Real life | 20 April 2017

Goodbye then, Bal-ham. You were my gateway to the south. I loved you for so many more reasons than that, but the fact that I could get away from you and go down the A3 to the verdant grasslands of Cob-ham was probably one of the biggest ones, if I’m honest, so by and large Peter Sellers was right.

It was a love/hate relationship. The dynamic of our life together was forged by the state line that runs through you, which is every bit as drastic as the Mexican border.

My flat was a few hundred yards from the boundary between Lambeth and Wandsworth, so I have spent the past 16 years within touching distance of a flagship Tory council while being dictated to by the loony left and their amusing ideas of how to best spend my money, for example on toilets for heroin users.

Fox-feeding, that was the speciality of the Corbynistas of Lambeth. I will always treasure the memory of the night I caught a local cabbie throwing raw sausages from the window of his cab to the ravening beasts — sorry, I mean ‘magnificent creatures’ — who came off Tooting Common each night to prowl the streets. Patrolling their territory, they lapped up the tidbits of passing lefties, and helped themselves to the liberal spillages of tofu, mung beans and quinoa from the wheelie bins.

Ah the wheelie bins. Every one an example of native Bal-ham art. They had assigned me four by the time I exchanged contracts on the cottage. Two black, two green. And endless rolls of plastic sacks which they insisted the recycling was put into before it was placed in the green bins.

Plastic wrapped in plastic placed in plastic. That was the lefties’ preferred way of saving the planet.