Will Self

A weird, piratically themed Cornish pasty takeaway outlet has mounted a sustained assault on English railway terminuses and high streets. Casting my eye over the mock-treasure map of store locations on the West Cornwall Pasty Company’s website, I counted 40 of them between the Tamar and the North York Moors. I’d been creepingly aware of the pasting being dished out by the pasties – their black-and-yellow livery has been ousting the tricolour of Delice de France and other such baguette bars for some time, and a year or so ago I even found myself buying one of the buttock-shaped savouries.

I say “buttock-shaped” because someone has to make the obvious point: Cornish pasties are the most arsiform food known to humankind, even crinkled along the rim as if they were an engorged perineum. In my experience, while the British have a great love of double entendres, there are still statements of the obvious (usually those connected with the nether regions) that we refuse to make.

Alain de Botton is another example; he’s a perfectly amiable chap – if a little thin-crusted when it comes to criticism – and a good enough philosopher-lite (think a pinch of sage, but lots of onion), but I cannot be alone in finding myself unable to hear his name spoken without registering it as “Alain de Bum-Bum”. If I were he, I’d go the whole way and simply change my name to Alain de Bum-Bum. Surely everyone would be impressed by my post-Freudian honesty?

Anyway, there I was, in the stinky shaft of Clapham Junction Station, eating a chicken balti pasty, and inevitably my thoughts went first to bums and then to the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life. As I say, I’ve nothing against Alain de Botton at all, but the thought of becoming unable to eat a Cornish pasty without thinking of him was . . . insufferable. To try to distract myself, I struck up a conversation with the “captain” manning the pasty bar. Was he French? No, he said, he was Polish. This was promising. Maybe with a little positive reinforcement – I took another bite of the balti-flavoured buttock – I could come to associate pasties with seafaring Polish émigrés: Joseph Conrad, perhaps.

Because the truth is that the West Cornish Pasty Company makes a pretty mean pasty, and I find myself eating more and more of them. My seafaring pal told me that the most popular pasty after the traditional was a chicken and mushroom: “It has a really creamy sauce.” I didn’t find this helpful at all, because whenever I bite into an Alain de Botton I half suspect a really creamy sauce to come oozing out.

Conrad – as I couldn’t help but think of him – also confirmed that the pasties were indeed made by hand in Cornwall, then frozen and transported around the country. The West Cornwall Pasty Company does seem a pretty enlightened outfit: it tries to source the bulk of its ingredients in Cornwall and has even encouraged the harvesting of Cornish wheat and onions (not by any means traditional crops) in order to bolster its slow-food credentials. Sadly this enlightenment doesn’t extend to human resources, because its pasty bar staff are paid a scant few pence over the minimum wage, just like any other fast-food peons.

Still, I suppose this association between low-paid work and pasties is a tradition in its own right. If I narrowed my eyes a little I saw, instead of the shaft of Clapham Junction, the shaft of a Cornish tin mine. True, it should’ve been Conrad rather than me chowing down on the pasty, but really the only thing within sight that contradicted this minatory vision was the pasty shack itself, which was bedecked with surfboards and sub-Alfred Wallis, pseudo-naive-St Ives daubs.

I had chosen the chicken balti in a mood of transgression – a real Cornish pasty can only be filled with uncooked ingredients, and it seemed unlikely the West Cornwall lot had managed to invent a self-currying pastry. Not that the trad pasty need only be filled with steak, potato, onion and swede – back in the day, those clever miners even had pies with both savoury and sweet compartments. I pondered the notion of this dualistic pasty while Conrad dealt with a teenager who wanted a £1.40 waxed paper cup of potato wedges. Pondered this, and also the chain’s naff pirate theme. But then it dawned on me, what did pirates like? Rum, sodomy and the lash, of course – hence the bum-munching.

I listened to Ed Miliband’s speech to the Labour party conference while at stool the other day. This was purely serendipitous: a function of the dispensation of my digestion, the location of the lavatory and my wife’s bizarre interest in such things (conference speeches, that is, not my digestion). Not to gross you out or anything, but had I not been so engaged, I doubt I would have managed to concentrate for more than a few seconds – for whatever else Miliband Jr may be, he’s a worthy successor to Tony Blair, that air-guitarist of political rhetoric.

I kept hearing the “new generation” trope come floating up the staircase, and I managed to gather that what the heir to Keir Hardie was saying was that he and whoever joined him would be in the vanguard of this new generation – a bizarre flying picket of progressivism, seizing the centre ground of British politics.

Good luck to them, I say, for capturing this contested territory makes advancing across the no-man’s-land of the Somme in 1916 look like a cakewalk. The sheer press of suited bodies! The murderous enfilades of blandness! If Babyface Ed manages to survive, he’ll be the last man standing on a heap of corpses – the rest of the combatants having bored one another to death. Not, I hasten to add, that you could have guessed any of this, had you stood at the lectern in Manchester and looked out over the assembled delegates. True, not all of their faces were transfigured with joy but, by golly, they were rapt.

How can one account for the madness of this particular crowd? In Swift’s Laputa, persons of quality were attended at all times by “flappers”, whose task it was to provide “external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing” using bladders tied to sticks. Unless the Laputans were so flailed, they were constantly in danger of slipping into reveries about cosmic matters. But delegates to the party conferences seem to manage to speak and listen with no such external aid.

