Will Self

Sep 3, 2024 | theneweuropean.co.uk | Will Self

The woman with the two large Styrofoam cups stood looking bewildered for a moment, until one of the other people in the lift grasped the problem and asked her: “Which floor?” While a second belatedly offered up the sort of fatuity that all too often passes for comity: “Got your hands full, haven’t you?” The latter was too much for the woman – she began her explanation with a degree of normality: “Yes, they gave me a free coffee in Pret”, but then, realising, perhaps, the coincidence between...

Aug 27, 2024 | theneweuropean.co.uk | Will Self

My mother made me read a book called Jews Without Money when I was a kid – it was about the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 19th century – the most tumultuous period of migration to the wide-open New World from the teeming shtetls and ghettos of the old one.

Aug 20, 2024 | theneweuropean.co.uk | Will Self

Do you remember the Olympics? That’s right, the O-lym-pics: it’s a quadrennial international festival of athletics and competitive sports generally. It’s usually held in a world capital, and believed by many people to be a sort of assay of that country, and its global standing (whatever that is).

Aug 6, 2024 | theneweuropean.co.uk | Will Self

We’ve been hearing the word ringard a lot chez nous since the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris. Ringard – meaning tacky to the point of cheesy – and with it the idiom trois fois rien (three times nothing), which means exactly that – although when applied to these events it should, quite possibly, have been subject to a multiplier of 10. Or a hundred – since the festivities were smeared right across the Cité de la Lumière, and included all sorts of empty fatuities.

Jul 30, 2024 | theneweuropean.co.uk | Will Self

I recall being in Thailand in the late 1980s – Bangkok, specifically. There was tourism, sure, but westerners weren’t in sufficient numbers to alter the character of the city, which was… intense: the Chao Phraya River, which worms though the tumult, was itself a tumult of high-speed fantail boats carrying commuters, the wash from which lifted the flotillas of sampans moored along its banks in a vast and compelling undulation: as if this were the lower-intestine of south-east Asia itself.