Will Self - Psychogeography

In Thailand the sybaritic life on a farang-only island off Phuket was about as appealing to me as a shit-smelling durian. The pink Western porkers were massaged by little brown Thais and served up with that worldwide luxury hotel fare which always involves American pancakes and sculpted melons.

Bangkok felt better; a lot better. Men carried grandfather clocks through the flooded streets, streams of tuk-tuks farted out noxious fumes — two strokes and you’re out. Along every side alley were food stalls offering sizzling snacks. You could graze your way from one temple to the next giant Buddha, being alternately steeped in chilli and the polymorphous perversity of Thai religious iconography. We found a reasonable, family-run guesthouse in the outer northern suburb of Nonthaburi. There were the usual Kiwis playing Boggle, a bespectacled German living out some von Aschenbach fantasy and our landlady, Mrs Rai, who together with her family wove their lives into those of their guests. I chucked a baseball back and forth with her pubescent son, and checked English homework with her daughter.

The garden of the house ran nearly down to the river, and a few minutes’ walk away was a khlong where we could catch the longtail boats into the city centre. The longtails were really the best thing about the city for the visitor — high-prowed vessels powered by enormous outboard engines that sent up great frothy washes as they parted the brown waters of the Chao Phraya at a rate of knots. To ride them, along with two score salarymen and women, was to share vicariously in the frenetic pulse of the working city. Still, no matter how we strived, the sheer scale and hubbub of Bangkok was exhausting, and the afternoon heat usually saw us poleaxed in our room, under the fan, blearying at the curious spectacle of an entire wall given over to a giant poster of the Manhattan skyline at night.

Manhattan is the most iconic of cities, true, but, still, I’d rather have had a wall-sized poster of the skyline of Bangkok; that at least would’ve made me feel I’d arrived. But it wasn’t the most obtrusive Manhattan skyline I’ve ever shared a transient’s room with. That dubious distinction belongs to the Hotel Britannia in Manchester. Here, in the very humming core of the four-square building, with its cavernous bars full of superannuated soap actors, and its hypogean discotheque (called something like Hades or the Ninth Circle), I found myself tenanting a room without windows.

To check into a hotel room without windows once is just about a bearable novelty, even if that room has one wall taken up with red curtains, which, when swished aside, revealed a sinisterly top-lit, wall-sized poster of the skyline of Manhattan. I bedded down for the night and in the small hours was afflicted with the most terrible dreams of being buried alive. Gagging on consciousness I snapped on the bedside light, and, not remembering where I was, lunged for the curtains, only to be confronted by the dark outlines of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State, et al.

It was a truly sublime moment, as I reeled back in awe at the sight of this. Was I perhaps in New York? I poked at the vision and its paper surface yielded slightly. No, New York seemed unlikely; after all, what creepy mind-warper of an hotelier would cover a real view with a fake one? In that case, was I back at Mrs Rai’s in Nonthaburi? My Thai trip had been eight years previously, and yet stranger holes in the space-time continuum have been breached. It took me a good few minutes of examining phone pads and checking my own belongings to resolve this disorientation, and then I swore never to be put in the windowless Manhattan suite ever again.

But the Big Apple can never be wholly cored, and it crops up in the most inapposite places. Why, for instance, is there a large photograph of the booking hall at Grand Central Station on the wall of the cafeteria in my local Sainsbury’s? Supping weak tea and eating sloppy lasagne, are us customers meant to reflect on the umbilical linkage between Vauxhall in south London and this temple to the railway age? I put this despairing question to Peter, a fellow psychogeographer, and he blanched, while a snail trail of sweat wormed its way down from his sparse hairline. ‘It’s strange you should say that,’ he replied in a faint voice, ‘but I’d just bought a ticket for Poughkeepsie the other week, and was on my way to track 129 from the booking hall, when I found this on the stairs.’ He produced a dog-eared Polaroid of the cafeteria at the Nine Elms Sainsbury’s.

It was proof, as if any were needed, that the world — as anyone who’s travelled it can tell you — is not a globe but a Möbius strip.

In 2000 I was hired by the film director Bernardo Bertolucci to write a short story based on a film script he already had. The action was set in Naples, partly during the Renaissance and partly in the contemporary city. If he liked it, he was then going to get someone else to turn it back into another film script. I know this sounds like a roundabout way of arriving at a film, but the movie business is a strange one in which creative properties undergo preposterous metamorphoses: TV adverts are made into films, so are computer games; for all I know some tyro producer is currently developing a film based on a supermarket’s ready meal.

I visited Naples for four days to sop up the atmosphere and found the city cavernous, threatening and deathly. Almost the entire population had cleared out to Ischia, the Amalfi Coast and Capri, because it was the Eve of the Assumption in mid-August. I wished I’d been there for the Festival of San Gennaro, the city’s patron saint. A vial, purportedly containing this personage’s dried blood, is kept in the cathedral; and twice a year, on appointed days, it liquefies. Or not. Liquefaction years are good ones, full of prosperity and joy; dry years are bad ones: the football team loses, the volcano erupts, Berlusconi remains in power.

Perhaps the greatest book on the city by an outsider is Norman Lewis’s Naples ’ 44 , his account of a year spent in the Neapolitan labyrinth as a British Army intelligence officer (although, as he sagely remarks at the outset, ‘military intelligence’ is an almost perfect oxymoron). Lewis was treated to all sorts of wondrous occurrences, and his memoir conjures up vividly a society in which natural magic was still as potent as technology. The year before he arrived Padre Pio, the miraculous monk, had regularly been sighted flying like a cassock-clad Superman over Vesuvius, and plucking plummeting Italian airmen out of the sky.

My own, brief sojourn in this astonishing encrustation of urbanity — the impasto of successive architectural eras, Hellenistic, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, is so thick as to be geologic — was distinctly downbeat in comparison. I put up in a modern hotel on the Partenope, a sea-front strand facing the dell’Ovo Castle, and made forays into the old town. Starting at Gambrinus, the exuberant art nouveau café on the expansive Piazza Reale, I gave it a good crack, gothicking along with the best of them. I visited this church, that cloister, the other convent. I plunged into crypts and stroked petrified catafalques — an act which can have you arrested anywhere but Naples. I stopped at a restaurant and, directed by the waiter, ate a selection of local delicacies, most of which — to be frank — looked and tasted like Ambrosia creamed rice. Yummy.