Will Self

This week’s Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

Circa 1969 the only restaurants in Britain were Chinese ones – or at least, that’s the way I remember it. They had placid aquaria in their front windows and strange, liquidly bubbling music was piped through their dimly lit interiors; the piquant aromas of chicken and sweetcorn soup, Peking duck and sweet-and-sour pork balls rolled across the dusty-red carpets, while the staff padded to and fro with the soundless self-effacement of sorcerers’ apprentices. To us kids, Chinese restaurants were all the fun of the fair as we faffed about with chopsticks and contemplated the unbearable lightness of being a prawn cracker; but most exciting of all, the arrival of the food was preceded by the lighting of a candle inside a tabletop heater. What was this? As a child, I assumed it was of a piece with shrines and gongs and burning paper money at funerals – another figure in the strange chinoiserie of suburban London.

Of course, once we had read Timothy Mo’s brilliant novel Sour Sweet, we all understood what a performance the standard British Chinese had been all along: the cuisine a dockside fusion designed for the barbarians’ uncouth palates, and the obsequiousness actually wary indifference. But where are the Chinese restaurants of yesteryear? I search for them high and low, on provincial bypasses and in the armpit of brutalist shopping centres – and still I cannot find them.

I don’t mean that there are no longer Chinese restaurants; it’s just that they no longer tend to an archetype. Just as the quintessential “Indian” seems to have died out some time in the mid-1990s, so the “Chinese” went extinct a decade before that. Perhaps both depended for their genre status on first- and second-generation immigrants operating in a more monochrome society.

Nowadays, at the hipper end of the spectrum, there are eateries with names like New Culture Revolution, which are all blond-wood benches and rubber floors – Scandinavian echt dangling in a basket of rice noodles. In fact, New Culture Revolution is the name of a small chain of Chinese restaurants – or “noodle and dumpling bars”, as they style themselves. Whenever I pass by one, I wonder if its owners – who I assume aren’t Chinese – are quite aware of how crass this ascription is, playing as it does upon mass internecine murder. It is on a par, surely, with calling a salt-beef joint Yo-ho-Shoa!, or a borscht and vodka set-up Gulag-it-Down.

I will never eat at New Culture Revolution, but I’ll eat at just about any other Chinese restaurant I can. I cherish Chinese food above all others, and find it comforting to the point of making me weep – as if I were thrusting my head between the great warm dumplings of an ancestral mother spirit. This Oedipal passion dates back to one afternoon around 1977 when I went up to the West End with a gaggle of friends and we ended up eating at Poon’s Wind-Dried Duck Company in Soho.

This was an altogether different experience from the pork balls of the previous decade. Poon’s was a bustling establishment crashing and banging up four storeys of a narrow terraced property on Lisle Street. The food was at once plainer and more tangy than the usual Anglo-Cantonese fare, and the waiters were bracing in their open contempt for their clientele. So began a lifetime of regular eating in Chinatown, during which I have patronised just four restaurants: I shifted my business from Poon’s to the cheaper Man Lee Hong some time around 1981, and then to China China on Gerrard Street. I stayed put there for two decades until, around three years ago, I rounded the corner to discover that it had transmogrified into an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Oh, woe! What is it with the all-you-can-eat buffet? The marginal unit of preference between healthy plenitude and disgusting gluttony should be evident to anyone who has reached their majority, so all such establishments can possibly represent is a society gorged with its own contempt for impoverishment. That the Chinese should operate them here is ironic, given that their homeland has suffered from terrible famines within living memory.

Still, I was reading this week that “peak food” could soon be reached, so we may live to see all-you-can-fight-to-the-death-for buffets. As for me, I switched to the Canton 30 yards away in Newport Place, and there I remain.

The latest Madness of Crowds column from the New Statesman:

At a Sunday lunch in the ‘burbs of north London, the kids run amok around a play fort in the garden that resembles a pocket Alamo; meanwhile, us grown-ups dissect chicken, then use our teeth to suture it to our stomach linings. In the febrile atmosphere of the power vacuum enveloping us – the infinitesimal gap between Gordon and Dave – all seems at once momentous and trivial, as if every question one asks were a request that Bertrand Russell pass the salt. The subject of Britain’s Trident nuclear deterrent comes up, and our hostess – who, while by no means stupid, has fewer political bones in her body than the chicken – ventures: “But if we were to get rid of it, what if Iran gets the bomb?”

Mrs S patiently explains that, were this eventuality to arise, it might be reasonably accorded Israel’s responsibility – as it is their avowed desire – to unleash mega-death on the bearded fanatics of Qom (and a few million innocent bystanders). But I’m gone already, dived deep under the incorruptible Atlantic, down into the depths, where the Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarine describes its quadrangular course across the ocean floor. I consider the crew, who have no contact with the outside world for three months at a time; I meditate upon the captain of this supercharged giant black dildo who, acting on the orders of Gordon – or David – would unleash missiles armed with multiple nuclear payloads.

