Will Self

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

Saturday Live is an innocuous enough Radio 4 magazine programme that goes out – duh! – live on Saturday mornings. I listen to it in a desultory fashion. At times, it seems heart-warming, yet it can also be not only unbearably winsome but a perfect exemplar of a certain we’re-cosy-but-sort-of-liberal-and-compassionate strain in the self-identification of the British bourgeoisie.

It was originally presented by the late John Peel under the still more winsome title Home Truths. Fi Glover then took the mic for some years and now the Reverend Richard Coles, ex-pop star and current Anglican vicar, is at the helm. I’ve been a guest on the show but rather like Samson at the hair salon, I could feel the will-to-contrariness draining out of me as I chit-chatted away with the cuddly Glover. It’s not a mistake I’ll make again – that way the ossification of acceptability lies. So, imagine my surprise when I snapped on the radio to hear Alastair Campbell in conversation with Coles. I say surprise, but I mean a mixture of admiration . . . and disgust.

I’m not so out of touch that I haven’t been aware of Campbell’s slow, steady and – as befits an erstwhile political strategist – clever campaign of personal rehabilitation, but to my way of thinking the Saturday Live gig was a masterstroke. I didn’t listen for long because, to me, Campbell will – until he makes a sincere and public apology – always be the man responsible for dishonestly making the case for a vile, unnecessary and exterminatory foreign war. He will also remain with the bloody taint of David Kelly’s death in the region of his hands, until the full truth surrounding the “outing” of the weapons expert’s name is known.

As for his work with the first two Blair governments, contrary to his self-estimation of the “good” he did, what many of us who had a glancing acquaintance with Campbell at this time remember him for is a propensity for spittle-flecking abuse. I wouldn’t dream of shaking hands with an unrepentant Campbell – indeed, I’d go further, and, paraphrasing the character of Boris in Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, I wouldn’t waste my own spittle on Campbell, believing it to be too precious a fluid for the likes of him.

Clearly that’s not how others in the media feel: they give Campbell plenty of space to peddle his so-called novels, to expatiate on his love of footy and to beat his manly – yet sensitive – chest on the subject of his battle with depression/alcoholism. In yet another cri de coeur following the death of his friend the pollster Philip Gould, Campbell set out the things he hoped he would be remembered for in life (conspicuous by their absence were the ones for which he actually will) and high on the list was his sterling work to reduce the stigma of mental illness.

I suspect that whether consciously or not, Campbell seeks to encourage the notion that he is “mad” – or, at any rate, significantly disturbed. Why? Because this means that without him ever needing to make the argument, any accusation that he is culpable for some of the murky doings he was involved with becomes weakened; if he was “mad” then, QED, he cannot be “bad”. It’s a brilliantly simple idea.

Contrast this with the thinking of his former political master, “Call Me Tony” Blair. Being a believer and knowing himself to be culpable, Blair has entered the Catholic Church, presumably with a view to cancelling out Protestant predestination and in the hope that absolution will be forthcoming. Even I, who bow to no one in my revulsion from Blair, cannot help but feel sympathy: his easyJetting to Rome is a prima facie admission of responsibility, whereas Alastair “We Don’t Do God” Campbell has given the whole morality thing a swerve. And what’s the upshot? Blair cannot even do a UK book tour for fear of his safety, while his former minion is free to troll from television to radio studio pushing his product.

That mental illness – in all its multifariousness – can be said to vitiate the exercise of free will that we believe intrinsic to moral responsibility is not at issue here. But what seems bizarre – and evidence, surely, of a kind of woolly groupthink bordering on lunacy – is that individuals can self-diagnose such a diminution. I suggest that Campbell produce a letter from his shrink if he wants to be let off this hook, rather than going to “Confessor” Coles to get cosily shriven.

The latest Real meals column from the New Statesman:

Now I know what a susceptor is, I’d like one put inside George Osborne’s pants – actually, I wouldn’t mind having one put inside my own pants, or indeed just about everyone’s pants on this godforsaken Siberian island of ours. A susceptor, for those of you not up to speed on the wonders of dielectric heating applied to cooking technology, is a thin layer of aluminium either seamed through the packaging of microwaveable foods, or inside the small plastic or paper trays they reside on. The metal absorbs infrared energy efficiently and then radiates it inwards towards the food (or the chancellor’s genitals, pubic area and possibly lower belly, depending on whether he’s a briefs or boxers sort of a chap).

With the use of susceptors, microwave ovens – which cook at relatively low temperatures – can do all sorts of clever things such as activating the oil necessary to pop popcorn, or possibly stimulating cold fish like Osborne. Look, I’m not suggesting that we actually want a satyromane in charge of the British economy, but I do think the Oik – as I believe the St Paul’s School old boy is known to his Old Etonian Tory colleagues – could do with a little gingering up. Last September, when yet again those tedious allegations of him snorting cocaine with a dominatrix back in the naughty 1990s resurfaced, we were told by the prime minister’s spokesman, “the chancellor is 100 per cent focused on the economy”.

