I had the feeling that I never quite qualified for Hampstead: financially, culturally, sartorially. It’s hard to get the look just right: Alan Bennett/Jonathan Miller corduroy, V-neck pullover and tie, bicycle Oxbridge, London Review of Books kitchen suppers on the lower slopes, the better part of Camden Town – and then Peter Cook, actors and authors, slewed bohemia with dosh, towards the leafy summit. But that was then, the days of renting rooms in houses where single gentlemen who left the BBC under a bit of a cloud shared a bathroom with bright, shiny, geometric girls from advertising agencies and hirsute Israeli men, maturing in theoretical architecture. On Downshire Hill, becalmed in the Freemasons Arms, that dead Python, Graham Chapman, gestured at the crossword and started mid-morning on lunchtime drinks. The preserved bedroom of John Keats was across the road. When I went to the bar for another heady draught cider – the debauchery! – I tried to see which black Penguin Graham wasn’t reading.
