Will Self

“I vividly remember my first experience of hands-free mobile phones. It must have been around 1998 in Stockholm. I arrived by night, in the teeth of a blizzard, and distinctly shaken up by having flown from London sitting between the pilots of the SAS flight. I was, shamefully, on a press junket, and this was the only seat available. I wandered the concourses of Stockholm airport waiting for my onward connection and absolutely freaked by the numbers of soberly dressed businessmen who strode about the place gesticulating and talking aloud, even though there was no one there.

“What was this, I wondered – the atavistic Scandinavian bicameral mind in action? Were these guys talking to Wotan, or were they schizophrenics? It took me a while to notice the little pigtails of flex dangling from their ears, then grasp that this was only the stringy extension of a communications revolution hell-bent on inverting private and public space. Ah! The mobile phone – how can we imagine life without it? (Well, if you’re, say, over 30, the answer is: with perfect clarity – after all, we can remember that carefree era of less paranoia and greater punctuality.) More specifically, what was civil society like before any fuckwit with a portable phone started believing that he or she had an inalienable right to yatter on in public, at inordinate length and as loudly as a trombonist?”

Read the rest of the latest The Madness of Crowds column at the New Statesman.

“Chicken, chicken! Every place I go there is chicken, every step I take, wishbones and drumsticks crunch beneath my soles, while the blisters in battered old chicken skin crepitate eerily. If, as I do, you live in a large city, you’re never more than a few feet away from some disjointed portion of a poultry carcass. If, as I am, you’re the owner of a dog, you’re never more than a few seconds away from having to shove your hand down its throat to try to retrieve a splintery bone.

“Sometimes I think this great alfresco charnel house is only the just resting place for these poor birds’ leftovers – after all, their miserable and truncated lives were spent boxed, then they were exterminated with Einsatzgruppen awfulness, before being flogged in boxes; at least now – albeit in bits – they’re spread about, as if having been subjected to a strange inversion of a Tibetan Buddhist sky burial, whereby human beings scavenge bird corpses rather than vice versa. At other times I project myself into the dim, distant future; surely, in the course of geologic time, these great middens will petrify, forming some hitherto unknown sedimentary rock, one that will cause geologists of the distant future to dub this the Kentuckyzoic era?”

Read the rest of the Real Meals column at the New Statesman website, though given that Self asks “how can anything that tastes this awful be quite so popular?” perhaps it might double up as his Madness of Crowds column too?

“This column takes its title from Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay’s seminal work on folly, first published in 1841, and subsequently much revised to account for the mechanisation of 19th-century hysteria. Mackay treats of many psychic states, ranging from the innocuously barmy to the downright deranged, but to my mind one of his most interesting sections concerns the way in which a nonce word, or phrase, will grip the masses, until you cannot listen to an exchange between two people without hearing it used. D’you know what I mean?

“In Mackay’s day the London mob were seized by successive manias for catchphrases as various as ‘Quoz’, ‘What a shocking bad hat’ and ‘Has your mother sold her mangle?’. In some instances, he is able to trace the expression back to its origins in a real happening, or a popular ballad, while with others, although unable to explain where it came from, he nonetheless furnishes a wealth of anecdotage. One such is ‘Who are you?’, a line that was so much the rage, it entered the literary canon through the mouth of the caterpillar in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

To read the rest of Self’s Madness of Crowds column, visit the New Statesman website.