He has made many appearances on British television, especially as a panellist on Have I Got News for You and as a regular on Shooting Stars. Since 2008 Self has appeared five times on Question Time. He stopped appearing in Have I Got News for You, stating the show had become a pseudo-panel show. Between 2003 and 2006, he was a regular contributor to the BBC2 television series Grumpy Old Men. [33] In the 2015 UK general election Self voted Labour in a general election for the first time since 1997. In May 2015, he wrote in The Guardian: "No, I'm no longer a socialist if to be one is to believe that a socialist utopia is attainable by some collective feat of will – but I remain a socialist, if 'socialism' is to be understood as an antipathy to vested interests and privileges neither deserved nor earned, and a strong desire for a genuinely egalitarian society." [49] In March 2017, he wrote in the New Statesman: "Nowadays I think in terms of compassionate pragmatism: I'll leave socialism to Žižek and the other bloviators." [50] Finney, Brian (May 2001). "Will Self's Transgressive Fictions". Postmodern Culture. 11 (3). doi: 10.1353/pmc.2001.0015. S2CID 144272638. The result is a book that is written by an intelligent and acutely self-aware author. Self has created a book that delves into how people can act when in the throes of addiction. I guess many readers can loathe his experimental style plus the fact that the entire book is written in the third person: A Will Self— I read a bit of Foucault, I didn’t read a huge amount of Foucault. I read a bit of R. D. Laing, I didn’t read a huge amount of R. D. Laing. I think in part my own experience of addictive illness is why I write about it because it’s a type of mental illness or mental malaise. It very much put me in touch with insanity on a personal level. I ended up being with quite a lot of people with what would be loosely defined as the major mental pathologies – schizophrenia, manic depression – and I ended up also being around a lot of ‘psy’ professionals as well. My oldest friend is a psychiatrist and I always got a lot of stories

Addicts, recovery boilerplate will tell you, are self-obsessed, grandiose, self-pitying, arrogant, infantile, trapped in a repetition compulsion – and all these qualities are unsparingly and knowingly showcased here. Self doesn’t shill for sympathy. His feelings towards most other human beings run the slim gamut between envy and contempt (except in the moving closing passage where he talks about the death of his drug-takingfriend Hughie), and there’s a startling moment where he suggests that his hidden inner self is, in fact, that of Caius – the aristocratic frenemy identified by one reviewer as Edward St Aubyn. Will Self is the cleverest person in the room. He writes in a way that gives you an overdose of that notion, which is ironical in a memoir about his drug addiction. Unfortunately, you spend most of your time either looking up obscure words and esoteric references rather than enjoying the flow of the writing. The Minor Character – Self's short story was turned into a short film on Sky Arts which starred David Tennant as "Will". Look for further support online or over the phone. See our list of places to go for support, community and advice online. It is stunningly well-made and everything from the epic nose to the profound palate, to the oak, fruit and depth of flavour is nothing short of astounding. It is still a baby, but is perfectly balanced and can be enjoyed now. This prodigious wine will run for a decade with ease, and it is a true vinous gem that deserves to strut its stuff on the very best dining-room tables in the land.But in 'Will' he eschews anecdotal familiarity in favour of ponderous grandiosity, and instead of focusing in on the essence of one subject, be it drugs or time or man's relationship with the city - as in the psychogeographical writing which to me constitutes Self's strongest work - he relies on a series of fragmentary vignettes, memories dredged from his embattled hippocampus concerning him and his rich, nihilistic Oxford junkie friends. For all his loquacity and verbal dexterity, there is something unsatisfactory about his reflections. They are full of curious lapses and jumps, like a novelisation of a PowerPoint presentation. He overloads us with context, yet the architecture of his own existence seems divorced from any relatable frame of reference, perhaps precisely because of this surfeit of gnomic allusions, pithy quotations and witty ironic asides. By the same token remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you're writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching: "Later, George watched Grand Designs while eating HobNobs. Later still he watched the shopping channel for a while . . ." The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can't deal with this you needn't apply. Keep hydrated with plenty of non-alcoholic drinks - but avoid coffee and energy drinks as these can cause sleep problems. a b c d Finney, Brian (2001). "Will Self's Transgressive Fictions". Postmodern Culture. 11 (3). doi: 10.1353/pmc.2001.0015. ISSN 1053-1920. S2CID 144272638.

