Will Self

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

Sweets and batteries by the tills – isn’t that the way of it? And Good Housekeeping too. I often find myself queuing for the checkout while chewing on a great wad of spearmint gum and experimentally touching the terminals of a nine-volt Duracell battery with the tip of my tongue. Under such a sensory overload, an article about Katie Price’s latest marital schism acquires a giddy surrealism. But then the checkout operative beckons me forward — I replace the magazine and the batteries, then still my jaw, so evading once again the nefarious manipulations of the merchandisers, whose objective is to substitute the instinctive herd behaviour of a bovine consumer for my capricious will.

Supermarkets are the abattoirs of capitalism and we are but so many cattle, driven along brightly lit aisle after aisle until our credit is electrocuted. True, some people hold out and shop locally, discussing the cut of a meat or the bloom of a peach for hours on end with homely, red-cheeked butchers and flaxen-fringed costers – but who are these folk, for I do not know them. Then again, some shop online – although not enough. The story of Ocado, floated recently on the stock exchange for a staggering amount, despite being barely profitable, could stand as an extreme instance of merchandising itself: send products (refrigerated Mercedes vans) scooting up and down the aisles (residential streets) for long enough, and people are bound to buy them.

But by far the majority of us cows graze at the Big Five supermarkets, and this means that, for a significant portion of our lives, we are in a peculiarly divided state of mind, for, at the precise moment when we most compellingly feel ourselves to be exercising a choice, we are in fact being comprehensively manipulated. The sweets and batteries are by the till, but fresh fruit and veg are by the entrance so as to give the entire retail barn that wholesome natural vibe. When I shop at my local supermarket, I often feel as if I’m walking into an Alpine meadow – which is why I frequently find myself buying a new dirndl, a fondue set and a CD of yodelling, all the better to seduce Heidi with.

Actually, with fantasies like that, I’d do well to keep my Von Trapp shut, but in my experience fantasy is the only way to protect yourself against this walk-through brainwash. You may set out intending just to get some chives and a support stocking, but inevitably you end up with the Yugoslavian Riesling, the 24-inch flat-screen TV and … well, chocolate isn’t really a purchase per se, now, is it? It’s more like self-love wrapped in gold foil.

The most disturbing aspect of supermarket madness is that it’s all scientifically determined: from the second the electric doors shush open, every thought you have has been graphically plotted. When I studied economics at university, the theory that most appalled me was the notion of revealed preference, which proposes that consumer preferences are transitive – from one bundle of goods to another – dependent on price and revealed by acts of choice.

Once an individual’s pattern of consumption has been determined, a so-called “indifference curve” can be plotted, which demonstrates how his or her demand will fluctuate between equally preferred bundles of goods. I’ve no doubt that supermarkets situate “gondolas” and shelves so as to maximise sales by the positioning of “bundles” of goods that they know consumers will perceive as more desirable.

This is why the supermarkets have got bigger and bigger. Meanwhile, we have got stupider and more powerless. In perhaps a millennium or two, humanity will have evolved fully into Homo shoppingtrolleyus, a lumbering beast on castors, with four stomachs, one loyalty card and a bar code across its forehead. Until then, we are doomed to being compelled to buy value packs of Quavers against our will.

Or are we? Why not do as I do? Enter the supermarket as if plunging into a Zen trance, allow yourself to experience the giddy whirl of choice as if it were a revolving mandala – then piss off without buying anything. Or else, undertake long treks to remote supermarkets in order to buy one item. A couple of years ago in Chicago, I walked nine miles from the Loop to the Near North Side to get a pair of socks at Wal-Mart. Sure, it was a crazy thing to do – but it was my own madness, not the crowd’s.

The latest Real Meals column is here:

You can’t get realer when it comes to meals than chowing down with the Statesman’s own laureate of the low life, Nick Lezard.

I’ve known Nick for years (ever since, in fact, he compared my prose to that of the classical emeticist Tertullian), and together we’ve eaten some memorable meals, including that Highland police-evading delicacy poulet au hashish, but in recent years – as his column amply confirms – Nick has fallen on hard times. True, he never exactly lived high on the hog, but now he barely scrapes by low on the streaky. It would have been unfair to subject Nick to the snail sorbets and caviar casseroles served up at London’s top tables – let alone stick him with the bill – so I suggested that we rendezvous at the Stockpot near Leicester Square.

The Stockpot is one of a mini-chain of three restaurants offering plain, wholesome British cuisine (with a few Italian fripperies) at scandalously low prices. You can have a three-course meal for two at the Stockpot, with wine, for well under 40 quid. Unbelievable, no? I mean, in most West End restaurants you can barely get a maître d’ to sneer at you for that kind of money.

I’m not altogether certain what the genesis of the Stockpot was, but all three outlets have a powerful ambience of having been there since time out of mind. Granted, the Stockpot is a metropolitan phenomenon, but I like to think that every British city still has its equivalent: somewhere that dishes up liver and bacon, bubble and squeak, fish and chips – all the binary conjunctions that once made up the bedrock of the British diet before the creation of chicken tikka masala.

