The pleasures of peripolitania

Were you to look up the word ‘peripolitan’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, you would not find it. Though the thing weighs three tons and preens itself on containing every word jotted in English since the language first dragged itself out of the primordial alphabet soup, peripolitan is not there.

This irritates me no end, because I coined it, 20 years ago. I have, furthermore, deployed it at every subsequent opportunity, often in bold or italic the better to catch the lexicographic eye; but whenever I ring the OED to ask them when it’s going in, some snooty philological time-server tells me that they already have a perfectly good word to describe those who live on the edge of cities: they are suburban. But suburban is not a perfectly good word, it is a perfectly rotten word, it degrades the environs I cherish into something woefully less than urban; it is a sneer, a snub, a smirk behind the metropolitan hand. How does the OED put it? ‘Having the inferior manners, the narrowness of view, etcetera, attributed to residents in suburbs.’

Well, they will have to change their tune, now, thanks to the Elgar (born, remember, in the Worcester suburbs, sometime conductor of the County Asylum Band, but now the very noise of England) plucked from their wallet and slapped on Blackwell’s counter in exchange for Griff Rhys Jones’s absolutely cracking autobiography. For Semi-Detached is as captivating a celebration of peripolitania in its pomp as any of us who also lived through those postwar years could wish: it is both eulogy and elegy, joyful and mournful by turns, hilarious but poignant, a meticulously evocative chronicle of a childhood that none of peripolitania’s children will ever live again, now that the azaleas and magnolias that once blossomed in a million front gardens have been summarily evicted by Range Rovers and BMWs on a million concreted forecourts, as the butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers disappear into Tesco’s cannibal maw, and the erstwhile myriad suburbias of south-east England fuse into one gigantic conurbia from Watford to the sea.