Ascot and Sunningdale and Staines. Staines – what a name for a town. Egham – it's unbearable, says W. Feltham – these names, these names! True life is elsewhere, isn't it?, W. says. True life is elsewhere. But we are in the suburbs, and on the slowest train in the world.
We speculate about the lost geniuses of the suburbs. Bracknell's secret Rilke (Coetzee lived in Bracknell, W. says) … Martin's Heron's hidden Leibniz (Martin's Heron: what kind of a name is that?). And Ascot's own Solomon Maimon, drunk in Tesco's carpark …
You'd have to go on the sick, if you lived in the suburbs, W. and I agree. You'd have to stay unemployed, wandering the streets with the early-retired and buggy-pushing mothers. And you'd go mad from isolation. You'd go off your head. And then you'd top yourself.
It's different in the north, of course. It was different in my Manchester, back then before the regeneration, W. says. It was different before Marketing Manchester and Heritage Manchester and Superclub Manchester. It was a shithole, I tell him. It was a shithole, he agrees. But you can only live in shitholes. Where else is there to live?
Maimon would have felt right at home there, in old Manchester, we agree. I felt right at home there, as muggers held knives to my throat and junkies trailed after me asking me for money. I felt right at home in my box room next to curry house extractor fans.
There's a crack in the wall, I told the landlord, who was showing me round. – 'A crack in the wall, yes', he said and smiled. I could hardly breathe for cold and curry, but I took the room nonetheless. – 'You were born for squalor', W. says.
And that was the beginning of my education, W. says. Or what one might could call an education.
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