I often used to eat at the branch (now closed) on Basil Street, behind Harrods, which was much frequented by cabbies, and there was nothing more comforting than watching these cockney knights of the open road spoon down their jelly and custard while inveighing against wobbly modernity.

I pressured Nick towards the liver and bacon with onion gravy and veg – a snip at £6.50; while I had chicken kiev with rice and veg – a relatively expensive £7.90. I say “pressured” because I wanted to know what the liver and bacon was like, without having to eat it myself. But then I’m like that in relation to a lot of experiences, both sensual and aesthetic. I also want to know what the foam night at Space is like, but I have no intention of going. Jules Verne picked up on this tendency over a century ago, when he remarked of Phileas Fogg that he was the kind of Englishman who sends his manservant to see the sights for him.

Passepartout also had the whitebait to start with, at my insistence. He enjoyed both heartily. “Um, um,” he ummed, “this is really quite good – you should try some.” And I did, just to please him. My soup wasn’t too bad either, giving the lie to that school of thought which says you can spend all day making soup only to end up with something that tastes marginally worse than what you get out of a can.

However, with the chicken kiev, I hit the culinary rumble strip and juddered to a halt. Like The Towering Inferno and Earthquake, chicken kiev was an integral part of the early 1970s. They were disaster movies; it was disaster cuisine – a great lowering lump of crap chicken, filled with garlic butter and herbs before being coated in breadcrumbs and fried. Chicken kiev felt anachronistic at its inception. Forty years on, I felt as if I were in a 1970s episode of Doctor Who in which cavaliers duelled with cyborgs.

Nick was faring no better with his liver and bacon; it had begun promisingly – the meat was tender and tasty – but soon ploughed into the escape lane filled with onion gravy. We tried to stimulate our jaded palates by putting these plates aside and ordering peach-and-apple pie with custard (£2.95), and chocolate sponge pudding with chocolate custard (£3.20), but it was too late – we were stuffed. The only thing we had any appetite for was the bill, which came in at £40, allowing a generous 20 per cent tip for the waitress.

I say “we” had an appetite for the bill, but in the spirit of this column I must tell it like it is: I’d gone out without enough cash, and obviously the Stockpot hasn’t heard of plastic – yet. So, Nick was obliged to pay the greater part of the bill. No wonder he’s down and out.

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

Arnold Bennett – a bestselling novelist in his day – was said to have carried a mint-condition £10 note in his wallet wherever he went. If he chanced to see someone reading one of his books in public, he was going to give this lucky individual (it was a considerable sum in the 1900s) the tenner. Needless to say, the money was still in his possession when he died.

I’m not certain what this apocryphal anecdote says about the nature of bestsellers, time, literacy and so forth, but what I do know is that, were the Swedish thriller writer Stieg Larsson to return from the grave and wander through modern Britain, he’d need a sack of banknotes on his back in order to honour all his readers. To date, the three books of Larsson’s Millennium trilogy have sold three million copies in the UK. Assuming an RPC (readers per copy) of 1.5, it means one in ten of the literate population has read at least one of these books.

I find this deranging – just as I find the mass consumption of assorted John Grisham legal thrillers, Harry Potter junior wizardry and Twilight teen vampirics equally bizarre. No doubt all books that become bestsellers have intrinsic qualities that make them attractive, but it seems to me that, beyond a certain point when the sales become exponential, other more irrational factors come into play.

In part, bestsellers must partake of the general hysteria of any craze, from the Rubik’s Cube to Sudoku and back again. With books, however, the underlying dynamic seems to me much crazier. Books are involving – even the worst of them – and they call upon the reader to project herself imaginatively into other psyches and situations. Books take a long time to read: a Larsson, weighing in at over 500 pages, is a good ten hours plus for the average reader. It’s one thing to engage in a craze for something akin to masturbation – repetitive, staple sensuality – and quite another to give your entire conscious mind over to a lot of tedious Swedes cutting each other to pieces.

To be fair, I’ve only read half of the first Millennium thriller and everyone tells me that they get better. Even so, I was shocked by quite how greyish and pulpy the prose was, with nary an involving metaphor nor even an amusing juxtaposition of two words. Instead, clichéd description is followed by actual cliché, and always there is a devilish amount of detail about clothes, about office routines, about laptops – about Swedish social services ferchrissakes. This could be because of the translation, but I doubt it.

Even so, snob that I am, as I chomped my way through Larsson’s cardboard prose, it began to seem curiously flavoursome. This was probably because of what it lacks. Don’t get me wrong: I’m no fan of literary fiction that lays down egregious simile after precious metaphor like speed bumps on a suburban street. “Slow Down,” it proclaims, “and Admire My Style!” Bestseller prose has the virtue of being solid paper engineering – not this fancy découpage.