Personally, it’s this that I hold against Osborne – after all, who among us can say that we haven’t snorted the occasional “big fat line” offered us by a dominatrix? The Archbishop of Canterbury has done it with Pope Benedict – Tony Blair did it with Rupert Murdoch; we all, no matter how pure and exalted, have a Mistress Pain somewhere in our closet.

No, it’s this focusing 100 per cent on the economy that’s causing all the trouble – what Georgie-boy needs to do is to take a load off, get out his reusable hessian shopping bag and boogie down to Sainsbury’s where he can pick up a whole series of excellent microwaveable meals-for-two for under a tenner. The other evening my very own Mistress Pain said to me, “What shall we have for supper?” and without more ado I did just that. The Sainsbury’s Indian banquet – yes, banquet! – for two comes in an attractive ministerial-style purple box with attached handle, and there are options of either chicken jalfrezi and chicken tikka masala (which I opted for), or a milder korma/masala version. As well as the two main dishes, there’s a generous container of pilau rice, a plain naan bread and four onion bhajis. This is a lot of food to microwave a container at a time but that’s not a problem because the bhajis and the naan have to be done in a conventional oven, so by juggling appliances and plates you can ensure it’s all piping hot when it limps the ten feet from counter top to tabletop.

Why, I hear you scream, are you banging on about this bloody microwaveable Indian meal!? The answer is simple: it’s all about the economy, dummy. My banquet was reduced to £7, so I was able to satisfy both the insatiable Mistress Pain and my own rather limper appetite for £3.50 a head. The food itself tastes damn good – no, let me rephrase that: this was the best Indian meal I’ve eaten in the past fucking year, and I include in that a state banquet in New Delhi at which I was seated next to the president, and she popped balls of gold-leaf-encrusted saffron rice into my mouth with her own fair hands. Indeed, compared with the average Indian sit-down – let alone takeaway – Sainsbury’s wins hands-down on cost and quality.

I expect Sainsbury’s chicken is sourced no more or less ethically than the fowls cooked up by my local balti house – but it tasted more succulent to me. The sauces of the main dishes were also way less ghee-y than I’m accustomed to – and all the better for it. The onion bhajis were the hot bollocks – Osborne, take note – while the pilau rice was cooked so perfectly that I could comb the grains into perfect regularity with the tines of my fork.

As for the Sainsbury’s naan, well, as a belated anniversary tribute to the Scots Bard I can only observe, A naan’s a naan for a’that. If only Osborne understood this, but I’m afraid for him it isn’t the case that: “The rank is but the guinea’s stamp/The Man’s the gowd for a’ that…” Rather it’s the gowd that counts.

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

I once asked the late JG Ballard if he’d been offered an honour. He told me he had – a KCBE, or something of that stripe – but when he queried whether he’d be able to style himself Commander Ballard, the gong wonk (gonk?) said no, and so he refused it.

The other day I heard a commentator on the radio saying that perhaps every time the newly stripped Fred Goodwin had to book a restaurant table and give his name as “Mr Goodwin” it would remind the disgraced RBS chairman of his own gross moral turpitude. Clearly, this sage – I believe it was “Sir” Digby Jones, late of the CBI and the last government – would rather that Goodwin was burning in a sulphurous pit for all eternity, but failing that, the very common torment of having to enunciate “Mr Goodwin” would have to do.

Personally, I doubt this speech act would be sufficient to unstopper a cascade of penitence – I cannot imagine that Fred – as I prefer to think of him in these PCMT (Post-Call-Me-Tony) times – has the conscience required to feel the pain of every single British taxpayer who continues to have to work in order to patch up the hole he shredded in his former money-factory’s balance sheet – oh, and pay for his pension as well.

The question raised by the Goodwin debacle is: why is it that people, en masse, go crazy for honours? The answer, surely, is hypnotism: a gong dangled in front of even the most clear-sighted individual sends them into a deep-time trance of reverence for the institutions and powers-that-be (and have always been, as they never tire of telling you). It doesn’t seem to matter who they’re handed out to, or for what, or indeed that the “British Empire” of which so many of them are members, companions, knights, baronesses and order-recipients now amounts to little more than a few fly-specks on the map. Postmistresses and panjandrums, journalists – who really should know how infra dig it is – and junk-bond traders: they all fall into the same trance.

That Lloyd George was spunking off honours on his buckers and cronies a century ago, and that this gushing continues unabated a century later, affects gongers, gongesses and the great un-gonged not one jot. Gong devaluation certainly won’t be the result of Fred’s ritual humiliation – on the contrary, such group-think histrionics produce exactly the opposite effect.

It’s quantitative easing that might well solve the vexed question of knighted, ennobled and otherwise honoured wanker-bankers as well – let’s give everyone a knighthood! True, it would be a bit like that scene in Spartacus, with lollipop lady after manicurist after call-centre operative rising to his or her feet and bellowing, “I’m Sir Fred Goodwin!”, “I’m Sir Fred Goodwin!”, but at least these absurd hunks of tin would become just that. (Of course, poor Liz Windsor’s arm might drop off with all that dubbing – someone will have to design a knighting machine along the lines of Margaret Atwood’s LongPen, the remote-signing device she invented so that she could honour purchases of her books at a distance with a few wiggles of a stylus on a computer screen.)

