Grace Notes @ Snarkattack

It’s 4am, on Good Friday, and I’m watching this awesome but lame marathon of a programme on cable TV called Most Haunted. They are conducting some sort of ghost-hunting expedition in Clerkenwell’s House of Detention, in London.

Which leads me to Wikipedia. Yes, lame I know. At the bottom of the page are various places towns and boroughs in England (my gosh, there are a lot of them).

I click on Clapham. I was born in Clapham South, and a lot of my Anglo-Indian relatives live very close by (Balham, Tooting Bec). My parents have also lived in various places round here. In case you’re interested, here is a link to the page I was viewing:

Clapham, according to Wikipedia.

I know that this area of London, previously in the county of Surrey, is ancient, we’re talking pre-Norman Conquest (before 1066). I find it somewhat funny that ‘Clapham’ apparently derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘Clappa’s farm’.

Great! I was born in a town that sounds like it was named after a bleeding venereal disease. Yea me. Incidentally, when I was born (1970s), there were lots of hospitals exclusively for women to give birth. An ex-boyfriend of mine had a mother who was born in Clapham South, and she would be nearly 70 and even in her time this was the case, she told me.

But upon further reading, I also learn that Natsume Sōseki lived in Clapham for a while. I mention this because in a -->