The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

To Legoland, near Windsor, with three young children and a baby in tow, and only five adults to manage them (which is at least seven too few). Remarkable thing, memory. As soon as something is over, we immediately begin the process of mentally editing out the rain, the crowds, the overpriced food, the constant fretting over sudden disappearances, the toddler tantrums, the sense of attempting to herd cats, the exhaustion, the sore feet, the traffic, the grind – and we retain for posterity just those brief moments of joy. Our Legoland trip was thus, in hindsight, a great family adventure of glee, brilliant model cities and a cool submarine ride. This is doubtless necessary for all sorts of anthropological reasons and is also is why it’s important to just keep doing things, despite the hassle. As Paul Simon wisely put it in Bookends: “Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.” And edit them judiciously too.

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Did anyone else notice that when Andy Murray missed, the ball landed out by a whisker, causing him to wince and curse his luck; whereas when Roger Federer missed it was a wild miss-hit landing yards out…but otherwise every shot landed exactly where he wanted it? I’m not sure what, if anything, this signifies.

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I see that Terry Wogan has been found guilty of an exciting new BBC thought-crime: causing a real risk of causing offence. He cracked a small joke obliquely referring to the Costa Concordia accident. For what will Wogan be remembered, I wonder? Children in Need’s millions, of course, but otherwise just a general sense of mild amusement, rather than a body of work. Eric Sykes was a brilliant comic, but The Plank and an antiquated domestic sitcom don’t seem sufficient to stand as a memorial to his talent. A problem of light entertainment, I suppose.

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Nige correctly identifies the residence pictured at the top of the Diary as that of Charles Pooter. Aka ‘The Laurels’, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway – an address with a distinct tang of suburban despair, much like 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam (Hancock) and 29 Acacia Road, Nuttytown (Bananaman).

Pooter describes ‘The Laurels’ as “a nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement, with a front breakfast-parlour. We have a little front garden; and there is a flight of ten steps up to the front door, which, by-the-by, we keep locked with the chain up.” I bet The Laurels would be worth a few bob these days, Holloway being in Islington, very much the urbs rather than the suburbs, densely and multiculturally populated during the 20^th century and now another victim of London’s relentless gentrification.

To find our railway suburbs now we must go beyond the M25. My cousin has a stunning five-bedroom house in leafy Buckinghamshire, complete with vast garden and a proper heated swimming pool. We spent an afternoon there last week for a milestone family birthday party – barbecue, flowing champagne and Pimms and beer and tea and cake, children playing happily, a hilarious mass swim, everyone getting along, even the sun unexpectedly shining. What have I edited out of this memory? Ah yes, the green-eyed monster.

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In north America the word ‘suburbs’ seems to refer to vast soulless badland conurbations from which arty teenagers yearn, ever yearn, to escape, generally via the redeeming power of rock ‘n roll. The Canadian band Arcade Fire have an album called The Suburbs (currently on heavy rotation in my car) which concludes with a brilliant song about “The Sprawl”, in which “dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains, and there’s no end in sight.” Good word ‘sprawl’. Quasi-onomatopoeic, I recommend repeating it as a mantra until spiritual enlightenment is achieved.

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For some reason, quite a few commenters on my other blog have over the years presumptuously accused me of living in ‘a nice middle-class area’, this supposedly undermining any observations I might make on urban class and ethnic issues.

And indeed I do live in a nice middle-class area, in the sense that there are lots of nice middle-class type people living in it (we discovered them after having children). It’s just that we also share it with nice working-class people, nasty working-class people, nasty rat-faced bull terrier-owning tattooed people, nice and nasty people of all ethnic categories, a very large number of first-generation Polish and Somali immigrants and a small but visible smattering of heroin addicts.

We could just about now afford to move to more gentrified places, if we wanted to, but we’re inclined to stay urban. There’s no competitive element or constant demand to display impeccable taste in every little thing. “You can just be who you are here, without worrying about it,” as Mrs Brit insightfully put it. I mostly agree but there are cons. I get occasional nightmares about rabid bull terriers savaging my legs and arms as I battle to protect infants from their slobbering jaws. But nothing is ever perfect, is it?