Will Self

In his column in the London Evening Standard, Sam Leith writes – apropos allegations that the Energy Secretary persuaded an aide to take his speeding points – “Which of us . . . wouldn’t try to wriggle off that particular hook – however much we may tut-tut when others do it?” But can Leith really mean this? I wouldn’t lie in order to avoid the consequences of an illegal action (so long as I believed the law justifiable), and nor would I “tut-tut” if I heard someone had perverted the course of justice; I’d get on the horn to Plod Central and suggest they arrest the malefactor.

I suppose by “particular hook” Leith only means avoiding a driving ban and not, say, committing perjury at a libel trial in order to cover up your dalliances with prostitutes while scooping up half a million in damages (Jeffrey?Archer style). But whoever you are, lying is lying.

Wherefrom comes this peculiar moral latitude in respect of driving offences? Well, just as collective tolerance of that deranged institution the monarchy derives in part from residual belief in the divine right of kings, so all sorts of madness can be explained by the divine right of drivers. Unlike the stars of the popular US science-fiction TV series Heroes, the average Briton possesses only one superpower: the kind measured in horses. To drive a car is to experience a huge augmentation of strength; push your foot down a few inches and you – together with a quarter-tonne of steel – are thrust hundreds of yards in a matter of seconds. Depress the other sole and the entire shebang screeches to a halt – hopefully in time to avoid killing someone.

Car manufacturers understand the mystical character of driving only too well, which is why their more or less identical little boxes are commonly advertised as shape-shifting chimeras. It’s a panther! It’s a giant dancing robot! It and you are melded together into a serpent of light that coils over hills and loops through valleys. In adverts, cars and their drivers stop time, leap over tall buildings and otherwise contravene the laws of physics – which is bonkers, considering that what drivers on our right, tight little island mostly do is exhibit inertia as they squat, motionless, in traffic, the exhausts of their £15,000 padded cells farting out carbon monoxide, lead, particulate matter, petrol that hasn’t been combusted, etc etc.

The image of the car, which was forged during a time of expanding horizons and – naturally – low levels of car ownership, has yet to adapt to our current era, when motorways are car parks abutting airfields tessellated with the steely oblongs of unsold cars. If modern-day drivers took a long, hard look at themselves, they would realise that they exist pretty much to pilot these carnivorous vehicles through time, rather than space; that the private car has become a strange parasite that depends on us for its obscene propagation, forcing us to slave long hours so we can buy the next expensive phenotype.

I don’t need to tell you what madness transpires when the unstoppable divine right of drivers impacts with the immovable traffic, because you’ll all have witnessed it thousands upon thousands of times. From the odd obscene gesture and shouted epithet to full-blown Kenneth Noye-style beatings to death, the experience of driving on modern roads is more akin to the chaotic moiling you can witness on a crowded psychiatric ward than locomotion as rationally understood.

No wonder that, when the opportunity presents itself, people speed – to speed is to slip the surly bonds of earth and dance the skies on laughter-silvered wings; while to be pulled up by some time-serving traffic cop is to collapse back into a present in which you’re confined to an old metallic Nissan stinking of new-car-smell air freshener.

The divine right of drivers is responsible for the rise and fall of governments, the death of hundreds of thousands and the most comprehensive alterations to our physical environment since the woodland clearances of the Bronze Age. Truly, we revolve the roundabout of life according to its precepts. And if it’s bad enough to be an ordinary human being deprived of said right, what must it be like to be a thrusting, puissant Lib Dem politician so arraigned?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all airline food aspires to the condition of potato dauphinoise – or, possibly, Irish stew. Any given dish may start out its life in the great catering kampongs of Gate Gourmet, being fluffed, beaten and otherwise teased into a variety of shapes, but, by the time it’s been wadded into foil trays, covered, stacked, chilled, loaded and lifted off into the tame, grey yonder, it will have been compressed into layers of a slightly undercooked, whitish, root-vegetable consistency, interspersed with a reassuring, beige juice.

I say reassuring because airline food is all about comfort and nothing else. Unlike other meals, its taste is solely a product of the diner’s anxiety. The nervy flyer, wedged between John Grisham fans and contemplating a death that, for sheer, quotidian pathos – “Died in that air crash, you say? On her way to a city break in Tallinn? Blimey, what a pointless way to go!” – is equalled only by slipping in the shower stall on a cake of Imperial Leather, will reach joyfully for the proffered tray because, after all, if you’re eating, you must be alive, no?

All of this flickered through my mind as the British Airways Airbus 320 grumble-bumped over the tarmac of Boryspil Airport near Kiev. Visibility was meagre, rain was lashing the plane window and the wind speed was probably some ghastly rate of knots – it was Polish-president-killing weather and I was in pole position to experience it. I’d had a hefty dinner the night before in a themed “Soviet-era” restaurant, where I was served – get this! – a chicken Kiev by a waitress in a knee-length, flared, black skirt and a white, lace apron. My Ukrainian hosts, whom I’d asked to order for me, couldn’t understand why I roared with laughter when the butter-stuffed fowl was plonked in front of me – and I had to go into a long, halting explanation that took in the 1970s, Abigail’s Party, the winter of discontent, blah, blah, blah.

Then, bleak dawn found me in the restaurant of my upscale hotel, woefully contemplating a buffet of Romanov extravagance: everything from sushi to custom-made omelette and back again was on offer, when all I wanted was a slice of toast and a glass of orange juice. However, it was a flat fee of 320 hryvnia – and, at those prices, I wasn’t about to be short-changed.

