Jonathan Meades on the writing of An Encyclopaedia of Myself

The Spectator has the text of a talk Jonathan Meades gave at the Edinburgh Festival about the writing of his memoir An Encyclopaedia of Myself:

I wrote of my father’s lifelong friend Osmund Edwards: Uncle Os lived far away beyond the Severn; he owned a pub surrounded by orchards and hop-yards. I have a very strong memory from the age of about three and a half of that place, of a bright day, of a line of trees – limes maybe – beside a dusty dappled road. That was, I believed, the first time I registered dapple. 

My memory was indeed very strong – and entirely incorrect. Forty years later I returned to that pub between Tenbury Wells and the worryingly gothic St Michael’s College. No orchards, no hop-yards, and the surrounding fields were devoted to cereal crops. Lime trees? According to an old postcard I subsequently found, there never had been trees.

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