52 The Times Magazinework. Except Passchendaele with dogs. As the
paths grow muddier and muddier with the
heavy rain and the increased footfall, walkers
just spread further and further from the track
in search of solid ground until it’s just mud
as far as the eye can see, with unhappy souls
trudging pointlessly across it like something
out of Wilfred Owen.
So I’ve moved to the paths around the
steep perimeter on the Hampstead side: the
drainage there is good, the going is firmer,
and I can try to drift off into whatever bullshit
audiobook I’m listening to, but always my
gaze drifts into the houses that look over the
heath, and I begin to dream.
Look at them there, retreating into the
darkness as evening falls, glowing with life
from the inside. Tall, Victorian, parapeted,
Hogwartian piles, with seven bedrooms and
a tile-floored Tuscan kitchen, chandeliers,
double reception rooms on ground and first,
two pianos, houses with gardens as big as parks,
where the kids could really play football...
“I SHOULD BE LIVING THERE!” I yell,
thinking I’ve said it to myself, except shouting it
at top volume because of the stupid earphones,
causing curtains to draw, security lights to
flash on and guard dogs to tug hungrily at
their chains. While inside, uniformed nannies
run steaming hot baths and children fluent in
six languages slide down polished mahogany
banisters to escape them.
So then I cut into Hampstead, off the heath,
and pass Italianate villas where Keats wrote
poems and then died, going happy to his grave
because at least he had off-street parking, past
double-fronted houses with the door in the
middle, a big hall and possibly two staircases.
I peer into lower-ground-floor kitchens done
up in £250K of Smallbone where gorgeous
hostesses cook supper for 12 (in more amenable
times), while upstairs in the drawing room
Maurice opens good champagne and the
children play clarinet duets by candlelight,
for the amusement of twinkling guests.Giles
I walk. It’s what I do...
Where is that from? Come on, come on,
I’ll have to hurry you. Yup, it was that awful
miniseries with Hugh Grant as the obviously
murderous doctor who obviously commits
a murder in the first episode and then lurks
around, pulling evil faces for the next five
episodes while everyone goes around saying he
is clearly the murderer, and then in the final
episode it turns out that he is the murderer.
You must have seen it. Everybody did.
Because everybody has seen everything,
because there is nothing else to do. I don’t
even watch telly and I’ve seen 48 episodes of
a thing in French, 9 different comedy dramas
about Orthodox Jews and 3 whole series of a
thing where the Karate Kid is grown up and
working in a car showroom.
So, yeah, the Hugh Grant thing. It also
starred Nicole Kidman as a 90-year-old woman
whose head has been replaced by a balloon
with a face drawn on it by an angry child,
and in order to place her near the scene of the
murder so as to create a possible alternative
killer to Grant (despite him cackling, “I did
it, I did it, tee hee hee,” at least six times per
episode), they give her this obsession with
walking about at night. No reason. Just walking.
It’s what she does. Near where the murder
happened, that her husband did.
We watched this bilge in lockdown, as I said,
because there was nothing else to do. But also
because it was so lockdown.
“I walk. That’s what I do.”
Yeah, Nicole. That’s what we all do. We’re
not allowed to do anything else. At some point
in the day, every single human on earth now
puts on a hat and coat and heads out to march
round in circles for an hour, listening to some
shit podcast while turning the parks to mush.
It’s like Passchendaele up on the heath,
where I walk every evening when I’ve finished‘Now I’m stuck at home,
I’m desperate to move out’
STAYING IN WITH THE CORENS
GILES & ESTHER’S LOCKDOWN 3 LIFE
I’m 51, I’m doing okay. I should be living in
such a house. Leading such a life. And I could.
I could. I do the maths every day. Sell off
our windy barn in Gloucestershire, Esther’s
engagement ring, my comic collection, a car,
one of the children, the house in Kentish Town,
borrow a couple of million at 1 per cent, like
you can at the moment, and make the stretch.
Then I’d be on the inside of a house like that,
looking out from my huge oval bedroom with
its original Georgian cornices and a landing
big enough for a half-decent game of cricket,
considering a cocktail in the billiard room,
instead of out here, peering in, suddenly realising
the time and hustling off home to my poky
end-of-terrace to order a cheeseburger on Just
Eat and watch something shit on the telly.Esther
There’s absolutely nowhere I’d rather be than
in my house. If I am away from it, at a party
or a restaurant or something, from about 9pm
I’m just waiting to go back there.
Even when setting off on a holiday I am
genuinely excited about, when I look back
at my front door, all cosy and beaming with
maternal benevolence, I want to shout to the
family, “I’m not coming!” and run back inside.
I can even feel homesick posting a letter.
Why I am deranged with love for my house
is a puzzle. It isn’t even that great. It’s not
some snazzy show home with mid-century
furniture. It’s a shabby Victorian townhouse,
identical to a million others. I was once
banging on to a local mum about how much
I loved my house (she lived in something
similar three streets away) and she scrunched
up her face in disgust and said, “Why?”
It’s a good question. Sometimes I think it’s
because I’m a home-loving Taurus. (Giles rolls
his eyes and goes, “Duhhrr,” when I mention
star signs, which is such a Leo thing to do.)
TOM JACKSON But it’s probably more to do with the fact that