Will Self

I meet Francis Kerline for lunch at the Terminus Nord, opposite the Gare du Nord in Paris. Francis, who is himself an accomplished writer, has been translating my books into French for 18 years now – and peerless work it is, too, taking my flocculent verbiage and shearing it into beautifully coiffed French. Back in the day, I always felt he looked at me much as Salieri does at the puerile and scatological Mozart in Amadeus: as if he couldn’t quite believe he was spending his time on works produced by such an idiot. Still, as we’ve grown older together, I detect a certain mellowing.

The Terminus Nord was, Francis tells me, a buffet de la gare of the type that used to be found at every French station of note but, nowadays, they’ve undergone the kind of refurbishment and homogenisation that our world won’t be done with until we’re all sitting naked on a mound of rubble, slobbering on a radioactive Turkey Twizzler while humming a lullaby in Mandarin. The Terminus is now, he thinks, part of a chain of about 10 restaurants in Paris, and while the steaks are still grilled on the spot, the more complex dishes are made in a central kitchen and couriered out daily.

Still, the interior and ambience of the Terminus are real even in their fakery – if you see what I mean. After all, Paris is a relatively small city that receives some 42 million visitors every year, so almost everything in the centre has a staged feel. The Terminus is therefore archetypal, what with its clusters of frosted-glass, globular lampshades, its savage napery, mirrored walls, brass rails, tiled floors and waiters whose combination of éclat and arrogance would put a warlord to shame. Francis says the interior retains its style moderne feel and the murals of young, boatered and moustachioed men seem to date from 1925, when it first opened, while the coffering of the ceiling suggests – to me, at least – the outline of a train carriage.

Neither of us feels hungry – which prompts the question of why we’re lunching instead of smoking – so we do that reluctant luncher thing of skipping the entrée and both ordering the same dish: risotto bio carnaroli aux noix de Saint Jacques et cèpes coulis de potimarron. Basically, this is five big scallops with some gooey rice and a sauce made – Francis assures me – from unusual pumpkins. The little bolus of food is almost lost in its big dish, but once we manage to tap our way across the yards of crockery rim, it’s perfectly tasty. We drink Perrier, and Francis also has a glass of Chablis.

Despite it being 12 years now since I’ve drunk alcohol, Francis still finds my abstinence bizarre: “I can’t understand drinking to get drunk,” he explains. “That’s not the way we French drink wine – when I have a glass of wine, I’m imbibing the region where it comes from. If I want a beaker full of the warm south, I choose something from Provence; if I want to taste the myth of France, I sup on a big Burgundy like a Romanée-Conti; and if I want the very douceur de la vie to wash over my palate, I will opt for a sweet wine from the Loire – such as a Coteaux du Layon, because its aroma will summon the honeyed light of that region.”

Indeed. I sit there thinking about how, at best, when an English person drinks wine, she’s sucking up a social class. If British wine-bibbers were being honest, instead of asking for a dry white, they’d request a provincial petit bourgeois and have done with it. As for me, over a decade of being a conduit for mineral waters of all sorts – filtered through volcanic rock, chalk, limestone, siphoned by sisterhoods and carbonated by Carthusians – has left me politically altered. Together with a teetotal friend, I recently conducted a water tasting and, after working our way through enough fluid to leech the amino acids from our brains, we concluded that the City traders of the 1980s had it right: Perrier is the acme of sophistication. Make of this what you will.

And on that note, the Assortiment de trois fromages avec salade verte est arrivée. Francis is dismissive: “So boring,” he mutters, “a brie, a Saint-Nectaire and that …” The troisième he doesn’t bother to name, poking it with his knife. If rennet could look humiliated, I’m sure that this sad wedge would. Still, I’m not disconsolate. After all, I’m not in the business of consuming culture but rather of reading culture through consumption and, on that basis, lunch has been a real success.

Periodically throughout my working day the retro-Bakelite phone in my writing room starts into life with a loud drrring-drrrring! Which is strange: the number is unlisted, the line has a call-blocker on it, hardly any of my friends or even family has the number, and over the years I have done my level best to discourage anyone who does from dialling it.

I’ve had cause before to remark on the oddity of the phone era, when, between roughly 1960 and 2000, anyone in the country felt a perfect entitlement to start whispering into anyone else’s ear unannounced while the other person felt duty-bound to listen. The mobile phone may be a scourge, but thank God it put paid to that mind-bending mandatory intimacy with the masses.

Anyway, the phone rings and because it has no answerphone attached – another of my anti-communication devices – I am forced to answer it, whereupon I hear either the transoceanic witter of a long-distance call from an Asian call centre, or the hesitant click of a machine preprogrammed to say things such as: “Barclays, HSBC and NatWest have all been found guilty of passing excessive charges on to their depositors. If you have an account with any of these banks you may be eligible . . .” and so on. I shan’t trouble you with more because the odds are that if you’re sentient and domiciled in the UK you, too, have heard this tens of times, along with tapes trying to persuade you to have your will made out for you, presumably by a computer.