He was supposed to be delivering How the Dead Live in the autumn of 1998, but he missed that deadline, and the next. He knew he would have to be sober to write it, but he kept putting it off. In March last year, he achieved a DIY detox from hard drugs and booze, but he was still smoking enormous quantities of pot - 'A couple of Masai warriors had to pitch bales of the stuff into the basement every day.' Eventually he decided that only total abstinence would work and in October presented himself at an AA meeting, saying he was helpless in the face of addiction. 'I was 38 years old. I was in one shape or form addicted to drugs for nearly 20 years.' He's time to regret the drugs and the debts and the betrayals - the weeping, the wailing and the rotting of teeth. He's wanted to be a writer - to lounge about in a silk suit, smoking opium . . . . but, clearly, that's not going to happen now." Sorry, Will, you're poor not rich - and you've found out the hard way that without money to bolster your dreamed lifestyle, your Oxford degree means shit. Will Self at the 15 February 2003 anti-war rally in Hyde Park, London. Photograph: Dan Chung/Guardian Why did he get addicted in the first place? Pretentiousness seems to have been high in the mix. The young Self was reading enthusiastically about hard drugs long before he did them, and the book is full of quotes from Crowley, Cocteau, De Quincey, and “Brother Bill” Burroughs. “Will, generally speaking, approves of homosexuality,” he writes early on – “together with violent anarchism and drug addiction, it’s part of a trinity of subversive activities he quite fancies.” As someone – I think it was Russell Brand – said: “The thing about heroin is, it’s very more-ish.”

The idea of biodynamic agriculture was developed by Rudolf Steiner, whose work in the early 20th century predates most of the organic movement. Like organic farming, biodynamic wine also avoids the use of synthetic chemicals (and so without sulphites will have a shorter self-life), but takes a much more holistic approach to the vineyard as an entire ecosystem, aiming to encourage ecological self-sufficiency through interconnected living systems.

As such, a great many factors are taken into account during the growing season, such as astrological influences, lunar cycles and special soil preparations. While biodynamics isn’t necessarily based in hard science, proponents claim the process produces consistently good results in terms of vineyard health, which can of course lead to excellent wines. Some of the greatest wine estates, such as Domaine Leroy in Burgundy and Maison Chaputier in the Rhone Valley, employ biodynamic techniques. While there are no official rules for the biodynamics sector, there are two programmes that certify wine internationally: Demeter and Biodyvin. The only problem with Self's fiction, as if often the case with people of this ilk, is that he has a tendency to push things too far. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it just results in work that is shrill, annoying, and tedious - How the Dead Live is a perfect example of that principle. For all his brilliance, there is something of the annoying and rebellious little boy in Self's adult persona that really turns some people off.That's not to say this is a failing of the author. In this case, it's a failing of the reader. I'm just not clever enough to appreciate his style of writing. You recently said you’re writing a novel set in 1950s America. What drew you to that time and place? Rage on, rage, on, Will! Dope and sex, sex and dope turbocharged when Will teams up with fellow Oxford student Caius (Edward St. Aubyn). "Caius has, besides his vast trust fund, untold reserves of built-in orphan power. Will's mother says what defines chutzpah is the ability to murder your mother and father, then claim clemency on the grounds you're an orphan." A Will Self— Somebody said all male writers’ first books are acts of parricide and that book is a satire on academia and the social sciences among other things. My father was a political scientist and it was clearly an act of parricide. It takes the piss out of my father and his friends and their irrelevance as I saw it and the perniciousness of their discourse and the way in which people believed it. The Papers of Will Self, archives and manuscripts catalogue, the British Library. Retrieved 13 May 2020

I’ve done a whole series of airport walks over the last decade or so which are very consciously subversive of the way in which we are expected to encounter the world and the way in which we are meant to travel. They were quite clearly satirical walks which were subversive of the alleged ease of international air travel and against air transit as a luxury good and democratic necessity. They were also subversive of the way that place itself has become commodified. It’s become something that people buy and sell and people go to places as if they are acquiring a flat-screen TV. a b Dowell, Ben (3 April 2009). "Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer line up new series of Shooting Stars". The Guardian . Retrieved 19 March 2018. Self, Will (14 April 2017). "Call me British, American, Jewish, Londoner – just don't call me patriotic | Will Self". The Guardian– via www.theguardian.com.In the 90s, Will Self helped form my literary tastes - and as my friend Alex said in his own review: "I was just the right age to find the appropriate tinge of outlaw glamour in things like doing heroin on the prime ministerial plane." Alongside such shenanigans, the author already had a prodigious output of journalism (collected in Junk Mail, which I hoovered up in my late teens), and most importantly for me, he presented the regular Cult Book Slot on Radio 1's Mark Radcliffe show - which, as with its film equivalent with Mark Kermode, I (unlike my more independent-minded friend) took as gospel about what the cool intelligent person ought to consume to be, and show they were, cool and intelligent. If only I still had a full list of the titles, the unread and unwatched ones would be nagging at me to this day.