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uncomfortably squeezed by busy, wide relief roads of which I had no recollection and there was now a big tourist edifice called the White Cliffs Experience, where, I presume from the name, you can discover what it feels like to be 800-million-year-old chalk. I didn't recognize anything. The trouble with English towns is that they are so indistinguishable one from another. They all have a Boots and W.H. Smith and Marks & Spencer. You could be anywhere really.I plodded distractedly through the streets, unhappy that a place so central to my memories was so unfamiliar. Then, on my third grumbling pass through the town centre, on a lane I would swear I had never walked before, I came across the cinema, still recognizable as the home of Suburban Wife-Swap despite a heavy patina of arty refurbishment, and everything suddenly became clear. Now that I had a fixed point of reference, I knew precisely where I was. I strode purposefully 500 yards north and then west - now I could almost have done it blindfolded - and found myself square in front of Mrs Smegma's establishment. It was still a hotel and looked substantially unchanged, as far as I could remember, except for the addition of some hardstanding in the front garden and a plastic sign announcing colour TVs and en suite bathrooms. I thought about knocking at the door, but there didn't seem much point. The dragonlike Mrs Smegma must be long since gone - retired or dead or perhaps resident in one of the many nursing homes that crowd the south coast. She couldn't possibly have coped with the modern age of British guesthouses, with their en suite bathrooms and coffee-making facilities and people having pizzas delivered to their rooms.
If she is in a nursing home, which would certainly be my first choice, I do hope the staff have the compassion and good sense to scold her frequently for dribbling on the toilet seat, leaving her breakfast unfinished and generally being helpless and tiresome. It would do so much to make her feel at home.
Cheered by this thought, I strolled up the Folkestone Road to the rail station and bought a ticket for the next train to London.

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   TWO
GOODNESS  ME,  BUT  ISN'T  LONDON  BIG?   IT  SEEMS  TO  START ABOUT
twenty minutes after you leave Dover and just goes on and on, mile after mile of endless grey suburbs with their wandering ranks of terraced houses and stuccoed semis that always look more or less identical from a train, as if they've been squeezed out of a very large version of one of those machines they use to make sausages. How, I always wonder, do all the millions of occupants find their way back to the right boxes each night in such a complex and anonymous sprawl?
I'm sure I couldn't. London remains a vast and exhilarating mystery to me. I lived and worked in or around it for eight years, watched London news on television, read the evening papers, ranged extensively through its streets to attend weddings and retirement parties or go on hare-brained quests for bargains in far-flung breakers' yards, and still I find that there are great fragments of it that I have not just never visited but never heard of. It constantly amazes me to read the Evening Standard or chat with an acquaintance and encounter some reference to a district that has managed to elude my ken for twenty-one years. 'We've just bought a little place in Fag End, near Tungsten Heath,' somebody will say and I'll think, I've never even heard of that. How can this possibly be?
I had stuck a London A-Z in my rucksack and came across it now while searching unsuccessfully for half a Mars bar I was sure was in there. Plucking it out, I idly leafed through its busy pages, as ever amazed and quietly excited to find it peppered with districts,1
villages, sometimes small swallowed cities whose names, I would swear, had not been there the last time I looked - Dudden Hill, Plashet, Snaresbrook, Fulwell Cross, Elthorne Heights, Higham Hill, Lessness