For that’s the sop to the submariners’ consciences: they may push the button, but they will never know the point of impact, except in the eventuality that Gordon – or David – is himself carbonised, in which case the captain must read the personal letter from the prime minister of the day, which reposes in the safe, and which will authorise him to fire at his own will. What will the captain do, I ponder, if David succeeds to the premiership? Will he leave off his boxing of the seas to return to HM Naval Base Clyde, at Faslane and pick up a new letter, or is he instructed to take it on trust?

Either way, this rusted link in the chain of command encapsulates all the corrosive psychosis of that most insane of collective delusions, the national security doctrine known as Mutually Assured Destruction, or by its entirely apt acronym – Mad. While it may be true that in the cold-war stand-off between the US and the USSR, Mad prevented the annihilation of both empires (and, following the diversification and ramping up of weapon systems, the collateral destruction of the entire world) by making a nuclear first strike suicidal, there’s no reason whatsoever for Britain being Mad, any more than there is for Sweden, or Senegal.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that by taking Polaris from the States, and thence Trident (both systems having been developed in the US and the technology leased to us), successive British governments have also taken a job lot of mass paranoia. After all, while Gordon or David may delude himself that he’s entirely independent when it comes to vaporising Moscow – or Tehran – the fact of the matter is that no such action could ever be taken without Barack’s say-so.

I often observe the effects this extreme double-bind has on the British national psyche. I see it in the vain posturing of our politicians on the international stage; I see it in the state-sanctioned death cult of our armed forces; and I see it most poignantly in comfortable suburban homes where, when replete with Sunday lunch, someone idly considers the necessity of wiping millions of people off the face of the earth as a reasonable exercise of self-defence.

But that was then – and this is now. With the Bullingdon boy in No 10, and the camp Yorkshire slaphead in the Foreign Office, I quite appreciate the pressing need to extract the country from the maw of bankruptcy. Still, there is such a thing as killing two birds with a single stony inaction: scrapping Trident would save a shed-load of money, while also puncturing once and for all the fantasy that Britain remains a world power.

It would be the political equivalent of the entire country downing a bracing draft of Largactil, and starting to recover from the post-traumatic stress disorder of the 20th century. As any good therapist could tell Dave, confronting reality is the first step towards positive mental health – but then positive mental health isn’t why Dave went into politics, is it?

The latest Real Meals column from the New Statesman:

A long time ago, when I could still bear to eat in social contexts, I attended a dinner at London Zoo given by the Royal Zoological Society. I was seated beside an expert on crustaceans who told me two things: first, that the fattest and tastiest crabs lifted in Cromer, north Norfolk, were found in the proximity of the town’s sewer outfall pipe; second, that he and his crustacean-expert pals liked to go on holiday to Belgium, where they would go from one moules frites joint to the next, challenging each other to identify the greatest number of parasites in any given kilo of mussels. Strangely, they never tired of this little game.

The parasites were entirely harmless – but still, there’s always something a tad suspect about mussels. To my mind, they’re rather like oysters that have been working out too much and hitting the sunbed as well – sinisterly tanned and toned. Still, my mother was very fond of moules marinière and used to cook them for us – no mean feat in England in the 1970s, when often the only fish available came in the form of Shippam’s paste. There’s something hugely inspiriting about a great, foodie waft of freshly boiled mussels: they smell at once nutritious and piquantly dirty. If raw oysters are the cunnilingus of gastronomy, then mussels are … well, best not go there.

In the mid-1990s, when I was the Observer’s restaurant critic, I was packed off to review a new restaurant called Belgo that had opened in Covent Garden. The gaff was subterranean and steely-clad. There was one room with long refectory tables, at which diners sat to be served by waiters dressed up as monks. The menu was heavy on the muscle-bound bivalve, and there was also a substantial carte featuring obscure Belgian beers brewed by real monks and a selection of Dutch genevers. These latter came in shot glasses set in depressions carved out of wooden paddles wielded by the monk-a-likes – so, it was an open incitement to get horrifically pissed on gin, which we duly did, and the evening ended … well, best not go there either.

I remember thinking at the time that the Belgo schtick was pretty much the apogee of themed restaurants; a sort of Blade Runner-meets-Trappist vibe prevailed that required only dry ice – or clouds of incense – to achieve total inauthenticity. If you had told me then that, 15 years down the line, Belgo would have several branches bedizening London, together with several more belonging to a subsidiary chain called Bierodrome, well, I’d have licked a tonsure in the top of my own head. Ho-hum. Such is the queer cavalcade of history.