But more importantly, I was aware of a commonality of felt experience. I was a Larsson reader in a way that I could never be a Jamesian or a Conradian; moreover, as the plot ratcheted me forward with the inexorability of a funicular grinding up a Stockholm hillside, it occurred to me that the readability of bestsellers may have an occult origin; by which I mean not some hocus-pocus, but a mysterious attribute of the collective human mind. A decade or so ago, quite serious research was published on the concept of “morphic resonance”, which appeared to demonstrate that texts are more easily absorbed if they have been learned by other people; that if 2,000 Japanese schoolchildren memorise The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, then 2,000 Hungarian kids will commit this poem to memory with greater facility than, say, Sweeney Agonistes.

Morphic resonance would certainly account for what it feels like to read bestsellers. When I read The Da Vinci Code (worldwide sales in excess of 80 million), it seemed as if my eyes were being dragged forcibly along the lines of text, such was the speed with which my mind sucked in the – admittedly facile – meaning of Dan Brown’s prose.

In the last analysis, the truth of the matter – and this is something that Bennett understood only too well – is that nothing succeeds like success. How mad is that?

The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

My nephew Jack and I are heading south after an unsuccessful attempt to reach the remote Hebridean island of St Kilda. Facing the implacability of a force-nine gale, Angus the skipper demurred. Mind you, when we arrived at the quayside in Stornoway, I’d felt like demurring as well; it wasn’t so much the prospect of 40 miles of heaving North Atlantic as the spectacle of hungry gulls mobbing the back of Angus’s pick-up. “They got a whole load of sausage rolls earlier on,” he admitted.

Now we’re midway through a long day of transport food. Jack gave the full Scottish on the Ullapool ferry a swerve but, for want of anything else to do, I tucked away egg, bacon, black pudding and toast, then sat burping Buddhistically as the ship lurched and groaned. There was nothing to eat on the coach to Inverness – probably just as well, because a sick bag was looped round every armrest and the atmosphere was charged with static electricity and the fumes of stale puke. Jack managed to cram a wrap of some sort down his neck at the Costa in Inverness; I had the driest ham sandwich of my life as the train jogged through the Grampians and down to Edinburgh.

So, we’re standing in Waverley Station, waiting for the 5pm East Coast service to King’s Cross to pull in. Jack has been unable to resist 12 Millie’s Cookies mini bites for £3.95 – and I’m with him on that one: I doubt I’d be able to resist a Millie’s cookie in front of a firing squad, eschewing the blindfold for their toothsome chewiness. “Look,” I instruct him, “when we board, we need to get seats right by the buffet so we’re in pole position for the dining car. If we go in for a sitting after an hour or so, we should be able to hang out there for the remainder of the journey, thus blagging ourselves a first-class seat.”

It’s little tips like these that I see as the very essence of the avuncular, but when I present myself guilelessly to the steward, she’s having none of it.
“If you’re in second class,” she says unprompted, “you’ve to eat and then return to your seats immediately.”

“You mean right away?” I query Bertie Woosterishly.

“Immediately.”

Even so, a railway supper is always worth having; it doesn’t matter that the decor is Noughties-utilitarian, nor that the view is of the cooling towers of Eggborough Power Station. The mere fact of a waiter staggering towards you with a steaming platter conjures up the romance of the Stamboul train – or, at least, the Brighton Belle of my childhood, when we ate kippers under plush shades and my father excoriated Lord Beeching again and again and again.

Leek and potato soup, £4. A spicy roast breast of chicken with preserved lemon and served on a bed of basmati rice, £16. Not even the miserable vers libre of menu language can frustrate the punctuation of those rounded-off prices. Nonetheless, I had the leek and potato soup; Jack had the ratatouille tart. I had cod; Jack had a steak. I had the pear and hazelnut pastry; Jack crammed down a chocolate fudge cake – even though the Millie’s mini bites were eating him from within. When the un-Spartan boy protested at all this noshing, I snapped at him: “Keep at it! But masticate each mouthful at least 40 times – I’m not going back to second class.”

A man came along the aisle with a large plastic bag and when he passed us, I saw the slogan “Cleaning your East Coast train” on his back. What is this modern mania for ceaseless rubbish removal, if not the flip side of excessive packaging? Do we hope to unwrap, discard and clear up our way out of recession? These and other observations I shared with Jack as we thrummed towards Peterborough. He looked at me the way I used to look at his grandfather over kippers on the Brighton Belle.

Still, I knew we’d passed that faint but nonetheless significant line: all it took was a judiciously deployed Clydesdale Bank £10 note and the hefty steward was in our metaphorical pocket – there was no way she’d chuck us out now, even though it wasn’t really legal tender. So, a three-course dinner with drinks and coffee, plus hefty tip: £65.55. It was a fraction of the price differential between second and first class.

True, the cod was thrashing around in the leek and potato soup like an ocean-going yacht in a force nine, but sometimes you’ve got to suffer for your luxuries.