Will Self

People say social media are enormously important. Yes they do. Presumably they tweet this sort of thing to one another: “Social media are enormously important because they create new virtual communities that offer all the advantages of propinquity without the drawbacks of phys prxmty.” I say “presumably” because I’ve never actually tweeted myself, so I don’t know if they compose their pithy 140 character apothegms intuitively – or aim for an approximate count then abbreviate as above. In the giddy months when Twitter was trilling up and up to its current state of cacophonous ubiquity, I was asked on a radio panel show if I’d ever consider tweeting and replied that the only circumstances under which I could imagine doing such a thing would be if a songbird flew into my mouth.

Nowadays, I’m not feeling so secure on the matter. A friend who works in publishing told me recently that use of social media is now part of her regular job assessment; and furthermore, claimed that in 10 years no one would be able to have her sort of career if they couldn’t tweet. It does seem surpassing strange to me that an ability to discover, assay then disseminate 140,000-word texts should be predicated on the broadcasting of 140 character slogans – but then what do I know? I wasn’t even aware that F Day had been reached on 13 February this year – hell, I didn’t even know what F Day was. My next door neighbour filled me in: “F Day is when the number of Farmville players in the west officially exceeded the number of actual farmers.”

But when will Peak Farmville occur? This being the point at which so many people are engaged in playing Farmville, Angry Birds and all the other little time-wasters embedded in social media sites, that there’s no one left to produce the food necessary to keep them alive. And if Peak Farmville, why not Peak Twitter? Apparently the tweets currently posted on the Twitter site each day could fill 8,721 copies of War and Peace.

Twitter seems to be a way of getting together with people and showing off, or having a good old gossip. On Twitter some tweet streams are open-access, others are confined to followers, still more are mere birdbaths sipped on by a pair. An adept twitterer can shift between all these conversations, scanning the tweet deck as a socialite of old might’ve worked the room – dropping in on this colloquy, passing by that chronic bore, peering over this obstructive and insignificant shoulder to see if anyone more important is in the offing.

I know all this because I’ve been talked through the practice and considered it anthropologically, as Mauss did the sexual goings-on of the Trobriand islanders. Thus all the things that happen in the messy world of physical propinquity do end up – albeit distorted – taking place in the realms of social media: people buddy-up, seduce, bully and ostracise; the Twittersphere fuses and fissions like a murmuration of birds hovering over the tidal flats of our culture.

Is all this human twittering in any meaningful sense crazy? Not, I’d argue, if you see it for what it is – but if it’s considered to be an advance of some kind in the sphere of human relatedness, that has to be nuts. I spent a great deal of the 1970s avoiding bores with slide carousels who wanted their holiday slides writ large on suburban walls – why on earth would I want to reacquaint myself with such tedium in the form of Facebook’s petabytes of snapshots? I think it was the anthropologist Robin Dunbar – one of the proponents of the “social mind” conception of human cognitive evolution – who theorised that language developed as an outgrowth of the group cohesion that other great apes cement by picking parasites from each other’s fur.

I always find parties, dinners and meetings go with a certain swing if I visualise all the attendees naked and nit-combing one another . . . The other day my wife, who has a long tail of Twitter followers, looked up from her laptop to say that she’d been tweeted by a man who asked whether I might be prepared to engage with my followers on Twitter a bit more directly, rather than palming them off with automatic tweets generated by my website, to which the only possible response is, Sorry, I’m fully occupied visualising naked furry humans grunting – oh, and imagining what it would be like to have a live songbird in my mouth.

Will Self’s latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

I remember about half a decade ago being on a metro in Barcelona, rattling out through the suburbs towards some beachfront resort, and a young man getting on with a life-size puppet of Madonna that he proceeded to dance with – her stuffed legs were tied to his live ones, her insensate hands clasped in his feeling ones. I can’t recall which Madonna record was playing on his beatbox but it was big that year. I thought the performance exquisite and witty but then I was in touristic mode while the other passengers were commuters. I dobbed up a two-euro coin – they sat there stony-faced.

This came back to me over lunch the other day: I sat there stonily facing a strip of perforated steel sheeting wrapped around a pillar while on a flat-screen monitor Madonna cavorted in a leotard. She did the splits, she gyrated, she smarmed but mostly she thrashed on the floor simulating the spasms of sexual ecstasy. About me in the university canteen there were many modular table-and-chair units fully occupied by young women in hijabs but none of them paid any attention to this carry-on; it occurred to me that it was me – and me alone – who was the proverbial picture in the attic, sicklied o’er with the malaise of prudery and age.

