Will Self

It’s a measure of how our conceptions of Eden have done an abrupt 180-degree handbrake turn that Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us should have become a bestseller. This thought experiment, imagining what a post-human world might be like — and how quickly Mummy Gaia would recover from the depredations of her wayward sons and daughters — ended up being advertised on the Tube. As you descended the escalator into the frowsty netherworld, you could feast your eyes on the book’s cover image: Nelson’s Column entwined in a bushy convolvulus while the admiral’s stony gaze surveyed a tree canopy undulating towards the horizon.

The message of the book’s success was clear: a significant proportion of the reading public were prepared to entertain the idea of life-after-them, and not as a dystopic vision, but an Edenic one: the garden without Adam and Eve, only their much-loved pets, now happily liberated.

Looked at one way, every era gets the apocalypse it deserves. Wells’s alien invasion of the 1900s spawned thousands more — and these then overlapped with the nuclear fry-ups that became current from the 1940s. The natural disasters — droughts, floods, earthquakes — that ushered in the age of environmental consciousness became more and more extreme until they purged the planet as utterly as the fire and brimstone of Revelation.

So what should we make of the new fashion for a post-human world itself, rather than the 20th century’s obsessive dwelling on the wipeout? One view is that it’s simply the recasting of religious fables that are ineradicably human. Richard Dawkins might fall to the floor gnawing on the woolly his wife knitted for him, but just as his own works supply us with a story of our own origins to match any creation myth, so the post-human world supplies our need for an end-state. What’s it all been for? we cry, existentially tormented adolescents that we are. And the answer comes back: a lovely arboretum.

It seems that MI5 has largely given up on the terrorists who for years now have expressed their love for some apes by trying to kill others. It’s not that Huntingdon Life Sciences is to be allowed to go about its slicing and dicing entirely unmolested — it’s only that a clearer and more present danger has emerged: Earth First! and other eco-warrior networks have, we’re told, their wilder fringe, those who believe in the most radical solution to the threat humanity presents to the planet and its biota: getting rid of people altogether. Actually, I incline to the view that such folk are as sweetly deluded as Sarah Palin-style climate-change deniers. And like the deniers, they’re completely anthropocentric; after all, it’s still all about them — or us. But if Gaia does shuck humanity off its back, or it transpires that our own instinctive impulses — to go forth and to multiply packaging — result in the flame-grilling of our own cities, the only way of comprehending this, without recourse to a sky god, is that it’s not really about us at all. Despite our ability to comprehend our own death — whether individual or collective — and our much-vaunted free will, we’ll have to accept that our belief that humanity is different from any other species of life, whether religious or scientific, has been utterly groundless.

The writer John Gray has described the current standing-room-only situation on Earth as an example of a “population spike”; the same sort of thing you see with rats or rabbits when they’re provided with particularly easy pickings. Indeed, Gray also proposes a new Latin tag for us; no longer should we be called Homo sapiens, but Homo rapens, such has been the ferocity with which we’ve munched our way along the world’s buffet. Gray anticipates an era of resource wars and pandemics as the world warms; the population collapse will be cataclysmic — from 11 billion in the middle part of this century to…? Well, who can say?

Clearly the human suffering embodied in this stark subtraction is inconceivably vast; luckily we lack the equipment to empathise with it. Humanity is not a single family of angels but a great mass of chimpanzee troupes. Those who place a premium on human exclusivity — whether progressives who look for a technological fix or the Luddites of Earth First! — cannot help but be angry with us and themselves: we screwed it up. As things get worse, the self-hatred of humanity will ramp up accordingly. But those of us who truly accept that people are animals just like any others will have at once the most sympathy and the most detachment.

We couldn’t help despoiling the world — it’s in our nature. You cannot expect a puppy to rub its nose in its own shit — but that doesn’t make you love it any the less. I have the luxury of doubt: I don’t know if there ever will be a world without us. What I do know is that sympathy and detachment are a better basis for action than anger and recrimination.

28.12.08

A review from the Times from December 2007, in its way the opposite of the Real Meals concept from the New Statesman:

There are London restaurants where having a well-known name secures you a table at short notice – and then there’s the Ivy. The Ivy plights its troth on being wedded to notoriety. It’s the kind of restaurant that, if it could, would tear itself from its foundations and heave across town to squeeze into the Big Brother house, before happily having sex on camera with the Wolseley or Scott’s. If you’re bridge-and-tunnel folk – snob Manhattan-speak for suburbanites – then you haven’t a hope in hell of reserving a table at the Ivy unless you call weeks, if not months, in advance. But if they know who you are, you can be magically seated.

All of which is by way of conceding: they do know me at the Ivy. Not quite as well as AA Gill, who wrote its cookbook, but well enough. Well enough that when I called for a table recently, I was asked to confirm my identity because, apparently, there’s a comic impersonator who calls up and blags reservations by pretending to be me.

Actually, I feel like I’m pretending to be me when I’m at the Ivy. As Nietzsche observed: “When I see a so-called ‘great man’, I see someone who is aping their own ideal,” and at the Ivy, there’s usually some monkey business going on. The paps gather outside the theatre opposite, where The Mousetrap is now in its fiftysomethingth year, and act out their own little play: not a whodunnit, but a who-is-it?

