Will Self

The writer, satirist and urban explorer Will Self talks to Gyles about his childhood, his career and his life now. From his boyhood as "little Willy", the apple of his mother's eye, who was both enfolded and smothered by her love; to his adolescence when he began smoking, drinking and experimenting with drugs earlier than most; to his student days when his good looks meant he found it easy to get women into bed... this is an absorbing, entertaining and sometimes surprising episode, full of laughs, and full of astute observations (as you might expect from one of our foremost satirists). Will also talks about taking heroin on John Major's plane, being on Shooting Stars and his illness and recent stem cell transplant. Our thanks to Will for his dazzling conversation, and for being such charming company. And thank you, too, to his wife Nellie for coming along! Will's new book The Quantity Theory of Morality is out now and is HIGHLY recommended. You can buy a copy here https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-quantity-theory-of-morality/will-self/9781804711224. Enjoy this... we're sure you will. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:01Speaker 01

  Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may. There's a new guest waiting with quite a lot to say. So I'm going to shut up and say welcome to another episode of Rosebud. We do indeed have a very special guest for you. Cue the music, they're ready.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Hello, I'm Giles Brandreth and a warm welcome to another episode of Rosebud. I always say every guest is special. This one is extra special to me because I have been reading his work now for, well, since the early 1990s. And I love the way he writes. I love his way with words. I love the way he plays with ideas. I love the fact that he is a satiric writer, but also can touch the heart. He is Will And he's a controversial writer to many. He's been up for every award that you can

• 2:16Speaker 01

  imagine. Booker Prize, Whitbread Novel of the Year, you name it, he's been there. I've just been reading, I think, the twentieth novel by him that I've read. It's called The Quantity Theory of Morality. I think that's probably inspired by his first big breakout novel, which was The Quantity Theory of Insanity, back in nineteen ninety one. This is an episode, I suppose, that should begin with a bit of a trigger warning because there's going to be sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Well, no, certainly drugs, certainly sex. I don't think there is much rock and roll. There's a rollercoaster life.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  So there's so much packed into this conversation. But here is a very funny, I think, very wise, very interesting character. Please do, if you haven't read his latest, I do thoroughly recommend it. I haven't got to the end of it yet. I'm halfway through. It's made me laugh out loud at times. It's called The Quantity Theory of Morality. It's published by Grove. The hardback is out now. You'll certainly find it fascinating. Welcome to Rosebud. Cue the music.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  William Woodard Self, born twenty-sixth September nineteen sixty-one?

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  So far, so good. What, have you always been called Will for short?

• 3:48Speaker 02

  No, it's self-adopted. My father, being of the grey flannel trouser tweed jacket profession, called me Little Willy, which was a subrake, interestingly, in the playgrounds of the nineteen seventies I was keen to lose.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  We'll come on to that in a moment. Yes.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  So I I called myself Will and rather than William, I thought it was dashing and Shakespearean.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  And it is. It's a great name. Will Self is a great name.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  It's it. I've always been interested in nominative determinism for obvious reasons. I love stop, art, play, jumpers for that reason, which has an obsession with nominative determinism and philosophy. And of course, my mother was an abstract Freudian. She'd been in analysis when I was, she was pregnant with me, with Anthony Store. So the idea of self-will came at me from so many different domains as a young person. The the most signature name event for me, though, wasn't when, as a child, we were in a hotel in New York and William Self was paged because he was the producer of Batman.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  But actually, when a friend of mine called O'Shanacy, when I was in my teens, said, there's nothing that remarkable about your name. There's more of you in the phone book than there are O'Shanacies. And actually, the London phone book is something we've all lost because it allowed you to get a feeling for demography instantly. You can flip through it. And we we went to the book and indeed there were more selves than O'Shanacies. And that pulled me. There were only about twenty selves.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  But that phone book was fascinating because there were only five Brandreths, I do remember.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Right, well, there you go.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  But there were two or three pages of people called Smelly.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Yes, many Smelly's.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  And we did. Did you ever phone them up?

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  And say, are you Smelly?

• 5:47Speaker 02

  The person who most liked phoning them up, who won't like being reminded of it, was a childhood friend of mine who's called Matthew Freud, who was very fond of persecuting Mr. Smelly.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  It's basically being called Freud, he had a licence for it.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Well, that was the argument, Self and Freud calling smelly.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Okay, now let's begin at the beginning, um, Will Self. Born twenty sixth September nineteen sixty one, I have to ask you, what is your very first memory?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  I think it's almost certainly, I've thought about this a lot, there were two very early memories and they're similar. But they're in, so they're from probably when I was around one or one and a half.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  That's very early.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  And what, what's the one that you think is the earliest?

• 6:35Speaker 02

  I think it's being in the pushchair, not the pram, though I have pram memories from the same period. Because there were two vehicles, one was a pushchair and one was a silver cross pram. And one memory is being pushed along Brimmer Hill, the road in the Hampstead Garden somewhere where we lived. And seeing the view from Brimmer Hill across the Hampstead Garden suburb to St Jude's, the church in the centre and beyond it. The northern heights of Hampstead and Highgate. And the other view is contrawise going in the other direction towards East Finchley. So the, the council estate in East Finchley was called Prospect Ring.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  And if you remember, Martin Parr did a book called Boring Postcards. Do you remember that in the nineties?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Prospect Ring featured very strongly, to my brother in mind's delight.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  These are the postcards, the most boring things you would imagine.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, most boring things you see, so Pop, Prospect Ring is still there, but much changed. It's three or four point blocks arranged around a small council estate with a laundrette. So mum would put me in the pram with a pillow slip of dirty laundry and push us up to Prospect Ring. And. There was something about being pushed in the Silver Cross Pram up to the even in my infant mind struck me it's markedly different from the prospect in the other direction looking out towards Hampstead. It's more or less, I mean, I've been writing a book on London suburbia called Etting Suburbia Rego the last few months about the walks I took before I went into

• 8:14Speaker 02

  hospital because I realised that the everybody, you know, the the the modern obsession is with the idea of the bucket list that somehow when you're terminally ill, you're going to drag yourself to Machu Picchu. What I realised when I got seriously ill and realised I might die, there's a there's a one in five chance of dying from the procedure I've gone through within two years was that in fact, I've lived all my life effectively in London, all of it. And that thing that torments any proper city dweller, which is I always go to the tube this way, why don't I go that way, was what I decided to do in in the months leading up

• 8:58Speaker 02

  to going into hospital. So what I did was I walked five hundred miles around London suburbia.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  And I think I probably I already knew London probably far better than most people. I've walked out of the city from the centre at least ten or fifteen times. I I used to do it twice a year more. But curiously enough, I've tended to avoid outer suburbia in all of this.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  But this is what you and Dickens have in common.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  These long walks.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Dickens would leave from Doughty Street for Gad's Hill in the evening, walk overnight, composing two books, alternate chapters in his head. I can only do one book at the moment.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Well, you've not been well, so I think we can allow you that. So get back. You are in the pushchair.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  You're being pushed by your mother.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Who is your mother? What is her name? What is her background? What is her character?