So, as the plane strained aloft, there was I, caffeinated to the gills and with an unpleasantly distended belly. I was also still stuck in my 1970s reverie, and mulling over the awful truth that if the plane was diverted, then crashed on to a mountain range, mine would be the buttocks the other passengers would make a beeline for, plying their 50mm-long nail clippers. This was why, when the BA trolley dolly came back after take-off and offered me hors d’oeuvres, I naturally said, “Yes.” Yes to scary roundels of white bread, topped with scary roundels of cream cheese, scattered with a few limp chives; yes to the cutlery wrapped in its linen winding sheet; and yes to the main course of pork, which turned out to be greyish nodules, accompanied by peas, carrots and . . . yes! Potato dauphinoise.

Mmm, yummy, I thought as I chowed down. People are so snotty about airline food, but this stuff was great. On I munched, reflecting on how there was something existentially lovely about the two Ritz Crackers wrapped in clingfilm that accompanied wedges of Cheddar and Cheshire cheese. I ate it all – every last crumb, even the scary-looking dessert: a spongy cake, sitting in a pool of cream, which looked as if it had lost control of its bowels. I ate it all – and ate it with relish – and then I finished off with one, two, three more cups of the superfine British Airways coffee. I also fell in love with the steward. I pictured our civil partnership ceremony at the Camden register office on Judd Street and his Ealing flat that I’d move into. On his layovers, he would bring me airline meals he’d filched and I would grow morbidly obese on the oh-so-comforting potato dauphinoise. This was better than the cannibalism daymare I’d had during take-off, but we were now dallying down over London and it was time for me to face the facts: I was alive, I had survived, I’d eaten three huge meals in the space of 12 hours and I now had suitably punitive indigestion.

An army may well march on its stomach – but for a civilian to fly on his has to be a strategic mistake.

Good afternoon. I’m glad you were all able to join me here for a brief presentation on some of the key issues that will be affecting us in the medium term. Since our organisation was founded in 2002, we have aimed to provide clients in both the private and the public sectors with real-time analyses of structural capabilities and help them to interface these with logistical support. Since 2007, we have increasingly recognised the importance of sustainability as a key component of our best practice. Previously, “sustainability” was a technical term applied in the environmental sciences to those ecosystems that achieved high levels of diversity and so were able to withstand negative impacts – but that all changed with the full assimilation of environmentalism to what passes for mainstream political debate.

Our sustainability group has dated the precise moment at which environmentalism ceased to be sustainable outside the party-political context to some period between the publication of the Stern review in October 2006 and the installation of a wind turbine on the roof of David Cameron’s Notting Hill home in March 2007. Some have argued (Parris, Procter, Phelps et al, “Sustainability and Metonymy in Post-Millennial Meaning”, British Journal of Ephemera, volume nine, August 2010) that the sustainability of sustainability itself, far from being a vicious circle, is a virtuous one and that some sort of perpetual motion machine could be built using this principle – one that would deliver a sustainable energy supply at minimal cost.

Others disagree, pointing out that simply because district councils have sustainable public transport provision, sustainable vandalism prevention and sustainable dog-waste schemes, it doesn’t mean that sustainability can be sustained, given the reductions in government spending overall. One thing is beyond dispute: “sustainable” is the mot du jour. During a recent PMQs, I heard the Prime Minister employ the term in all its variants – nounal, verbal, adverbial and even conjunctive – no fewer than 375 times, while the so-called leader of the opposition even managed an inspired example of tmesis:

“If the honourable member honestly believes that I give a sustaina-fucking-able-shit, then he’s sustainably mad.” To which the Prime Minister rejoined: “Sustain yourself, dear.” Whereupon the opposition benches erupted, waving order papers and chanting over and over again: “Sus-tain-able! Sus-tain-able!” in a manner strongly reminiscent of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.

When I stood up this afternoon to address you, I myself wondered whether it would be possible to speak on this subject at length without some form of sustenance – which is why I’m taking frequent slugs from this Vimto that’s been liberally admixed with vodka – but the truth is that, once you begin talking about sustainability, it’s possible to go on for a very long time.

I was fortunate enough to be asked to join a field trip last year that journeyed to an isolated plateau in the Venezuelan jungle. Hacking our way up a vertiginous precipice through sustained undergrowth as dense as purple-stemmed broccoli, we came upon a strange, lost world full of jargon and buzzwords that time had forgotten. Here, ongoing situations and consumer demand frolicked in sylvan glades of “minded”.

I was amazed at the diversity of these lexical throwbacks and unsheathed my digital recorder, determined to capture them for posterity. But, then, disaster struck! A jejune member of our party uttered the S-word and, before we knew it, sustainability was crawling about the place in such profusion that the entire semantic system was undermined and became . . . unsustainable.

In conclusion, then, when we look forward to 2012 and consider what sort of strategies may be sustainable, given emergent trends, we need to bear in mind that sustainable can mean any – or all – of the following: maintainable, supportable, viable, self-supporting, justifiable, defensible, expedient, deniable, larger (as in the expression “sustainable profits”), smaller (as in the expression “sustainable rates of emissions”) and the same (as in “sustainable growth”). So long as we remain absolutely clear about this, I feel certain that a way of bullshitting that we’ve all come to revere will remain, in the medium term, sustainable. Thank you, Jeremy.