Actually, if I were looking for a Gene song title to encapsulate my feelings about starting work in the capital, it would inevitably be Haunted By You. London is where a good many of my friends who didn’t spend their mid-to-late twenties failing to write a PhD and then succeeding in starting a family went to do…other things. For me, it represents an alternative not chosen, a potentially very different sort of life. So the ghosts in that house, the wodwos in that wood, are putative other selves: a gibbering, misshapen horde of fantastic projections…

(Wodwo, apparently, is a variant of woodwose, derived from wuduwasa, a wild man of the woods, for which the Wiktionary gives the etymology: “From wudu + an unexplained second element [italics mine]”…)

Fortunately, I hope to be meeting a few old friends for lunch from time to time. With any luck they will be able to remind me who I am, if I show any signs of forgetting.