Where I Live

I love where I live, although it could give Stepford a run for its money.

Our neighbours have a coat and a broom and a gizmo for every eventuality, whether primly plucking at their window boxes or bent double over their passenger footwells in forensic search of a stray hair to snaffle through their disapproving dustbuster. A dustbuster which has its own rack nailed into the garage wall.
A sunny day such as today will bring the Seniors out in force to primp their pristine flower beds making the air dense with the thrum of lawnmowers. No Sunday morning is complete without the revving of leaf-blowers and the officious clipping of secateurs.
These are gardeners who wear gloves and have tartan kneelers. Tartan has been annexed by the elderly, and given a wipe-clean surface to boot.

The olds do an awful lot of laundry, endless sheets spin daily on the outdoor airers, interspersed with several hundred tea towels. What do they do which leads to so much washing? They have spent good time perusing the inserts in the Mail and Telegraph (the Post Office here only buys in 2 Guardians a day). They have filled in the forms and are now in grateful receipt of tool organisers and multi-pocketed aprons, trugs and trowel sets, different drawers for different nails. Therefore, they put things away properly, rather than hurling things in a corner, which means that they can safely leave their garage doors open to the cruellest of scrutinies. I know, I’ve peered, and it’s eye-opening how other people live. Not in a whirl of chaos, nor amid a riot of half-done jobs, in desperate pursuit of another five minutes. No, what is revealed in my neighbours’ garages is advert life (OAP version) and advert walls suggesting that a frenzied orgy of organisation took place one weekend resulting in A Place For Everything And Everything In Its Place. Not the squalor of badly piled belongings which would constitute our garage had we not turned it into a room. This they find hard to believe.
One actually said plaintively, “Don’t you want a garage?”
“Waste of space, Paul,” I replied heartily, and firmly.
Our parking near to the fence running between our gardens, a fence we paid for, annoys them.

I’m surprised, frankly, that we are allowed to live here.
Our neighbours did try.
While we were on holiday last year, they ganged up and wrote us a nasty letter lamenting our skip and our vans and all the gubbins that conspires to create an extension. I was so upset that I broke a nice glass when I read it. A nice glass that just slipped from my hand in shock.
Prior to that, they’d done their damnedest to ensure we wouldn’t get planning permission. The council read us all their letters.
Then we finished and they have been silenced.
Finally, our drive is nicer than their drives. Na-na-ni-na-na. Our windows are newer. Our lighting more groovy. Our front door solid and substantial. And the house is much bigger. It gleams with Lindab. Our lawn is a sward and a far cry from the Steptoe yard it was for so long. It’s still a dump inside, but they can’t see that and we shut the door quick, leaving them to be confronted with external Bigger and Better. My how they hate it, gnashing their teeth through the grimmest of Hello Theres and waving a trowelled fist at the sky.
God, schadenfruede’s good. Revenge is sweet and best eaten with the tinge of frost that 2 years of renovation involves.

Architecturally, our village is displeasing. A long ribbon road squashed in with all the brick’n’mortar nasties that the ‘60s and ‘70s could throw at it. But every shiny car tings sparkly twinkles in the sunshine, no weed is safe and everyone chirrups Good Morning when I crash past with the dog.

We have a good pub whose every landlord (9 in 14 years, I think) does their best to squander the opportunity afforded by an affluent North Cotswold village. The newest of these refers to the “local” locals as riff-raff. He has invested in barrels and chains and takes a keen interest in monitoring what he calls The Parking Situation.

There is a post office/café/shop presided over by another mad man, this one a glum Mancunian who eye rolls for England and traps you with tales of driving to Spain with 3 dogs, 2 parrots, and a duck. “The feathers!” he breathes, “You would NOT believe!”
The shop is cluttered with tartan shopping trolleys whose owners frown that tea is a penny more expensive here than at Tesco, or tut at children fisting flying saucers and white mice into the little counting trays; lying on the floor they hinder the elderly from roaming in free-fall disapproval. There are almost as many children in the village as oldsters so it’s a battle which can run and run. I got in frequently to make unnecessary purchases feeling it my duty to keep the place going. You have to factor in that buying a lemon can take 45 minutes.

And there is a most excellent primary school. A sad man tries to break in most weeks, and recently made a sorry, ham-fisted attempt to kidnap a child. The police were too busy handing out parking tickets to bother making it out here. The man waited politely for an hour or two to be arrested and then gave up and went home.

In the playing field, tucked behind the village hall, is a sub-standard play area for tinies, complete with plaque detailing the opening ceremony honours. I must have read it a thousand times and I still couldn’t tell you who cut the ribbon. Ditto the dedications on the benches.
There is a petanque square, and a cricket square and grimy nets, and a big field for footie and for general hanging around on. There are trees and a stream and other fields to run to. 2 tennis courts are in the far corner where I am often to be found playing a game of chat, while admirable elderlies on the other court huff and puff and sprint and dash and then say things like, “Fancy a cuppa, Jill?” at the end of it which always makes T11 guffaw if he’s lurking.

Our house is fairly horrid, and the first new house we have owned. It is, however, half hidden in a corner yet still in the middle of the village which suits my nosey needs perfectly, and ensures that I can keep up with what’s what.
We shifted the driveway around deciding that being able to park a dozen cars there was kind of irrelevant, but can do nothing about pulling the rug on the house’s spot in the plot. Maddeningly, we have a mere 20’ strip across the back but more out the front which is a waste. You wonder about the wisdom of builders sometimes, or we do, having had massive exposure to dubious decisions.
Built about 30 years ago, it was butchered by the ruination of lazy neglect when we bought it from a batty old trout who waved her broom at our removal men, wouldn’t get out and when she did, hours late, left behind a shedload of rubbish. This called for the first in a long line of skips.
Painfully, we have dragged the house into the twenty first century along with the usual uphill struggle that new ownership entails, replacing carpets and windows and doors and knocking down walls and building extensions and installing new bathrooms and kitchen and fireplace and flooring. Wires await a home cinema (we’re bad with cinema audiences: rustling, chatting, crunching, texting, slurping) but we ran out of money, as dangling cables in the ceiling attest, so it’s no films for us for a while.

Cash has haemorrhaged from our account. The numbers, in negative, are scary. I dare not tell the children that their inheritance has become walnut and granite.
But every day, when I walk into our gorgeous new kitchen and look out over the field at the back I could weep with gratitude. It’s not a proper, magaziney view, being a mere field, although knowledgeable people impress by being able to name the hills beyond, but I love it. And a big sky we get with such a view, domed as if to keep us in one of those snowstorm things, and Disney birds bouncing from feeder to feeder lark around outside. Plus, of course, it’s somewhere to sling the dog turds.