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Well, I I feel I know her quite well. I wrote a novel about her that came out when I was in hospital called Elaine about her life in the nineteen fifty's. She was born in nineteen twenty one in Columbus, Ohio. Her father, Jack Rosenbloom, was pretty looked quite like me. He was allowed.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  Wiseacre is what you would call Jack. He was a wiseacre and I and having known his son very well and his daughter, I I know the type. And me.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  But he was tall. He was tall.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Tall.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  My my mother's first husband was a rather eminent literary critic called Robert Adams. Uh, expert on Milton, professor at UCLA. Very eminent and he wrote a memoir that was never published with the description of my grandfather in it. And the fascinating thing about this description is he describes my my my grandfather brilliantly and then and and it is completely antisemitic, the the the portrayal. It is a cartoonish depiction of a flashy wiseacre Jew. Who who is unscrupulous, has no morals. What's true about my grandfather is that he was a bit like that.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  He he my mother said that they survived in the depression because my grandfather would go to a small town where the department store was about to close and he'd say. I'll organize the stock sale, I'll put up the banners and I'll make sure that you can realize there's much money out of the. So he he actually sort of was a vulture that preyed off the. And my mother was very struck by this, she didn't like him clearly. He was a she would describe him as a vulgarian.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  So what was she like? What's the essence of her personality?

• 11:44Speaker 02

  She wanted to be Virginia Woolf.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  That was her, including the insanity.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Was she a sparring writer?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yes, very much so.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  And was she a good writer at all?

• 12:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  She wasn't bad, but her chef d'oeuvre is her diary, which I inherited on her death. Which was. Anything up to fifty spiral bound, narrow, faint student notebooks completely covered.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  And that's what inspired.

• 12:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I didn't read them through and I still haven't.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  What is your sweetest memory of your mother, you and your mother when you were a child, your sweetest memory?

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Oh Giles, my mother was was overpowering. I mean, I it was, I haven't got free from my relationship with my mother probably until I went to art school. I mean.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  You mean recently went to art?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it's taken me decades to deal with her and my brothers haven't dealt with her at all.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  But then what's your worst memory if we can't find a sweet one?

• 12:54Speaker 02

  Um, no, there there are, no, I was her Benjamin, I was, she adored me and and she was funny, brilliant. She taught me to read before I went to school. She taught me to read when I was three. I mean, I could read and write at three. I mean.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  I'm surprised you couldn't read and write at eighteen months, to be candid with you, but no, well done her.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  My dad would despairingly say, because mum thought I was a prodigy, but dad would say, John Stuart Mill could read and write by the age of three, but in Latin and Greek as well. That was his deflation of my genius.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  That's good. So go on with your mother.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  No, she was adorable as a mother. She was endlessly inventive, funny. She was incredibly imaginative. She'd make play dens, parties, she had, she had, she was brilliant with kids.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Well, give me then, give me a happy moment, just give me a describe you doing something with her.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Well.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Making food with her, helping her.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  All of it, I mean, we cooked together, we we, everything I wrote, I would show to her or drew. She encouraged me all the time. She was physically warm. We cuddled until I was about ten or eleven, until my my testosterone got out of hand. I mean, I was absolutely enfolded by her. She also was incredibly depressed.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  You know, almost to the point of psychosis. She was on Valium a lot when I was a kid and she had a filthy temper. Like one of the, like a cataclysm, which I unfortunately inherited. You know, because if you have that bomb going off in your life, particularly if it's the person who is also your world. I mean, my father was totally absent. He was totally absent. I ran away from home all the time. I was a bolter.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  You better describe your father quickly then. Who was your father?

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Peter Self, he was, in my childhood, he was Professor of Public Administration at London School of Economics. And he was one of what, of Harold Wilson's activators. So he was the post-war generation of public servants and policymakers who drove modernisation. His field was urban planning, urban and regional planning. His first book was called Cities in Flood, about the unrestricted growth of London. If you think of a novel like Orwell's Coming Up for Air, his description of the salesman's life in the thirties. That was the environment in which my father had grown up and he was obsessed by the idea of rational urban planning. That, that's why we lived in a hamster.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  And that was the passion of his life. Was your mother the passion of his life? How did they meet?

• 15:40Speaker 02

  No, not at all.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  I mean, how did they meet? Why did they get married?

• 15:43Speaker 02

  They were drunk and had sex and, and she got pregnant with my immediately older brother. When she was recently divorced from Robert Adams, her first husband. And obviously a bit of a gay divorcee, though not very gay. Uh, and there was a, a drunken encounter. I know so much about it.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  From her diaries?

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Were they ever?

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Including the fact that she knew she had condoms in the drawer.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  And chose not to produce them?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Not to produce them.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  So she was ready to become pregnant on this night with Peter Self?

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Yes, and I think that, you know, and I, I tried to get this in a novel, you know. The war gave a lot of women freedom, including my mother. She was in her early twenties. She was in New York. She had a job. She worked for the Book of the Month Club. She met people, she knew intellectuals. Her husband was away in the Pacific.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  No.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Um, when he came back, like even though he was an intellectual and so forth, he still expected her to cook him dinner. And kind of, and and she hated it. Her reaction to the phenomenon that people now call patriarchy was visceral. She viscerally had a contempt for the idea that men should have any social or domestic superiority whatsoever. When we were late from walking on the heath for lunch, mum would take the roast and throw it on the lawn, so that we got home to a deconstructed Englishness.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  My father's attempts to somehow have a normal middle-class life were continually being exploded.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  She stayed with your father, though, divorced her first husband, comes to England, meets your father.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  No, meets him in in America.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Oh, first.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Gets knocked up in the States.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Ah, so you're.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Comes over.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  This is your elder brother?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  He was married as well. He was married to Diana Pett, who worked for many, many years as Rocco Forty's right-hand woman, very successful businesswoman. My father's first wife, only died very recently in her late nineties, Diana. Very beautiful. Uh, and extraordinary story, she was unable to have children because her mother had been a Christian scientist and wouldn't let them operate when she had appendicitis, so they had to perform a hysterectomy. Married my father, knowing that she was unable to have kids, he knew as well. But then he got broody. He wanted children. That's the condom.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  So he got, he got broody, he got drunk.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Your brother is conceived.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  A lot. He drank all the time, my father.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Drank all, drank all the time. How long is it before you come along?