It struck me, listening to the conference delegates “debating” on Newsnight, that at least one explanation for their ability to withstand the sort of Largactil verbiage dished out by Big Nurse Miliband, Dr Cameron and Clegg, the anaesthetist, is that the younger among them have known no other discourse than this bollocks about “service providers” and “stakeholders”. And when it comes to the fatuities of “choice”, these poor lambkins have had no choice. Such youngsters no longer know whether they believe in anything before being afforded the opportunity to ask a selected sample of people like themselves what they believe in. There are no politically engaged young people any more – just focus groups of one.

Which is why, I suppose, the party conferences are an even more attractive gig than ever before: hemmed in on all sides by the zombies of apathy, the ever-diminishing numbers of activists fight a rearguard action as they back towards the electric doors of this or that conference centre. If the condition of modern man and woman is to find oneself hopelessly atomised, then the only safety remains in the crowd.

The crowd in Manchester seemed to have spent a lot of the week looking at a stage set with a curious simulacrum of a television studio – or even a bourgeois living room. This, then, was the condition of democratic socialism: staring at a brightly lit L-plan of leatherette sofas, upon which were poised increasingly exiguous ministers – fading . . . fading . . . fading away into the long shadows of the political wilderness. Because, for many conference delegates, strangers to the factory floor, or the wakes week, or any other form of group endeavour, this was the closest they’d ever been to collectivism. And what a fine madness it was to look upon the Eds and Davids and Frodos (sorry, I meant “Andy Burnham”) while imagining that, as they were so clearly sitting in a living room, you must be sitting there with them.

For that is the final and inescapable madness of the conference: that these people are your friends, your family, even. Ah, well. I suppose the Labour Party can at least comfort itself with this narcissism of small differences – that no matter how bored, bamboozled and benighted it may be, the Tories are always worse.

Now, back to the toilet.

Will Self’s latest novel, Walking to Hollywood, is published by Bloomsbury (£17.99)

From time to time, I succumb to one of the great delusions of the modern world: namely that a gadget or device will allow me to do something I’ve been doing for years faster and more efficiently, thereby gifting me more of the kind of time I so desperately need: down time. This is how mobile phones, netbooks and now e-books have all entered my life. Each time, I discover that said gizmo does nothing for me and then swear that I’ll never make the same mistake again, but I can’t help it – it’s like a coup de foudre; I see an advert or hear the twittery spiel of some deranged early adopter and off I fly into computer-generated fantasies of techno-adequacy.

The netbook was a case in point. I adore all small things as a matter of course, being at root infantile (but then aren’t we all? Surely the relentless evolution of all gizmos into a sole “white pebble” morphology is proof positive that we yearn to dabble for ever in the rock pools of juvenescence?), and while I already had a very small laptop, I convinced myself that by shrinking the thing an inch all round it would instantly become that much more handy. I would take it with me wherever I went and whip it out in public – a Promethean flasher! – then efficiently answer those pesky emails and swiftly type those columns on, um, the madness of gadgets.

To be fair to me, I did agonise over the purchase for a good month – after all, I have form – but inevitably I succumbed, only to discover, what? That the netbook not only remained zipped up, but also that, rather than finding it so small that I carried it with me all the time, it was, in fact, so insignificant that I could hardly be bothered to take it with me at all. I supposed that the netbook had done me a favour, that I would never succumb to the gadget gaga again, but then someone gave my wife a Kindle and I was off again.

Before I’d even started to play with the thing, I was fantasising about how it would massively enhance my flagging mental powers. With 2,500 searchable volumes at my fingertips, I would become effortlessly erudite; moreover, there’d be no more agonising over which book to take on a 90-minute train journey; not “either Rosemary Conley’s Complete Hip and Thigh Diet or À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” – but both! Then, I discovered that there were myriad classics that could be downloaded from the Kindle Store for absolutely free. At last, I would get to grips with Middlemarch, Moby Dick and The Man Without Qualities (for some reason it’s the Ms I’ve missed out on), just dipping in whenever I had a few spare minutes.

But you don’t read the classics like that, do you? Any more than you write the damn things on a small slab of plastic and micro-circuitry. Christopher Hitchens observed that if Casaubon attempted to penetrate Dorothea, it would be like trying to fit an oyster into a parking meter – and mutatis mutandis, the same image holds good for my trying to fit Middlemarch into my own tense and frigid brain. And while we’re on the subject of parking meters, what deranged, petty functionary imagined that introducing payment by mobile phone would make life easier for anyone, save the compulsive car-user? For those of us who only drive occasionally, the act of parking now involves 10 tedious minutes of data entry.

And while we’re on the subject of driving, satnav has to be the ultimate useless gizmo when it comes to saving time. I’ve lost count of occasions I’ve had to deprogramme a minicab driver and persuade him that just possibly I know a better route across town than his dash-mounted white pebble, as I’ve lived here my entire fucking life. What’s more, it astonishes me that there has been no public agonising over whether glancing back and forth between the world and a schematic representation of it while travelling at speed might be a distraction.

If satnav can’t be used while driving, it becomes distinctly obsolete – like all the other improvements in automobile technology, none of which has increased the average speed through cities by one jot in the past century. That’s the truth about whole swaths of technological advance: as it is to the individual, so it is to society. Superficial advances in areas such as medicine and domestic science provide us with more disposable time – but then we just fill it up fiddling with our iPhones. How mad is that?