Somewhere north of London there is a small town - parts of the remaining High Street are Victorian, though now an enormous shopping centre of recent creation overtowers it. Approaching from the east, the road passes under a high steel-grey brick railway viaduct and then curves up to the new ring road roaring under the walls of that shopping centre.  The walls are almost impervious to entry, standing like an ancient castle with only a few embrasures, presumably for decorative effect, though it would be easy enough to imagine arrows and boiling oil pouring down on invading forces trying to take the hill. Now languages of every nation are heard in its streets as if the town were taken by an unspoken infiltration instead of conquest, and were those languages not being used in conversations between businessmen and -women, mothers and children, students and waiters.

The town is called Watford. The young lady to my left as I type is from a Baltic state. Last week a conversation in Czech reached me in stereo as two other young ladies took seats on my either side.

The name does not come from a ford on the River Wat.  Rather, one is likely to ask River What?  For again approaching from the east, beside the road runs a strip of green - a linear country park, signs say.  River bank is a better description. Watford stands on the River Colne - a flat, dull, southern river. The "wat" in Watford may have something to do with the same three letters in Watling Street, but as no one knows the origins of that name either we are not much better off. Almost certainly, though, Watford was where the Romans found they could ford the river on their way north.

However, near the stream in the town centre, my hotel was built on Water Lane. Walking out tonight, Water Lane crosses not only the river, but also another wet unnamed ditch. Last year colleagues in the hotel found floods that had risen six feet cut them off. Water lays and stands wherever it can in this town - I found this as I tried to avoid the flooded half of the road as I drove out to the office in last week's rain, and the flooded half of another road, and another.

The viaduct cuts across the plain of the Colne, very high, very black, and for some reason very narrowly arched.  Apart from the entry into the town on the main road, all other roads passing under the viaduct narrow to one lane, now subject either to traffic lights or one-way traffic. And there in the narrow strip of land an enormous supermarket (I found a plaque this evening, celebrating the re-direction of the river past their front door and under their car park) and two strip malls of electrical and carpet shops have been dropped. I was able to explore, though an unwitting explorer when I lost my way, through the chicanes that pass through the arches - the roads do not have enough space to curve around in the free area, so must pass through and curve back on themselves like mutant rams horns. Never can a town have been said to have turned in on itself as in the roads of Watford.

And somewhere outside the town, near the linear park, near the motorway to the north, and the A5 that once was called Watling Street, is the office building in which I have been working.

Yet tomorrow I shall be going back in time, to Oxfordshire, and the medieval village of Woodstock. I think I hear the panniers on the packhorses being loaded now.