Will Self

There are many waymarkers along the winding trail of a man’s life, but few can be quite so dismal, so minatory, so like unto a psychic gibbet from which a rotting corpse twists in the mephitic breezes from the nearby abyss, as logging on to the Clarks website to look for a comfortable pair of walking shoes.

“How did it come to this?” I asked myself as I examined critically the Storm Walls, the Rangle Mixes and the Fall Proofs (need I mention that each of these shoe models is also appended “GTX”? How ineffably sad is that? It’s as if middle-aged men were boy-racing towards the grave in sensible footwear) before settling on a pair of the hideously named but achingly suitable Rockie Los (GTX).

I – I! – who for years had near furled my feet in order to feed them into suede winkle-pickers; I – I! – who had once fallen asleep in an overheated Vienna hotel room wearing patent leather Chelsea boots of such exemplary snugness that when I awoke I’d contracted a vicious fungal infection that tormented me for the next decade. I! – well, you get the point: I used to be a hipster, but now I can see the hip-replacement approaching at a brisk limp.

But before I clicked the “Add to Order” button I did something still sadder than buying a pair of Clarks shoes: I read the reviews that other Rockie Lo purchasers had posted on the site. Who does such a thing? Who has either the time or the inclination to write a shoe review? Is there some lost cohort of the Trollopian clerisy, who spend the mildewed years of their reclusion tapping out these clap-happy analyses: “Probably the most comfortable pair of shoes I have ever had, well made and keep your feet dry in very wet conditions. I wear them for work and needed smart and durable shoes, they fully meet my requirements. Highly recommended”? Or so contended Stephen from Barrow-in-Furness, who I pictured wearing a mildewed cassock as he crouched over his laptop.

Still more deranging was the small button at the foot of this screed labelled “Inappropriate? – Report this”. I mean, to write a shoe review at all is perverse, but to write an inappropriate shoe review, that way madness lies – and besides, what could such a thing be like? “Your Malone Class grey leather shoe is almost unspeakably arousing . . . No sooner had I opened the box and seen my new pair lying there, soixante-neuf, tongue to upper, than I reached for the tube of lube and eased my trousers off my potbelly . . .” Or possibly: “Your Talon Mid men’s sport boots are a must for any fedayee who seriously wishes to take the jihad to the infidel, the heels are large enough to conceal several ounces of Semtex or other explosives, while the Velcro fastening means that the shoes can be speedily removed in the event of an abortive mission . . .”

I wondered quite how vigilant the webmasters at Clarks were; how long could I get away with posting inappropriate shoe reviews before the cyber-police arrived and hauled me away like some still weirder version of Julian Assange? I idly considered marking out a portion of each day to doing just this – and why stop at inappropriate shoe reviews? I could also comment outrageously on oven gloves, children’s toys, medical supplies; anything, indeed, that caught my fancy. But then it occurred to me: there’s a big crowd of nutters who are doing just that.

While the abuses, bullying and all-round lunacy of social networking are well attested to, to my mind the more homely realm of shoe reviewing is just as bonkers. In the sphere of political comment, the web replaces the nuanced analyses of those who have thought long and hard with the jaundiced ejaculations of saloon-bar bores who don’t even have the balls to show their face.

In the world of books, the typographic bile of illiterates who’ve yet to learn to spell or punctuate achieves equal billing with the opinions of William Empson. Just as with the madness of calling the PM “Dave”, so the posting of comments on the web represents a reaction against the loathed “cult of the professional”, setting up in its stead an equally deranged “cult of the amateur”.

So, I took Stephen of Barrow’s comments with a pinch of salt and hied me to my nearest branch of Clarks, where I was ably assisted by that professional anachronism: a salesman. Rockie on.

Within a Budding Grove, with its hint at the similitude of erectile clitoral tissue and burgeoning plant life, is the somewhat suggestive translation of Proust’s À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs given by CK Scott Moncrieff. The more literal “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” is not without its sexual problematic – but, anyway, I invariably think of first one rendition and then the other every morning as I walk up St John’s Road from Clapham Junction, because tripping towards me comes a loose procession of young women, hurrying towards the station. Young women neatly groomed; young women in charming dishabille, frowsty from their beds; young women homely; and young women caught in that brief and startling window of beauteous opportunity that makes it inevitable that the human race will continue to propagate.

As they click-clack past Phones 4u, the pawnbroker and the Santander bank, their resemblance to Marcel’s covey of adolescent girls bowling along the promenade at Balbec is, at best, tenuous (especially given that the fabulously flirty Albertine was, in fact, based on Proust’s stolid Belgian chauffeur, Albert). But they still have that vivifying effect on me – their dash, their absorption into the hamster wheel of the working day that is yet figurative of the wheel of life itself! Their tense unconsciousness! And never am I more à l’ombre of the Clapham girls than when one of them breaks step and dives sideways into Greggs, the bakery. Fresh baking and jeune women – you don’t have to believe in the capacity of tea-soaked cake to summon involuntary memories to understand what a powerful gestalt this forms.

Branching out I like to think that I’m not alone in this – and, as there are 1,400 branches of Greggs throughout the country, it’s a fair bet that I’m not. Standing in the queue this morning, meditating on whether to opt for the £1.99 or the £2.25 breakfast deal (the distinction is about 500ml of tea and orange juice), it occurred to me that there was something rather special about the considerable niche Greggs has carved in the national unconscious. After all, Greggs is more ubiquitous than McDonald’s, it serves around a million breakfast customers each day, and yet its public profile is as flat as a Scotch pancake.

It’s the body snatcher of British fast food. Started on Tyneside in the late 1930s, the chain has expanded by snaffling up other bakeries – in Glasgow, Thurston in Leeds, Broomfields in London, Bakers Oven all over – and “rebranding” them with its own non-look: blue melamine fascias, wood-effect laminated floors, er … that’s it.