Defenders of the honours lunacy always point out that it isn’t only crony capitalists and political placemen and women who are cloaked in ermine and topped-off with balls. But the odd ennobled social worker is no match for those furious oxymorons: the Labour lords – surely paradoxes on a par with fascist humanitarians or vegan hammerhead sharks. Indeed, the willingness of quondam social democrats (let alone socialists) to take such titles tells you all you need to know about the English – and Scots, Welsh and Irish – vice of hypocrisy.

I have more sympathy for hereditary peers than I do for Prescott, Kinnock, Mandelson et al. At least they acquired their titles through good old-fashioned expropriation – or brewing – and the notion that we commoners exist in the sub-basements of their Downton Abbeys may be offensive, but it isn’t flat-out ridiculous.

Which brings us full-circle back round the M25 to J G Ballard. He was right, honours are all about how to style yourself, and the stripping of Fred’s knighthood will have no impact on his carefree ability to book a table at the most expensive restaurant in the land – that, clearly, is a matter of substance.

The latest Real meals column from the New Statesman:

“. . . they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas”

So writes Jorge Luis Borges in Tlön, Uqbar Orbis Tertius, in my – not especially humble – opinion, among the finest pieces of short fiction ever written. In conceiving of a world of philosophical idealists, for whom the persistence of objects in space and time is as preposterous as mysticism to Scotto-English empiricists, Borges gets close to explaining my response to the Lorelei, a pizzeria/coffee bar on Bateman Street in Soho, London.

I must’ve first eaten at the Lorelei in the early 1980s, and at that time we youthful students were all struck by the anachronistic air of the place: its Formica-topped tables, rush-bottomed chairs, oxblood-coloured vinyl banquettes and scuzzy lino floor were redolent of an earlier age, an age also enshrined in its Cimbali espresso machine and the sconces of its dim spotlights. As for the mural, it would be difficult to respond to this implausible creature as Heine did to his Lorelei: “There sits the most beautiful maiden/On high, so wondrous fair/With glittering gems she is laden/She combeth her golden hair.” For this one had pretty dun hair, beige skin and a grey tail for that matter – still, it could’ve been the lighting.

We ate at the Lorelei because it was cheap – very cheap. And the pizzas were … fine – not great, but acceptable. There was a small corkage fee and you brought your own rotgut. I never forgot about the Lorelei, but we are all gastropods and over the decades my stomach inched me off elsewhere. Then, about 10 years ago, I happened to detour along Bateman Street – a quiet backwater – and there she was, still beckoning from the bricky bluffs alongside La Capannina “Gentlemen’s Club” (another mysteriously long-lived establishment). I went in and the joint was exactly, uncannily the same – right down to the row of dusty rubber plants in the front window and the pile of 25kg flour bags on a chair by the door. As I sipped an espresso and smoked my pipe, I wondered if the Lorelei might be a sort of mystic portal, through which I could reach the fabled Tlön, so unaccountable was its persistence in space and time: after all, the rents round here are astronomical and most eateries have the life expectancy of subalterns on the Western Front.

At home I Googled the Lorelei, and found a woman writing about eating there in the 1960s and how it was unchanged since then apart from the loss of the jukebox, which had a great selection including Edith Piaf singing “La Vie en Boeuf-Sang”. I began to have weird thoughts: Might some little-read essay of Hazlitt’s – “On the Stagione”, perhaps – include observations of eating there in the early 1800s? Was the Lorelei a hangout of the Ivy Lane Club, one not immortalised by Boswell only because he objected to grated carrot dominating the side salad?

Anyway, for at least half a century the Lorelei has been doing its thing, so it seemed only just to take some boys there. Robert Graves said that as a child he was kissed in his pram by Swinburne, and that Swinburne had been kissed in his pram by Tennyson, and that Tennyson . . . well, you get the picture: I liked the idea of confronting these pizza-obsessed whelps – it’s pretty much all they’ll gnaw – with such an ancient lineage of Margheritas. Besides, where else in this world – or any other – can you read on a menu the enticing phrase “topped with prawn sauce”?

Needless to say, they found the Lorelei surpassingly weird. The youngest put his face in his hands within minutes of our arrival and moaned, “Well, this is depressing.” His older brother couldn’t quite credit the prices on the menu, which were in pence, saying, “How can it be so cheap?” It’s true that the prices had gone up in the 30-odd years since I first ate there, but a signature Lorelei pizza (sardines, mozzarella, tomatoes, anchovies, olives, oregano) will still only set you back 690p. I had a rigatoni matriciana for 600p and a side salad (still with Boswell’s hated grated) for 250p. For four the bill was a mere 3,233p – but how long can this go on? Il Padrone is, to be frank, getting on, and so to paraphrase Heine, “I know not what evermore grieves me,/What makes me sorrow so:/A tale of old times never leaves me,/A tale of pizza ago …”