The garden window

Shortly after moving back to the house in which I grew up I found myself looking out of the back bedroom window wondering what to do about the garden.
It is a big garden of the kind that they do not give to council houses anymore and, but for Margaret Thatcher, it would not now be mine. Twelve years ago I worked out that mortgage repayments would be lower than council rents and my parents exercised their right to buy. In due course, I inherited the house.
As I leaned on the window sill of the room I had shared with my brother nearly thirty years ago Nihal, my next door neighbour’s 7-year old, kicked a football around with some of his friends in their garden.
Twice the ball came over the fence and Nihal looked up at the window to ask permission to climb the fence and fetch it. The third time I was not there, but in the garden picking up the ball. I carried it to Nihal and said: “Good footballers play with the ball on the ground and pass to the feet.” It is a useful trick, which I recommend. The ball did not come over again that weekend. I returned to the bedroom window to ponder how a single man could maintain a 70ft by 30ft garden.
Two gardens further down from Nihal, another family group was playing in their back garden. I could not see anything because some privet hedges, of the kind that are the hallmark of a certain era’s council estates, obscure this garden. It was loud and joyous and I could hear the father fully engaged in the play, managing shrieks of delight and at least one major tantrum with equal ease. I listened, enjoying the scene for ages. I was mourning my mum and it made me feel better. But I could not work out what was wrong with what I was seeing and hearing.
I little while later – perhaps the same day, perhaps a few days after – I recalled a conversation that mum had related to me. She had been waiting at the bus-stop chatting with some of the other old folk who populate the mid-morning bus services. Damilola Taylor cropped up in conversation and one of the group had wondered out loud what a 10-year old was doing out that late. “Ian, it was barely going dark,” said my mum. She did not need to explain the full meaning of her statement. What should be wrong with a 10-year old heading for home just as the night is falling?
This is what niggled me about the idyllic back garden scene. When I had been a 10-year old in this house there were sixteen similarly aged kids in my road. I would guess there is a similar number now, maybe a few less. But we very rarely played in the back garden, and generally were not allowed to for fear of ruining the flowerbeds. We were not allowed out to play, we were sent out to play.
I started to pay a little more attention when I strolled up to the Co-op or tried to clear the front garden borders.
A few days later, the woman opposite was cleaning her car. Her son – I would guess around 12 or 13 years old – weaved around on an expensive looking bike. And never went more than 50 yards from the house.
I never saw a kid younger than around 12 without an adult nearby.
On the various playing fields that came with the estate, only occasionally did I see groups kicking a football around. One Sunday, when I wandered up to my old primary school a group of early-teens eyed me suspiciously, assuming that I was about to throw them out of the teacher’s car park, which they had shanghaied for a kick about. It was already obvious that kicking a ball about in the street was out of the question, because there were too many parked cars and a lot more traffic than when I was ten.
Over the full summer school holiday I did not see a single game of hide-and-seek, tag, hopscotch, French cricket, cricket, Wembley, Follow-The-Arrows or skipping. There were no cops-and-robbers, much less cowboys and Indians. I saw no evidence of willow branches being stripped to make a bow and arrow set.
I could see little evidence that one of these three things was being used creatively:
*A ball or ball substitute (tin can, stone)
*A piece of chalk
*A toy gun, or appropriately shaped twig.
A friend with kids assures me that all that I have described above still happens in school playgrounds. The evidence of my own eyes and ears tells me that at least some of it happens in back gardens. The private – or at least supervised – realm seems full of joy. But the public realm is empty.
More, another time.

Anti-social housing?

At PMQs yesterday the MP for Eltham (I didn't catch his name) asked a long question that amounted to "Will you let councils build more council houses?" the Prime Minister talked at some length, but never answered that question, which I suspect we can take as a 'No".
Meanwhile, the plots of land are still available to those who can afford them (no consent remember) and on various sites the council gets into a merry bait trying to get schemes through in a way that won't cost them control of the council.
But that's OK because there are still opportunities. Take, for example, a perfectly decent 1930s built semi-detached house.
Demolish it.
Build two detached houses with a gap of about 5 feet between them. After all, who need building or planning standards these days?
Measure the increase in value by being able to call them detached.
Good game, isn't it?

A very sub Post Office

I went to renew my car tax today. Once it would have been an easy stroll up to the local shops and the sub-post office. Then such good stuff was removed from sub-post offices. Then the sub-post office itself was removed.
The drone from the Post Office said that the closure was necessary in order to keep other sub-post offices open. That is garbage. Utter, utter garbage - exactly the same garbage it used the last time it had a round of closures. Lies.
Soon, it seems, there will be only the one Post Office - on Trafalgar Square - with nine counters (six open) and a queue half way up Pall Mall.
The despicable death-by-a-thousand-cuts manner in which the Post Office is abandoning small town Britain is a national disgrace.

Ribbon development returns?

Just up the road is a plot of land that once-upon-a-time was the corner of a farmers field. It is in the greenbelt, but that has not stopped an outfit called Property Spy from selling house-sized plots at £80,000 a time. Without planning permission and - theoretically at least - without the prospect of planning permission.
The UK government's Barker Review into housing provision provides the signal that Property Spy might be onto something. It does so by recommending the "introduction of flexibility at the local level through the allocation of additional land in Local Development Frameworks, with the release of this additional land triggered by market signals".
That's what you get when you ask an economist to do a geographer's job. What Barker is recommending is the return of ribbon development (where do you think these 'market signals' will point?) and the throwing away of 50 years of holding the line against urban sprawl.
Greenbelt policy has many problems, but it is hard to deny that it has done an exceptionally good job of protecting the countryside. And in much of the country working class people[*] have benefitted, because new and expanded towns had protected countryside within easy reach.
Hmmm. Let the greenbelt fail next to an edge of town former council estate, or let it fail near a nice cosy village with a well-organised resident's association? Tricky.
[*]I apologise. We're not allowed to call them working class any more, are we? They are 'key workers'.

And another thing....

OK, so this isn't exactly a small city post, but sometimes one needs to vent.
Tried buying a TV (or any other electrical item) lately?
I bought one not so long ago and found myself relying more on shop staff than I like to for advice. Try looking up reviews for consumer goods on Google. What you get are loads of links to other search engines and loads of links to people trying to flog you the kit.
But trying to find a proper, impartial, review site is a different matter. "What Hi fi" is pretty good, but I found it more by luck than judgement. Again, the corporate seems to win out over the individual.
Surely it' not too much to ask that when you ask for reviews, you get review sites not selling sites. Is it?
And yes, I am aware of the irony of using blogger to make these observations.

"St Albans writers groups"

So here is how it started: someone was setting up the website for Verulam Writers' Circle, a St Albans writers group. It is one of only two writers groups in the city, the other being Ver Poets.
Setting it up was quite straightforward because there was no need for anything fancy and dynamic, just a lot of information packed stuff for existing and prospective members. Then a real headache set in.
Verulam Writers' Circle has been around for a good few years and the name is rather stuck. But it doesn't take a degree in symbolic logic to realise that prospective punters will search on the string 'st albans writers groups', only without the quotes.
The trouble is that local papers and loads of assorted pointless directories contain those words, and because many of these sites are commercial, loads of people link to them - and page rank prioritises these, even if the string 'st albans writers group' does not appear anywhere on them. At least, I think that's what's happening. The net result is getting a humble local group to show for up to people who would be interested in it has proved a bit of a 'mare.
Google, it seems to me, is biased towards the corporate in a way that other search engines aren't.
I actually think it is worse than that. But more on that another time.