective techniques (most of them learned, mark you, from the lowly Eskimos) that included that ultimate atrocity: feeding their sledge dogs to . . . their other sledge dogs. Damn it all, you cannot possibly consider a man who’ll watch such dog-on-dog action any kind of adventurer – let alone a victorious gentleman.

So it is that even after half a century of painstaking revisionism by the likes of Roland Huntford, the Scott debacle remains embedded in the national gut as a splendid example of pluck, fortitude and self-sacrifice, instead of a criminal one of officer-class arrogance, cravenness and homicidal ineptitude. But the really important thing to remember about this ill-fated expedition is that it prefigured, in miniature, the grotesque “sacrifice” of British lives that came two years later in the killing fields of Flanders, where the manufacture of limbless  ex-servicemen was conducted as if on an assembly line. Perhaps the most pitiful addendum to the whole sorry business of British polar exploration was the fate of Shackleton’s men, who, having survived the loss of their ship in the Weddell Sea in August 1914, made it across the pack ice to Elephant Island, from the isolate wastes of which they were finally saved, only for many of them to return to Europe just in time to get killed in the First World War.

This year will be wall-to-wall remembrance, and the British state, which excels in co-opting dissident voices to its oxymoronic ideology of post-imperial imperialism, will have a field day propagating the bizarre double bind that while the First War was a dreadful business, it nevertheless produced some excellent poetry, and of course it remains the case that Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Seen from this angle, His Dumbness was simply the vanguard of a great horde of bonkers militarists. We’re at a curious juncture in our island story: despite being defeated in almost all the theatres it has engaged in over the past decade, the British army has never been held in higher popular esteem. This isn’t down to state, it’s a function of a populace who subconsciously view our troops not as puissant warriors fighting for a noble cause but charity cases in the making, just like themselves.