Ask Will Self a straightforward question and you get a cryptic reference to an Austrian philosopher. "I agree with Wittgenstein that it doesn’t matter what you eat so long as it’s always the same thing," he says, telling me in that wonderfully lugubrious monotone that is his trademark. Self, a writer celebrated for his caustic wit and brooding intelligence, has been a Stockwell dweller for 10 years (‘the North Lambeth side’) and I’ve just asked him where his favourite restaurants are.
"I like regularity," he continues. "So, about once a week, I like to go to my local Indian takeaway, Hot Stuff, on Wilcox Road. It’s not exactly a great secret any more, because it’s had quite a lot of publicity. But it’s still the best value-for-money Indian food in this sector of London, for my reckoning. And I love Wilcox Road, a fantastic old road where My Beautiful Laundrette was filmed by Stephen Frears, the way it looks down onto Battersea Power Station."
To judge from Self’s many cantankerous contributions to shows like Grumpy Old Men or Have I Got News For You, you’d deduce that he’s not the sunniest of souls. And although during the course of half an hour’s interview, it’s right to say that he’s often scabrously contumelious and superfluously magniloquent (I’m borrowing from Self’s lexicon here – in other words, he can be very sarcastic and very wordy), he’s certainly full of, well, if not love, then fascination with not just south west London but the capital as a whole.
"London is my muse," he says. "Ninety per cent of my fiction is based in the city. After my human relationships, my relationship with London is the most important relationship I have. I miss it when I’m not here: the light quality, the smell of it, everything."
Self’s latest book, Book of Dave, is set in the capital, though hundreds of years from now. It tells the story of taxi driver Dave Rudman, who, deserted by his wife, writes a rant-filled diary, filled with details about his work and observations on modern-day London, then buries it in the garden of his wife’s new home in Hampstead. Fast forward a few centuries and most of England has been destroyed by flooding, but a small tribe who live on the ‘Isle of Ham’ discover the book and take it as gospel - quite literally. They see Dave as a god ‘who sees all of us in his rear-view mirror’, believe that mummies and daddies must live apart but split the childcare evenly and greet each other with the expression: ‘Ware2, guv?’
One scene from the book is set on the London Eye, which Self tells me is one of his favourite south London landmarks, a mile or so north of his home.
"I’m big on the wheel," he says with relish. "Now that it’s up, it is a landmark that defines the London skyline, incorporated into every logo. But when it first went up it looked astonishingly odd, like the bicycle wheel of God, abandoned after the frame had been ripped off from the South Bank by some hoodie."
Will Self was born in 1961, the son of an academic, who read precociously as a child but also had a taste for intoxication. The drinking and marijuana smoking of his teenage years reached an apex when Self went up to study at Oxford, where he regularly used heroin. Soon after leaving, Self was forging a name for himself as a fiction writer and hack in London but his drug-taking and journalistic career collided spectacularly when he was sacked from the Observer during the 1997 general election campaign for allegedly snorting heroin in the toilet of the John Major's election jet.
These days, the writer, famed for his dark imagination, who went on to forge macabre fictions about a man and woman who swap sexual organs (Cock and Bull), an artist who wakes up in a world of monkeys (Great Apes), and to depict death as being just as stressful and tedious as life (How The Dead Live), has been narcotic-free for years. Indeed, you are more likely to find him setting off for a long hike or bicycle ride through south London than scouring the backstreets of Stockwell for a dealer.
"I’m a big walker and cyclist," he tells me. "I’m a slow speed traveller. I love walking out of London, actually. I like the way it gives you a sense of the city’s history, as you penetrate each ring, it’s as if you practise a kind of dendrochronology on the city; seeing how each layer of its bark was laid down."
Naturally, I have to look up the meaning of ‘dendrochronology’ when I get back home (it means tree dating, by means of counting rings) but I didn’t expect to do an interview with Will Self and not encounter the odd polysyllabic word that circumnavigated my head.
So why has he stay put in Stockwell for so long then? What is it about the area that he likes so much?
"Well, my wife [the journalist Deborah Orr] had been living in Brixton and I had been living in Notting Hill. So, it was sort of a compromise. I wouldn’t say that I love the area but I’m perfectly happy here."
Not getting much else from Self on this front, I think it’s time to move the questions on, but then Self suddenly throws me a lifeline.
"At the moment, I’m interested in the primal Londoner in my family, Adolphis Samuel Self. I discovered that he was born in Wiltshire and must have walked to London. He got married and lived in Kennington."
He must surely feel a deep, familial connection with this pocket of south London, I suggest. What led you to research your ancestors, I ask, hoping there’s a Will Self autobiography in the offing.
Self inhales a deep breath, offers a textbook Will Self scowl and mutters: "Oh, you know, it’s just part of that tedious middle age preoccupation with genealogy."