Will Self

I’ve always found George Gordon (Lord Byron) to be the most proximate of those literary and historical figures whose towering eminence and temporal removal should, by rights, place them at a distance. Nowhere does he seem closer to us than in his letters; take this example, penned on 30 August 1811 to his half-sister and half-lover, Augusta Leigh:

Newstead Abbey
My Dear Augusta, – I don’t know what
Scrope Davies meant by telling you I liked
children, I abominate the sight of them so
much that I have always had the greatest
respect for the character of Herod, But, as
my house here is large enough for us all,
and there is a coaching inn in the vicinity,
where, in a backroom – well appointed,
with woodblock floors and gaily painted
walls – they serve fried potatoes, beef
patties clasped in buns, and sweet
carbonated sherbert drinks, I daresay
we shall be able to abandon your whelps
sufficiently so that we might discover the
leisure in which to fashion more . . .

Naturally, this passage occurred to me as I stood on the woodblock floor of a gaily painted branch of Byron, a burger chain that is expanding with mushroom alacrity to rival other posh kiddie-nosh purveyors such as GBK (Gourmet Burger Kitchen) and Haché. It seemed to me self-evident that Byron – which now has 31 outlets, the bulk of them in London’s bourgeois ghettos, but with outliers in Cambridge, Oxford and the Bluewater shopping mall – must have been named after the scandalous peer, but when I taxed the waiter, he denied it and gave me some cockamamie tale about the name being derived from a Middle English expression meaning “from the cow shed”. As soon as I was home I reached for the OED and discovered neither an adjectival form of “byre”, nor anything in between.

True, Byron the burger joint bears little formal resemblance to either the author of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and She Walks in Beauty, or to those lapidary works themselves, being pretty much a standard example of the stripped-down functionalism school of contemporary restaurant design: the aforementioned woodblock floors, some padded vinyl, paintstriped walls in cassata colours, metal-legged stacking chairs, exposed ventilation ducts, and so on and so forth … You could dish up anything in these surroundings to early 21st-century iPeople and they’d fork it down. I’ve seen long lines snaking from the doors of Byrons all over town, and boxed my own ears with frustration at the evidence of such mass credulousness.

Because there’s nothing that great about Byron’s burgers – they’ve simply hit on another way of flogging the same old dead cow. This gastro-fast-food-mash-up isn’t new: burger joints of the tony type – such as the Great American Disaster and the original Hard Rock Café – sprung up alongside the ubiquitous Wimpy Bars in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

No, what has been well done will be well done again, and there’s nothing new under the bun. But while I may have come to Byron to scoff byronically rather than scoff, um, Byronically (if you’ll forgive this neologism), I ended up being rather charmed. Why? Well, because of the human rather than the bovine element. I’m sure that when the herd are in, the staff are just as fraught as any minimum-wage-and-tips McJobbers, but we – the whelps and I – were dining in the late afternoon, and the gaff was fairly empty. So, maximum attentiveness from the cheery young servitors: they were highly responsive to my tedious intolerances, ensuring that the garlic-tainted dressing for my lamb skinny burger came in a separate dish, and when Da Boyz’ burgers were wrongly caparisoned in bacon, they swiftly exchanged them.

It made all the difference. Despite the implicit tension of being served takeaway food at sit-down prices, I began to relax into our booth and wasn’t even riled when, as the witching hour approached, they applied the dimmer switch so that the ambience “ … mellow’d to that tender light/Which heaven to gaudy day denies”. I’ve no idea why restaurants feel it necessary to do this. I suppose for the clear-eyed and youthful it induces a cosy intimacy, but for those of us already grimly anticipating the ultimate dying of the light it seems like an unnecessary trailer. I’d probably feel differently if I was “a mind at peace with all below”, but at least I’m a generous tipper.

As the medieval astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Square strikes the hour, a crowd of tourists duck and crane to capture its face in the viewfinders of their digital cameras and on the screens of their mobile phones. The crowd is so large that those in front go down on their knees in order to afford those behind them a clearer shot.

Should the massed photographers choose, they could come back on the hour, every hour, until they get the shot they desire; or, alternatively, they could buy a professionally taken photograph in a nearby shop, or even download a perfect image from the internet. But no: they must have their own work of art, in this age of mechanical reproduction, and so they clutter up the cobbles. Skirting the edge of throng, I observe snidely to my Czech companion, “One of them is undoubtedly taking the best ever photograph of the clock” and she snorts snidely in turn.

When I was a child, in the 1970s, we already thought Peak Photograph had been attained – if, by this, it is taken to mean a state of affairs in which the amount of imagery produced was in excess of our capacity to experience it meaningfully. I’m not talking here about John Berger’s decontextualisation-through-reproduction of artworks, but of a far more profound loss of engagement: the world itself was being emulsified by so many exposures, and so losing whatever haptic quality it once possessed. Instead of touching tree bark, or crumbling earth between our fingers, this sense was being gratified by the toggles, lenses and grips of cameras; while our once wondrous viewing of exotica had already become synonymous with tedium – a social ritual that lives on in its computer-programmed form as the slide show.

That was in the Instamatic age: the modish cartridge film system that allowed for easy aiming, snapping and reloading. But then each new photographic technology has seemed to privilege facility rather more than fidelity. The box Brownie was the Instamatic of the 1900s, bringing within reach of ordinary people a capability that previously only belonged to the exalted: that of representation. In his fine book The Discovery of France, Graham Robb notes that in the albums of the late-19th-century French peasantry there are no photographs of children; it was pointless to expend so much time and money on an individual that might – given the death rate – prove more evanescent than its depiction.

Now we have the complete inversion of this, and from our standpoint the short trip to the developer’s seems an insufferable trek, yet it’s been a scant decade-and-a-half since this was the way. Our attitude to photographic images has also transmogrified; instead of being a form of recording, they have become incorporated into our visual field: we are all cameras now, with our shutters open, passive, recording not thinking.

It won’t be too long before all those oval-framed sepia scraps have finally mouldered away and there will be no rummaging through shoeboxes in junk shops for painfully posed photographs of the 1923 works outing to Pontypridd. But up there in the cloud, the crowd will continue to multiply without end. So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.

What should we do about this triumph of trompe-l’oeil; the blotting-out of the real by a blizzard of its selves? Well, to begin with, let’s stop skirting the crowd photographing the astronomical clock. Plunge right in! Interpose yourself between the lenses and their object! It doesn’t matter any more! Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity. Amateur photographers may be disregarded – most professional ones outright shunned. After all, while it may be true that a large number of monkeys typing concertedly could probably come up with this column in year or two, any of you reading it could probably take most of the photographs in this magazine, given a couple of hours.

As we walked on through the narrow, winding streets of Prague, I explained all of this to my companion and she laughed bitterly but didn’t demur. It could’ve been because she was steeped in that peculiarly Czech sense of the visual world as a shadowplay (one that has given rise to an unrivalled culture of theatrical puppetry); or perhaps it was simply because she herself was an unhappy pro snapper.