Six years ago, I moved from Gospel Oak to Penzance, which was yesterday named one of the best places to live in the South-West. I wasn’t in Penzance to celebrate yesterday — not that the Cornish would celebrate, they know their home is special — but in Gospel Oak, staring up at my old home, a flat above an old pub with soaring windows, wondering if they have ripped down the Winnie the Pooh wallpaper.
London or not is usually presented as a binary choice: bucolic with sheep or the dazzling charisma of an ancient, blackened city. When I get off the train at Paddington, and take a taxi through Little Venice, the nostalgia is unbearable, particularly — and I have no idea why — if it is raining, and if it is night. I felt a stirring staring up at the windows but that is ageing for you: lives so unlived that they are fictional. Has anyone felt such longing for Gospel Oak? Does it even deserve it?
Writers are to blame for this false dichotomy. (I have done it myself. I have written homages to my chickens, who die as regularly as Anna Karenina. One died on Friday). It is a strong narrative, as old as writing itself: fleeing Hades (London?) for paradise (not London?) longing for a simpler time (1940, when Enid Blyton was writing The Children of Cherry Tree Farm?) — a metaphor of personal renewal.
I know I moved to Cornwall, at least partially, to be a child again. My father saved me from drowning at Porthcurno when I was eight or nine. All parents do this at Porthcurno: there is a powerful undertow.
I thought when I moved to Cornwall that I would cliff-walk each day and take joy in gardening and cooking. I would grow fit and strong and write with ease in the relative solitude. Six years on, I can tell you that I cliff-walk about twice a year — and always with visitors, who insist on it — and I hate gardening and cooking as much as I ever did. I am not fit and strong — I live next door to a pasty shop, Aunty May’s — and I write as uneasily as ever.
All told, I am still me, just not in Camden Town. I have not, as a fellow journalist suggested in A Defence of London piece — written to batter my own Cornwall is Brilliant piece — left my husband. Cornwall did not expose the essential emptiness of our marriage (was this projection?) and my son is not a reluctant prisoner in a failing school. But I work all the time, and so does my husband. I stare at a computer screen as often as a wave, so much that I might as well be in Gospel Oak. Paradise costs money, and a garden is growing on the roof.
Now that Penzance is crowned, other Londoners will come to the South-West for the sea, the sky, and the crazed duality of the weather: six months sun, then six months rain. But you need to do more than move house or county to change yourself, time travel is impossible, and Enid Blyton novels are for children. There are lifeguards at Porthcurno: I would probably have lived.
Succession is brilliant bleak satire
Succession, whose fourth season started yesterday, is the new “greatest TV show on Earth” following The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and Madmen.
To me they are stories of deadly sins, because there are no new stories to tell. The Sopranos is about wrath; Breaking Bad is about pride; Madmen, greed. Succession, which chronicles a family, the Roys, scheming for power — for succession — is probably based on the Murdoch media dynasty. It is about envy: ours. It is by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Peepshow, and it is bleak satire.
With the exception of Logan, the founder of the dynasty, the Roys are all idiots. It is quite soothing — you might be on £30,000 a year, but at least you aren’t as stupid as Kendall — but is it healthy?
If you are laughing at the Roys, you aren’t doing anything more useful, like taxing them. Succession is dazzling, and it is another anaesthetic.
