Home Sweet Home

Not posted in a while.  Been lots happening both personally and in the news of course.  But despite starting two or three posts, I just wasn't feeling it.

However, today I went for a short drive around the area where I used to live.  So I thought I would briefly muse on that.  I have very rarely gone back since I left home completely.  It is not a particularly nice town and I had little attachment to any friends who had not also left.  Maybe one or two but that was it.  My parents divorced a short time after I left and that was that.  House gone, no need to visit the place.

There were a couple of things which really struck me today, in the suburbs where I was brought up.  The first was the complete de-greening of the place.  Nearly every lawn where we had played has been turned into a double driveway.  Many trees and hedges have vanished.  And a lot of grass verges have been co-opted into people's properties - and therefore their driveways.  It wasn't a posh neighbourhood but I remember it as leafy and pleasant.  It was rather odd to be confronted with such mass environmental change and it worries me to think how many other places are now the same. 

The other very clear situation was house building on a large scale.  Developers have finally managed to get access behind some of the classic 'ribbon development' roads on the outskirts and are taking full advantage.  But none of it looked to be 'affordable housing'.  And I could not see how the infrastructure is going to manage.  New schools and roads will be desperately needed from what I could see.  And the huge swathes of fields which have gone was quite shocking when you had not been there for such a long time.

It all appeared to be a microcosm of the sorts of issues facing many towns in the UK.  Not enough housing for those on lower incomes, lack of investment in everything needed to sustain modern life apart from these houses, the one hospital is on the other side of the town.  And the car is king.  It is already king in the existing estates and will have to be king on the new ones because you will not be able to get anywhere without one. The only public transport is buses.  Similar issues are happening where I live now.  

Once again on this blog, I must go back to 'this is not a poor country'.  We have money.  It is just not being spent properly.  Theresa May leapt to the defence of the NHS when Trump attacked it.  Brilliant.  Now spend some money on it.  Ministers pondering on the housing crisis - sink estates, hundreds of people in B&Bs, the issues following the Grenfell tragedy, etc?  Cancel Trident and spend the money on houses - council houses.  As for the environmental changes I saw, I don't see how, at present, we can escape from the car trap.  Homes are built further and further away from facilities but there is no other transport.  Many houses accommodate at least two working adults.  Unfortunately, it is the green in our lives which is having to give way.

Actually, I lived in that place for so long that I remember there being fields in places which are now thirty to forty year old estates.  Change has to happen.  Of course.  But I don't think nearly enough thought is being given to the planning situation now and that is something which should worry us all.

Persist and resist

As any regular readers will know (if there are any!), I didn't post last week.  I just couldn't seem to summon any energy.  As the summer approached, I had begun to feel I was running on empty.

But then I saw a post by Alan Cumming on Instagram (@alancummingsnaps).  It was in relation to the recent Pride events but his post talked of all the struggles going in the world at the moment.  The racism, sexism, religious intolerance.  Here is a little of what he said:

We live in scary times.  It's hard to maintain the level of outrage with so many outrageous things happening daily, hourly, and the fight can seem exhausting.  the other day a wise woman posited that 'persist' is as important, if not more, than 'resist' as a mantra.

This really strikes a chord with me.  And not just for persistence in the political and social struggles.  I have struggled for many years with depression.  Relatively low level but enough to cause me periods of real difficulty.  I know far better now when these are upon me but it can be hard to regain the upper hand.

But when you hear about the everyday struggles that so many people are dealing with, you feel bad for not coping better with your own somewhat cushy existence.  For example, in The Times magazine on Saturday (15 July), there was a piece about the Fitzmaurice family.  The headline was My husband can only communicate with his eyes, via a computer.  If that doesn't put teenaged tantrums, constant clearing up woes and general 'being fed up' into context, I don't know what will.  Ruth Fitzmaurice has a husband with Motor Neurone Disease and five children under twelve.  (I will definitely be reading her book I Found My Tribe.)

Persistance is something which we often forget we have.  We in the developed world often have such comfortable existences that when we see refugees on the oceans, people displaced in war zones,  people dealing with extreme poverty or illness, it is hard to believe that we ourselves could ever survive such ordeals.  We wonder aloud at the resilience of others.

Because the need for persistence and resilience has been taken away.  We don't have to hunt or gather.  Our problems are of a different nature.  But we, as humans, do have the resilience.  If pushed, we would all do whatever it took to survive for the longest possible time.  Our ancestors performed miracles with a lot less creature comforts around them.

So how about we channel some of that dormant persistence and resilience into continuing the fight for a better world.  And for myself, I will also be channelling some of that into feeling better and into counting my blessings a bit more often (even whilst arguing with the teen and the tween!).

And the winner is....

This weekend saw the inaugural Scarecrow Festival in our village.  It was fantastic fun.  With the "help" of my children, I attempted to create a scene from Disney's Frozen.  I was really quite pleased with my efforts until I actually did the trail myself and saw what everyone else had made!

When did a farm necessity become a competitive sport?!  There were Batmen and Spidermen (one on a roof!), soldiers and nursery rhymes, cartoon characters and ballerinas.  All home made and all wonderful.

It got me thinking about the evolution of traditions.  I look at, for example, a family tree that I worked on earlier this year for a friend and I can see that the entirety of one side of her family were very much based in a relatively small area for many, many years.  As discussed on previous posts, such situations were mainly due to the lack of affordable transportation.  However, it makes you wonder how things like scarecrow festivals and other community traditions (like those mad Pancake Day football games, summer raft races and so on!) have survived when you see how spread out families are these days.

It is a shame that so many traditions have gone by the wayside.  But when you do see a proper old fashioned event, it is usually a wonderful demonstration of British humour and eccentricity.  A couple of years ago, we were lucky enough to attend a raft race in Beer in Devon.  The pebble beach slopes very steeply there and the aim was for teams to push their rafts down this slope, get some speed up and then be the furthest out from the shore and the longest afloat.  However, when I say rafts, I mean floating Tardis with Weeping Angel and sound effects, the whole family of the Simpsons, a Thunderbirds rocket complete with uniformed pilots and a real piano with haybales and party of Wurzels on board!  Brilliant!

So maybe this is the way to keep some of these traditions going.  Bake sales become Bake Off's, Raft and scarecrow building become competitive sports.  And local music festivals have X Factor style heats.  Is this a bad thing?  I do think that our ancestors would rather see communities staying together and traditions continuing, even if it means tapping into the modern obsession with competing. 

So it is a great thing to see people starting something new, drumming up support for a community, bringing people together.  A short post today but I was feeling the positive vibes from the weekend as we walked to school this morning and I felt I should share them!