His sarcasm is sharp enough to strip the flesh from your bones, his humour drier than the Gobi desert and his vocabulary more complex than the MI6 security system. Katherine MacAlister interviews Will Self and emerges intact – just.

When I question his reputation, Will Self tells me: “I never know if I’m a fundamentally serious person who is just facetious or a farceur who just wants to be taken seriously. I just do not know, but I am what I am as Popeye would say.”

The English novelist, reviewer and columnist is known as much for his sardonic nature and withering opinions as for his satirical, grotesque and fantastical novels and short stories.

Either way he’s still coming to the Oxford Playhouse tomorrow as part of the theatre’s Fridays at 5pm programme, to read sections from his latest book, Walking to Hollywood, a fictionalised memoir of some of his own more extreme ‘urban peregrinations’, including a week-long ‘circumambulation’ of Los Angeles. Self will also be discussing the death of film, the industrialisation of urban space and the virtualisation of the human psyche – although not necessarily in that order!

So where to start? How about his intellectual superiority.

“I do not make a conscious effort with my vocabulary. I write, it’s my job. I went to Oxford and did a degree and became a professional writer in my late 20s,” he says. “And Oxford was what it was. I felt quite divided about it because I was left (wing) and Oxford was an elite education so I did feel conflicted about that.

“Of course Oxford is helpful,” he adds when I ask whether it gave him a leg up in the world, “It’s an elite education in a hierachial society and it gives you a flying start in life.”

Which he resents? “No I don’t resent it but I was aware it wasn’t given to everybody and that lots of equally able bodied people didn’t have that. But although I worked very hard there I was also quite wayward.”

By wayward does he mean he had fun? “Fun?,” he replies disparagingly. “I’ve never had fun, but I’ve tried. (Self is also famously an ex-heroin addict).”

It’s hard to know how to take Self, because he veers between a seriousness that takes your breath away and throw-away humour. So ask him about his talk and he says: “I like to think I am grasping all the subjectivity before all those individuals and embracing and caressing them all to a kind of climax.”

And yet question his motives for writing the book and he admits his extreme walking or ‘urban peregrinations’ are a by-product of a claustrophobia he can’t contain. “I have been involved in ambulatory ideas for the past 10 years mainly born out of restlessness and middle-age. But I think I’ve exhausted that now.

“I walked to Oxford a few years ago actually and managed to walk from my home to my place of birth, where I grew up, where I went to school and then university – Stockwell, Charing Cross Hospital, North London, Finchley and Oxford.”

“I don’t go away for very long – two weeks is the longest time for my peregrinations and my children haven’t shown any interest in accompanying me. I’ve frogmarched them on too many walks and they have now managed to escape.” (He has four children from his two marriages).

So are the walks cathartic? “Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. If you have spiritual and physical demands they don’t always deliver and then become a lost cause.”

So why walk? “I like to be fit but beyond that it’s more due to claustrophobia and a need to get out.” Away from the ivory tower?

“No that’s academia, my tower is more mouldy.

“But next up I’m going to write a nice static novel so I don’t have to go anywhere. I don’t think I’ll ever get itchy feet again, that’s over.”

So do publishers ever tell him what to write?

“No publisher would dare, but I wouldn’t mind a best-seller, although it’s not going to happen.“ What about his talks then? Does he mind spilling the beans?

“It’s not intimate though is it?” he asks. “The audience aren’t getting into bed with me so it’s not intrusive. What’s important in life is how the people you love perceive you. And I don’t find that I scare people off. That’s not true. People just need to make more of an effort, it’s all absolutely within their grasp.”

* Will Self will be at the Oxford Playhouse tomorrow at 5pm. Call the box office on 01865 305305.