Lead us not into introspection and deliver us from Surrey!

One of the three places where I lived while I was growing up, in fact, the place where I spent the most time of all, was a small Surrey/Hants border suburb, consisting of a large council estate, a corner shop cum supermarket, a bus-stop (from where I would board the bus to leave each morning) and a petrol-station which, in characteristic defiance of all sentiment, bordered my back garden. Of the three houses of my youth, and almost despite myself, I feel the most loyalty to this one...

Why? I had no friends in the village (well apart from a few weird eunuch boys from the local church with whom I was on nodding terms)- all my school friends lived in Guildford and I never went into the nearest town, that horrible military conglomerate, Aldershot. Bizarrely though, I have a number of cherished memories from my time here: kicking a football round the garden or running about with a plastic sword pretending to be a Jedi, walking or cycling along the old Railway line in winter with my Dad, watching Last of the Summer Wine in the front room with a fizzy ribena...

In a very limited sense, if you take away school and both sets of grandparents and all the days and holidays in Sussex and the West Country, then this was my childhood: a small, isolated one spent in some suburb of nowhere. Suddenly all the dots start joining up. Why I am at Kingston? Well, I refer to you the last sentence. Why do I get so much satisfaction from writing a blog which nobody reads? Well, I used to play on my own in a garden, inventing little TV series and giving imaginary interviews to myself about what was about to take place in Season Four... Is it really that much different, pretending that I am to be a great writer when I can't even place a comma correctly and, more importantly, no one much cares anyway?

Editor's note:

I'm going to cut this little piece off here. Yes, that's right guys, I've done it again... made a blog which, at its best, aspires toward the charming and quirky, quite aggravatingly self-obsessed and rubbish. My bad.