Will Self - Psychogeography

Indeed, as the tubas honk and the ducks bib and bob, I find myself transported back to an earlier, more romantic era. Perhaps the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on one of his legendary stomps across the Lake District, chanced upon Tebay Services, all huddled beneath its high gables. I like to imagine the great idealist, sweating off an opium binge in the Westmorland Hotel, while bemoaning his failure to win the heart of fair ‘Asra’. Meanwhile, Sara Hutchinson, that sturdy lass, is being tupped senseless by William Wordsworth in the next bedroom. Later, Wordsworth will retrieve his fustian breeches from the trouser press, and with his legendary fastidiousness make them both a cup of tea, adding one small container of UHT milk to hers.

If only I could stay here in Tebay for all of 2007. But why stop at a single year? If I reside at Tebay for long enough, the M6 will fall into desuetude and become grassed over, a second pre-industrial age will dawn and, instead of glib satires, lyrical ballads will flow from my pen. No dice: ‘That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’ is gone. Instead, I load up the family, ejaculate forty-odd litres of low-sulphur unleaded into the black womb of the Fiat, and head north.

What a strange interregnum the Christmas season is: the British people forsake their gainful employment and take to the roads for a fortnight, en masse, forming an atomised caravan of Hyundais, Volvos and Chevrolet Voyagers. In a peculiar inversion of the ways of our forbears, we made the round of visits, relatives and friends, but rather than a gentle progress of a couple of score miles, we drove for hundreds, the length and breadth of the country. In Jane Austen novels, if the Misses Bennett got a slight cold, they would impose on their hosts for weeks. By contrast, we stop to see the relatives for a few hours then motor all day to stock up on Vick’s nasal spray at the next services.

I calculate that between 23 December and 2 January I did a full thirty-five-hour week behind the wheel. I drove so far that I visited both the northbound and the southbound Southwaite Services (between junctions 42 and 41 on the M6) twice. Suitably enough, the season ended in Tinshell Services between junctions 29 and 28 on the southbound carriageway of the M1. This is an ancient, industrial landscape: the Drax Power Station cooling towers rising up over the flatlands like malevolent, smoking deities. Tinshell is a cold comfort car farm. There’s no brass band — there are no rustic gables. In the Wimpy where I buy the kiddies their junk food fix, the staff display their occupational stigmata: dreadful acne.

The time since the men’s toilets were last cleaned is inscribed by red, LED letters: ‘Aeons’. We have been weighed in the balance and found wanting; that’s why Tinshell is so chilly, so dreadfully mundane. The kids want to disappear into a booth advertised as ‘Van Gogh’s Colour Studio’ — but I fear for their little ears and so I palm them off with 20p’s worth of jelly beans. Does it have to end like this? The Dr David Kelly phenotypes moribund in this unbeauty spot? I crack, and we spend the next three hours on the motorway watching Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of £14.99 must be in want of a car television.

Thanks, Mum. Were it not for your obsessive diary-keeping I might never have known that I once traversed the Atlantic by ship. True, I did have a jellyfish of a memory, a two-year-old’s gelatinous perceptions, trawled from deep time, and refracted by the waters of Lethe: a much-loved teddy bear with corduroy ears, round portholes, a white-painted railing. . Er, that’s it. But your diary really does the business, Mum, setting down our 1963 crossing from Southampton to Quebec in all its prosaic detail.

How I sympathise with my father, who on the night preceding departure is introduced thus: ‘A tired Peter packed last night — reluctant but he did it.’ I, too, have the greatest difficulty in packing, and sometimes think I would travel more if there were an identical set of my own effects at every prospective destination. Presumably that’s what the very rich — and fascist dictators — aspire to.

On board the Franconia , as the ship beat down the Channel, my mother set down in her diary a combination of geographical ignorance and rather touching arrogance: ‘Today we are off the coast of Cornwall: I thought it was Ireland, but another lady thought it was Scotland, so I’ve at least not exceeded her.’ Meanwhile, my older brother and I were soon behaving uncannily like my own small boys: ‘W threw 2 pieces of potato on the floor, J dipped his head and got a spoonful of minced chicken in his eye.’

As on any sea voyage, mealtimes seem to have been the chief focus for social interaction, and Mum’s inevitable disapprobation: ‘Two young American girls at our table last night, going back to Calif. after a year in France. I took an instant dislike to them, for their smug expectation that the glories of France were for them. Was I ever so lacking in humbleness?’ Mum was American herself, but while her countrywomen’s sense of entitlement bothered her, the Atlantic terrified her: ‘In the night I awoke to clothing swaying on hooks & Willie.’ (That’s me.) ‘I sat on the easy chair with him & felt so happy & lucky. This morning both of them were ill, so we dressed them and took them on deck for fresh air. A very long day. I saw the imminent breaking up of the ship every moment, & ourselves & our beautiful young drowning in hideously cold & salty water.’

Not to be facetious, but would a freshwater inundation have been any better? Poor Mum: not only subject to this marine neurosis, but also to my father’s watery analysis: ‘V. tired,’ she writes two days later, ‘Peter rightly says it’s my “disposition” — anxiety tires one. I am quite exhausted.’ Still, when not worn out by small children and the vast ocean, Mum did find time to cast a jaundiced eye over herself and her husband: ‘I look very lumpy & unattractive in my clothes, my face looks worn. P has developed a great lump of varicose veins on his leg. I can’t think my looks are all age — but some, perhaps.’ She was, of course, five years younger than I am now.

However, the most pleasing entry in the diary comes when the Franconia draws near to North America: ‘Sun & wind today, steely gray waves, long line of land on the horizon (Newfoundland) & a rocky looking mountain (Belle Isle?). P said he met someone who had been shipwrecked here (in 1910?) & had to live weeks on berries.’ The whole anecdote is my father to a T — or a P — especially the detail of ‘on berries’; I can just hear my father pronouncing this with considerable relish, as if being marooned were an opportunity to re-enact the healthful regimen of an interwar, Fabian summer school.

Other aspects of the diary are not quite so cosy. My parents’ marriage was never a tranquil one, and Mum confined every rebarbative misgiving between narrow feint bars. ‘These,’ she writes at one point, ‘are the wages of meaningless marriage.’ Which leads me to consider whether or not the virtues of air travel are not emotional quite as much as economic. True, couples can argue quite as well on planes as they once did on liners, yet there isn’t the time for this kind of festering despair.

Still, it was all drawing to an end. On 3 September Mum reports: ‘Land outside the porthole’; and then, for the next ten days, the Franconia wends its way up the St Lawrence ‘taking on one pilot after another’. We finally docked in Quebec on the 13th, and the passengers were confined to the non-air-conditioned theatre, while the luggage was offloaded. Here I disgraced myself with diarrhoea, soiling my clothes, and a chair in first class, much to Mum’s distraction. Ah! Even at two, I was an anarchist abroad.