“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” is the much-quoted verdict of Dr Johnson. But it admits of some ambiguity as to the question of which comes first. I have a one-year-old who hasn’t slept through the night since he drew his first breath, and a three-year-old who sleeps like a top but will not let five waking minutes pass without a request for a rice cake, the demand for a change of outfit, or a fit of temper that would terrify the most temperamental of divas.
I look at myself in the mirror—eyes more than usually sunken, skin more than usually sallow, hair more than usually lank—and I feel like I’m peering out from an observation platform somewhere deep inside a scale model of my body, constructed with an aesthetic debt to the late Lucian Freud. Tired of life, I think. Tired of everything.
It’s at such times that one seeks refuge in fantasies of escape. The latest to grip me has to do with the country. It’s my wife Alices’s fault. I always tell her that she shouldn’t go on the internet, but learning that a friend was moving to Frome in Somerset, she made the mistake of looking on one of those property websites, and whimsically emailed me a link, saying: “Shall we move here?”
The link opened to a Victorian house on the River Mells, with decking over the water and a picturesquely ruined mill beside it. Old wooden floors, wood-burning stove, a grassy lawn photographed in the golden light of evening. I could almost taste the cool water gurgling through the mill race. I imagined myself lying down on that lawn, drifting off—oblivious to the gentle splosh-splosh as, somewhere a little way away, both toddlers tumbled into the stream.
She didn’t mean it, of course. But now I am obsessed. As things stand we live in North London’s Archway—where the Wisteria-clad houses of Dartmouth Park and the bohemian cafés of Kentish Town give way to a terminal moraine of shouty drunks and kebab shops, hard on a gyratory system round which the drivers of panel vans circulate ceaselessly, saluting each other with shaken fists and leaned-on horns. Occasionally, into the mephitic air there rises the forlorn sound of a siren.
And yet, here... I peered into the picture on the internet, and mouthed to myself the word: “Frome.” Actually, it’s not even Frome. It’s a village near Frome, but I can never remember the name. I have never been to Frome. I have constructed a Frome of the imagination—a Somerset Brigadoon reverse-engineered from a handful of glossy photographs in an estate agent’s brochure.
The only “village” we’re anywhere near at the moment is Highgate Village—whose high street comprises a colonnade of estate agents broken only by outlets of mid-market chain restaurants in which the estate agents eat their lunch. I think “village,” in the context of Frome, and all the words for which that gentle trochee can serve as a preface tumble into my mind and out of my mouth. “Village green,” I say dreamily. “Village school... village church... village fete... village cricket team... village pub, I continue, entranced.
“Village idiot,” Alice adds, helpfully.
My conversation has, none discouraged, become monomaniacal. “I bet they have a proper butcher in Frome,” I will say, apropos nothing. “You know. The family sort who, ah, chines stuff, and similar.”
We’ll be negotiating the London pavements with our colossal double-buggy. “No dogshit in Frome,” I’ll mutter. “Or chewing gum. Just daisies and meadowsweet and tufted crow-toe and pale jessamine, and such.”
Or we’ll be contemplating the upcoming nightmare of finding the eldest a place in primary school: “In Frome,” I’ll say, “the children could walk to school. No stabbings, no paedos. Just sandals and satchels and kindly lollipop ladies.”
“Poached eggs or scrambled?” I’ll ask of a Sunday evening, adding nonchalantly: “And shall we move to Frome?”
I don’t hear the answer. I’m imagining chickens pecking in the garden, poached eggs fresh from the hen over slices of toasted homemade bread. Seed potatoes doing whatever it is seed potatoes do under the ground, and feathery green carrot-tops above, bowing to the breeze.
In my head, I am Candide, and this is my blessed place of retreat. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” The only real difference in the story, as I see it, would be that my equivalent of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake would cause thousands of pounds worth of much-needed improvements to Archway.
As our children totter round and round the concrete prison exercise yard that passes for a back garden, one or other of us following them in a wary half-crouch to make sure they don’t eat any cat’s eggs or tumble down a step and crack their noddles, I announce, in the manner of someone dispassionately giving vent to a universal verity: “In Frome...”
Finally, Alice says, wearily: “I think you’ll find it’s pronounced ‘Froom’.”
“Oh,” I say.