I could see the future: me, lashed into a tartan rug in some underfunded care home of the 2040s, a bowl of soylent green cooling by my paralysed elbow, and as my palsied eyelids drooped for the last time, flickering 3D TV images of Madonna’s perfect ass tormenting me unto death . . . The dying Oscar had said of the garish wallpaper in his Rive Gauche hotel room: “Sooner or later one of us will have to go.” But it’s always the wallpapers and Madonnas of the world that stay the course. It was enough to put a man off his stir-fried chickpeas and vegetables with plum sauce, and would’ve done so were it not that the food was so damn tasty.

I’d approached the canteen with some trepidation on my first full day at work in over 20 years, as a professor at a London university – but having been given an office, a security pass and a computer log-in there seemed no alternative to going for the full institutional experience. I had vague memories of eating lunch in hall when I was at university: we paid for the food using a bizarre Oxonian currency of little pink tickets called – I think – battels, and sat at long oak tables under oil paintings of long-dead dons, while a few moribund ones occupied a dais at the far end. It was a pompous environment within which to eat the same sort of food that was dished up in the café round the corner: chips, axe-shaped bits of fried fish in breadcrumbs that you could’ve performed seppuku with, and baked beans.

As soon as I’d oriented myself with the local fast-food joints, I decamped – and didn’t sup at my college again until a few years ago when I ate at high table as the guest of the rector. The food was the same ancient slop but after dinner we got offered a silver box of snuff along with the port doing the rounds. I horned up a generous spoonful that thankfully obliterated the taste of the food, as well as getting me as high as an oriel window. Ah, well . . . but at my new university the menu – like the student body – is decidedly more polyglot. Roast pork, stuffing and apple sauce for £4.50; a salad “meal deal” with Glacéau mineral water for four quid – pizza and pasta options; baked potatoes piping hot from the Bakemaster Victorian bakery oven; potato, leek and watercress soup with a fat wedge of granary bread for two shitters . . . and then there were the stir-fries, which are wokked right in front of you by chefs that seemed happy enough in their work: when I failed to take the additional portion of vegetables to which I was entitled, they called me back.

As regular readers will know, lunch isn’t really my thing, but now I’ve embarked on a revved-up life of the mind I feel the need of it – what I’m not so sure I feel the need of is

Madonna and Timber Just-in-lake, but I suppose I’ll get used to them. Anything has to be better than “sconcing”, a tradition at my old college whereby anyone caught talking “shop” in hall had to drink three pints of beer in a single draft from a sconce – or giant cup. But then, come to think of it sconcing – like so much else in our coalition-led society – has become democratised. Now any student can chug-a-lug beer until she pukes, which is only fair. But a noodle bar has to be better for your noddle.

It’s often said contemptuously of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, that he has a degree in traffic management. In fact, his degree is in civil engineering and traffic management, but as the latter is almost always subsumed to the former, it’s impossible for us to know to what extent his expertise lies in designing and constructing roundabouts, and how much in assessing their capability for regulating traffic flows. Anyway, what’s wrong with traffic management?

It may well be that in his native village of Aradan in Semnan province, Ahmadinejad was exposed from an early age to traditional patterns of vehicular movement that rendered him sceptical of the sort of western models shoved down his throat when he reached the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran. I like to picture the future president inveighing against the systems of chicanes, speed bumps and traffic lights imposed to regulate Tehran’s turbulent traffic flows, and instead proposing a return to the principles enshrined in the layout of Aradan: no perceptible division between sidewalks and the roadbed, no signs, and the speed of all traffic only determined by drivers’ – whether of bullock carts or cars – consciousness of pedestrians.

If this hypothetical situation did occur, then Ahmadinejad would’ve been in sympathy with the work of the pioneering Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who inverted decades of baseless theory by doing away with signage and reintegrating the troubled world view of the average car driver with the saner one of the pedestrian. Monderman’s innovation was that it’s the very devices designed to protect pedestrians – standardised signs and markings – that have ended up imposing traffic on the social context. He realised that in a realm governed by statutory directives – Stop here! Wait! Go! – drivers will respond by obeying these signs and signals, while neglecting the wider world through which they barrel.

Anyone with the least experience of walking through city streets knows the truth of this: so preoccupied are car drivers by these cues that they are oblivious to what goes on around them. I often sneak up on cars when they’re stuck in jams and, employing skills long-honed in the pits of Formula 1 racetracks, remove all their wheels without the drivers noticing. How I laugh when the driver is left impotently revving! But more seriously the madness of this approach leads directly to the stop-go frustrations of drivers who are alienated from everyone around them. “Road rage” isn’t simply a condition afflicting these poor souls – it’s a chancre eating its way through the built environment and all who inhabit it.

About 40 years too late, one small portion of central London has adopted Monderman’s approach – Exhibition Road in the heart of the museum district of South Kensington. A year or so ago, I noticed that a new roadbed was being laid here that had no curbs, and that instead of the usual black macadam there was a snazzy terrazzo of granite setts devoid of any white lines. Unfortunately, the traffic managers of the Royal Borough have neglected some of the most important aspects of Monderman’s thesis – there are signs at the beginning of the road posting a speed limit of 20mph, and furthermore the zone of shared road space is bisected by the sign-heavy Brompton Road.