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Couple of years.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Couple of years.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  By this time, they'd moved back to the UK.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Yes, they're in the UK. He's divorced. I've got all the divorce papers. I can look at it all, correspondence and everything.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  So there's the, there's the brother, there's you, and there are these parents, who are they in the early days getting on?

• 18:52Speaker 02

  No, they never got on.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  They never got on?

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Never.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  But they decided to have a second child with any more than?

• 18:57Speaker 02

  They had a storm. I think they enjoyed sex. They were both quite sexy. And I think, I think that's the trouble with marriages, isn't it? So that, that went on, but it was a very stormy. And, and my father first left when I was nine. So.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  So he walked out.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  He walked out.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  And that was it.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  No, it wasn't it. He came back.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  He was semi-detached then for several years. And that was bewildering. I mean, people wonder about, you know, I often get asked as a satirist, you know, where this huge contempt for the English comes from. And, and I don't really have a huge contempt for the English. What I am is a proper satirist. So I see societies from outside. The English take it amiss because they think I should be one of their own and not see it. But the thing is, I grew up estranged from the society I was in.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Now, I'm beginning to understand it all because you are, you are swift, you are Hogarth, you're all these things. But it's because of this family that you come from.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  In part, yeah. And the Jewishness is interesting because it was very odd, the Jewishness, because mum was an anti Semite. I mean, she really didn't want to be identified as a Jew. She was delighted that she had blonde children. She would say to us, do not make a big deal about it. You pass.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  You can pass. My immediately older brother, although he's philo Semitic, has always passed. And when in the nineteen eighties, when there was still casual antisemitism among the middle class.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  And I would say, what do you do about it? Because I would call it out. You know, I had a boss who said to me, oh, you don't want to go and pitch to them over there. Well, they're all yits. And I would say, you know, I'm of Jewish heritage, Tony. I find that deeply offensive. Oh, I didn't mean it, mate. You know, you know, you know what I mean?

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Exactly what you mean.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  You would go through that, but but my brother would say, no, I pass. I don't I don't see the point in getting into trouble.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Describe yourself as a little boy to me. I can now picture the family. This mother who is both depressed but also loving, giving, funny, sometimes angry. All these things possibly understandable, given she's got this husband who is absent for a while, and then he's back again, and then he's absent. There's drinking going on, which fuels all this. I imagine there's smoking going on as well.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  I smoked like chimneys.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  But he at least has got the passion of his work to sustain him. She's got the frustrations of having to be a mother, feeling depressed. Also not achieving what she'd like to do in her writing, despite these aspirations. We see the problems. You as a little boy, little Will, what's he like?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Well, I think up until my father left, I was probably, despite my mother being very tumultuous, I was fairly happy. I was, I was attractive, had a lovely little blonde page boy thing. I was very jolly. My mother's nickname for me was Happy Mouth, and and the joke was I would get up in the morning in a good mood and I'd just get into a better mood all day.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Lovely.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  And and and actually, I'm quite like that now.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  What did you do?

• 22:10Speaker 01

  What were the games you were playing to make you happy? What were the books you were reading? What made you happy?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  I I loved Alice in Wonderland particularly, and I would say that more than anything else, it is what made me.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Immediately want to write stories. I mean, I I already wanted to write stories at three. I've never.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  At three?

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've never seriously doubted my vocation and certainly by the time I was eleven or twelve, it was insupportable.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  What school did you first go to?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  I went to a lim- what we would call in those days a dames' school, run by Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Davis. And just to give you a portrait of how brilliant my mother was, these two old dames, who were perfectly all right, old ladies who ran a school for about eighty kids in Golders Green, and we all had little uniforms, Golders Hills School. At the end, when you left age seven, you were meant to go up to them both. They were standing on the steps, the house is still there, and you would shake their hands and say, thank you very much, Miss Davis, and thank you very much, Miss Fitzgerald. I said to mum, seven, I said, I hate Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Davis. They're they're authority figures

• 23:26Speaker 02

  I have no confidence in. So mum said, fine, I'll have the car waiting at the bottom of the steps, gunning the engine. I'll have my foot on the accelerator. When it becomes your turn, say whatever you want, piss off, Miss Davis and Miss Fitzgerald, and then you can run down the stairs and leap in the car and I'll drive away.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Oh, wonderful. Well, she was a great woman.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, she was a great anarchist. She she had a real sense of how to flip something in an unexpected way. So you would suddenly see that it was totally artificial. She would say, you'd you'd be with her when in childhood, and a beautiful young woman would walk past, trailing clouds of sort of Odeon and kind of, you know, just absolutely a picture. And mum would snarl out of the corner of her mouth, she thinks she shits chocolate ice cream.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  Right?

• 24:23Speaker 01

  I get.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  You get the picture.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  I get the picture. What I'm wanting to know now is why you have struggled with this relationship until quite recently.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  As, as she grew older, I'm a great believer in a book by Ernest Becker called The Denial of Death. And Becker's thesis is that, that Ophon, everybody has what he calls an immortality project. That in order to cope with the fear of death, you have a place you go to immediately that reassures you about your transcendence. And for most people who have children, it's their children. Unless they're writers, in which case it's often their work. It has to be. And for mum, it of course had to be the children as she got older. And after her father's death, uh, she became fatalistic.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  She would walk around going, I'm going to die of cancer. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. And this began in her fifties and she died in her mid sixties. So for the back end of her life, there was a sense of fatiloquence about her anger as it got worse. So in a sense, she was dragging me into the grave with her. And after she died, the entire family had deconstructed. My brother was already living in the country and partly in Ireland. My immediately older brother, my brother Nick, who you were at school with, had gone back to the States as soon as he could. So he was out of the picture. I was the only person left in London.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  My father had immigrated to Australia in nineteen eighty one. So I was there alone. So that's why it's taken me so long to get over mum. She'd come here in nineteen fifty eight, died in nineteen eighty eight, left me in vacant possession of England.

