As I drove from one training session to another through the coastal suburbs of West Sussex, I was startled to come upon some new houses being built, called the Elysian Fields. I wish I had taken a photograph, for no one will believe me. The houses themselves were in that nondescript modern idiom so widespread, walls in primary colours like a child's pairing of a house, flimsy, impermanent materials, sited thoughtlessly on a busy roundabout.
Apart from the vaingloriousness of the name, do the developers suppose that people will not remember that to inhabit the Elysian Fields, you had to be dead? Or, if they were to grasp the Parisian reference, might they not make unfavourable comparisons between a dirty road on the south coast of Sussex and the avenue down which the French armed forces parade on le quatorze juillet?
