In the slightly murky duck pond, the pathway running along the railway tracks, the children playing football on a pitch marked out by jumpers, is a quotidian familiarity and a sense of place quintessentially Swiftean: "There is a certain inescapable attachment," he says. Like Clapham Common, which featured in Shuttlecock, and Greenwich Park, which acted as a counterpart to the unruly Fens in Waterland, Wandsworth Common is a perfect study in harmony and simplicity. On this crisp February afternoon it is easy to understand why such groomed green spaces are also important to Swift's fiction. It just loosens up the mind in the way that you don't get when you are sitting at a desk." If ever inspiration is drying up, it is here he seeks refuge: "I do my thinking while I walk. O ver the past 20 years Graham Swift has made this short trip across Wandsworth Common in south London more times than he cares to remember: he leaves his Victorian terraced house, goes past the County Arms Pub (a wood-paneled establishment where the barmen know him by name) before ducking behind a row of houses and then, suddenly, he is in the park.
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