Will Self

The latest Madness of Crowds column:

My kids as a rule don’t say the cutest things, but the weirdest. As a result, I’ve learned to strip-mine ruthlessly their inchoate brains for ideas – which is why, presumably, they can’t wait to leave home. My youngest is still only ten, so he can’t get away, and I’m glad of that because he’s proved especially helpful in furnishing topics for this column. Yesterday morning, on our way to his school, as the bus grumbled along the Wandsworth Road, I asked him if he could come up with anything for this week’s Madness of Crowds. He thought for a second or so, then said: “What about all those shops that open knowing that they’re going to have to close down again?”

I knew what he was referring to right away – the melancholy sight of “closing-down sale” stickers blazoned across shop windows, behind which lurk uncoveted stock – but I cavilled at the way he put it. “I don’t think they know they’re going to have to close down,” I said. “On the contrary, I think each new shopkeeper believes devoutly in the likelihood of their success.”

There is, it seems to me, a great pathos in the lunacy of the wannabe shopkeeper. In essence, the condition of the retailer is the closest any human being gets to inhabiting the ecological niche of the Venus flytrap. Like the carnivorous plant, the human must remain immobile, seeking only through subterfuge – bright colours, teasing scents, pleasing goo – to lure the prey. Even once the meaty treats have snuck inside, there’s no guarantee that the poor mites will end up drained of their fiscal blood, because it takes so damn long to close those leaves/sales.

Whenever I’ve had a friend who’s opened a shop, I’ve observed the same insensibility creep over them as they realise that the only thing they’ve sold is themselves, downriver. Even before the collapse of the pyramid-selling scheme that was New Labour economic policy, chest-beating was already under way over the decline of the British high street. Previous governments have brought in dashing outsiders to advise on media, health and science but, as far as I know, Mary Prêt-à-Portas is the first retail guru to go to Westminster for a song (or possibly a fat consultancy fee).

Prêt-à-Portas’s conclusions were deliciously loopy: in a retail environment in which a third of businesses were “failing or degenerating”, the solution was to appoint “town teams”; laws on market traders should be relaxed and parking charges cut. Put simply, the only way to prevent the madness that ensues with the crowd’s departure was to drag it back again.

The one thing Portas wouldn’t counsel – oh, no! – was a moratorium on ex-urban shopping centres. (Nuking the internet wasn’t tabled at all.) This is a bit like a consultant on hungry Venus flytraps recommending more insecticides. But you can hardly blame Prêt-à-Portas. This particular liquidation sale has been going on for a very long time.

After all, it was Napoleon who described the British as “une nation de boutiquiers” and, by the time we reach 1910, we have these prescient lines about them being penned:

Essentially their lives are failures, not the sharp and tragic failure of the labourer who gets out of work and starves, but a slow, chronic process of consecutive small losses, which may end if the individual is exceptionally fortunate in an impoverished death bed before actual bankruptcy or destitution supervenes. Their chances of ascendant means are less in their shops than in any lottery that was ever planned. The secular development of transit and communications has made the organisation of distributing businesses upon large and economical lines inevitable; except in the chaotic confusions of newly opened countries, the day when a man might earn an independent living by unskilled or practically unskilled retailing has gone for ever.

Step forward, HG Wells (The History of Mr Polly), on the money as ever. We’ve talked about cognitive dissonance – or psychosis-lite – in this column before but no condition warrants this designation more than that of the consumer who believes passionately in the knock-down prices afforded by “the secular development of transit and communications” and equally devoutly in the socially cohering charms of ye olde mercer. No condition, that is, except that of the ye new olde mercer himself (or herself), who sets sail against the wind of change with only a sheet of plate glass as a means of propulsion.

The latest Real meals column:

For those of us not so much bitterly disappointed by the Obama presidency as predictably disillusioned (I knew he’d gone to the dark side when he snuggled up big-time to the lokshen soup lobby), the GOP primaries present a somewhat ambivalent spectacle. On the we-like side there’s the spectacle of one clown after another performing political pratfalls, but on the we-no-like recto is inscribed the saddening truth that to win against any of the current contenders – Gingrich included – would be like beating a dolphin at table tennis: it’ll say nothing whatsoever about the incumbent’s record except that he can, at least, hold a bat.

From the Real Meals perspective, the most important Republican candidate for 2012 has already quit. That Herman Cain got as far as he did says everything you need to know about the extent to which American democracy – so-called – marches on its stomach. If only Cain had simply gone on warbling “Imagine there’s no pizza . . .” every time he was popped a question, then he’d still be in the race – pepperoni being far more important than a mere peccadillo. Yes, Americans love their pizza with a deep-pan and all-consuming 15-inch passion, and while the idea of an actor being president still seems absurd despite the fact that it’s happened, no such cheesy whiff attaches to the notion of a former pizza company executive tossing dough balls about the Oval Office.

Hell, it wouldn’t even need to be an exec; given the oven-baked circularity of the American Dream, a pizza delivery boy – or girl – would certainly fit the bill. If only they didn’t require that tedious qualification of being a US citizen born stateside, I’d encourage the young man who delivered my Domino’s pizza the other evening to run. Encountered on the doorstep, he was courteous, nimble-fingered and open when I asked him about his travails: he worked, he said, a 12-hour shift most days, but on Fridays and Saturdays it could be 14. When not delivering pizza, he was far from idle, but rather scrubbing down steely surfaces, buckling cardboard and performing all the other labours that contribute to his employer turning over $1.5bn worldwide, while he putters along on minimum wage.

