place where you would expect anybody to live , and indeed it wouldn’t be much fun to do so three hundred and sixty-five days a year. It’s too noisy and dirty. Noise not just from the traffic, but also from the high-pitched whine of restaurant ventilator fans at the back of the building that never seem to be turned off, and dirt not just in the air, which leaves a fine sediment of black dust on every surface though I keep the windows shut most of the time, but also on the ground, the pavement permanently covered with a slimy patina of mud and spittle and spilt milk and beer dregs and vomit, and scattered over with crushed burger boxes, crumpled drinks cans, discarded plastic wrappers and paper bags, soiled tissues and used bus tickets. The efforts of the Westminster Borough street-cleaners are simply swamped by the sheer numbers of litter-producing pedestrians in this bit of London. And the human detritus is just as visible: drunks, bums, loonies and criminal-looking types abound. Beggars accost you all the time, and by 10 p.m. every shop doorway has its sleeping occupant. “ Louche ” was Amy’s verdict on the ambience (or, as she would say, ambiance) when I first brought her here, but I’m not sure that’s the right word. (I looked it up, it means shifty and disreputable, from the French word for squint.) The porn and peepshow district is half a mile away. Here second-hand bookshops and famous theatres jostle with fastfood outlets and multicinemas. It’s certainly not your conventional des. res. area, but as a metropolitan base for an out-of-towner like me, the situation is hard to beat. London is a midden anyway. If you have to live here you’re better off perched on the steaming, gleaming pinnacle of the dunghill, instead of burrowing your way up and down through all the strata of compacted old shit every morning and evening. I know: I’ve been a London commuter in my time.
When we moved to Rummidge from London twelve years ago, because of Sally’s job, all my friends regarded me with ill-concealed pity, as if I was being exiled to Siberia. I was a bit apprehensive myself, to be honest, never having lived north of Palmer’s Green in my life (apart from Army Basic Training in Yorkshire, and touring when I was a young actor, neither of which really counts as “living”) but I reckoned that it was only fair to let Sally take the chance of a career move from schoolteaching to higher education. She’d worked bloody hard, doing an M.Ed. part-time while being Deputy Head of a Junior School in Stoke Newington, and the advertisement for the lectureship in the Education Department at Rummidge Poly was bang on the nose of her research field, psycholinguistics and language acquisition (don’t ask me to explain it). So she applied and got the job. Now she’s Principal Lecturer. Maybe she’ll be a Professor one day, now that the Poly has become a University. Professor Sally Passmore: it has a ring to it. Pity about the name of the University. They couldn’t call it the University of Rummidge because there was one already, so they called it James Watt University, after the great local inventor. You can bet your life that this rather cumbersome title will soon be shortened to “Watt University”, and imagine the conversational confusion that will cause. “What university did you go to?” “Watt University.” “Yes, what university?” “ Watt University.” And so on.
Anyway, I was a bit apprehensive about the move at the time, we all were, the kids too, having always lived in the South-East. But the first thing we discovered was that the price we got for our scruffy inter-war semi in Palmer’s Green would buy us a spacious five-bedroomed detached Edwardian villa in a pleasant part of Rummidge, so that I could have a study of my own for the first time in our married life, looking out on to a lawn screened by mature trees, instead of the bay window of our lounge with a view of an identical scruffy semi
When we moved to Rummidge from London twelve years ago, because of Sally’s job, all my friends regarded me with ill-concealed pity, as if I was being exiled to Siberia. I was a bit apprehensive myself, to be honest, never having lived north of Palmer’s Green in my life (apart from Army Basic Training in Yorkshire, and touring when I was a young actor, neither of which really counts as “living”) but I reckoned that it was only fair to let Sally take the chance of a career move from schoolteaching to higher education. She’d worked bloody hard, doing an M.Ed. part-time while being Deputy Head of a Junior School in Stoke Newington, and the advertisement for the lectureship in the Education Department at Rummidge Poly was bang on the nose of her research field, psycholinguistics and language acquisition (don’t ask me to explain it). So she applied and got the job. Now she’s Principal Lecturer. Maybe she’ll be a Professor one day, now that the Poly has become a University. Professor Sally Passmore: it has a ring to it. Pity about the name of the University. They couldn’t call it the University of Rummidge because there was one already, so they called it James Watt University, after the great local inventor. You can bet your life that this rather cumbersome title will soon be shortened to “Watt University”, and imagine the conversational confusion that will cause. “What university did you go to?” “Watt University.” “Yes, what university?” “ Watt University.” And so on.
Anyway, I was a bit apprehensive about the move at the time, we all were, the kids too, having always lived in the South-East. But the first thing we discovered was that the price we got for our scruffy inter-war semi in Palmer’s Green would buy us a spacious five-bedroomed detached Edwardian villa in a pleasant part of Rummidge, so that I could have a study of my own for the first time in our married life, looking out on to a lawn screened by mature trees, instead of the bay window of our lounge with a view of an identical scruffy semi
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