Will Self

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

Broadstairs, the Isle of Thanet, a frowsty sort of an evening in early August, with shadows forming within shadows down the high street – a run of chip shops, chain stores and charity shops that steepens into a ski jump, which threatens to tip you off the dirty-white crescent of cliff surrounding Viking Bay. The consensus following a wholesome chicken dinner was that we should promenade and observe the morris dancers parading through the town; after all, who but a callow sophisticate could fail to appreciate this ancient rite, with its pagan roots buried deep in the loam of old Albion?

A few morris-dancing community support officers were gathered in the gloaming. They pranced, they twirled, they jingled their bells and they clacked their truncheons under the appreciative eyes of beery onlookers, whose faces were eerily leeched of colour by the up-light from their 3G phones. And then, lo, here was the parade! Side after side of morris dancers, some perfectly traditional in white shirts, straw hats and knee breeches, but others altogether mutant: there were Star Wars morris dancers with masks; there were beribboned morris dancers, their garments reminiscent of the straw robes of New Guinea’s tribal warriors; there were even punk morris dancers who pogo-ed down the road.

In recent years, I’ve been spending more and more time on the south coast and it seems to me that a curious cultural convulsion is gripping this landscape of boredom and bungalows, Tesco car parks and shingle beaches; for, just as the once-discrete towns of Shoreham, Hove, Brighton, Lewes, Eastbourne, Bexhill, Hastings, Folkestone, Dover, Deal, Ramsgate and Margate have become joined together into a continuous, urbanised littoral, so there has been this atavistic upsurge of hey-nonny-no-ing, anti-Catholicism and fertility cults.

In Lewes last autumn, we witnessed the parade of the Sussex bonfire societies, groups of largely middle-aged male and female urbanites, dressed up as anything from Darth Vader to pogoing punks. Accompanied by drummers and didgeridoo players and dragging barrels of burning tar along the road, the various societies have a tribal air to them. The same tribes were out again in May to celebrate the Jack in the Green festival – another weird exercise in new paganism, in which a leafy bloke prances through the old town, followed by the anointing of a tree boll with water, or some such flummery. Then they were at it again in Broadstairs, as Folk Week climaxed in an ejaculation of inauthenticity.

All these festivals, parades and bonfire ceremonials are modern inventions. The Lewes Guy Fawkes carry-on began as recently as the late 19th century, when it was formulated by a local antiquarian. The Jack in the Green ballyhoo was revived only in the early 1980s, while the entire jiggling edifice of morris dancing was only re-erected in the early decades of the 20th century by folklorists such as Cecil Sharp.

So complete was the deracination wrought by industrialisation during the 19th century that the folklorists often had to be a bit creative when it came to “discovering” old songs and traditions, and it is this spirit of fakery that we find in the contemporary face-painters and drum-bangers. Indeed, it’s arguable that it’s precisely because we’re in a period of equally profound cultural loss that the volk are impelled to such pretend continuities. Still, good luck to ’em, I say – it’s a jolly spectacle and they don’t seem to take themselves too seriously. Besides, I don’t imagine that any one of them labours under the delusion that he or she is parading along a folkway grooved into the greensward as deeply as a medieval holloway. To suggest such a thing would be as facetious as imagining that all those wallahs gathered together in the abbey for this coronation or that jubilee believe they’re participating in a ceremonial unchanged since time out of mind, rather than a bit of mummery got up by Walter Scott to boost the flagging popularity of the Hanoverian dynasty.

Oops, I’m being ironic again. But then irony – unlike cod paganism – is the real living tradition of our isles, while all the Viking boat burnings, summer solstice gatherings and assorted saturnalias are nought but another exercise in that very fine human madness: nostalgia for an age that never really existed.

The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman is here:

Did kidult culture spawn kidult restaurants, or was it perhaps the other way round? Certainly, the concentrated ambience of senile juvenescence that saturates establishments such as the Hard Rock Café, Planet Hollywood and TGI Friday’s makes them a suitable vanguard of the kidult revolution. I blame the Sixties. Between the door of TGI Friday’s – beside which stood a life-size model of the Iron Man (although, on reflection, is it possible for a fictional superhero to be “life-size”?) – and our table, the waiting captain challenged us with the phrase “All right, guys?” no fewer than four times, as if we were being subjected to a kidult interrogation.

Being a kidult myself, I didn’t mind, but Luther, who’s nine years old and a bona fide child, was – in his own words – “weirded out”. And when another servitor leapt out at him and barked, “What’s up, boss!?” he almost burst into tears. In fact, our entire trip to Friday’s was in this Vice Versa spirit, with the kid hating every minute and the adult, if not exactly cherishing the experience, prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt.

We were seated between a quartet of Japanese tourists who proceeded to haggle relentlessly over their bill and a Middle Eastern family consisting of black-bagged mum and a dad who footled with his 3G phone. Coyly, Friday’s avers that the “G” in “TGI” stands for “goodness”, but looking around at the multi-faith clientele babbling under a cloud of hickory-flavoured barbecue sauce, I was certain it could represent either a monotheistic “God” or the entire polymorphously perverse Hindu pantheon.

The decor at TGI is actually a pantheon of Americana – the aforementioned Iron Man, an ET, a drum kit, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and so on. “One of the things that’s annoying me,” Luther observed tartly, “is that it’s super-American.” Then he ordered a jumbo hot dog from the kids’ menu. For the duration of our meal, a succession of pop songs percolated through the gloom – you know the ones: Motown stompers, the Small Faces, the Kinks, even Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”. None of them was intrinsically bad, but they all suffered by association.

I toyed with requesting one of the special house burgers, but while not going so far as one of my friends who observed, of an anorexic family member, “For her, food is essentially pre-shit,” I can’t say the idea of seven ounces of beef slathered with guacamole filled me with anything but thoughts of coprophilia. So I settled for the Caesar salad and a side order of shrimps done in the Friday’s signature Jack Daniel’s marinade. Indeed, were it not for Luther’s gloom, I might have fallen further off the wagon than this and abandoned a decade’s sobriety by ordering one of the “Whiskey Wonders” – possibly a Godfather, which is glossed as: “A simple combination of Scotch and Luxardo amaretto that’s as classic as its movie namesake.”

The previous evening I’d had dinner with my nephew, who told me that his girlfriend was constitutionally unable to vomit. I think I’d found a cure. Friday’s prides itself on its cocktails: there are pages of such nauseating descriptions, and, as I leafed through them, it occurred to me that really these are the alcopops of a pseudo-sophistication, and that when all’s said and puked, there’s no fundamental distinction to be made between James Bond’s ultra-dry Martini and Vicky Pollard’s Bacardi Breezer.

Luther pronounced his jumbo hot dog to be “very jumbo”, which I think was a compliment. My Caesar salad was bone-cold strips of chicken laid out on a pallet of limp lettuce and hideous croutons. But then, is there anything more hideously inutile than a crouton in this whole wide world? The big surprise was the shrimps – which were surprisingly tasty; I wolfed them down.

All in all, I hadn’t minded TGI Friday’s nearly as much as I thought I would. It may have been the presence of my depressed nine-year-old, or it could be that I sensed that this was the beginning of the end for kidult dining – after all, with a rapidly declining birth rate, this curious inversion of mores may be about to implode. In the future, with an enormous ageing population, children’s birthday parties will probably take place in establishments like the Palm Court at the Ritz, with string quartets instead of guitar bands. One can only hope.