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• 27:28Speaker 01

  And your father was in Australia?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  But you've become fond of him in the end. You are fond of him.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  I was never not fond of him. My problem was I, transgenerationally, when in an unhappy marriage, you inherit the agon of one of the partners. And you can't get over it till you deal with your stuff with the parent who finds the other parent the agon. And that's why you find...

• 27:51Speaker 01

  The agon?

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Well, the thing that most upsets them, the antagonize.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  As in agony?

• 27:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  The cause of your agony?

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Their agon, the cause of their agony. So until I dealt with mum, I couldn't deal with dad. It wasn't, I didn't even have a relationship with him on my own terms. I couldn't. She was constantly in the way. And since he absented himself, it was very difficult.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  As a little boy, as a child, what were you like with your friends? Do you have friends at school? Did they like you? Can you remember your best friend from school?

• 28:20Speaker 02

  I can. I can remember I was passionate. I was a passionate soul. And I fell in love with boys, of course, because they're adorable. Who wouldn't? And I fell in love with boys, and I would always have crushes. And I wanted to be the most popular boy. And I couldn't be the most popular boy because I was a weirdo. So even though I tried, I looked good on paper. My failing was I wasn't a good enough sportsman. And I knew it by the time I was ten.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  But you were tall, were you tall?

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I played, I was, my, my high point was being captain of the second fifteen at rugby, once.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Can you, cause you say you were broadly speaking quite happy as a, as a boy, broadly speaking.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Up until I was, my father left, yeah.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  So that was, was that your first encounter with unhappiness, do you think?

• 29:16Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah. I think in the sense that mother was histrionic. She told me after my ninth birthday party.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  On the day of your ninth?

• 29:25Speaker 02

  For my birthday, yeah. And she was devastated and just completely lost. And, and immediately, you know, I knew that I had to look after her before that. And, and now she was like a zombie in the house. And the next few years were disastrous while he was gone. There were money troubles. It was the miners' strikes. Do you remember the power cuts in the early seventies? And mum, to be histrionic, would light the whole house with oil lamps and say we didn't have any money, turn the heating off.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  What happens to you? How does, how do these?

• 29:59Speaker 02

  I go feral.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  And literally feral? What, what does that mean? That means going wild.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, gradually. I go wilder and wild.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  What's your first encounter with going wild? What's the first thing that happened?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  I run away from early childhood.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Run, run, run away from home?

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Uh, and where do you run to? Who do you run?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  My first time, I only get the other side of the Fallon Way and the Hampstead Garden suburb. Mum is gazetted by the fars and turns up and busts me and takes me home. Uh, and that happens quite a bit. And then once the family is disintegrated, I have the run of the city. I used to come here to the Grosvenor House or the Dorchester. I had a sports jacket. Age twelve, I'd sit in the lobby smoking Balkan sobrani, hoping some woman who thinks she's shat chocolate ice cream would pick me up.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  Were you ever so lucky?

• 30:49Speaker 02

  No, sadly not, not for a few years yet. But the thing is, my tendencies as a bolter were really pronounced. I mean, I was hitchhiking the length of the country by the time I was about fourteen.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  And were you partly enjoying this?

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, loved it. Yeah, no, I, I, that's why I'm so puzzled that I've ended up just living in London. Because my, my tendency was to go. The point was, they left me in vacant possession, so I stayed.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm seeing you age twelve, sitting in the lobby here, in your jacket with your Sobrani. What was your first encounter with nicotine? How old were you then?

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Tobacco was everywhere. I mean, we, my brother and I were certainly smoking at eight or nine.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 31:32Speaker 02

  And then by the time I was twelve, I smoked every day. I would pace, go to school, and I had three cigarettes on the way to school. The last one in the park just by the school before I went in to fortify me for the day. I smoked very heavily. I remember when weights went out of stock, the old cigarettes, which used to be sold by weight. I bought up the whole stock. I was about fourteen. I had three hundred weights or something. I smoked twenty a day by the time I was fourteen.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  And, and that went on until two thousand and eighteen.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Wow, but you've given up now, which is good.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Just about, yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  And when did you, when did you get into drugs?

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Very early, yes. Um, more alcohol. I mean, the family was alcohol dependent, but they weren't alcoholics, my parents, I hasten to add. Particularly my father was in no measure an alcoholic. He never, ever changed his demeanor.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  And what about sex? Can you remember your?

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Oh, God, yes, of course. Oh, God.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Your first encounter with masturbation, can you remember that?

• 32:42Speaker 02

  Oh, God, no, I masturbated all my life. I could say it's time. I've only stopped now because you're interfering.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Well, feel free, this is a very relaxed podcast, I do assure you. But you don't have a first recollection of it?

• 33:00Speaker 02

  No, I remember just shinnying up the playground equipment, which gave me excited. So it was even pre, and my brother was precocious sexually and he was masturbating, so it was a bit certain amount of circle jerk. And then there was sex games at school with the boys, and including some sex with boys, you know.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  And were you taking this as part and parcel of your, this is what life is like?

• 33:27Speaker 02

  I wanted to be gay. I was rather disappointed not to be gay. I thought, I saw women were essentially unattainable.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  And also, they were the teachers, because this is a boys' school you were at.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  Yes, no, all the teachers were men and of course they'd all been in the war. We were terrified of their trauma. Mr Dean had been held prisoner by the Japanese. We were terrified for him. We were worried for them, all the teachers.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Do you look back on this period, obviously it's been wonderfully rich material for your books. It's one of the reasons that I love them, because I, I didn't dare do any of the things that you were doing, but I've loved in retrospect at one remove.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  At least you're honest.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, getting a taste of it. It's fantastic. No, this is why I have this self-shelf. When feeling a bit low, pull down one of them.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  I can't say I was sexually very, very precocious at all. It was just like everybody else. I was desperate to fool with girls' bits. And getting girls to come back with me, rolling around with them. But, but what I didn't realise, and it sounds odd to say it now, and people don't often talk about themselves with this degree of honesty, was that I was quite attractive. So I couldn't understand, I didn't feel attractive, nobody does, and I was spotty. But by the time I got to Oxford, I didn't really have any problems in that direction and, and, and probably it wasn't a help.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  What about love though? Can you remember the first time you encountered love?

