I grew up on Coronation St. It used to be prime-time viewing, five times a week in N.Z. and my family watched it every night. So I grew up with Bet Lynch, Deidre and Ken, Hilda and Stan Odgen and all of their complicated interminable feuds. The credits rolled against backdrops of red-brick mid-terraces, backyards that were a maze of walls and old sheds, shot against a battle-grey sky. With a cat sitting on a wall.
If you told me that one day, that would be my everyday landscape - that all I'd have to do to see a maze of walls and old sheds against a grey sky was look out my window - I'd never have believed you. The U.K. was a real country, a place where television programmes and news stories came from. Books were set there. Famous people came from there. They had real bands. And Christmas was cold.
Empires cast long shadows. When I was growing up, you could still sometimes find older people who called England `Home,' even though they had never in their lives set foot there.
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