Greggs has become the archetype of what a certain kind of baker is: not a retail baker per se (and although “baking” is done on the premises, I suspect that this is only heating up pre-prepared dough), but rather a dispenser of farinaceous snack food – sandwiches, filled rolls, sausage rolls and so on – within a bakery ambience. I doubt that most people go to Greggs to buy bread, despite the stooks of French sticks and the baskets of bloomers. Rather, the bread is synonymous with nutritious, maternal bounteousness; that’s why the working girls, the labouring lads, the morbidly obese on incapacity benefit – all of us – roll in to get our fill. Most mornings, all I buy at Greggs is a 40p gingerbread man for my own little man (I’m a firm believer in the idea that education can only be undertaken with a high blood-sugar level) but, today, I had a sausage roll. I was expecting some ghastly, flaccid thing, but the pastry was puffy and the meat not too, um, worrying.

I also bought the local delicacy on offer, a piece of so-called London cheesecake. This was pretty strange, being not cake at all but rather a square of puff pastry not dissimilar to the casing of my sausage roll, while so far as I could tell there wasn’t any cheese incorporated into this sweetmeat, which instead was garnished with some sort of coconut or mallow shavings. Sounds disgusting, I know – but I ate it while writing this and, after dipping a morsel of the cheesecake into a spoonful of my tea, then letting it dissolve on my tongue, I found myself being mysteriously transported about an hour back in time – to Clapham Junction.

One thing Ed “Claymation” Miliband won’t do in his search for a “narrative” to unite the Labour party under his leadership will be to espouse the least little hint of republicanism. On the contrary, if he’s still the top Gromit come 29 April, you can be absolutely certain he’ll be sitting in the Abbey with the rest of the paltry and the compromised (latter-day versions of “the great and the good”), all grinning and gooey-eyed as Will and Kate make their vows.

The palace – in association with the coalition – has of course already cornered the narrative market with its X Factor fairytale of how the daughter of a flight attendant and a flight despatcher nabbed her regal helicopter pilot. On this reading, the nuptials represent just another chapter in the long democratisation of the monarchical principle; a story of ordinary sceptr’d folk that began in a meadow at Runnymede and will end … well, never, for while the Windsors may aspire to the condition of salty earth, they can never achieve it, being ineffably, um, royal.

In the current era of crazed quantification, the monarchy’s detractors and its supporters tend to frame their arguments financially. So, no analysis of the wedding is complete without the figures being trotted out: the Queen’s £300m personal fortune, the £10m and more to be spent by her, Chucky and – preposterously – their new commoner in-laws; the policing bill to be footed by the taxpayer; and the estimated £6bn to be lost by the British economy because, with the extra bank holiday, millions of subjects will cop an 11-day foreign holiday (and how patriotic is that?).

But while this may seem to be the very meat of the matter, the truth is that it’s a useless garnish of persiflage, for the true lifeblood of the monarchy is, was and always will be the madness of the crowd, not the capacity of the citizenry for rational calculations of cost-benefit. The statistics have remained remarkably consistent over the years: broadly speaking, two-thirds of the British public support the monarchy, while a third oppose it. Under such circumstances you don’t need to be a focus groupie of old New Labour to grasp that republicanism of any kind is electoral folly. But is it, really? Because when you ask people why they support the monarchy, their answers reveal a great deal of this column’s favourite symptom: cognitive dissonance.

Almost everybody believes that while they themselves understand that the royals, as people, are deeply flawed, if not entirely useless, they nonetheless cleave to the notion that there exists a heartland out there of boneheaded proles who need an organic Duchy Original political principle to keep them in line. The political class, this unreasoning goes, cannot possibly expect to command the full assent, let alone the respect, of the masses, so the best that can be hoped for is a kind of adoration-by-proxy. That Tories should cling to this patronising drivel is understandable – it’s encrypted in their DNA – but that supporters of what was once a proudly socialistic party should endorse it as well is frankly deranging.

And so the long tables will be laid with paper napkins and the little Union flags will flutter and the whole tawdry spectacle of willed ignorance will continue. Oscar Wilde asserted that the English were a nation of hypocrites, but nothing exemplifies the genius of their hypocrisy more (besides looping in the Scots, the Welsh and even the Irish to the charade) than this capacity to mouth “democracy” while bending a collective knee to all the baubles of autocracy.

Of course, were Miliband to propose a republic as part of his grand policy review, an entire swath of vexed constitutional questions would be thrown sharply into relief, from devolution to the European Human Rights Directive to reform of the second chamber. But that would be far too genuinely progressive; that would imply that a key aspect of democracy is that sovereignty truly resides in the will of the people, rather than the will of the elite.

And we wouldn’t want that – oh, no.

And so the monarchy will endure, crouching like a jewelled toad on the blanched body politic, and from time to time it will spawn in a disgusting fashion: the well-oiled pornography of primogeniture, gloated over by a voyeuristic multitude.

“John Lanchester’s Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (Allen Lane, £20) did for the financial crisis what Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time once did for theoretical physics. This is a book that manages to demystify a subject that has become increasingly wreathed in the arcana of spurious quantitative analysis and preposterous predictive formulae.

“The outrageously self-serving and divisive behaviour of those in the financial sector depends for its field of operations on the bewilderment of the masses, making it impossible for the general reader to understand exactly what’s been going on.

“By restoring discussion of political economy to plain – and often very witty – prose, Lanchester has produced a very radical text. Whoops! empowers individuals. This book isn’t a programme of action – it’s something more valuable: a means for all of us to think constructively about our political and economic choices, or our lack of them.”