Real life: In praise of Balham

As if by magic, a long-lost cousin will every so often appear. They come from the sticks and ask if they can stay in my south London flat. I always say yes, on the basis that I was once taken in by kind people who took pity on a fugitive from Midlands farming country.

Jim and Caroline, husband and wife and two thirds of an alternative rock band, sheltered me. I found them in a dog-eared copy of Loot. I didn’t even know where or what Balham was when I answered the ad. Jim opened the door, showed me in and grilled me about artistic things. He told me I had got the room after I revealed that I had a copy of Crime and Punishment in my bag.

‘Say no more!’ the dear man cried. ‘And I know Caroline is going to love you because you’re wearing yellow.’

Back in the Midlands, people chuckled when I told them I was moving to Balham. ‘Bal-ham! Gateway to the south!’ they cried, in weird voices. As I was too young to have seen the Peter Sellers sketch, I trusted without irony in this handy geographical concept. I was a country girl at heart. I would be well served by being able to get out of the city by going through a gateway. It would be just like Narnia.

And so it has proved. After listening to Jim and Caroline play increasingly experimental rock music in their attic for a year, I managed to buy my own place and then, when I could afford what I really wanted, which was a horse, I discovered that it was as easy as promised to leave Bal-ham’s thriving community to access equally thriving Cob-ham, where Tara Lee, the violent chestnut hunter, was duly stabled.