• 35:02Speaker 02

  I always thought I was falling in love. I couldn't believe when they turned out to have, you know, feet of clay. I couldn't believe, which was remarkably quick usually. I was desperate to be in love.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  Were you writing love poetry?

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Oh God, yes, all of that. And yes, and. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I would see a girl and and just be paralyzed with with longing.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Give me, because I like lovely moments, give me a sweet moment from your teenage years with a girl, something just lovely and romantic.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  No, none of that. It didn't happen for me. And I think in a way it didn't happen because, you know, my my late friend Willie Donaldson, the great Willie Donaldson, said once, promiscuity is the motorway to loneliness. And the trouble was, I was already on the slip road. And and all of my romantic inclinations were blown away by the fact that there were lots of girls climbing into bed with me. And that was that was frankly, you you need not to be as quite as sexually lucid as I was if you want to preserve your romantic, your romantic ethos intact at that age, for obvious reasons.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  So it was not like that. And drugs had also come on the scene. And I loved drugs. I absolutely loved them. I was a natural.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  And you got seriously into them, you got.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. Every new drug I took, I thought, well, this is great.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  And this went on and on, didn't it?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  On and on.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  It's even a little bit to our time, because I do remember in the nineteen nineties, when I was an MP and in John Major's government, there's the famous story of going to, they sent you on a to report on something.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Yes, they did. I was living in in off the Portobello Road. And I remember getting up in the morning and checking my kit for the day, my notebook, my tape recorder and my drugs. And I had uh I had a heroin habit at the time, so I had some heroin and I had some cocaine. And I thought, well, I've got to get down to Smith Square. I don't want to be too stoned first thing in the morning for the press conference. I'll take quite bitter cocaine. So I took quite a lot of cocaine, a little bit of heroin, just to keep me on the level. Then we go on the buses and went out to RAF Northold and and I, you know, I'd I'd been a working journalist, really.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  But I wasn't a lobby journalist, but I was very well known by that point. It was the ninety six election. I was very well known already.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 02

  Nationally known person. So when I got on the bus, everybody went, here he is, there he is. John Sappell, I was at school with, the senior BBC correspondent, hello, well. And I think that's what aroused the the ire of another hack who was working on the express called Simon Waters.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Oh, he snitched on you.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  And he snitched on me. And what he did was, he didn't even, so the whole day went off without a thing. I'm a working journalist. I'm actually very good at my job. I've never missed.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  You weren't inviting John Major to shoot up with you at the back of the bus.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. My only concern was when we took off in the plane. I I realized that there were a lot of security detail. And I thought, actually, well, class A drugs is not a good thing to be carrying this close to the Prime Minister. So I went back to the toilet on the plane very responsibly and disposed of all of the class A drugs I had on me into my body.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  And then went back to my seat. There was no evidence that I'd had drugs on me or that I'd taken them. This guy then went to Brian Mewinney, because I didn't do anything untoward. The only, I would admit to this, when we got back to Birmingham Airport, I thought, time for a spliff.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  On the tarmac.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, oh my God.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Ah, the wind's blowing that way. I'll just go downwind of the security detail. I'm afraid I've, I've, I've always been a high risk merchant, but still I didn't think I was busted until I got back from Ireland the following week. I'd been to stay with my brother who lived in Ireland. And as I drove down La, uh, La, um, Latimer Road, guys came, the paps came from behind the parked cars, cameras, everything. And all that had happened was this guy had gone to Brian Mawhinney and said, I suspect he may have been using.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  He was the chairman of the Conservative Party at the time, yeah.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Mawhinney had gone public with it. My editor, Alan Rusbridger at The Guardian, then said, did you do it? And I denied it, of course, because there was no evidence. Then he came back to me again and said, this has become a political matter because you were representing The Guardian and The Observer. The Tories want to make something out of this. So I want you to sign a legal affidavit now. Well, I wasn't in a purge of myself.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Now, you must be very clever indeed, because despite the troubled mother, an absentee father, a, the exhaustion that comes with excessive masturbation, drugs, smoking and drink, you nonetheless.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  I always found masturbation invigorating myself, but there you go. I always, that was one of the things that all the anti masturbation propaganda failed with me.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  And we're moving on, because what I want to know is, despite all of this activity, you managed to get a place at Exeter College, Oxford.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  I did, yes.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Congratulations. You have got superhuman energy.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Unconditional place when I was seventeen, so I didn't even have to get A levels.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Well done, clever clogs.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was clever.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  And you went to do P P E, Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Not English, yeah.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  And that was because you wanted to?

• 41:16Speaker 02

  I wanted to be a philosopher.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  I didn't want to write like Enid Blyton. I wanted to write like Dostoevsky.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  You know, I didn't even want to write like Evelyn Waugh. I wanted to write like Goethe.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  You know, and it was not, my ambitions were so vaunting already.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  And were you writing at that stage? What were you writing?

• 41:35Speaker 02

  It was rubbish.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  I mean, obviously, it was just rubbish. You can't, you know, the biggest problem for a writer, as you know yourself, is authenticity of voice. That's why it's not, there are very few literary prodigies, youthful prodigies for that reason. Because you, and you need some life events.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  And not just the tragic comedy of childhood. You need adult life events.

• 42:02Speaker 01

  And when you left Oxford?

• 42:04Speaker 02

  When I left Oxford.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  You were going to, what were you going to do? Did you get jobs of different kinds?

• 42:08Speaker 02

  I was already in too much trouble. My, my, I doubled down on my estrangement and sense of uncanniness in the English class by becoming a heroin addict and being arrested for drugs.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  And charged and convicted. So I already had a criminal record at the age of twenty.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  And what was that like for your mother?

• 42:29Speaker 02

  I think she was upset.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  I think it was, and I think I cannot read the diaries from that period up until I went into rehab at twenty five. Because then there was five years during which I was a needle-using heroin addict in, you know, in a very grimy, heavy London, the London of the early nineties. So she must have been hysterical with anxiety.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Can you remember the lowest point of that to describe it to us?

