Therapy

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 across the street; and the second thing we discovered was that Sally and the kids could get to their college and schools with half the hassle and in half the time they were used to in London; and the third thing we discovered was that people were still civil to each other outside London, that shop assistants said “lovely” when you gave them the right change, and that taxi-drivers looked pleasantly surprised when you tipped them, and that the workmen who came to repair your washing-machine or decorate your house or repair your roof were courteous and efficient and reliable. The superior quality of life in Britain outside London was still a well-kept secret in those days, and Sally and I could hardly contain our mirth at the thought of all our friends back in the capital pitying us as they sat in their traffic jams or hung from straps in crowded commuter trains or tried in vain to get a plumber to answer the phone at the weekend. Our luck changed in more ways than one with the move to Rummidge. Who knows whether The People Next Door would have ever seen the light of studio if I hadn’t met Ollie Silver at a civic reception Sally had been invited to, just when Heartland were looking for a new idea for a sitcom...
    When Jane and Adam left home to go to University we moved out to Hollywell, a semi-rural suburb on the southern outskirts of the city — the stockbroker belt I suppose it would be called in the South-East, only stockbrokers are rather thin on the ground in the Midlands.