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I thought Stevenage was Hell, but Stevenage, it turns out, is the kind of place a bad designer would make to represent Hell if they were doing a film about Hell. Harpenden is actually Hell. And yes, most of my blog from now on will be me dissing the market towns and new towns of whatever part of Hertfordshire it is I live in. And their dentists. I expect to be burned in a whicker man, without anaesthetic before 2018 is out.
I lived in Harpenden for 6 months in 2012 when we thought we’d taken on our most stressful year by getting married and having our house extensively renovated at the same time (turns out 2017, having a second child, a dog and moving into an old house that needed loads of work on it was worse). But I was away on tour for most of that time and we tended to walk around town (though we were a fair way from the centre). The traffic is terrible and all the car parks are permanently full. There are more cars than there are people, so I don’t know what’s going on or why people are parking there, but after Phoebe’s gym glass we had to go to the shops. It was raining and Harpenden was gridlocked and there was nowhere for us to leave the car. Hitchin is like this on a Friday (not sure why) but Harpenden is like it every day. Thank God I live in a village where this isn’t a problem, unless you encounter some belittling scaffolders in a lorry.
It was raining and cold and we hadn’t slept enough and our patiences had been worn so thin that they were translucent. We parked in a spot, but I then realised it was permit only. As I attempted to pull out of the spot my car tyre touched the kerb and a passerby stopped to warn me that my tyre was flat. And then when they realised that it wasn’t actually flat it was just touching the kerb, they told me that it was bad for the tyre to leave it touching the kerb like that. I thanked them. But because of them the tyre touched the kerb for about 45 seconds longer than it would have done..
We finally chanced across a car park a good way up the High Street that had maybe four spaces. Why would anyone who had a car in Harpenden not use it to escape Harpenden?
I am kidding Harpenden, like with the dentist. I love you. Please drive into town and clog the place up when I return to Harpenden Halls in 2018. See all my tour gigs here.
http://richardherring.com/ohfrig/tour
After all that, the thing we needed to buy for the house cost about five times more than I expected. They can’t have known I was going to slag Harpenden off. I hadn’t written this blog yet. But perhaps they just worked out I would slag them off because of how shit they are.
I love Hertfordshire as much as I love my family and having my teeth bored into with no injection.
It’s all jokes.
