Will Self

It must have been a hippy-dippy-happy-hoppy fortnight round the David Icke household, what with Jimmy Savile being exposed as a paedophile. The Savile business has all the hallmarks of one of those “Who knew?!” moments (this to be exclaimed mockingly in the manner of Jeff Greene, Larry David’s roly-poly agent in Curb Your Enthusiasm). I mean to say: children’s TV presenter and confirmed bachelor who reveres his mummy and feels most comfy in loose-fitting sportive nylon turns out to be a kiddy-fiddler . . . Who’d’ve guessed it?!

Well, Icke for one, whose world view, aptly summarised as “New Age Conspiracism”, includes the tasty insight that many public figures are satanic paedophiles. Icke, a former TV presenter (although let’s not read anything into that), is rather better known for his contention that the human race is the result of a millennia-long breeding programme run by the Annunaki, a race of reptilian super-beings from the Draco constellation.

What the precise relation is between child sex-abusers sporting devil horns and extraterrestrial lizards I’m not in a position to divulge, not having waded through the reams of apodictic text that Icke has generated since his revelations of the early 1990s set him on the course from Grandstand presenter to godhead, via a stint as one of the Green Party’s speakers. (At one time he was touted as “the Greens’ Tony Blair”.)

Still, I’m not dredging up any of this Ickiness with a view to mocking the man or his beliefs – such dismissals, to my way of thinking, are mostly complacent, often revealing an equally credulous belief, on the part of those making  them, in their superior rationalism, seldom confirmed by anything they say, do, or think. No, what got me going on the Ickenield way was an encounter I had with Raj (not his real name, or implied ethnicity), who I often run into in the park where we’re to be found being exercised by our dogs. (I could, in an Ickeian fashion, enlarge on this: might it not be the case that human civilisation is a 200,000-year-old conspiratorial breeding programme organised by canine super-beings to create conditions in which intelligent apes with opposable thumbs will open tins of food for them and pick up their excreta?)

Raj is in his early 40s and a decade or so of hard-drug and alcohol abuse have knocked him about a bit – there are teeth missing and deep lines on his face where only a Beckettian septuagenarian should have them. Still, Raj has been clean and sober for years now – and by my standards highly selfless; because while he has fuck all himself, he works part-time as a carer for dementia sufferers. I know – just know – from the way he talks about his work that Raj is almost desperately caring. When I saw him the other morning he was upset because he’d had to take the day off due to a bad dental abscess; he was worried that whoever filled in for him might not be as . . . well, caring. All this, and because he’s waged he’s not eligible for free dental care, meaning that unless he lies on the form, the cost of the treatment will just about pauperise him.

Anyway, he was saying this and I was thinking: what a miserable world it is in which decent folk have to skulk about the system – I wish the entire coalition front bench could be struck down by a plague of gum boils, when Raj slipped in that he’d just dobbed up for a ticket to see David Icke’s gig at Wembley Arena. This, the culmination of a two-year promotional tour for his latest work: Human Race Get off Your Knees: the Lion Sleeps No More, during which Icke has been addressing enthusiastic crowds the world over and indulging them with his trademark Gladstonian rhetoric, speaking sometimes for eight hours non-stop.

As I examined Raj – with, dare I say it, the reptilian scales falling from my eyes – he went on to explain that he had all of Icke’s books at home and that the Leicester-born prophet of universal consciousness “spoke a great deal of sense”. And there you have it: I don’t believe in Icke for a second – but I do believe in Raj, fervently. And if great crowds of Raj-a-likes believe Icke speaks sense then it’s a mistake to dismiss their belief as mere ignorance and credulousness.

Even on the most cursory examination of Icke’s ideas I can see he’s doing something that the left in this country has abandoned: speaking truth unto power. There may be no conspiracy of satanic paedophiles bred by alien lizards but the way corporate entities and their capital flows undermine any possibility of real democracy in Britain, while all main political parties ignore it, has the lineaments of a conspiracy. Remember: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you, Jimmy.

The last thing you want to hear about is my bowels – I know that. In William Burroughs’s emetic classic, Naked Lunch, he has a riff wherein rampant bores escape from an asylum equipped with blowpipes and curare-tipped darts; these excolonial British civil servants paralyse their victims before subjecting them to tedious disquisitions on their own constipation – monologues that, Burroughs tells us, are “as intractable as the processes they describe”. So, none of that.

In fairness to me, having been diagnosed in May with that malingering bore’s catch-all “Irritable Bowel Syndrome” and placed on the highly restrictive low-FODMAP diet (see Real Meals passim), I think I’ve been comparatively restrained, managing to carry on writing about food pretty much as if I still ate normally – whatever that means. But now I feel I must share with you – dear dyspeptic readers – an exciting new culinary discovery: the WAGfree café, bakery and deli in Brixton Village.

Started up a couple of years ago by a newly diagnosed coeliac, David Scrace (crazy name – logical guy), this charming establishment caters to the colonically challenged with an extensive range of cakes, quiches, breads, tarts, buns, pies, pasta and even sausages – all free from so much as a micron of wheat and gluten.

We live in a provender-saturated culture – that’s the wholewheat truth. Brixton Village, one of the series of old shopping arcades that radiate out from Electric Avenue – used to be a curious mixture of the vibrant and the desultory. The pale-yellow-painted, three-storey-high passageways, concrete-arched and opaquely skylightened, are designated avenues – first through to sixth – and in times past they housed the odd greengrocer’s stall piled high with phallic yams and anfractuous okra. There were also butchers fortified by glistening ramparts of pigs’ trotters and cows’ feet; the chopped lilt of reggae, accompanied by a rhythm section of cleavers rising and falling, filled the saffron-scented air; while here and there were small shops flogging tea cosy hats and Bob Marley memorabilia.

