Will Self

“Caesar! We who are about to die salute you!” So, it is said, the gladiators of old addressed the Roman emperors before they went about the entertaining business of mutual butchering. It was drizzling and outside the grey-dun hulk of the Colosseum there was a small gaggle of modern Romans dressed up not as gladiators but as tacky-looking legionaries. I wanted to accost them and say: “You can do better than this: hanging around in this Gibbonian drag, hustling the odd euro by having your picture taken with marauding phalanxes of orthodontically challenged Benelux schoolkids.” Then I wanted to climb up on a shattered column, strike a pose and orate: “Give me your poor and huddled masses of legionary impersonators! Come with me to London, where there are plenty of creative opportunities for enterprising folk prepared to spray-paint themselves silver and stand on a cardboard box all day!”

Of course I did nothing of the sort, because I was a tourist and tourists are money; and the Colosseum is a great big begging box. Underneath the stands, where once the Roman mob disported itself, there were instead long lines of money inching forward to the ticket windows.

Frankly, I hadn’t been feeling that good to begin with: on the early-morning flight out of Gatwick, I’d come down with one of those blitzkrieg colds that precision-bomb a sluice gate in your mucous membranes. Luckily there were two free seats next to me, so I lay down sideways and slept deeply, awaking only occasionally to the sound of snot dripdrip-dripping on to the carpet below. I would have felt worse about this if it hadn’t been a low-cost airline. If you don’t want to spend a two-hour flight from Rome to Gatwick with your feet dabbling in my effluvia, then fly the fucking flag.

Now, standing in the thick of the crowd with a brace of my offspring and their mother, I was assailed by nausea – there were so many queues and so many queuing styles in this pan-European crowd mash-up. Stolid Scandinavians and thrifty Germans waited patiently in their restrained, fawn-coloured leisurewear; lisping and excitable Spaniards in transparent rain capes fluttered around like exotic birds; contraflows of captious and stentorian Brits threatened anarchy; while one tight little testudo of denim-clad Americans simply barged its way through.

In a gap between the seething bodies, we spotted a sign reading “Tour didactica” above a ticket window with only a handful of people in front of it and so were able to pay five euros a head extra to skip the Hydra-headed queue. Still, inside the arena things weren’t that much better. For just short of 1,800 years – until the construction of the Crystal Palace – the Colosseum was the largest manmade enclosed space in the world. But on this drizzly bad Friday, it felt as packed-out as the stateroom in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. It didn’t help that there was a mandated route around this colossal heap of ancient masonry, so that all the tributary queues from beneath the stands now flowed into one mighty gyre: along the periphery, up the stairs, through the exhibition on Constantine, then down again and finally out into the street where the bogus legionaries were still brandishing for tips.

You might have thought that anyone as crowd-phobic as I am would have called it a day at that point – but when in Rome, I always like to visit the Pantheon and have a coffee at the nearby Sant’Eustachio café (where I once partook of the elusive “God shot”, the espresso that convinces even hardened sceptics of the existence of a transcendent barista). True, the crowds are, if anything, denser and more polyglot in the Pantheon but here there is no signage, no admission fee and inside, under what is still – after nearly two millennia – the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, the tightly packed human herd positively lows with devotion as it swirls about the curved walls.

Christians would doubtless maintain that it’s because the Pantheon has long since been dedicated as a Catholic church that, upon entering, the masses become so meek and mild. The Colosseum, by contrast, still bears the taint of sadistic voyeurism, a psychic charge that infects even the meekest tourist. And you know what, shuffling from one oily icon to the next, I was inclined to agree – but then, in the interests of stemming my own viral tide, I hadn’t just had the one God shot at Sant’Eustachio but three in one.

I once had lunch with the late Malcolm McLaren. It was during his short-lived run for the London mayoralty and I confess I can remember none of the following: a) where we ate; b) what we ate; I’d like to be able to say that both these amnesias were because of the strange and unearthly fascination exerted on me by the discourse of this famed bowdleriser of the Situationist International’s détournement, but sad to relate I cannot recall; c) a single word that he said. This must’ve been in the early years of the last decade – at any rate, not that long ago. By contrast, I can recall, note-and-letter-perfect, “Buffalo Gals”, the proto-hiphop ditty McLaren released in 1982, including his serially offending yelps of “Two buffalo gals go around the outside/’Round the outside, ’round the outside …” Such is the queer pretzel-shaped path that time’s arrow describes.

Last week, undertaking a neo-situationist dérive across Paris with my colleague Joel Anderson, the buffalo gals came back to haunt me. We began in the northern banlieue of Épinay-sur-Seine, underneath the soaring concrete arches of the bridge that carries the A15 over this loop of the river. In front of us, on the claggy bank, was a Roma bidonville that would’ve gladdened the heart of any exploitative pop entrepreneur: tumbledown shacks, mounds of trash and actual half-naked brown babies playing in puddles of dirty water. We asked a hawk-nosed man wheeling a bike where his people were from, but he replied in perfect French that he didn’t speak French.

With the giant novelty cruet of the Eiffel Tower in the distance to guide us – our destination was hard by Les Invalides – we headed first west through Argenteuil, then south-east through Gennevilliers. Crossing the bridge into Clichy and smelling the distinctive pissflorescence of Paris proper, I raised the question of lunch with Joel and asked him to name his favoured French chain restaurant. He didn’t hesitate. “Definitely the Buffalo Grill,” he said. “I remember flying into Charles de Gaulle all the time and seeing its signature giant horns pronging up into the sky.”

