Will Self

Happy birthday to the hegemon! I’m sitting with Tony Lacey, my long-time publisher at Penguin – who was responsible for ushering a collection of these columns into electronic print – in Mishkin’s on the east side of . . . Covent Garden. It’s the Fourth of July and it was Tony’s idea that we celebrate my American heritage. Mishkin’s advertises itself as “a kind of Jewish deli with cocktails”, so presumably it isn’t named after the Christlike protagonist of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The plate-glass window at the front is stencilled with “gin” and “meatloaf”, which is about as implausible a culinary coupling as it’s possible to imagine.

The rest of the room is bare brickwork with old boards nailed up against it; some large booth seats surrounded by vinyl-covered banquettes and some smaller wooden ones. A zinc-topped bar is overseen by anglepoise lamps. Tony is drinking what looks like real lemonade out of a jam jar. “Whassat?” I ask him and he laughs, “It’s called a Will Skidelsky but why they’d want to name a lemonade drink after the books editor of the Observer is beyond me . . .” Darrell the waiter supplies the answer, but first, scanning the menu – salt beef, schmaltz herring, chicken liver, all that sorta mishegas – I ask him: “This is like a Jewish American deli experience, yeah?” He concedes that it is; “So,” I press on, “you’re telling me that my food is going to be touched and handled by actual Jews?”

To give Darrell credit, he doesn’t bat an eyelid, despite being only around five: “Um, no,” he says, “in fact I don’t think there’s a single Jewish person in the kitchen.” As for the lemonade drink, it turns out – natch – that bookman Skidelsky is a mucker of Mishkin’s owner, one Russell Norman, who also helms a number of other trendy eateries in central London, all of which – in their several ways – are deliciously, pungently, piquantly fake. Obviously I knew Mishkin’s was a put-up job the second I saw “gin” – my mother always used to maintain that there was no such thing as a Jewish alcoholic but while that may be an overstatement, the only liquor I can remember in Jewish restaurants was grotesquely sweet Israeli wine.

There was this and there was the odour when I walked in the door – insufficiently schmaltzy and old-mannish – and the decor, which was way too studied in its dishabille. Musso & Frank’s on Hollywood Boulevard in LA – which has to be, by reason of longevity alone, the quintessential example of the type Mishkin’s is aiming at – is a synthetic symphony of muted and smooth surfaces. Boho it is not. Then there’s the clientele, which should include a couple of tables surrounded by Walter Matthau/George Burns, Sunshine Boys types, a-kvetching and a-picking of their teeth.

While Darrell goes off to fetch me a Skidelsky, Tony and I recount our ailments. I have exciting news: the stomach ache I chronicled in Real Meals got worse until I ended up howling in bed with my colon in spasm. The croaker prescribed anti-spasmodic medication but after a long dark night of the soul on the web, I had to concede that I had a malaise with the disgusting appellation “irritable bowel syndrome”. I’d always assumed IBS was one of those catch-alls that malingerers battened on to as an excuse for their laziness and neurasthenia but now I had the damn thing myself, I was utterly convinced of its veracity.

So convinced, that that very morning I’d had an appointment with a dapper Scots dietician who instructed me in the virtuous properties of a low-Fodmap diet, which aims to reduce the intake of short-chain carbohydrates that irritate the bowel. It was love at first sight – as Joseph Heller would say – the first time I saw the low-Fodmap diet, I fell in love with it. It was so random: onions are out, vinegar is in; honey is bad, refined sugar is good – that I could see it would provide me with inexhaustible opportunities for being a fussy eater and so return me to the psychic arms of my long-dead but formerly doting Jewish mother.

So it turns out Mishkin’s is the perfect place for a Dependence Day lunch, and Darrell doesn’t mind as it takes me half an hour to order, flicking between the menu and my diet book. What a mensch (not, thankfully, of the Louise variety). As for the food, it’s fine but then that doesn’t matter much, it’s the authenticity of the experience that I crave.

Sitting in the chair at Smile, the fashionable Kings Road salon where I have had my hair sculpted by Keith Wainwright for the last six or seven years, I looked for too long into the abyss of the mirror in front of me, which – given that it was positioned in front of the mirror on the opposite side of the room – afforded me an unpleasant vision of infinite Wills, both rear and full-face. I looked at the scrawny neck, the Gautama ears and the praying mantis posture – but these I could cope with, I knew they were present, if unacknowledged aspects of my physicality. I even stared upon the juxtaposition between me and Keith with a certain equanimity: he is on the small side, I am freakishly large; so to look at him skipping about my semi-recumbent bulk, snipping away a hair here and a hair there, was akin to observing those birds that pick at the teeth of crocodiles.

Keith is a celebrated hairdresser – in a career stretching back to the 1960s he’s sheared ‘em all, including David Bowie at the spiky peak of his success. I delivered myself into his expert hands because I had at last, with almost preternatural stoicism, faced up to the fact that my hair was thinning at the temples. My old number four down the barber’s wasn’t hiding this enough – but Keith’s genius allowed him to seamlessly elide “balding” with “short hair”. He also said reassuring things to me (or at least I thought he did), of the form: “There’s no need to worry, you may recede at the sides, but you’ll be dead before it goes on top . . .”

And yet there it was, in the mirror, and all the infinity of other mirrors, right on the very apex of my skull, like some sinister new fontanelle, opening to herald my birth-into-death, a patch of bare scalp at least two inches across! I spluttered – Keith left off his deftness: “What is it?” he asked. I pointed to the mirror, “Look,” I said, “look at that, I’m losing it – and you said I wouldn’t!” Not so much a note as a full orchestra of infantile petulance had infiltrated my tone, and Keith, responding to this, grasped me by the shoulder and looked me full in the face: “I never said that,” he said forcefully, “I simply said that it would be a long while – if ever – before the sides and top met up. And anyway . . .” I may’ve been mistaken, but I think his grip on my shoulder tightened as his eyes narrowed and tone hardened, “ . . . what did you expect?”