These concerns are still there – but in the past decade there’s been an astonishing foodie infill. I wonder what Walter Benjamin – whose Arcades Project, the ur-text of modern psychogeography, took its inspiration from Parisian shopping arcades of the same era – would make of it all. Outside, buddleia still thrusts from the brickwork of the railway viaduct, while old Afro-Caribbean women trundle pantechnicon-sized shopping trolleys past clamorous nail bars. But inside the Village, beneath the hanging banners of national flags throng Lab G (Laboratorio Artigianale del Buon Gelato), Etta’s Seafood Kitchen, MTK African Restaurant, Honest Burgers, and French & Grace (home of the Über Wrap) – to name only those within a waddle of each other.

It would be fair enough to dismiss the WAGfree café as just another cavity in the bourgeois psyche impacted with eatables but for those of us who – should we eat wheat or gluten – bloat up Montgolfier stylee, then hover about the house propelled by our own flatus, Scrace’s place is a veritable oasis. His marketing mantra is: “It’s gluten-free but it doesn’t taste gluten-free. We bake things that are great to eat, not poor imitations of things you can’t eat.” This begs all sorts of philosophical questions – for does not everyone eat poor imitations of things they cannot eat: the shadows of the pure nutritious forms being carried past the cave mouth?

But let us nibble – not quibble: David told me proudly that the wheat- and gluten-intolerant flock from miles around to sample his sweetmeats – and having over the subsequent week polished off a trio of his mini quiches, a strawberry tart, the aforementioned sausage and quite a lot of bread, I can only say that they’ve got the right idea. I make no absolute promises on this matter but I hope that having boomed the WAGfree café in this column two things will happen: even those who can revel in wheat and make free with gluten will give it a try; and having disburdened myself I won’t feel the need for at least another five months to bore you with my intolerances. Frankly, I’m intolerant of my own intolerances (which also make me distinctly intolerant), so what they do to you out there in normal land I shudder to think.

Finally: as an added bonus, the clientele of the WAGfree café – so far as I can tell – does not include any wives or girlfriends of Premier League footballers . . . yet. Result, as fried potato supremo Gary Lineker probably wouldn’t say.

You don’t need to know this – but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio. On a good night I’ll push the frail barque of my psyche off into the waters of Lethe accompanied by the midnight newsreader – on a bad one it’s the shipping forecast. Somewhere in between the two lies Book of the Week, which goes out at 12.30am on Radio 4. I try to give this programme a swerve – my main occupation is writing books, and listening to other people’s isn’t that relaxing; it’s a bit like a performing seal trying to catch 40 winks while watching another seal . . . perform.

Schadenfreude lies at the root of this; I am, shameful to relate, lulled by news of riotous disturbances in distant lands. A baying mob attacking the US embassy in Cairo? Yawn. Crazed Chinese patriots torching Japanese car showrooms in Beijing? My eyelids droop. Machete-wielding provocateurs rampaging through Kenyan villages? Zzzzz. But a few weeks ago, when I found myself inadvertently listening to the adaptation of Paul Auster’s Winter Journal, I came viciously into wakefulness. Auster’s memoir employs the second-person singular, so that the saccharine and self-indulgent observations about his own life are addressed to . . . you. You went to Paris, you slept with a prostitute, you sat up all night drinking whisky.

What on earth could have persuaded Auster to so dramatise his relationship with his younger selves if not a spurious belief that we, his auditors, would share in his doubly reflexive self-self-indulgence? Still, I didn’t let it trouble me too much – or, rather, for the next few nights my timing was better and I returned to the more soporific go-round of destruction, hysteria and rapine. Then: another Book of the Week wheedled into my cochlea, Salman Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton; another series of highly subjective recollections, this time treating of their author in the third person. Thus: he had a miserable time at public school, he underwent the miserable confinements of the safe houses following the fatwa and latterly he canoodled with Madonna at the Vanity Fair party.

Two grandish old literary men does not a crowd make – and yet there did seem something telling about this unwillingness on the part of Auster and Rushdie to own up to their own singularity. I don’t doubt that Rushdie’s explanation for fashioning a third person out of himself relates to the extreme psychological effects of living under an alias for a decade, but as Pankaj Mishra pointed out in his review of Joseph Anton for the Guardian, Rushdie’s inclination to elide the personal with the geopolitical results in a curiously binary view of the world-historical events he has been caught up in. While on the one side there’s the good crowd: Anton/Rushdie, Madonna, Tony Blair et al – all those individuals who unequivocally support the right to unfettered speech and publication; on the other is the great mass of Islamofascistic loonies, who, when not burning copies of The Satanic Verses or cutting off their womenfolk’s clitorises, are plotting the terrorist acts against the west that he so presciently foresaw.

Mishra is at pains to point out that not for a second does he endorse in any way, shape or form the fatwa against Rushdie, or any of the other manifestations of extremist political Islam that have blighted the past quarter century – and I concur wholeheartedly with this. However, what I think concerns us both is that a Manichean approach to these events results in the lumping together of many different crowds into a singular mass.

To take the violent demonstrations over the past few weeks; the attacks on embassies and other concerns in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere may have been remotely triggered by the bowdlerised anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims, but their proximate causes are to be found in very different local cocktails of corruption, sectarianism and deprivation. These are people for whom freedom of speech is besides the point – for such is their benighted condition, they have not even the ability to speak but can only scream with frustration.

Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals – as Marx averred – is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he. I prefer to adapt Stephen Dedalus’s maxim, and rather than seeing history as a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake, I choose to regard it as a sedative susurration.