These automated calls hardly deserve the prefix “cold” – they are beyond cold: they are frigid, sub-zero calls, calls stretched out in the great frozen morgue of marketing, so unlikely are they to turn into a sale. They are to proper cold calls what email spam is to a hand-delivered sheet of vellum suggesting you might like to buy a Fabergé Easter egg – and illuminated by Fabergé himself! They are annoying but easy to deal with. You simply replace the bone on the dog and get on with whatever it was you were doing.

The first kind of call is more problematic. Being a child of the Phone Age, I have difficulty when I’m called by a human being in not practising at least basic politeness. That, far from sitting around watching DVDs of EastEnders in order better to mimic mockney (or listening tapes of The Archers so they can do RP), these callers seem to have acquired only the most rudimentary English is, I am afraid, besides the point. There is a pathos in their garbled queries (“Please am I now talking of the owner of this placing?”) that never fails to pull me up short. Who am I, I think to myself, who sits in warmth and comfort and – relatively speaking – indolence, to so cruelly use these poor slaves of the speed-dial and the headset? I listen to the hubbub in the background and picture some crowded steel shed full of starvelings chained to their desks, and then I’m lost.

Yet even if I do begin speaking with a degree of humanity, I’ve been reduced to a maddened arrogance within seconds by the sheer dreadfulness of the pitch for double-glazing or any of the other thousand things I neither want nor need. Crashing back down the handset, I am gripped by a sense of the futility of all endeavour and the grotesque manner in which global capitalism runs its spiked harrow across the psyches of the seven billion that won’t leave me for minutes. I shake with the ague of alienation. I think to myself: I hate it, hate it, hate it – but what must it be like for the elderly who’re more in thrall to civility, and who may have had to hobble for some time before learning that it isn’t an adored grandchild on the phone but Ponnambalam Ramanathan trying to flog them a hot tub.

I think despairingly of the deranging nexus that all of us are plugged into: a humungous exchange, the purpose of which is only to connect crazed impoverishment with loony entitlement, so that nation may flog unto nation. I don’t deny that at least some of my extreme sensitivity to these marketing exercises may be the result of my own six months working in the early 1980s for the computer giant IBM as a cold-caller. True,
I was calling businesses rather than private individuals, but it was still a dirty, intrusive and mind-bogglingly tedious occupation. It’s probably not the responsible thing to say, but it was the one time in my life when I’ve been grateful for being a heroin addict.

I’ve been coming to the small Devonian port town of Dartmouth for 20 years. When the kids were still in scale with this dinky ville, we’d rock up for a few summer days to coarse fish for crab from the harbour wall, ride the vintage steam train to the beach at Paignton or take the river cruiser up the Dart to the crystal-dangling delights of Totnes. But the bulk of my time in Dartmouth has been spent alone and off season. Courtesy of friends who own a cottage wedged up one of the town’s vertiginous wynds, I am able to retreat there to write.

I say “there” but I mean “here”, as I’m in Dartmouth as I write, peering out through a rain-speckled windowpane. Off-season Dartmouth has all the queasy romance of a ghost Trumpton. At night, staring out over the town’s roofs, there is barely a light to be seen. By day, the streets are empty. The sailing boats in the harbour are battened down for the winter and the mournful ting-ting-ting! of nylon rigging smacking against aluminium masts follows the lonely scribe as, deranged by his creative imagination, he batters his way through the shades of long-gone yachties, their V-necked Pringle pullovers crumbling into dust like some bizarre outtake from Pirates of the Caribbean.

Needless to say, such a summer playground is well-stocked with eateries. Whether you favour a quick snack – Pasty Presto – or a murder mystery dinner – the Royal Castle Hotel – or a perverted gobble – Edward’s Fudge Pantry – the town has something for everybody. Even in November, most of these joints are still open, their lonely staff waiting for equally isolated diners. I’ve almost always eaten at Tsang’s, a tiny, booth-like Chinese restaurant that offers excellent fresh seafood dishes. I’ve been going to Tsang’s for so long that the waitress, Irene, has retired, leaving behind only a memento of her presence in the form of a faintly lubricious commemorative dish entitled “Irene Beef”.

At the urging of my friends, I tried a new gaff last night. RockFish has opened on the harbour side, the brain food of Mitch Tonks, impresario behind the FishWorks chain, which has three branches in London. The Tonks philosophy is summed up by a slogan on the tablecloths: “Fish so fresh, tomorrow’s is still in the sea”. You can’t argue with that, and the fish in RockFish is fresh, tasty and well cooked.

I had the signature battered cod and chips, which came with the near-obligatory Mandelson guacamole (mushy peas), but there was a special of sea bass encrusted with chilli that would’ve tempted me, were it not that herby encrustation is to contemporary fish as basting with entitlement is to David Cameron. The RockFish was, by off-season standards, heaving – I counted 14 comers and diners during my scant, hour-long feed. However, while the establishment cried out, “What’s not to like!” with every fibre of its being, I cavilled.