I’ve treasured that remark ever since. What did I expect? I was 50 – my father’s pate was naked by my age, both my brothers had lost the bulk of their covering by their 30s, who was I to hang on, idiosyncratically, to some Rapunzel-like escape ladder of hair? But Keith’s “What did you expect?” has continued to shake the wobbly edifice of my denial ever since. George Orwell said, “By the age of 50 every man has the face they deserve”; and recently Martin Amis has pointed out that the mirror always lies, because once you hit 50 you deduct ten years from yourself and superimpose the younger you. Putting Orwell and Amis together seemed to indicate that everyone believes they deserve to be ten years younger.

Certainly, walking the streets of any British city you could be forgiven for thinking this. On our way to school the other morning my youngest said conversationally, “There’s a lot of mutton about nowadays,” and when, thinking he was referring to young sheep, I began to explain the expression “mutton dressed as lamb”, he said that this was exactly the sense in which he meant it. Ten is a little young to be making these distinctions, but the more curious phenomenon is how, throughout life, we move from an exaggerated perception of our own bodily quirks, to an occluded one; from maximising to minimising. In adolescence, pimples are a yard wide and gushing pus, chubby thighs are elephantine and hair is either too curly or too straight. But in our middling years we tip the other way on the fulcrum of delusion, and start believing that tight underwear makes us thin, or a well-knotted tie obviates a turkey-skin neck, or even that a few carefully arranged strands will hide a head like a billiard ball. Body dysmorphic disorder is a well-recognised mental illness but less acknowledged is the far more widespread phenomenon of clothes/hairdressing/make-up dysmorphic disorder (CHMDD). It took Dr Keith, with his devastating “What did you expect?” to tear the hairy veil from my eyes. Of course, it helps that this therapist is as bald as his patient soon will be.

I haven’t eaten a real meal in the past 10 days – if by “real” is implied a repast the consumption of which lies on the scale between “automatic” and “hearty”. Instead, each masticatory act has been chewed over in turn. Why? Because since that Saturday evening when I returned from Scotland on a Virgin train, I’ve had a grinding, stabbing, rumbling, bloating stomach ache. I’m not about to libel Richard Branson by suggesting that his on-board snacks are to blame – even though I doubt more overpriced or nauseating fare is served in the ninth circle of Hell – and as yet, I have no idea what’s wrong with me. I did go to the doctor last Friday but I was feeling a little better and he was demob happy – off to a holiday in Croatia – so after a cursory laying of hands on tender abdomen, he said that it wasn’t likely to be an ulcer as the pain associated with this malady was usually higher up.

Needless to say, within 24 hours, the pain had returned and, as if to avenge the NHS, it had relocated to my breastbone. It hasn’t let up since, so as things stand I’m not in a position to write about eating with any dispassion at all. But is this so unreal? I’ve had cause to note in this column before the situational woes of the restaurant critic – last year, I had something called a “dry socket” after a tooth extraction that put me right off my fodder for a month. I think it’s a truth that should be shoved down people’s throats more often that hunger is the best seasoning – most reviewers, by definition, are spoilt for choice and expense-account-funded; their general unwillingness to be pleased by anything that isn’t either novel or top notch is reflected in the pickiness of their plump readers. But deprive the lot of ’em of eats for 24 hours and they’d fall on half a KFC corncob from a bin in Salford Quays and devour it with … gusto.

By the same token, you never read a column by Fay Maschler, Adrian Gill or John Lanchester in which they contextualise the restaurant experience within their own internal biotic environment. “I would’ve enjoyed Les Trois Garçons in Kettering,” such a piece might begin, “were it not for the fact that I was farting like a dray horse; great, sulphurous bottom burps that radiated out from my table causing dismay and ultimately rebellion among my fellow diners.” Or: “The decor at the Obese Hamster in Witney is a teasing amalgam of the kitsch and the Bauhaus; in the ladies, they had a Cath Kidston basket for the toilet paper and – in my stall – a copy of Le Corbusier’s La Ville radieuse. I know this, because I spent a lot of time in there reading about how the city of the future was viewed in the past, due to a bout of diarrhoea.”

Or even: “I’d like to commend the waiter at Merchant’s in Norwich, who, with a certain spirited legerdemain, reacted swiftly to my vomiting into my empty dish before he could serve up the moules marinière by saying, ‘If sir doesn’t feel like the black truffle risotto after all, I’ll return it to kitchen,’ and whisking away the offending portion of last night’s rather rich dinner …”

No, these are not things that you ever read – any more than you see Gordon Ramsay on television, effing and blinding while he scrabbles to open a packet of Rennie – but why not? Wouldn’t this be a better world, with a healthier attitude towards food, if we all acknowledged that the act of eating is a bodily function just like any other? Instead, such is the lack of a bodily context for our daily bread that a dispassionate observer – a Martian, say – could be forgiven if it were to see us as ethereal spirits, floating on white clouds, strumming harps and somehow still managing to sup the ambrosia with our long-handled silver spoons.

Back in the days when I compulsively consumed science-fiction stories – and Smash instant mashed potato was advertised on the TV by crap, animated robot puppets – I remember reading one in which, in the future, if you had anything terminally wrong with your body, your head was simply detached and housed in a life-support system. If I remember rightly, the tale began in this sclerotic vein, with one of these heads saying: “This morning I had eight dozen oysters and six bottles of Chablis for breakfast – and then they emptied the bucket.” Disgusting, possibly – but from the angle I’m currently in (doubled over the keyboard with stomach cramps), emptying the bucket seems like a bloody good idea.