Will Self - Psychogeography

But I’ve no time to get lost in such regrets. I’m on a mission. In my rucksack are enough uppers, downers, twisters and screamers to transmogrify the passive pheasants of these pleasant hills into the avian equivalent of suicide bombers. Strange Miles, my neuro-pharmacological consultant — who operates out of a light industrial estate near Princes Risborough — has been working on this gear all summer. He swears blind that if I leave enough of it in the feed bins scattered along the ridge, then come the first day of the shooting season, instead of doing the flying equivalent of ambling towards the wavering guns of a lot of tipsy City brokers, the fowl will rise up and descend in a fluttering, bombinating horde. Their target? Chequers.

I only hope the Prime Minister himself will be in residence that weekend and get espaliered by an thousand tiny beaks, but, if not, if he’s in Texas or Timbuktu, then I’m prepared to accept whatever fatalities may be caused by the drug-crazed birds. Strange Miles and I simply see this as collateral damage in our two-man war against the entrenched power of the state.

On I slog and slide, the rich clayey soil spattering my nylon flanks. But what’s this! Just past Cobblershill Farm I come across a folding table set up by the wayside. A number of clingfilm-wrapped placards enjoin me to sign a petition against the use of this bridleway by four-wheel-drive vehicles. Of course I should sign! Every fibre in my being cries out against the desecration of the countryside by these disgusting vehicles. . and yet. . and yet. . if I’m entirely honest I cannot deny that I myself have done a fair bit of off-roading. In the early 1990s, when I found myself temporarily marooned in a small cottage in deepest Suffolk, the green lanes beckoned to me with their cushioned camber and their soft verges.

Few people realise quite how many green lanes there are in England, let alone that you’re allowed to drive cars along them. If I took the B roads back from the Ship Inn at Dunwich, or the Bell in Walberswick, to my cottage outside Leiston, there was always the slim chance that I might encounter one of the two patrol cars that cover East Anglia. Not that I would’ve been over the limit, you understand, it’s just that encounters with the authorities of any kind have always given my sensitive nerves a dreadful jangle. No, much better to slide out of Walberswick and then across the common on the sandy, rutted, potholed track past the haunted hippy house. In deepest darkest winter there was always a tremendous frisson when I reached the last outpost of civilisation and doused the headlights. Proceeding by the light of the stars at a stately 5 mph, the wind battering the featherweight chassis of the little car, always made me feel that I’d stripped away all the useful accoutrements of motoring, to leave merely a locomotive residuum.

It helped that I was driving a Citroën Deux-Chevaux. Yes, not for me the padded monstrosity of a Toyota Land Cruiser or the effortless functionality of a Land Rover Discovery. Not for me the effortless traction of four massive tyres. What made my night-time green lane driving an acceptable form of transport, rather than a dubious kind of recreation, was that I allowed the countryside itself a fighting chance. True, the 2CV does perform very impressively in the rough, but there was always a good chance that I’d get myself bogged down and end up having to slog home twelve miles on foot. It happened several times — and I felt good about it. But these bastards ploughing the Chilterns into a furrowed morass, they simply shouldn’t be allowed. I withdrew my tungsten carbide ballpoint from its oiled leather sheath and signed the petition with a flourish, before plopping on in the direction of Little Hampden.

A fortnight later the PM stepped out on to the ha-ha of Chequers in the lemony light of a perfect autumn morning. The shotgun reports up on the ridge sounded like the doors of so many suburban semis being precipitately slammed by hurrying commuters — or so he thought in a rare moment of metaphoric insight. And that cloud up there, what could it be? So many airborne motes fusing into coherence and then fissioning into chaos, like thoughts in a disordered mind.

James Fox doesn’t so much smoke cigarettes as allude to the possibility of them being smoked. The fiery treat is sparked, two or three deep inspirations ensue, then the white trunk is fiercely coiled in the elephant’s graveyard of the ashtray. Having observed James smoke for some time now I’ve been driven to consider anew how for the nicotine addict the act defines both time and space. One of the first things you notice when you give up cigarettes is how your previously linear narrative is translated into a series of perplexing jump-cuts. Just as journeys are no longer measured by the number you smoke — home to Tube, one; car to work, three — so the whole day loses its rudder and heels about hopelessly on the choppy surface of the era.

I suspect that James’s manner of smoking has evolved over decades of global journalistic assignments. His is the prescient puffing of a man about to be airlifted out of Kigali shortly before the machetes begin to swish; his is the stolen suck which precedes the long walk down the air-conditioned corridor of power. By smoking an untipped Gitane in less than three minutes James ensures that his space-time continuum is rigidly defined, a blue-brown set that can be erected and then struck within seconds. But at what cost? While I’ve always maintained that to seek out cut-price tobacco for myself with any seriousness is a dangerous admission (if I have to economise, shouldn’t I give up?), what’s to prevent me helping James to budget more wisely?

In Britain the Exchequer ensures that James’s preferred brand sets him back nearly twice as much as it would in its native France. I resolve to drive James to Calais to stock up; after all there’s a certain satisfaction in joining the great exodus to avoid duty, especially if experienced vicariously. Hundreds of thousands of Britons take the cross-Channel ferry to buy cheap booze and fags in France (and, since the French have hoiked their own tax, in Belgium); just as Finnish hordes take the train to Russia to buy vodka, and Norwegians — I am reliably informed — troll across to Sweden for cut-price sweeties. Doubtless perplexed archaeologists in the far future, discovering domestic middens of far-flung packaging, will hypothesise that the turn of the third millennium saw huge migrations of European peoples, each of them bringing their own distinctive material culture.

Rolling off the ferry in the afternoon darkness of mid-winter, James and I are sucked along as if I were piloting a spacecraft caught by a tracker beam. We bump over tram tracks and cobbles into the heart of Calais, skirt the Gothic asteroid of the Mairie and eventually dock in a busy thoroughfare. The shop fronts cosily glow; the good burghers of Calais, far from being enchained, are bustling about. At second-storey level we can see at least two of those distinctive elongated diamond-shaped signs which advertise the presence of a tabac .

In France the production, packaging and sale of tobacco is regulated by SEAT, the government monopoly, so these tabacs are as far from the British fag shop as is imaginable. In place of a Perspex rack offering a few tawdry filtered brands — with names like ‘Hanover’ and ‘Plantagenet’ — you’re presented with a startling array of tobacco-as-confectionery, displayed on glass shelves, while cabinets contain pipes, lighters and other fumilanary implements. And this is only the window dressing, because every tabac is attached to a vast storehouse, within which are entombed whole divisions of cigarettes, those suicidal infantrymen of the war against humanity.