Will Self - My Idea of Fun

‘I didn't mention them to her.’

‘That's good, my lad, very good. You see, I like to talk to a man who likes to talk but I also like that man to be close-mouthed. I can see that you and I understand one another, and that's as it should be. For if I am going to teach you anything it must be on the basis of such an understanding: firm and resolute.’

‘That's what I want to be, Mr Broadhurst, firm and resolute.’

‘Good. . good. Well then, I will see you anon.’ And he was gone. His back, as broad as a standing stone, diminished through the twilight as he trudged back to his caravan.

In the next week or so until I met up with him again I was suffused with wild imaginings. I braced myself for my apprenticeship to Mr Broadhurst. I anticipated the calling up of daemons, conversations with the dead, Anubis and Osiris joining the two of us for a ride on the ghost train at the Palace Pier. But Mr Broadhurst's instruction in the magical arts was not at all what I had expected.

Instead, having conducted a further searching examination, he set me to the cataloguing of the little rituals, those magical forms of thought that I myself had developed in order to cope with the stress of eidesis. Mr Broadhurst was very particular about this and he took it extremely seriously. He met me after school and accompanied me to the newly opened branch of Smith's in Churchill Square. Here we purchased a large-format cash book, the kind with ruled columns. Back at Cliff Top over tea in his caravan, he set out the column headings for me thus:

Practice Content Frequency Intent

and then explained what they meant. ‘Now see here, boy.’ He tapped the page. ‘This first heading refers to the nature of what you do. Some rituals — the majority, indeed — are concerned with bodily functions. For example, the way you urinate. Do you aim at the commode, or at the water contained therein? How do you roll back your foreskin? What formulae do you recite to yourself when at stool? In what order do you cut your toenails? And so on, and so forth, there is no need for me to elaborate further, you understand me well enough. .’ Mr Broadhurst paused for a moment and then resumed. ‘Incidentally, do you masturbate yet, boy?’ I blushed. ‘You do. Good, good. Had you not I would have lent you some instructional literature — onanism is, you see, terribly important, a most efficacious ritual.

‘Naturally there are other kinds of practices that perforce can be described as ritualised. There are those concerned with the way we eat, the way we sleep and the way we open the door. There is even a ritual component to the way we walk down a street. Furthermore, there are rituals concertinaed within ourselves. I refer, of course, to manners of thought that have become formalised, certain convolutions, the consistent combination of apprehensions with little twistles of kinaesthetic intimation, d'ye follow me?’

No, I didn't follow him at all. Not only was the vocabulary well beyond me, but I couldn't even tell what my instructor was driving at.

‘What I'm driving at, boy, is that, even when you become reacquainted with a part of your body, that meeting has its characteristic mental agenda. You think: My thighs, and attendant on that very “thighy” feeling is the acknowledgement: They are too plump and suck at surfaces sweatily — d'ye see?’

This time I did see because he had uncannily identified one of my private sources of shame and voiced my own concomitant mantra. Nevertheless I was confused. I still couldn't grasp that he understood the particular use I made of such ‘consistent convolutions’. ‘But, Mr Broadhurst, sir, all these things that I do and think, they're just habits, aren't they? I mean everyone does these things, don't they?’

He exploded. ‘Don't be a booby, boy! I cannot abide a booby, not under any circs’ ‘soever. Of course these are habits, of course everyone does these things, that is not the point!’

His anger was unlike any other that I had known. It carried with it, implicitly, the threat of extreme retribution. Lines scoured on flesh in the penal settlement, or detention beyond the Styx. Ever afterwards when Mr Broadhurst barked — I jumped.

The point was — as he explained to me throughout that autumn and the winter that followed — to understand that habit was ritual, and ritual was habit.

‘I am the Magus of the Quotidian!’ bellowed Mr Broadhurst. We were promenading past the Metropole Hotel on the front at Brighton. I was amazed that nobody stared at us, or even shouted back. ‘I am powerful precisely because I understand how habit trammels the mind's energy, d'ye see? All these people — ‘ he gestured wildly with a carpet roll of arm — ‘they imagine that they perceive what is really there but they don't. Instead their minds are constricted by a million million common little assumptions, assumptions choking them like bindweed — and these they take for granted!

‘But there is a way to break this down, to dissolve it — oh yes indeed — to unlock the Motive Force. Every time you indulge in an habitual act you bind yourself in with the others. These habitual acts are the rituals of sanity. More than that, they are sanity, d'ye see? And sanity is nothing but an emasculation, a dread deadening; and I won't have it! Oh no I won't!’

So it was that I set out laboriously to catalogue the very schema of my own sanity, to list exhaustively the full range of my personal habits. I did it, in fact, habitually, for forty-five minutes each day after I had done my homework. A typical listing would read as follows:

Practice Bodily: nose-picking with semi-dried snot Content Prise the hardened flakes away from the wall of the nostril Frequency Variable, when bored every five minutes Intent To avoid nasal blockage

This was the kind of prosaic patterning of self-absorption that I knew would entrance Mr Broadhurst. But there were also other kinds of listing that had a more obviously magical significance, thus:

Practice Mental: thinking that it will rain tomorrow Content Carefully visualising the evenings rainfall and imagining the drumming noise it makes on the bungalow roof Frequency Most evenings Intent To try and prevent it raining

After about three months I had managed to fill the entire cash book with this sort of mundane rubbish. I say that now but at the time I took my task extremely seriously and I swelled with pride when Mr Broadhurst took me back to Churchill Square to buy my second book.

It was whilst working my way through this, often writing in the column headings for several pages in advance to give myself the illusion that I had completed more than I actually had, that two important suspicions that had lain dormant for some time rose up and took on the aspect of horribly credible hypotheses. I cannot say whether or not they impinged as much then as they seem to with retrospect. No matter how disturbingly accurate my visual memory may be, all-seeing is nowise all-hearing but suffice to say they were further indicators that the bridge over which I had crossed the abyss had been mined behind me.

Firstly there was the maternal complicity I have already spoken of. Mr Broadhurst was by now in the habit of picking me up from Varndean Grammar on Wednesday afternoons, accompanying me to Pool Valley, and then on home by bus. This was his midweek check-up, anticipating the full review of my homework on Sunday afternoons. ( The Big Match to Songs of Praise slot had become institutionalised.) This routine became the focus for a certain amount of gossip. Gossip retailed by those selfsame people, the scions of higher platforms on the social scaffolding, who came for drinks at Cliff Top.