Will Self

“A couple of years ago, a locksmith high on junk food pulled out of a McDonald’s drive-thru without looking and wrote off my car. At the time, as I went in a split second from steel-cosseted calm to rain-drenched shock, I wasn’t that pleased; but as time has gone by I’ve realised that he did me a big favour. However, it isn’t the madness of autogeddon that I wish to examine this week but the plague of overfamiliarity that has swept British society.

“Sitting in the police transit van a few minutes after the accident, I was chivvied through my statement by a couple of officers: ‘Calm down, William,’ said the WPC, reading my name from my driving licence. ‘We need to get the facts straight here.’ I was annoyed by the young woman’s tone, but it wasn’t until my shock wore off – a few hours later – that I sat bolt upright and ejaculated: ‘She called me William!’

“The absurdly youthful police officer is a standard-issue accessory of middle-age, but it can only be in the past decade or so that they’ve begun to address valetudinarian members of the public by our first names. I blame ‘Call Me Tony’ Blair for this insane inversion of social mores, as it wasn’t until the kidult air-guitarist acceded to power that such informality became de rigueur. Now everyone calls me Will: people I’ve never met before, writing me formal requests, employ the ghastly salutation, ‘Hi Will’, or even more absurdly, ‘Dear Will Self’ – as if I were a Quaker – and as for those I encounter in the flesh, only in the US or Germany do they use my proper title: Mister Self.”

Read the rest of Mr Self’s Madness of Crowds column at the New Statesman here.

“Wagamama has been serving a bizarre fusion cuisine – part Japanese traditional, part English nursery slop – for nigh on 20 years now. When the first restaurant opened in the early 1990s its exposed kitchens and austere interior design seemed the dernier cri in foodurism. Checking out the T-shirted waiting staff, punching orders into handheld computer terminals, one was convinced that this was exactly the joint where Deckard the blade runner would chow down, were he sent to hunt replicants in London.

“However, nothing is ever so dated as the future – or, as Theodor Adorno put it: ‘The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself.’ And while during the fin de siècle we may have yearned for flying cars and sexy cyberwomen, what the Noughties brought instead was robotic waiting staff and a strange syncretism of occidental consumption and oriental production, which means that there must now be a significant proportion of British yoof who inhabit an entirely Japanese materiality: shopping at Uniqlo and Muji, eating at Wagamama, reading manga comics and fiddling about with Sony netbooks. All while remaining utterly ignorant of Shinto, Buddhism, the films of Akira Kurosawa and the novels of Mishima. Everything has been lost in translation except the profit motive.”

Read the rest of last week’s Real Meals column at the New Statesman here.

“I’ve been putting it off, hopping up and down, tensing first one buttock then the other, waiting until the pain is insupportable . . . but although it’s a dirty job, someone has to let go and ask the question: why is it that so many men piss in the streets nowadays? Time was when the average British male would no more publicly urinate than he would fornicate or defecate – but now the streets round my way run yellow. Indeed, there’s an alley opposite my house that I can see from where I’m typing this column, and if I chance to glance in that direction I’ll often clock some perfectly ordinary-looking chap duck into it, unzip, then splutter.

“I’ve got so fed up with it that on one occasion, when I saw two men taking a dual leak, I went across and asked one of them where he lived. ‘Why d’you wanna know?’ he said. ‘Simple,’ I replied. ‘So I can come round and piss outside your house.’

“Of course, I’m not so ignorant as to imagine that the taboo against al fresco relief was always in place, but I should imagine that apart from wartime it endured for much of the 20th century. Certainly, I can never remember seeing British men do this when I was a child – it was a dirty foreign habit, indulged in by the likes of the French, whose pissoirs were in any case barely decent. Even in the late 1990s a trip to Paris always began with a distinct urinous tang as you stepped forth from the Gare du Nord, whereas now the smell hits you at St Pancras.”

Read the rest of last week’s Madness of Crowds here at the New Statesman.