Will Self's Blog, page 18

Town planning as state security in Paris

Baudelaire writes, “Mainte fleur épanche á regret/Son parfum doux comme un secret/Dans les solitudes profondes.” And George Dillon translates, “Many a flower has bloomed and spent/The secret of its passionate scent/Upon the wilderness profound.” I stand outside La Belle Équipe on the corner of the rue Faidherbe and the rue de Charonne staring down at the great tattered mess of handmade cards, poesies, rotting bouquets wrapped in cellophane and hundreds of little aluminium sockets that once he...

On the big political stories of 2015

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZrLs2fjADQ

On location: the Trafford Centre

Last year I bought a copy of JG Ballard’s last novel, Kingdom Come, a dystopic tale of the near future in which bored suburbanites descend into anomic violence as they retreat inside a giant shopping mall. Predictably, I bought my copy at the Bluewater shopping mall in north Kent, on the outskirts of London. Bluewater held the title of Britain’s biggest shopping mall for a number of years and it is surpassing large: a huge circular corridor that has become a destination. I asked a police offi...

Self Drives: Maxwell’s Equations

All five episodes of Will Self’s 600 mile trip on the trail of physicist James Clerk Maxwell are now available to listen to on the Radio 4 website here.

Real meals: Cereal Killer Café

To the Cereal Killer Café on Brick Lane in Shoreditch – at the very epicentre of London’s hipsterville. Yes, yes, I know, I probably should have hied me hither a few weeks ago, immediately after the establishment had been subjected to an all-out attack by two hundred anarchist rioters wearing pig masks and carrying flaming brands, who threw paint and, err . . . cereal at the whacky eatery. I hung fire because I suspected the cereal riot might be the beginning of a widespread revolt against fo...

On the Paris attacks

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn_ZwefhT3w

Arsenalna, Kyiv: the deepest underground station in the world

Here’s how Louis-Ferdinand Céline characterises travel in his trippy 1932 novel, Journey to the End of the Night: “An infinity opens up just for you – a laughable little infinity; and you fall into it.” Maybe so, yet sometimes – just sometimes – the falling into that laughable infinity is enough to justify all the very grindingly finite journeys we take in our lives; for if one thing seems beyond dispute, it is that no sooner has the circumnavigation of the kitchen table been completed than t...

Short stories at the RA

Listen to Will Self’s recent evening of short stories at the Royal Academy here.

Boris Johnson and the death of political satire

You can find Will Self’s latest New Statesman column here.

Real meals: macaroon madness

Whither the macaroon? I concede that, for those of you condemned to the provinces, this may not seem a pressing concern – unlike being forced to accept elected mayors with spurious powers so that the Chancellor of the Exchequer can burnish his credentials as a devolutionist. However, in this metropolis and many other cities besides, the worst has already happened in terms of local governance, while the bourgeoisie are ascending in a giddy, spiralling fugue-state of hyperglycaemia caused by ov...