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Well, I write about it a lot because it was the building, I first went to Stockwell, where I now live to buy heroin, and I walked there.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  From North London.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Because I didn't have any money and I'd heard of the a guy in a squat in Stockwell. The the woman I was using heroin with knew this guy who might have some. And we walked all the way to Stockwell and we went to this building and he was an ex squaddie. You'd you'd find a lot of junkies who'd been in the army. And it was the first time I think I'd seen junkies living at quite that level. They had nothing in the flat, nothing at all, not even just sticks of furniture to slump on. There was a child that had no nappies. So I remember the first afternoon, the child just squatted and shat in the middle of the floor while we were waiting for him to get back with heroin.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  And I thought this probably is a sort of nadir, Will, but I've seen worse. I mean, I've been in I've been in a squat in the same period using heroin and and somebody saying to me, we ought to get that corpse out of the bathtub. And there'd been a guy dead in the bath next door for a couple of days. Guns pulled on me in King's Cross. Uh, I used heroin for a time with a very flamboyant character called David Martin, who was an infamous character. You you may be familiar with the story because they shot a man called Stephen Waldorf by mistake when they wanted to track down David Martin, who was a transvestite, which was why they couldn't find him.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Well, I knew David Martin well, so I was already by my early twenties stuck heavily into the major London underworld.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  And at that stage in one's head, what is happening? Are you just existing? Are you unconscious of moments of contentment or happiness? Or that is irrelevant? You're just driven by the need for the drug?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Ah, I think it's still part of the project. It's the saison en faire. It's the it's the, you know, as one of my oncologists said to me in hospital when I was complaining about large amounts of morphine they were giving me. He said, I said, I was an addict for twenty years, Carl, and I really try and stay clear of opiates. Yeah. And he said, oh, come on, Will. The road of excess leads to the palace of enlightenment.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Well, it's good to have a oncologist for a sense of humour.

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Oh, my doctors.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  And literary awareness, too.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, my doctors are great.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  And were you writing during this time? This, these, those five years?

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Yes, always writing, always writing, always involved around writing. I started cartooning at Oxford. And I, and, and this again was such a formative experience. When I left Oxford aged twenty, I had my little portfolio of Spock cartoons and strips. And I went around all the newspaper offices on Fleet Street. And you would have to, you'd go into reception, you'd have to say, I've got some cartoons. They say, well, I don't know where the cartoon is in the pub or. Eventually he or she would come back and then they'd leaf through your portfolio and go, not funny, not funny, not funny. The worst one was, um, a private eye who was Willie Rushton's brother.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  And he was an old cussing, but I never got a cartoon into the eye. And he'd just go, ah, this is shit. He once sent a batch of cartoons I'd sent to him back. And he'd written across the back of the envelope, no bloody good.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  But, you know, I mean, it might sound trivial to people, but rejection's important. It's important to experience rejection and experience it viscerally. No bloody good. I'm grateful to Rushton for, for that.

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• 48:06Speaker 01

  What has been, because we've, we've, I want to cover your television career briefly before we.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  It's making you sound like that sort of Peter Cook spoon for John Freeman. Do you ever hear that thing he did just before Cookie died with, um, what's the young chap? Though he's my age, Chris Morris.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Where he says, um, he said, you, you were interviewed in sixties, of course, by John Freeman. Peter Cook goes, he was absolutely dreadful, condemned, but bowed down in tears during the interview.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, my television career, Charles.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Actually, it's touching on television. Let's, I, I mentioned your name to several people and they said, oh, the guy from Shooting Stars.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  I think, I think my problem on Shooting Stars was I was working with some great comedians. Some real, I think they were one of some of the best comedians.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  How did it come about? How did you get that?

• 49:01Speaker 02

  Drink, drink, drink. It's the curse of the working class.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  You met some people in a bar and they said, we're making a show.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  I drank in my thirties. I mean, I was a drinker as well. And I loved, for a few years I loved Soho. I'd been an early Soho person because the first friend I made at Oxford was the relief barman at the Colony Room Club. So I first went, when I first.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  This is in Soho. This is run by a woman called Muriel Belcher.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Yes. And of course, The Groucho opened next door and I knew Liz Calder was my publisher and she was one of the, one of the people behind the club. So we moved into The Groucho because they. Better. Remember, the licensing laws still existed up until the Blair government. So if you wanted a drink at three A M., you had to blonde to the Groucho. And I used to play poker in there with Stephen Fry in the eighties. Uh, so I already knew so very, very well indeed. And Jim Moyer of Vic Rees used to drink in the Groucho and we used to drink together. So one night we were pissed. Jim said, why don't you come on the show? Bob and I'll have you on the show. And I went, yeah, all right then. I'll do it.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  And he said, ah, you're shitting me. I said, no, I'll do it. So that I did it.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you are essentially, you are a writer, and I think you're the most remarkable writer. For you, the breakout moment was when, I mean.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Quantity Theory of Insanity, yeah.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Undoubtedly.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  I'd never, my only ambition, Giles, has been fulfilled. It was to publish my first book. It's like, it's awful. It's like first love. It's never come back. All I wanted was my name on the spine of a book. I love literature passionately. So passionately that for me, for somebody to write a book and have their name on it is more important than anything. I am more impressed by somebody who's written a book than anyone.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  So the first, the first big book is that one. And the last big book, is it the last big book, the Quantity Theory of Morality? No, it isn't the last big book because you're working on this new one about.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  I've written another one.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  You've written.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  After this.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  After with this one. I love, this one, I have to say, I love. It's hilarious.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  It's outrageous. It's hilarious.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  And it seems to have a character I remember from the first one, who still seems to be there.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  Zach Bosner. Yeah, he's now ninety-three.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  I know.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  But he, he's, he does.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  I tell you, he's still.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Have you finished it?

• 51:33Speaker 01

  No.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Ah, well, I won't.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  I don't, it's a spoiler. I've been reading it over the weekend. It is fantastic. The characters are hilarious. Or to explain, basically, there are sort of four central characters. It's a series of scenes, there are parties that are repeated. We, we introduce characters, we get, you give, the one thing where you've thrown me, because we are of a similar vintage, though you are younger, is you give people's dimensions, the height of people, the girth of people, indeed, their penis length, but in centimeters. So people of my vintage, this is actually useless. I actually. My wife said to me last night, what are you doing with the phone? I said, I'm trying to change centimetres into inches.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  I should have provided a sort of ready reckoner.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Can I say, there should be a little bottom on those pages, a little asterisk saying, for the older reader.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  And we'll do an addition.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  No, seriously, because people of my generation, we always did it when we were measuring up, we always did it with a, well, anyway, let's not go there. But with a ruler with inches.

