Country life

Derby's postcodes are very strange. I live in DE23, yet I just have to walk down the road and I'm in DE1. I'm right next to the city centre, how come I get a postcode that makes it sound like I live somewhere in the wilds of Derbyshire? When I lived in Tumby Woodside, the best part of fifty miles from Peterborough, I was in PE22, which is the postcode for all the little villages on the far side of Boston that aren't quite close enough to Lincoln to get an LN code. Boston itself is PE21. I've never lived, long-term, in any place with a postcode number under twenty. That statistic makes me sound like some kind of country bumpkin who's afraid of settlements with more than three inhabitants and lives in a cave somewhere, eating passing rabbits and weevils and shouting at goats. It's a good thing nobody knows or cares about my postcode.

I'm watching Crimewatch right now, for want of anything better to do. I used to watch it regularly when I was a lot younger. I don't know why, maybe it's the appeal of the badly-acted dramatisations, or the vague hope that I might have witnessed the arch-criminal without knowing it at some point in the distant past. Of course, with my inability to remember faces, I wouldn't know about it even if I saw them on Crimewatch.