Inside, the warm and woody interior cossets its clientele, while through the diamond-mullioned windows comes the lightning flash as an A- (or F-) lister enters the lobby beneath the snappers’ lenses. Famous people like to be around famous people because it’s cosy and pally. And sticking together gives the comforting delusion that it is they who are the herd, while the rubberneckers are actually rather fabulous and unique individuals.

This is a win-win game that the Ivy’s front-of-house staff play brilliantly. If you have a “name”, they remember it; they say it’s nice to see you, they inquire after your wife, husband or even dead pet gerbil. They are the supernannies of the celeb circuit, and command salaries that reflect this. It’s rumoured that the doorman at Scott’s takes home about £80,000. I see nothing odd about this: getting moguls, models and mafiosi, and even muggins here, to feel good about ourselves is something a posh shrink would murder to be able to achieve.

Since I was last at the Ivy, the restaurant seems to have significantly upped its game. When I ate there in April, the food was substandard and I saw a mouse dart across the stairs to the gents. But unless the offending beastie could prove it was escaping from the theatre opposite, there’s no way its presence could be deemed acceptable.

Still, that was nothing compared to the dozen oysters I once ordered in the Ivy, which came complete with their own lice. When I objected, the then head waiter had the nerve to try and persuade me that they were a sure indicator of freshness. But that was before Chris Corbin and Jeremy King flogged it – along with Le Caprice and J Sheekey – and moved on to pastures new.

The anxiety was always that the restaurant’s new proprietors, the soulless corporation that owns the Belgo chain, would never come up with homely touches like oyster lice – or, worse, that they would muck about with the time-honoured menu. The reason I like the Ivy quite so much is that, in keeping with its role as a nursery for the famous, it basically dishes up comfort food for adults.

This is not the gaff to go to if you want your palate to be stretched until it snaps back in your face. This is where you go when you’re hungover and tired and ulcerated: it’s the Rennie of contemporary cuisine. Shellfish, game, roasts, broths and chowders – this is what we pampered types expect at the Ivy. We want them cooked well, but without unnecessary frills: there’s only the tiniest drizzle of jus on the menu, and that comes with the roast poulet des Landes with dauphin potato (chicken and chips to you, squire).

I noticed few changes in this bill of basic fare since I’d last troubled to examine it. The caviar was still there, and the sautéed foie gras, too. A substitution for the chicken tikka masala seemed to be a Thai red curry, but otherwise, all was in order: pasta dishes, risottos, even hamburgers. Our waiter tried to sell us the fish of the day – a plaice fillet cooked in black-bean sauce with salsify – but that was way too adventurous for me and my companion who, by her own admission, had been utterly “trolleyed” the night before and was in a delicate state. So she – who, while a blonde, bears absolutely no other resemblance to Adrian Gill’s famous dining companion – opted for the beetroot salad with Ragstone goat’s cheese, while I had the sweetcorn chowder with cinnamon muffin, and a brace of West Mersea native oysters on the side, purely to catch up on the lice sitch.

The Bottle Blonde’s salad looked as if it had been put together in a Greek taverna circa 1973, but according to her, the competing flavours of sweet dressing and pungent cheese remained interesting throughout the munch. I ordered the chowder purely to see how “nursery” an Ivy dish could be. I wasn’t disappointed: this was the starter as geriatric dessert, a reassuring gloop with the consistency and sweetness of a vanilla frappucino. The cinnamon muffin really was a cinnamon muffin, and as for the oysters, there wasn’t a louse in sight – unless you count me.

Last year, I cried when I realised the grouse-shooting season was over and I hadn’t eaten enough. This year, I’m not going to make the same mistake. At the Ivy, good children can have their grouse taken off the bone. I pretended I’d been good and was rewarded with a perfectly cooked bird, accompanied by creamy mashed potato and a wad of spinach.

The Ivy’s wine list is the solid business you’d imagine, running all the way up from reds by the glass for a reasonable five quid to £235 bottles of vintage Krug, but I know nothing of this, not having had a drink for many moons now. My companion – for obvious reasons – was crying off as well. Frankly, she put on a pretty poor show altogether, not even making it through her salmon fishcake with sorrel sauce – “Too rich,” she moaned pitifully – and declining a dessert. I, meanwhile, managed to cram in a steamed chocolate and orange pudding, and downed a much-needed pot of verveine tea.

The Bottle Blonde tells me that Corbin and King have lured the celebs away from the Ivy, and on the night we were there, I didn’t recognise anybody. Not that this counts for much: I didn’t even realise who Kate Moss was when she introduced herself to me. The BB told me she’d run across Jimmy Nail, Jools Holland, Lucian Freud and Helena Bonham Carter at the Wolseley in recent weeks, although she neglected to say whether they were all eating together, which would be a sight worth seeing.

On the basis of our outing, which cost £112, inclusive of the extremely nurturing service, the Ivy has every right to grab back these luminaries – or, at any rate, someone who can do convincing impersonations of them.

The Ivy
1-5 West Street, WC2; 020 7836 4751. Lunch, Mon-Sat, noon-3pm; Sun, noon-3.30pm. Dinner, Mon-Sat, 5.30pm-midnight; Sun, 5.30pm-11.30pm