A quick auxiliary brain search revealed that we were no more that a dosie-do away from a branch. After a morning wandering ’round the outside of Paris, lunch takes on a buffalo stance in the Place du Maréchal-Juin, so my partner and I hip-hopped there with out any more ado. There is, of course, a species of détournement involved in eating in a joint like this when almost any street in central Paris still boasts a family-run bistro offering a perfectly reasonable €15 or €20 prix-fixe menu. Sadly, there were no giant horns ’round the outside of this Buffalo Grill but there was a scarlet canopy with the enlarged head of Wild Bill Hickok (or possibly Buffalo Bill) picked out of it in white.

Once we were seated, Joel called my attention to the oxblood-coloured faux-leather wall coverings, framed pictures of old French cowboy comics and, lurking on a nearby ledge, a wooden bust of Wild Bill Hickok (or possibly Buffalo Bill), who appeared to be earwigging the conversation of some rather voluble Senegalese.

Unwilling to eat actual buffalo in the eponymous establishment (bison was on the menu but it would have been like choking down a slug on a lettuce leaf in the Slug and Lettuce), I opted instead for an inoffensive bit of grilled chicken and some frites. Joel had some salmon he claimed was perfectly tasty – my chicken was as tough as an insufficiently chewed moccasin, but still: what was I expecting? Along with a big bottle avec gaz the bill came to €29.60 (service compris), and we strode out into rue de Courcelles if not exactly replete, at any rate no longer famished.

Then the trouble began. A simple mental transposition was all that was required for grills to become girls, and girls to metamorphose into gals. On we tramped – turning into the Champs-Élysées and then the gourmandising Avenue Winston Churchill – but for me the gold-leafed magnificence of the Grand and Petit Palais were nought but a blur, and even the reappearance of the Seine failed to register. All I could think of – if you can call it cogitating – was: “Round-the-outside-’round-the-outside-’round-the-outside …” Over and over again, a demented, humped and woolly buffalo of an earworm that rampaged around my head. If I ever join Malcolm up in heaven, I’ll make sure I pay more attention to what he says over lunch. Of course, if we’re in the big fire there’ll be no chitchat as we get cosmically overcooked.

At the time of Diana Spencer’s funeral in 1997, I remember writing this: “When the corpse of a 36-year-old woman is dragged around town on a cart you have to acknowledge something strange is going on . . .” My concern was to consider the death-drag as an example of how London acted as a stage set upon which collective fantasies of intimacy with power were being played out. Sixteen years on, the sentence requires only minor adaptation to establish the necessary degree of anthropological estrangement from the funeral of Margaret Thatcher.

With Spencer’s funeral, the cortège travelled in a complete revolution – Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey, via Trafalgar Square, before heading north for her island interment at Althorp. This death-drag allowed for her corpse symbolically to visit sites of pleasure (the Royal Parks) and power (the Palace of Westminster), while its circular form symbolised her feminine mystique. With Thatcher the death-drag was linear – even phallic – a straightforward spear-chuck from the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in the bowels of parliament to St Paul’s.

Thus Thatcher’s corpse took the journey made by living English monarchs when, upon accession, they were required to meet with the aldermen of the City of London and renew its charter. It was decanted into St Clement Danes, before being hauled on by a fresh team of warriors. I say “warriors” advisedly: the key thing about Thatcher’s death-drag was that while it connected temporal power (parliament), with Mammon (the City), and this connection was sanctified by men wearing dresses (the high priests), the set-dressing projected an image of a fallen warrior queen (think Boudicca). Thatcher was said to have sanctioned this route, which allowed her body to draw sustenance for the afterlife from the bronze imago of Churchill and the stone one of Nelson. The crowds who turned out to line the route of the death-drag were – compared with those who witnessed the Spencer charade – sparse. But in both cases the numbers were far lower than the intense pre-mediatisation of the event would’ve led one to expect. In part this has to be a function of the positive feedback loop embodied in mass behaviour: a crowd increasingly stays away the more it is told that greater numbers are anticipated. But the failure of people to turn up for Thatcher’s funeral also betokens – or so I like to think – a certain credulousness about the event itself. Intuitively, people grasped that Thatcher’s interment had very little to do with Thatcher or her “legacy”, and everything to do with the parlous state of representative democracy.

Those who did line the route and who applauded – and even cheered – the removal of the boxed corpse from the Temple of the Sky God (an astonishingly infra dig performance for such ardent Churchillians, many of whom, surely, would’ve been aware of the universal hush that attended his death-drag), were as deluded as those who turned their backs on the procession. Their madness was to take the spectacle at face value; in Freudian terms, they saw only its manifest content and were blind to its latent meaning. I would go further – but then I always do – Thatcherites and anti-Thatcherites were co-opted into a fantasy of historical agency, in which their support or lack of it was integral to the sanctifying of the state’s monopoly on violence.

Thatcher’s mystique – contra that of Diana – rested entirely on her deployment, when in office, of internal repression – directed against NUM picket lines, the IRA, poll tax rioters etc – and external violence – primarily enacted in the form of the murders of 323 Argentine sailors (mostly young conscripts). The military honours accorded Thatcher were the recognition by the current holders of the monopoly – the coalition government – of her perceived effectiveness in maintaining this, and their ardent desire that the crowd should see them, by association, as similarly effective monopolists. All so-called opposition MPs who colluded in the death-drag were complicit in this mass-hypnosis.

The truth is, of course, that Thatcher died a long time ago. She died when she left office. Then, when the Alzheimer’s began to cobweb her synapses, she died again. This triple-death of Thatcher underscores the dialectic that now achieves a new synthesis. The death-drag passed off without too much trouble, overseen by men (and the odd woman) armed with fully automatic rifles capable of firing 600 rounds a minute.