Untitled Document

The first rule is never go back.
In 1998 when I moved back to England from France I went to live in Brighton where I come from. (Actually I come from Newhaven and I grew up in Peacehaven, but Brighton is the nearest town of any size, and I went to school there for a bit so it's close enough. I just put that in for the pedants.)
It wasn't the people of Brighton's fault that I felt trapped in a fine mesh of localness, not exactly anyway. I felt the same way when I moved to Norwich four years later, except that I circumnavigated a lot of localness by steadfastly refusing to get involved.
Being a bit famous I'm always coming across people who try to pull themselves up to (what they perceive to be) my slightly superior level, and in so doing nearly drag me down to theirs. And there are the people who hate to see anyone doing OK, so they want to drag you back, bring you into line. These kind of people make trite comments when they get drunk along the lines of too good enough for the likes of us . Sometimes they get belligerent as well.
And the other problem about being from, or merely living, anywhere is that unless it's a complete dump people are often unreasonably proud of the fact that they're from and / or in this place, and this manifests itself in a certain smugness, a kind of arrogance. You can experience this by strolling round the North Laine in Brighton at the weekend. People are at the centre of their own little universe, which is fair enough - I probably am too, but I'm not expecting everyone else to join in my party. Not that I'm having a party.
And there's the petty social politics - if you're not careful you start to feel, not just a right, but sometimes even an obligation to be morally outraged by other people's mundane bad behaviour when in fact you don't give a damn.
When I wrote Local I had Brighton, Norwich and the Medway Towns - Chatham, Rochester and Gillingham - firmly in mind. These are all places where I've felt in danger of being sucked in whilst feeling like a total outsider at the same time.
And finally, there must be a government department that hangs shopping trolleys in the trees - I once lived in a flat with a view onto the top of a bus shelter and I was impressed with how the display was changed regularly from month to month. One month there'd be a trainer and a broken melamine drawer, the next an old sock and a bicycle tyre. Someone was taking care of it but I never caught them at it even though I often stayed up all night.