I thanked him and carried the boxes downstairs. My 14-year-old and I had already had a run-in about the vexed question of the cheese-stuffed crust – a revolting embellishment that he insisted was only available on the large 13.5-inch pizza. His little brother was content with 11.5 inches of “original” pizza, and I had the same of Firenze (Ventricina salami, pepperoni and Peruvian roquito peppers on a thin crust base – although what the fuck this has to do with the city of Dante is beyond me).

“That, boys,” I announced, “was the first time I’ve ever ordered food online.” Stuffed Crust stared down at me from the peak of his contempt: “I know, Dad,” he sneered, “because you sat in front of the computer in those stupid reading glasses of yours looking like some mad professor as you goggled at the screen.” This may have been true – but as I pointed out to him: “There was just so much choice!” Yes, choice between equally unappetising-sounding dishes, because I’d get on my moped and ride a long, long way simply to avoid a Meatilicious (pepperoni, ham, chicken breast, smoked bacon rashers and Cumberland sausage), let alone a Mighty Meaty (go online if you want to check out all the dead swine heaped on this dough bier).

The boys made free with their carbs, but I found my Firenze distinctly cardboardy and instead began to fixate on the box it had arrived in – densely corrugated, bold and smelling sweetly of melted mozzarella and tomato purée. I took an experimental nibble and found to my surprise that the box tasted perfectly all right, its texture paradoxically less cardboardy than that which it had formerly enclosed. My sons looked on appalled as I ate, tearing off strips and dipping them in the garlicky goo that had come in a little pot embedded in its lid.

For those of us not so much disillusioned by the Obama presidency as revolted, the discovery that a Domino’s pizza box is as palatable as a Domino’s pizza points the way to a sustainable future, and with the current Mega Deal – 7 Days of Crazy Prices! – you can get any size box delivered for a mere £9.99. You don’t have to be Herman Cain to imagine there’s no pizza.

The latest Madness of Crowds column:

To Mortlake Cemetery for the funeral of an elderly acquaintance – it was only my second funeral in the past year or so and I was struck by the sparse turnout compared with the previous one, which had been for a considerably younger person. But then it’s difficult to reach a ripe old age without the windfalls having rotted away already, while the funerals of the young have at least this small compensation: they’re mostly pretty well attended, unless the deceased was especially loathsome.

A stroll through the cemetery grounds was the usual pathos parade: “Sadly Missed . . .”, “Much Loved . . .”, “Together at Last . . .” and so on. Then there were the graves themselves, which, in progression from the marmoreal splendour of the High Victorian – complete with columns, petrified laurel leaves and caryatids – to the post-war modernism of row after row of miniature Mies van der Rohes, reflected the evolving urbanity of their constructors.

To observe that cemeteries are the deathly analogues of the living cities within which they’re implanted is as trite as noting that the funerals of the old often aren’t that popular – still, on some days a plastic bag snared in park railings emanates tremendous profundity, while on others mortality itself is pretty, um, dull. That our town plans are shaded in with these greyfield sites is something we take so much for granted as to scarcely notice it: the train pulls away from a terminus built on top of a overcrowded catacomb and accelerates past the tightly packed headstones of inner-city graveyards; then, as we reach the leafy outskirts, we find the green swathes of garden necroburbia.

London, being a large and old city, displays this character very plainly: the inner boroughs, having filled up their allotted plots by the early 19th century, bought up tracts of open land further out and soon developed thriving cemeteries, which is why – to give just one example – St Pancras and Islington Cemetery is located between Finchley High Road and the North Circular. They order these matters better elsewhere: the Glasgow Necropolis looms over the living city like a Caledonian fantasy on a theme by Arnold Böcklin; while in the polymorphously perverse context of Los Angeles, an Elysium such as Forest Lawn Memorial-Park seems homely.

Clearly part of Americans’ Manifest Destiny is to plant corpses further west. Here, however, the fashion for cremation came about because of our right, tight little towns becoming overpopulated by cadavers. But there were still those pesky cremains to deal with and in due course our cities have become almost as cluttered with their containers. My father’s leftovers reside in a multi-storey columbarium, while my mother had to make do with a collective marker on Hampstead Heath that she shares with other Jewish people who died of cancer.

I say she had to make do – but I mean me and her other formerly nearest and dearest, because, while I bow to no man or woman in the militancy of my agnosticism, I still think the odds are pretty much stacked against a purgatory that consists in hanging around Hampstead Heath – or Mortlake for that matter. Which is where collective irrationality enters the picture: why should the biodegradable remains of human beings be lumped together in this fashion? Is it that having been a part of the crowd in life they cannot bear to experience a solitary afterlife?

Obviously not. No, our necropolises are the product of two irrational beliefs that synergise, eating up quality real estate. On the one hand we have the childlike conviction that the plains of heaven closely resemble the gardens of suburbia – right down to concrete wishing wells and dinky picket fences – while on the other we have the livings’ need to do everything, including “visiting” the dead, en masse. You see this in Scotland in particular, where on a Sunday afternoon cemeteries are packed out with relatives indulging in the al fresco housework of dusting headstones and rearranging floral displays.

I’m not quite so monstrous as to suggest that we require no ritualised remembrance or our dead, but need it be quite such a grim parody of our own quotidian existence? After all, there’s an awful lot of countryside crying out for bodies to be buried in it. I can readily imagine a shift in our ritual life that would see people six feet under areas of outstanding natural beauty, and their loved ones visiting on foot. English heritage indeed.