Will Self

My wife, who has had cause to spend some time in hospital over the past year, observes that if patients were told on admission that they would have to pay for their own food, they would have a fit – with a commensurate drain on the already straitened resources of the NHS. And yet, almost invariably, the first thing that a visitor is instructed to do by their prone one is to go down to the lobby and get a sandwich from Marks & Spencer, because the food divvied up gratis is such muck.

I’m not sure how the powers that be at M&S feel about this association: serious illness/M&S chicken sandwich. My hunch is that they’re pleased. How else to explain the selection of snacks they’re offering on behalf of Macmillan Cancer Support, which enables the buyer to chomp and donate at the same time? I recently took the unusual step of going to a hospital for lunch – I’d like to say that I was meeting Andrew Lansley there to have a frank exchange of views on his NHS reforms, but the truth was more sickening, if quite as prosaic: I had this column to write.

Under the current dispensation mandated by free-market ideology, large hospitals have become one-stop shops for anything from having a heart bypass to purchasing a pair of Pretty Polly sheer tights. Strolling from the cashpoint to AMT Coffee, via a boutique with the teasingly downbeat name Stock Shop, I think I could have been forgiven if I’d forgotten, for example, that I’d come in with acute coronary thrombosis and spunked off all my money on a carb binge.

Standing in the M&S café, I thought about the associations that the St Michael brand has for me. In my childhood, the stores had a genteel cachet, summed up in our family lore by my father’s Uncle Martin, who had taken early retirement from the colonial service to live out his days in a villa in Cheltenham. I remember the celebrated luncheon at which Uncle Martin, the faint nimbus of a psychic sola topi still shimmering about his snowy brows, fixed us all with gimlet eye before saying – apropos what he was masticating – “We buy all our chickens at Marks & Spencer . . .” Ever afterwards, drawling out “Marks & Spencer” in the manner of the ex-district commissioner would reduce my mother to giggles, for, like many immigrants to England, she had an eye for the fatuity and infinite divisibility of its class mores.

So it was a no-brainer: I selected the chicken salad sandwich and went to the counter to ask what the seasonal soup was. “Butter and nut squash,” said the more recent immigrant behind it, whose name badge read Kurshid. It was a charming malapropism and I hoped he’d never lose it.

While Kurshid microwaved the beige gloop, I selected a slice of Bakewell tart: the sight of flaked almonds always makes me think of the smell attributed to prussic acid by detectives in Agatha Christie novels. Kurshid made me a latte and I retreated to a nook. Above me, circular lampshades glowed red between naked neon tubes; on the walls, pseudo-Warhol prints showed sections of fruit juxtaposed with St Michael tomato soup cans; outside the floor-length windows, the hospital façade was pinioned together by steel struts and tensioned cables that resembled a monstrous, orthopaedic brace.

I tried the gloop – it was OK. I bit down on the chicken sandwich – it could be borne. I sipped the latte – ah, well, I thought, so it goes. On the hospital’s concourse, medical and auxiliary staff mingled with patients and visitors. The hospital staff wore loose tunics and baggy trousers of the same colour – either blue, green, white or butter-and-nut-squash – while the civilians were just a little more informal. Kurshid and the other M&S staff wore fetching black ensembles.

At the next table, a middle-aged woman with tired eyes spoke in the low tones of bereavement. I wanted to lean across, pinch her cheek in a Michael Winner-ish way and say, “C’mon, darling, cheer up!” Then I noticed the lanyard around her neck that bore the words: “Aspire – equality and diversity staff networks”, and clocked the dog collar which cinched that neck. “For Christ’s sake!” I screamed internally. “This is what your life has come to: fantasising over an M&S sandwich about goosing a woman priest!”

I reached for the Bakewell tart, sniffed it judiciously and, hoping with the fervent calculation of the parasuicidal that the hospital had a poisons unit, took an enormous bite.

There was an unfortunate episode this morning as I was on my way back from the school run. Walking from the bus stop, I passed a sullen-looking young woman with straight black hair, wearing blue jeans and khaki jacket and a very slightly recherché nose ring – you know the kind: quite thick, such as you might see attached to a dog’s collar. In a moment of madness, I unfastened the lead from my dog’s collar and, in a move that surprised me with its poise, fluidity and sheer dash, attached it to the ring in the young woman’s nose. Then I gave it the merest of tugs and said, “C’mon, love.”

Frantic, she cast around for assistance – but this is sarf London and no one was paying any, so, sensibly, she shrugged her shoulders and trotted on behind me as I led her to the nearby cashpoint, where I told her to withdraw £100 of her own money. This she did. We next strolled companionably to the local park; here I let her off the lead with this avuncular advice: “Take that ring out of your hooter and go spend this on something that doesn’t make you look like livestock . . .”

Oh, OK, I admit it – that was a fantasy, but it’s one I’ve had so often in the past decade or so that it might as well be real. The mass mania for piercings finally seems to be on the wane – yet there are still plenty of people wandering the streets looking as if they’re pigs, or cows, or even – so many bits of metal are there shoved into their flesh – bulls nearing the end of a corrida. Particularly unsettling is the sight of a grandmotherly woman with a ring in the end of her blue-veined nose, or silvery loops through a pendulous and exposed midriff.

Still, mustn’t be ageist – or sexist; young men look just as grotesque with a face full of ironmongery. It’s a tough call as to which is more upsetting: seeing lovely young flesh so traduced, or sagging old skin so traumatised. I don’t deny that there’s an après moi component to my disapproval – when I was young I had a couple of non-essential holes put in me. The latter was done by a hippie armed with a cork, a burnt needle and a can of lighter fuel for anaesthetic purposes. Needless to say, the piercing became awesomely infected – a golf-ball-sized lump of pus that remained cinched in its silvery loop, such a dedicated follower of fashion was I. Moreover, I accept some blame for the craze. In the early 1980s I wrote the text for one of a series of books called Modern Primitives; these featured photographs of unusual piercings and pseudo-ethnic tattooing. I can’t remember what I said about this body decoration at the time – doubtless some bullshit about individuality – but I know what I want to say now: in the annals of the west’s obsession with primitivism – from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, through Henry Moore, to I’m a Celebrity . . . – nothing gets closer to being asinine than the notion that, by bashing metal through your cartilage, you connect with a more authentic mode of being.

Not, I hasten to add, that I imagine a lot of the conformist-inked or fully metalled see themselves in this light – they’re just doing their thing, man, and who am I to rust their clinking-clanking parade? It is, after all, a free world. That’s true – sort of – but there does seem to be a more than averagely large disjunction between this mode of self-presentation and the mainstream when compared with that of other subcultures.

Or, rather: if a nose ring, why not a penis sheath, or a lip plug – and while you’re at it, why not have your urethra cut out and flayed with a stoneknife in the manner of particularly austere Centralian Aboriginal tribes? To affect the widowy weeds of the Goths or the waxed sagittal crests of the punks is one thing – but the modern primitivism implied by excessive piercing and tattooing stands out because of its sheer irreversibility.

I know that’s why I got tattooed in my teens. I thought to myself: a hole in the ear will heal up, but a tattoo will never be eradicated and so I will never be able to scuttle backwards into the bourgeoisie. How wrong I was! Now, I’m a homeowner, a taxpayer and all the rest – probably because rather than in spite of the anarchist black flags inscribed on my forearm.Still, nothing encapsulates the madness of modernity better than an ill-advised bit of self-mutilation, representing as it does the deranging collision between impulse, permanence – and narcissism. Squeal, piggy, squeal!