No wonder drivers and pedestrians are confused – and last month a pedestrian was knocked down and seriously injured by a slow-moving truck. Needless to say, local residents were quick to blame the Mondermanisation of Exhibition Road for this accident and call for further signage to promulgate a 5mph speed limit – but the truth is that it hasn’t been extensive enough: a proper “street for living” needs to be coextensive with either a sizeable district of a city, an entire town centre, or a whole village, so that drivers entering the area need to have psychologically reinforced the idea that they are no longer on the open road.

“He blew his mind out in a car / He didn’t notice that the lights had changed . . .” I like to think of this as a couplet that the young Mahmoud might have grooved to, wearing his trademark windbreaker. That his political drive seems to have been full-speed-ahead to crazy intolerance shouldn’t bituminise Monderman with the same brush.

The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

My old friend the writer and academic David Flusfeder and I arrived early at the Ebury Hotel in Canterbury for a dinner after a literary event at the University of Kent. It was the only table our Kentish colleagues had been able to find that wasn’t in a loved-up restaurant – this being the evening of 14 February. In my experience, Valentine’s Day dinners à deux are always an anticlimax. If you need a special anniversary meal to call attention to your mutual love, the chances are it’s already spent. The most passionate dinners, I’d argue, are in fact ante-climactic, because you’ve already made love before you’re handed the menu.

I digress – but I only wanted to set the scene: smallish provincial hotels, often family-run, are a staple ingredient of national life, and because of John Cleese and Connie Booth’s fine sitcom, the notion of dining in them has for decades now had a farcical glaze and a drizzling of outright contempt. When I was a child, my family had an ironic riff that pre-dated Fawlty Towers. Whenever we found ourselves entering the fusty Axminster-carpeted foyer of a hotel in Snoreminster, my mother would stage-whisper, “Sorry, sir, tea’s off, sir”, this being something that was once said to us in one such establishment, and which became for her – a transplanted American – a phrase emblematic of the untranslatable crapness of the British service industries.

Times change, and nowadays you’ll often find better service in Snoreminster than in the frenetic metropolises, but there remains the presumption as you cross the somnolent lobby that things may take a turn for the surly and incompetent worse. The trouble at the Ebury began after we’d scanned the dining room, not sighted our companions, and retreated to the reception desk, where a large golden tit of a bell reposed by the blotter-and-pen set. This being Valentine’s Day, the perky golden nipple of this bell was crying out for a tweak – but if that weren’t sufficient cause, there was also a sign taped to it: a Carrollian “Ring Me”. Anyway, I dinged the necessary, and a flustered, plumpish white rabbit in a striped waistcoat materialised.

He managed to contain his irritation and directed us to wait in a scary little bar full of aggressive black vinyl furniture. Then he rematerialised behind the bar and asked if we’d like a drink – I said I’d like a Virgin Mary and he snapped: “What’s that?” Emollient to a fault, David ventured: “It’s a Bloody Mary without the vodka,” whereupon the infuriated creature said, “What’s that?” Our fellow diners had pitched up by this stage and one began to itemise the ingredients of this outlandish beverage – but half-American as I am,
I couldn’t be arsed to pander to such rudeness, so snapped: “Just give me a Coke.”

The same sort of chilliness was encountered when we asked for nibbles, and the fellow pointed to a row of large mason jars full of nuts on the bar. Still, eventually we solicited drinks and got on with the dining experience. David’s argument was that the Ebury man was hard-pressed, had been dumped in it by colleagues, had to run the entire establishment himself etc – but we both knew the real reason: the bell that dinged for he.
I almost felt like having a word with the man, suggesting that if he didn’t want punters to ring the damn thing, he should remove it – or at least ditch the come-hither sign.

In fairness to the Ebury, from then on things went swimmingly. The food, courtesy of chef M Jean-Pierre Cabrol, was excellent, and although the dining room had that smallish-provincial-hotel ambience – heavy on the pile carpeting and overstuffed bourgeoisie – we had a thoroughly pleasant time. I wish I could say the same for the waiting staff. Whey-faced young women in black suits that would gladden the heart of the flintiest puritan served us with what to my mind appeared to be ill-suppressed fear. When I was the restaurant critic for the Observer, I’d often encounter such cowed behaviour, as I’d been recognised and the establishment was desperate for a good notice, but while not wishing to denigrate the reputation of this noble organ, I hardly think Real Meals has quite the same reach.

No, I suspect the White Rabbit may’ve metamorphosed into the Red Queen, and ensconced somewhere in the bowels of the hotel was shouting at all comers, “Off with her head!”