WEST OF EALING

Well that’s it then. We’re in ‘West London’ now apparently. I saw an advert for my local lido, tweeting that it was just ‘25 minutes away, on the Elizabeth Line’.

Crossrail. The Elizabeth Line. It’s new. It goes right through central London and we’re on the end of it. That makes us Londoners. Come and have a lovely swim.

I don’t begrudge the Londoners coming over here, doing the backstroke and having a fancy sandwich. That’s great! Come and spend money in our town. But do we really have to be part of London in return?

For one thing, we’ve spent half a century trying to actually be a city of our own! Inverness, we lost out to. Then St Asaph. Chelmsford, Preston. Now Colchester and Bangor. And Stanley on the Falkland Islands, which to be fair is a sort of capital, but is still home to mostly penguins and a pile of whalebones.

Anyway, the point is that it’s much harder for us to get the Queen’s approval if we’re just a sort of West Ealing, subsumed into the metropolis, like Croydon or Dartford. I mean, sure, her great grandmother pulled the blinds down when she went through on the train, and sure we have a little history of monarchs statues actually with their back to the town, but how in the world are we going to change attitudes if we’re no more than borough on a string?

I wonder how Maidenhead and Slough feel about it all. They must be on the Elizabeth Line too. It’s like a tractor beam gathering all those little towns and green fields and pulling them in with its gigantic, bulging mass.

Well anyway. Readers of My West London News can get here faster than a taxi can take you from Trafalgar Square to Crystal Palace. Trees flash by, houses with washing lines, sidings and red brick tunnels, perhaps allotments with lean-tos and scarecrows. Back in the Big Smoke before your hair’s had time to dry.

I guess on the other hand, it’s a lot easier to get to the Natural History Museum. Though it’s also a lot busier. Oh, and I don’t know - why am I getting grumpy about this, of all things?

And before you chime in, it’s definitely not ‘maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’, because I am absolutely not.