It’s doubtful whether Belgo/Bierodrome qualifies as a Real Meals subject, as you could spend your whole life in Nuneaton or Nairn never clapping eyes on one of these joints. But that’s just the point: people need to be warned. An innocent provincial lad or lass, unsuspectingly treading the
streets of the Great Wen, and finding them not only not paved with gold, but also lined by Belgian-themed restaurants, could be severely traumatised.

Jaded as I am, I still felt pretty nervous entering the Belgo in Holborn the other evening. Still, I’d arranged to meet my god-daughter there – she’s fashionably wheat-intolerant and we needed to talk.

Actually, it turns out that the other Belgos don’t tog their staff in habits, and the interior was pretty standard for a mid-price eatery: tables, chairs, bar, etc. Not only that, but the staff were absurdly solicitous. The young woman who served me my starter of black pudding and apples told me about the blood pudding made in her native Hungary – later, I found out she’d just written a dissertation on Virginia Woolf. Frankly, that’s more social intercourse than I’d reckon on in an average month.

Bea – my god-daughter – chose moules marinière to start, while I had a kilo of Thai-style mussels for the main event. They were fine, although by no means overwhelming. Bea’s main-course salmon was overdone – but isn’t it always? As for desserts, I like sugar as much as the next 25 morbidly obese men who’ve had gastric bands fitted, but the cheesecake was still way too sickly. We finished up with espresso and mint tea. The bill came to 60-odd quid. All in all, it was an anodyne, mid-price, themed Belgian restaurant experience – not the heart of darkness I’d feared.

The latest Madness of Crowds column is here:

The other day I was walking with a brace of my children up the steep road that approaches Brighton Station from North Laine when I observed a long, dark, liquid rivulet flowing down the pavement, and then a young man, blind drunk, and hobbled by his jeans, which were at half-mast. I pointed out to the boys the paradoxical purity of the line of pee – it’s unusual to see an entire urination so graphically demarked – and then the high-fashionableness of the dosser, whose boxer shorts were fully exposed.

Whence comes this rage among young men to hoist their underwear up above their outerwear? A rhetorical question: we know it comes from da ghetto, and we know also – or can easily deduce – why it comes from there: young, poor African-American men were in no position to afford the full designer fig mandated from the 1980s on, so they opted for the pants alone and then made a fashion statement out of pulling rabbit’s ears of Klein or Hilfiger from behind their waistbands.

There’s also, I think, the curious constraint on the legs the fashion demands – is this not a subconscious allusion to a post-industrial and trans-generationally idle workforce? Especially when combined with carpenter jeans that have never been near joinery, the punchy boxer shorts seem an ironic statement of the form: “There is no striding work available for the likes of me, so I will stumble about the place, fettered in a denim-and-cotton chain gang.”

To suggest that any given style of dress is folly is surely the height of tendentiousness – after all, is it not the case that the fripperies of every generation appear surpassingly absurd to the dandies of the last?

When I summon up memories of beseeching my mother to sew flowery inserts into my jeans to create exaggerated flares and, a mere three years later, trying to force my feet through the eight-inch cuffs of drainpipes, well, it makes even the most priapic of codpieces, the most erect of coxcombs, the tightest of corsets and the most steatopygic of bustles seem tame.

And yet … and yet. I still can’t get over the outer-underwear; every time I see a young chap hoick up his jeans so that a little cloudy puff of underpants issues from the waist it occurs to me that many thousands of other young men must be doing exactly the same thing at precisely the same moment.

It’s like that, style, isn’t it? No matter how many newspaper supplements there are, how many magazines, and how many TV shows telling you what thong you should part your arse cheeks for, there still seems an instinctive and herd-like impetus to changes in habiliment: one day you see someone looping their scarf in a certain way, the next you notice that everyone is looping their scarf like that. Fashionistas prate on endlessly about clothing as a means of expressing individuality, but it takes only a decade to elapse for us to look back and see that we were as undifferentiated as buffalos in our recherché hides.

However, it wasn’t until I sat down to write this piece that my own underlying neurosis concerning exposed male nether garments became clear to me: like Freud en train to the completion of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, I realise that it is within the tucking-in of my own psyche that the underlying dirt is to be found. My father had a singular lack of personal modesty: he would wander around the house stark naked, a sock in one hand, while querying in fluting tones: “Has anyone seen my other sock?”

Even in public he found it hard not to breach the taboo of common decency. His own nether world, for as long as I knew him, consisted of elephantine grey flannel Oxford bags, and even more elephantine flannel underpants, usually of a distempered hue. As this ensemble was lashed in place by a thin leather belt, Dad often got discombobulated, and on these occasions he would, quite unselfconsciously, un-belt, unfasten and unzip his trousers, then rearrange these wads of cloth.

So it is this, the memory of the primordial outer-underwearer from da ghetto of the London School of Economics, that I am trying to repress when I see all these fellows flaunting their pants. It is not the madness of the crowd that this illustrates – but one of my own.