At night I wandered around, peaking at the gorgeous, cosy, and terribly English, houses. How I craved to live in one of those houses! And then another period of exile abroad was handed me by the Fates, in the form of a foreign partner.
I finally got to live in suburbia a decade ago, but my illusions of the idyll lasted as long as a curious pigeon in a Rolls Royce jet engine.
Twitching curtains, bitchiness that would shame a Coke-fuelled drag queen, and resentments simmering like a lamb in a tagine over parking, gardens, fences and other such trivia. And this being England, the whole gamut of human nastiness is covered by a veneer of respectability, Church on Sunday, a jolly little street party for the Queen's birthday, and Cheshire Cat grins at one's implacable foes.
It stirred long suppressed memories of my mother interacting with neighbours in Yorkshire, women with mouths like frightened horses, and the eyes of suspicious cats, tense little encounters littered with baying false laughs and their discourse peppered with competitive boasts.
And don't even get me started on the creepy little word of suburban sexuality.
The architecture of suburbia fascinates me, the way we live, the way we used to live, the values reflected in our quotidian world, who could not be besotted and repelled by the gaudiness of gnomes, the elegant nostalgia of Art Deco windows, or the sad, haunting curves of 1930s Modernism?
It is this love-hate relationship with suburbia that fuels my writing, and which colours each of the short stories in my collection, Spicy Green Ginger.
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