Brent won. Lois’s emails picked up in their frequency. Would I write something about The Ends to celebrate The Ends? But this simple request proved difficult to manage. It was like being asked to breathe when breathing is sort of what you do on the regular. Everything I write is more or less about Brent, yet being explicitly asked to write about Brent sent me into a spiral of self-consciousness from which no writing seemed likely to emerge. Poor Lois kept emailing. The deadline crept closer. I worked myself up into a panic. Brent, I’d say to myself, as I sat at my desk, Brent. Brent! Brent? I tried getting more specific: Kilburn. The Kilburn High Road. So long, so wide and so old. During the writing of a novel of mine, NW, I’d read a lot about the Kilburn High Road and its history, and knew it was Celtic originally, then Roman, then Anglo-Saxon, with an ancient river buried deep beneath it. Once a part of Watling Street, it was a common route for medieval pilgrims, on their way to visit the shrine of St Albans, or the Black Madonna in St Mary’s, Willesden. Some of those pilgrims no doubt took their rest at Kilburn Priory (est. 1134), a famed local nunnery of Augustinian canonesses. Yes, the especially pious pilgrims would have stopped there. But surely many more people – basic types like you and me – would have paused in one of the pubs, like the Red Lion (1444) or the Cock Tavern (1486) for some ale and a pie and a bit of chat …

One day, just as I received another anxious email from Lois, it happened that I spotted a copy of The Canterbury Tales on a shelf in front of me and, at a loss for what else to tell her, I spontaneously suggested that perhaps I could take this connection between Kilburn and Canterbury pilgrimages and translate the original Chaucer into the contemporary local vernacular: The Brondesbury Tales. Cute idea. But when I actually took down the Chaucer I was reminded that his tales are many and long and it might take me till 2030 to complete the task. Well, how about The Wife of Bath? Alas, this, too, was long. Well, how about a few verses of it, like a short monologue, the text of which we could put in our excellent Brent Magazine, or maybe even have a local actress perform it at the Kiln Theatre? Such was the plan.