• 52:31Speaker 02

  My editor said, do you have to give the length of the penis of every male character immediately after their name throughout the chapter? Maybe you can make the satiric point at the beginning. I, I didn't deign to answer this because the point is that in, in our society, I happen to be a believer in Simone de Beauvoir. And I believe gender is something you learn to perform. And people who learn to perform masculinity are unbelievably conscious of the ephemeral symbol that they carry around with them of it. So it's, it's hugely important in that way.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  And in order to underscore the satiric point of the chapter, which is to defang gender. There are two satiric chapters on gender where my objective is to make it perfectly clear how we assume gender. Uh, and what the consequences might be. So in the scene where all of the characters have assumed masculinity is their gender, it ends in a funeral that's a violent battle royal. When in the scene where they all assume that they're women, it ends equally unpleasantly, you know? So it's saying gender essentialism takes you nowhere. Clearly we're all a bit of both. Now, how are we going to figure it out, you know?

• 53:57Speaker 02

  So there was a point to it, if you'll forgive the pun, it wasn't just gratuitous. Um, and indeed, I think people just don't understand satire often, you know? Somebody said once, I was reading the quote, uh, yesterday that there's a tendency among. Reviewers, for example, to say that something's a hilarious satire when they don't understand it. But by the same token, it shows they don't really understand satire. What is satire? The purpose of satire is moral reform. It's very uncomfortable to people. We're not just bemoaning everybody for the sake of it. If we were doing that, we really would have a different job. We're doing it because we're oddly enough, people who believe in people behaving properly.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  I know that seems really outrageous. And now I think, you know, The Telegraph interviewed me for this recent book and they put the headline that sort of they put on it was. I used to be a junkie, but that's why people should listen to me now. And actually, it's not as ridiculous a line as people might imagine. The capacity to err and recover yourself suggests some idea of what normative behaviour might be like.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  As you were saying earlier about failure.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  Because your life events will have included three marriages.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Two of which, uh, I imagine have ended.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  But reasonably amicably.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  No, not at all.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Oh dear.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  No.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  But do you have children by them?

• 55:24Speaker 02

  I have four children.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  So by the first.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  All grown up.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Are you easy to live with, Will?

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Now.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  I think I'm probably very easy to live with. I have so few demands. I mean, I've. Serious illness, and if you are confronted with the possibility of dying and you take it seriously. You don't deny it or elide it into some other project. It makes you, your demands on life disappear completely.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Where are you on the health front? What went wrong and where are we now?

• 55:57Speaker 02

  I have secondary myelofibrosis, which is a, a, uh, blood cancer. The problem is it flips to an aggressive form of leukemia. And that's why I was scheduled for the stem cell transplant.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Which you had two or three years ago.

• 56:12Speaker 02

  I had it in, uh, autumn twenty twenty four, so it'll be two years. Median term survival is eighty percent make two years. So I've still got a few months to go, but the signs are pretty good.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  And what's it made you, what's, what is the difference in you now since you knew this diagnosis and the prospects?

• 56:32Speaker 02

  It's incalculable, I think. It's enormous. I think that, that it's, it's had an absolutely huge impact on me.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  When your head hits the pillow at night, for personal happiness, what's going through that head of yours?

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Well, you, you look on the other side of the room.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  You're very lucky.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  I am, uh, uh, uh, one of the problems in my life in recent years has been that I am passionately in love with my wife and, and not just, I don't just love her like an old dog, but I am in love with her. So when I wake up in the morning and I see her face next to me, I fall in love again. And I think she's in the room and she can probably testify to the truth of it.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Does she find that a bit exhausting?

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Not in the least. She's an incurable romantic herself and we find it very hard. We're so entranced by each other to pay much attention to other people. We're one of those awful couples. We find each other completely exciting and entrancing. And having been through really severe illness and if I can come, you know, it may be small comfort to people because I think one of the saddest things that you face when your body won't behave anymore is to be with somebody who, you know, you may have, um, still have a more proper way than that way. And, and my wife and I are long past that point. We love each other

• 58:04Speaker 02

  totally. And we were even able to use the, the, the fact when she had to care for my body as part of our love. And that is, you know, so for example, the effect of the stem cell transplant is that you get something called graft versus host disease. So your whole skin becomes not infected, but irritated to the point of raising up in lumps. And you have to rub steroid cream over your entire body three times a day, which burns incredibly and attacks the GVHD.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  My wife had to do that three times a day for months. We called it creaming, the creaming ritual. I would be, I was emaciated, bald, hairless, like a concentration camp victim. And she would have to rub every inch of my body with this cream. I was too weak to do it myself. Now, that's love, okay?

• 59:01Speaker 01

  Beautifully defined.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  That is love.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Three quick last questions. What comes into your head when I say, and maybe from your earlier years, a moment of joy?

• 59:11Speaker 02

  I don't have to reach for it. It may disappoint people that I reach for today. It's been a joy being here. It was a joy driving in. I don't mind anything like that anymore. I don't, I don't hurry anymore for anything.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  The joy in the now.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  The joy in the now is complete. And I'm not talking about sort of crystal dangling mindfulness. I'm talking about understanding that it's all we have. It's all we ever have. And to face death without fear, you need to hold that. And frankly, I don't have any fear of death anymore. Because as far as I'm concerned, this is what it's like. Nellie loves me, Nellie loves me, Nellie loves me, nothing.

• 59:58Speaker 01

  And a moment of sadness.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  A moment of sadness. Well, terrible sadness over the last few years. The death of my ex-wife, very, very sad. No matter our differences, we had two children together. It was an unhappy death. And that stays with me. I don't leave any of the dead at all. They're with me in the room when I wake up as well. My brother-in-law, her brother died shortly afterwards. I had to look after him. I was with him when he died. His death stays with me as well. And the dog, which they both loved, who was an awful character. He was one of the most, he's in the book, you'll get to him. So, you know, there have been a lot of losses and really the loss of the family. The kids are grown up, there's no family home anymore.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Everything's gone.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  You're now in your mid-sixties. Will, what have you learned from life? What has life taught you?

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  It's taught me above all, I'm deep in the Bible because I'm interested in ethics. And Christianity is an amazing religion.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  It's amazing. Humanism is bupkis. Humanism, Schopenhauer says of Kant. Kant is like a man who goes to a masked ball. All evening long, he dances with a mysterious, beautiful woman. At midnight, she removes his solitaire. It is his wife.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Okay?

