Will Self: PsychoGeography

A call comes from David, last heard of - in this column - squelching through the glutinous mud of the Jurassic Coast, at Charmouth, in Dorset.

"How's it hanging, mate?" I say, cheerily. "Got a new BMW motorbike yet?"

"No, not yet," he replies, "but I have high hopes. The great irony is that this has happened on the poshest beach on the Devon coast. Sidmouth is full of upper-middle-class weekenders, and Branscombe is absolutely beautiful."

"So, you think it's the locals who're doing the looting - sorry, I mean, salvaging."

"Definitely, there'll be a fair few conservatories chock-full of Estée Lauder cosmetics before the day is done."

We are referring, of course, to the stricken freighter Napoli, which has been run aground some 10 miles along Lyme Bay from where David lives. For the past few days, the papers and the television news have been full of arresting images of ant-like people in Puffa jackets, struggling to tote improvised stretchers, loaded with loot, along the pebbly foreshore.

Forty containers have come ashore, out of the 103 that have been lost from the ship. The enterprising salvagers have broken them open and retrieved goods as various as carpets, wine, exhaust pipes, and the aforementioned motorbikes and beauty cream.

If only David were right about the local component to all this, but as the strange Saturnalia has progressed, it's become clear that folk have come from as far afield as the Midlands and Manchester, only to have their hired vans detained by a police checkpoint. Undeterred, they've staggered on to the beach, on foot, determined to wrest whatever small victory they can from the bounteous sea.

Perhaps it seems a little crass to make light of this, especially given that the Napoli is also haemorrhaging battery acid, pesticides, and naturally, oil: a five-mile slick now stretches between Chesil Beach and Portland Bill, while the RSPB is giving 600-odd oleaginous seabirds a stiff lather.

Yet what impinges on me, from the psycho-geographic point of view, is how the wreck of the Napoli constitutes part of the domestication of the sea. Indeed, any shipwreck that provides our nation of shopkeepers with more stock, transmogrifies the very waves into freezer gondolas, and the beaches into supermarket shelves.

I've written here before about the wreck of the Cita, a Polish freighter, which went aground off the Scillies in 1992. Apparently, the ship's master fell asleep at the wheel somewhere in the region of the Straits of Gibraltar. And while the ship's automatic pilot managed to get her all the way round the Iberian peninsula, across the Bay of Biscay and up the Channel, it sadly hadn't factored these flyspecks of land into its computations. The islanders benefited to the tune of a superfluity of Jack Daniel's, mahogany doors, training shoes and car batteries. This seems just: if you want a new front door in the Scillies, you have to get it freighted there anyway.

Besides, the law recognises a right of salvage, and the pathetic bleating from the so-called "authorities", in the wake of the Napoli, that salvagers must register their finds within 30 days, or else face prosecution, smacks of a certain desperation. It's difficult to imagine the local constabulary dedicating much manpower to surfing ebay on the look-out for flying - yet drenched - carpets.

Nevertheless, it's also hard not to feel a certain sympathy for the couple in Cape Town, who were freighting their personal effects back to Europe, only to switch on the TV and see the natives of Devon prancing about Branscombe Beach in their purloined skivvies, like a troupe of chimpanzees run amok at a zoo tea party. Truly, this must have been a deranging experience, a complete bouleversement of the correct order of private and public space.

Coincidentally, on the second day of the Napoli bean feast, I found myself having dinner with a woman who edits a monthly shipping magazine. She discoursed knowledgably on such arcane terms as "slip" and "hog", which, apparently, are the dangerous twisting and humping motions that precede the break-up of a ship's hull. Without in any way wishing to prejudice the activities of the loss adjusters (who would!), she also filled me in on why it was that the Napoli's 2,400 containers seemed to be piled so very high on deck:

"It's tax. You see, if containers are in the ship's hold they pay a higher tax rate on them, than if they're in the open air."

I observed that this put me in mind of the 18th-century window tax, and my informant concurred. Ever since this conversation, I've found it impossible to visualise container ships, no matter how functional, as anything but the Queen Anne dower houses of the open sea, their superstructures studded with the bricked-in windows of atavistic tax avoidance.

Finally, Ralph drew this picture, "Tug Boat Crazy", last year. Proof positive - if any were needed - that he is, indeed, psychic.