The green, green grass of (my first) home

I'm still writing essays, only now I'm doing them in the style of Sneil the snail, my former pet and semi-namesake from my primary schooldays.* (I wonder what ever happened to him, poor bastard! I used to take him everywhere with me but one day I must have just forgotten him, only to recall him now for an unamusing analogy a mere thirteen years later.)

Today, for want of things to do as a break from my exertions, I ventured back to my old house on the border with Eversley, Berkshire. When I write 'border' I do mean it; the stream at the bottom of my garden was the county boundary between Berkshire and Hampshire; the latter signifying the stolid housing estate upon which I lived and the former, wonderful expanses of greenbelt which have stayed stuck on my subconscious despite life since being almost entirely devoted to a world of overlooking flats, petrol-stations and the general suburban sprawl.

Briefly, walking back in the old fields this afternoon, I did feel 'something' awakening within me... perhaps a vague desire, oneday, to get out of all of this and return to the rapidly declining agrarian landscape. Whatever it was, I couldn't honestly tell you that it had much to do with memory- we left that house in 1990! No, my clearest memories from those days involve a bright blue dummy and, for some reason best known to Bob Holness, Bob Holness.

Still, I am deadly serious when I say that I will return there. I will be MP for Eversley or somesuch- maybe even a mere councillor so I can get there a tad sooner (although, on second thoughts, is such a position even open to people who have been absent from the community for eighteen years? I hope so).

One thing's for sure, and I say it often enough: I have had enough of these bloody suburbs!

*How does one write this- 'primary school days' seems to atomize the term too much but 'primary schooldays' seems to imply that these were, somehow, the pivotal point in my academic career... I still don't think I've reached that (perhaps I never will).