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:30Speaker 02

  You get the point.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  That's humanism.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  They're dancing with their wife. Either be a Christian with all that it entails, but don't pretend you can strip it of its ethics and still have anything serviceable at all. You can't. We need to understand that our problem, what I've learnt, I read Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth in the early 1990s. I believe in the International Panel Panel on Climate Change's predictions. By the end of this century, this country will be near enough uninhabitable if we don't do something. Now, I didn't have all that spread bet of children for nothing. All right? So I am vitally concerned about adjusting our moral thinking to cope with living in a world in which we can't go forth and multiply

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  and in which God is not obviously bounteous. The problem for the Abrahamic faiths is if we blow the world up, is that God's purpose? And how does it make God's world any more beautiful? The gun's been on the table since the 6th of August, 1945. And you, Giles, are too well schooled in drama not to know Chekhov's observation. Once you start a play with a gun on the table, sooner or later, it's going to be fired. So the priority of defanging nuclear weapons and dealing with the climate emergency by not consuming as much are what I've learnt.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  And is there finally a line from the Bible or anyone else that is one of your favourite lines?

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Well, it's actually one of my own because somebody asked me to sign it in a book this morning. So it was retailed back to me as one of my own lines. So it's perhaps a bit naughty to have one of your own apperçu, but nothing is ever lost in the economy of ideas.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Nothing is ever lost in the economy of ideas. The joy is now, and now it has been a joy to have you with us, Will. Thank you so much.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Thank you, Giles.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Well, there you go. Another, I think, memorable episode of Rosebud. Our thanks there to Will Self, who is, well, an extraordinary conversationalist, but also an extraordinary writer. I'm reading, as you know, The Quantity Theory of Morality, his new novel. Harriet Jane, our producer, she has read it and loved it. I recommend it wholeheartedly. If you enjoyed listening to Will as much as I enjoyed meeting him, I know you'll enjoy the book. Before I go, have I got time for a quick email? I think I have. And this one comes from Keith Guy. Yeah, a guy called Keith. Oh, a guy called Guy,

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  Keith Guy. And he writes, "Good morning, Harriet." The podcast, by the way, is called Gyles Brandreth's Rosebud. I mention Harriet Jane, the producer. It's nice when we get letters saying, "Dear Giles and Harriet, but good morning, Harriet." I mean, honestly. Well, I mean, you know, people don't even know who directed Gone with the Wind, let alone who produced it. They do know that Vivian Lee and Clark Gable were in it. Anyway, that's by the by. "Good morning, Harriet. I've just been listening to today's Rosebud episode and enjoyed it, as always. However, what pricked up my ears this morning was your mention of your mum smoking in bed and a nicotine stain on the

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  ceiling above her. This triggered a fond memory from the early 1960s. As a twenty-something trainee lawyer in Poole, Dorset, I worked in a small practice next door to the much larger firm of Dickinson, Mansa, Brandreth and Yeatman. I believe there's a Giles family connection there." There certainly is, by the way. That was my grandfather in that firm. Dickinson, Mansa, Brandreth, that's my actual grandfather. Anyway, on the letter goes. "The elderly senior partner there was a Mr. Courtney Dickinson. He must have been in his eighties, but still had an abundant head of white hair. He smoked expensive handmade

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  cigarettes. I often visited him in his office and was privileged to accept the occasional offer of a ciggy. I can see him now, sitting bolt upright, cigarette in his mouth, a streak of nicotine stain colouring his hair, and a large yellow stain on the ceiling above him."

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Happy days. My very best wishes to you and to Giles, Keith Guy. Well, a wonderful recollection there, a beautifully phrased letter, and you were completely right to send it to Harriet because she does monitor all the correspondents. She really is quite brilliant. So, thank you Keith for being in touch. If other people want to drop us a line, it's quite easy to do by email. It's simply [email protected]. People have been asking about shows because the word has got out that Harriet and I will be appearing on the Edinburgh Fringe. All of August we will, 4pm every day, Assembly George Square is where we'll be doing it.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Just go to Edinburgh Fringe, look up Gyles Brandreth, Up Memory Lane, or Assembly George Square, and you'll find us. And you can book now, and people I'm excited to say are booking now. And kindly, some people have emailed to say they're coming from foreign parts to catch us, to meet us, to see the show. It's a show about memory, the fun of memory, the challenges of memory. We're calling it actually Up Memory Lane, Gyles Brandreth, with a twist of Rosebud and Harriet Jane. And, well, we hope there are a few laughs, there are a few songs. We're in rehearsal now. And we're doing some London tryouts beforehand. You can look up those. We're at the Bedford Park Festival quite soon. Then we're at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Then we're at the old sorting office called Oso, O S O, Oso Arts. That's in Barnes in South West London. I think that's in July and right at the beginning of August, just before we go to Edinburgh. So you can catch one of our tryouts, work in progress. That will be in the London area in the next few weeks. Or book up to see us in Edinburgh. We'd love to see you there. And we're working out a way of, after the show, making ourselves available to say hello to members of the Rosebud family who come our way. People also sent very interesting comments and communications and letters to Rosebud Reflections, which is not run by us, it's just run by the people who make Rosebud Reflections.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  ...happen, and that you will find on Facebook. Oh, and if you've enjoyed the show, do feel free to leave a comment wherever you listen to it, a podcast comment, or if you watch us on YouTube, and an increasing number of people are watching us on YouTube. My wife Michelle's godson, Alec Goodell, who's the son of my best friend from school, Simon Goodell, he is looking after putting our shows onto YouTube. So one drops every Friday, occasionally there's an extra one as well, but check out Rosebud on YouTube and the Rosebud Podcast on YouTube, and you will find us there. And again, if you like the show, you know, join up, become a subscriber, I don't think

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  it costs anything, and leave a nice comment if you've got something nice to say. If you haven't, this is called "The Rest Is People Talking About Their Childhood", that's a joke. I'm sure you do enjoy Rosebud and leave the message for us. So that's it for me. My thanks, as always, to our producer, my producer, Harriet Jane, who you'll be hearing next Tuesday, and I hope you'll be meeting either at one of our London trials, or when we are in Edinburgh all of August with Up Memory Lane. For today, from Will Self, to whom I really say thank you, and to everyone who has been listening, thank you very much for your company. It was a memorable one, wasn't it? Cue the music.