Will Self

Celebrated author of novels, short stories and non-fiction, Will Self contributes to many publications and regularly appears on radio and television. Fifty of his PsychoGeograpghy columns from The Independent have recently been collected in a new publication featuring art by Ralph Steadman.

Will Self

PsychoGeography: Ordinary rendition

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Will Self: PsychoGeography

Saturday, 10 May 2008

Richard Ford, the American writer, asserts through the eponymous hero of his novel The Sportswriter that the trouble with professional sportsmen – and women – is that they're incredibly boring people. They may not have started the race of life this way, but a full-time job that entails not only the performance of repetitive actions, but intense concentration on them, tends to stub out whatever spark of originality, or individuality, they may once have possessed. However much you may love sport, you know in your heart of hearts that this is true. Simply recall the last post-fixture interview with your hero that you listened to. Were there pearls of wisdom? Was there elegant turn of phrase, or sly humour? I think not: it was a game of two halves, Harry, both of them described with excruciating clichés.

Will Self: PsychoGeography

Saturday, 3 May 2008

Last time I was in Dublin, Vivian drove me round in a big black Merc; this time it's a still bigger and blacker Chrysler. "I should've bought a cement truck," he observes, as we ooze past the Point, a massive new shopping-cum-entertainment complex that's sprouting a small forest of large cranes, "I'd be coining it now." Last time I was in Dublin, the old city seemed teetering on the edge of being metropolitan – now it's fallen over. Last time I was in Dublin, the joke was the group of three pyramidical office blocks on the bank of the Liffey that were known locally as "Canary Dwarf"; now it's them that have been dwarfed – or, at any rate, flanked by acre upon acre of plate glass and steel.

Will Self: PsychoGeography

Saturday, 26 April 2008

To Broadstairs, not to bathe – it being April, but merely take the air. The Isle of Thanet has always been a little problematic for me; I can't even say it without recalling Ian Dury's lines: 'I rendezvoused with Janet / Quite near the Isle of Thanet / She looked just like a gannet...' &c.; Somehow the great bard of the Kilburn High Road perfectly summed up this, the very coccyx of Britain, with its seafowl and its foul maidens.

Will Self: PsychoGeography

Saturday, 19 April 2008

This is a picture that Ralph took earlier this year of Sir Hartley Greenwhythere, for many years Her Majesty's ambassador to the Elysée Palace. Sir Hartley was enjoying his final cigarette at the famous Café Prostate, haunt of Marcel Duchamps and Dozy, Dave, Beaky, Mick and Titch, before the introduction of the Parisian ban on smoking in public places. It's almost impossible to imagine Parisian cafes without tobacco smoke – it's like imagining Jean-Paul Sartre without Simone de Beauvoir, or Brigitte Bardot without a seal cull.

Will Self: PsychoGeography

Saturday, 12 April 2008

Don't read this over breakfast!

Will Self: PsychoGeography - The love song of TS Eliot

Saturday, 5 April 2008

Ralph Steadman, who is a proper Surrealist, dwelling more in the country of the unconscious than the workaday world of gravelling the drive and scraping the putrefying rat, has done well to avoid the provocation of his own rambunctious id when creating this beautiful portrait of the Nobel Laureate, Thomas Stearns Eliot. Remember: Ralph is the fellow who wrote – and illustrated – an entire book about a sanitary engineer, so the anagrammatic potential of "T S Eliot" must be uppermost in his commod(ious) psyche.

Will Self: PsychoGeography

Saturday, 29 March 2008

I entrained at London Bridge, my fingers sticky with the residue of an almond Danish, and eager, as ever, for the flatlands of the Thames estuary. This interzone was where my mission began in the late 1980s: to untangle human and physical geography. I've never wavered from my conviction that there's something bizarre about all those millions of Londoners who have never seen – or even seen represented – the point where the River Thames flows into the North Sea. That there can be a location so nearby and yet so under-imagined – that alone tells us that the world remains strange to us.

Will Self: PsychoGeography

Saturday, 22 March 2008

To Sadler's Wells to see Opera North's production of Britten's Peter Grimes. I'm not that familiar with the piece – or at least, I didn't think I was – but it turned out that I had absorbed it in some occult way: the shingle of Suffolk beaches pounding the libretto into my psyche, the winds over the marshes blowing haunting skirls into my inner ear. Which is just as well, because the boiler had been on the fritz for the past few days, and the unaccustomed warmth of that many London bourgeois gathered together sent me into a deep swoon.

Will Self: PsychoGeography - Wheel of fortune

Saturday, 15 March 2008

Lowland Scotland is networked with motorways – many of them astonishingly empty. Where my mother-in-law lives, in Motherwell, you can get in the jam jar, and within an hour be in Stirling Castle, or Edinburgh Castle, or clambering up the natural fortification of Ben Lomond. So, you can be forgiven for thinking of the entire statelet as a series of arbitrarily interchangeable visitor attractions. We were zooming up to Stirling when I saw the sign for the Falkirk Wheel.

Will Self: PsychoGeography

Saturday, 8 March 2008

It was a nippy February evening in Stamford, Lincolnshire. Meanwhile, inside the Arts Centre – which boasts a perfect little jewel of an auditorium – it was right toasty. Sitting in the dressing room, I idly read the Victorian playbills that were stuck up on the walls: "Miss Elizabeth Chitteridge playing the pianoforte, will be accompanied by a full orchestra, including local gentlemen on cornets and bassoons. Good fires will be lit. Stalls seats – two shillings." And so on.

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