The Jam, there, with “Town Called Malice”.  The town in question, I can only presume, was the band’s home town of Woking.  During my year working in Malice and living nearby, the only trace I saw of Woking’s most famous sons was a largeish Paul Weller poster outside the Virgin Megastore.  Nor does the town take as much pride as might be expected in its ornate mosque, the first purpose-built mosque in Britain, no less (note the qualifiers, usually written in smaller print; is it just my overall prejudice against Surrey-and-everything-in-it, or do I detect a note of bitterness?  “Sure,” I imagine them saying, “the Muslims of Liverpool may have pipped us at the post with their converted warehouse, but I bet they don’t have a big green dome!”), and no-one has ever really cared for Woking Palace – including the Tudor Kings who owned but generally avoided it.

In fact, if anything counts as a symbol, an icon, of Woking town, it is without a doubt the novelist H. G. Wells.  To my mind  Wells is certainly worthy of being the town’s favourite son – except that he wasn’t from there and never lived there for very long. He was actually in Woking for just about long enough to  start fantasising about its complete and utter destruction at the hands of Martian fire and smoke.  The War of the Worlds (which, naturally, I spent my last day in Woking reading) was of course a seminal book – as powerful an argument against colonialism as I have ever read (at least from someone who never actually experienced it), and a terrifying prophecy of the industrialised, total wars that characterised the century between then and now – and its understandable that Woking takes a certain pride in having been used as its stage.

But still – for all that my stay Darn Sarf was largely boring and lonely – how can you not have a soft spot for a town that so celebrates its own fiery demise?

This particular Martian has a street to itself, lording over a pavement that represents – in a stylised brickworky way – a landscape shattered by the impact of a huge metal cylinder from space.  There’s more scenes of mass destruction in Wetherspoons, along with the Invisible Man and the Time Machine (not works in any way associated with Woking, to be fair, but then when have top UKIP funders been known for their commitment to accuracy?)  Again, what’s not to love?

Actually, quite a lot I suppose.  This being the UK’s Silicon Valley (apparently), most of my colleagues were economic migrants, like myself, from the four corners of the nation – but whenever I met a fellow Mancunian outside of work, we’d greet each other with a weird kind of relief, and reassure each other fervently that the whole world wasn’t like Surrey.  Of course, in the interest of balance I should mention the experiences of one of my colleagues who actually was a local; he spent three years in Manchester, hated it there and was glad to be back in Surrey afterwards.  It’s whatever you’re used to, I guess.

Anyway, yesterday I packed my life up into the boot of my Dad’s car and left Woking behind, Martians and all, for good.  It was with a certain surreal giddiness at first, though obviously four hours in a car got that out of my system.  In the end, coming over what I think was Longdendale Moor (it was quite spectacular, at any rate, and the heath was a particularly intense shade of purple this year), I felt an intense sense of being home.  For the first time in four years (before Surrey, I studied in Strasbourg, France), I’m back and with no plans to move in the foreseeable future.

I now have a week of training ahead of me for my epic swim, and then organising my new life as a student (the halls of residence sound terrifying, but overall I’m dead excited.  Excited and tired).

Tune in next time, for more intense political thought!