There was the dot-com typography – when restaurants begin to style themselves like email addresses, I’m virtually gone. Then there was the decor: a tunnel-like space with a steep internal pitch and a cladding of weather-worn, paint-daubed boards. I got the fish shtick: we were meant to be in a beach hut, hence our tableware, which consisted of flimsy cardboard boxes. Setting aside the sustainability of origami platters, there’s a reason, Mitch, why restaurant food is served on crockery, which is that it can be heated. Without the added warmth of a hot plate, the second law of thermodynamics had reduced my cod to an entropic condition long before it was finished. The chips – some cut as thick as Ukip – were stone cold.

Looking up at the sloping ceiling, where the tablecloth glyph of fish and slogan had been replicated in the knowing form of kids-drawings-really-done-by-adults, it occurred to me that RockFish was a good example of what the architectural critic Owen Hatherley has dubbed “pseudo-modernism”: design that, with its knowing incorporation of the gimcrack into the commercial environment, underpins the heretofore complacent neoliberalism of our era.

It was a biggish insight to be provoked by a fancy fish and chip shop – although by no means as big as some of my chips, one of which had the dimensions of a dildo in The Story of O.

I thought Edward ought to hear about it, but when I got round to his fudge pantry, it was sadly shuttered.

I remember 31 October 2001 well enough. I’d just flown in to Minneapolis and was staying at some spooky chain hotel or other. There was a sign on the reception desk that read: “We regret we’re unable to offer candy to our guests as we would normally do, because of the current terrorist threat.” The background rumour was that al-Qaeda was widening the ambit of its evil to include poisoning Hallowe’en treats – all across the US already traumatised kids were being urged to stay home, lest they get a gobful of lethal Islamofascism. In truth, there was an aptness to this febrile myth, as Hallowe’en is now so entrenched in the American collective psyche as an antic pagan counterpoint to the society’s workaday religiosity. Americans take their Hallowe’en way seriously, and in the larger cities it’s an excuse for all sorts of adult devilry as well as the usual juvenile japes.

I remember being in New York one Hallowe’en shortly after my third child was born and, because of the massed celebrants, having to walk 20 blocks or so uptown from the Village to our hotel, carrying the infant in my arms. We were passed by devils and demons and fetishists in gas masks wearing full-length black rubber coats – but far more bizarre was that every third or fourth ghoul peered at him and said, “Gee, is that a real baby?”, so in thrall were they to dressing up. When I was a child, we lived in the US for a year and I experienced trick-or-treating for the first time. I was bowled over by the notion that simply by putting on a plastic mask and going from door to door, you could amass large quantities of sweets.

As I recall, there was no such practice in England at that time – although my wife, who grew up in Scotland, says she remembers trick-or-treating well from her own childhood. This would accord with established wisdom regarding the custom, which derives in part from the poor soliciting food on the eve of All Saints’ Day in return for praying for the departed. The folk belief was that the souls of the newly dead still wandered the earth and that this was the last opportunity for them to avenge any wrongs; conversely, it was the final chance for the living to appease them. The Reformation put paid to this fluid cosmos with its commingling of those above and below the ground, and henceforth souls were to be neatly boxed off in Purgatory to await the final trump.

Scots and Irish Catholics kept at it, and when they immigrated to the US in the second half of the 19th century, they took the custom – which by then had mutated into an exchange of sweetmeats for a rather more mundane deliverance – with them.

Trick-or-treating established there, popular culture (film, television etc) in due course reseeded it back in England. What a crazy-go-round of simulated mayhem! Like some folkloric correlate of the North Atlantic oscillation, high levels of credulousness rush from one side of the ocean to the other and back again, carrying with them millions of rubber bats, wonky pitchforks and tankers full of spray-on cobwebs.

Not, you appreciate, that I’m a killjoy – I like a reinvention of an ancient festival with enhanced commercial opportunities as much as the next sap. Show me an Up Helly Aa and I’ll put on a horned helmet (£19.99 rrp, terms & conditions apply); direct me to Glastonbury Tor and I’ll pitch not one but 30 disposable dome tents (a snip at £32.99). Those poor Italians, groaning under the deadweight of having to pay the interest on their sovereign debt – they’ve been driven to consider abolishing a saint’s day so that they can boost productivity. But we here in northern Europe, the realm of fiscal rectitude, understand that that way madness lies.

No, instead of getting rid of public holidays we should increase the opportunities for consumption of such ephemerals as sweets, fireworks and glow-in-the-dark antlers. By the time you read this column, the equally factitious festival of 5 November – remember, remember! – will have been and gone. Back in the day, children (get this!) made their own effigies of the papist terrorist wannabe and used them to gain the funds for a few bangers and firecrackers. Now what kind of use would that homespun fun be for that longed-for desideratum, growth? So much better to withdraw 20 quid from the cashpoint and spunk it straight off in a shower of screaming sparks. As for the guy, why on earth hasn’t some Sugaresque entrepreneur spotted the gap in the market for prêt-a-brûler? God knows there are enough public figures clamouring to be burnt in effigy nowadays, all the way from Cameron to Clegg to Cable. And that’s only the C’s! We could even burn Sugar as well, thus joining Hallowe’en seamlessly with Guy Fawkes Night in a week-long saturnalia. What glee!