#thamesmeerd

Not many people realise that Erinsborough – the fictional suburb that features in the Australian soap opera Neighbours – is, give or take a couple of letters, an anagram of neighbours. When my bandmate Paul Kelly announced during a rehearsal that our band, Dream Themes, should make and star in its own soap, he mentioned this piece of trivia and added that he'd anagrammed “Dream Themes” to find the name of the town where said soap should be set. “How about Thamesmeerd?” he said. “Not to be confused with Thamesmead, of course.”