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Rabbit, Rabbit

24/10/2016

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Les, our local handyman and all-round good egg, came around to have a look at the guttering. He brought an old hand along to help him. The old man held the bottom of the ladder and as he did so I chatted to him.  

“This dog’s got greyhound in him” says he.

“No, he’s a collie cross – this, that and something else, but not greyhound, long legs though.”  A minute’s pause whilst we watch Les pull a load of mud with grass growing out of it – a lawn basically – out of our gutter.

“Yeah, greyhound. I thought so. I had one just like this once, collie/greyhound cross it were. Used to catch rabbits just fine. Twenty, thirty at a time. I used to get a quid a pop. I would sit at the table in The Crown in Newport and people would come from all over – Wolverhampton. They’d give me a pound and take one off the table. The dog would be lying under it, asleep like.”

“We’d have bought some off you if you were still doing it, my wife makes a lovely rabbit stew in, um, mustard cream sauce. Crisp green salad to mop…”  I was hearing myself saying this and sort of tailed off into silence, leaving the sentence uncompleted, as I wondered if even Anne could have sounded any more like a middle-class wanker. Les meanwhile was showering us with gutter detritus, so maybe he heard me...  

“What we would do was shine the lamp and catch the rabbit in it, and the dog would catch sight of them and go around and end up behind them, stood over them, and they were still frozen in the light.”

“Clever that, going around the back – that’s the collie in him.”

“No, he wouldn’t kill ‘em. He’d bring ‘em back to me and I’d pull their neck.” He does a little demonstration. “I was earning more money from doing that than from working, like."

“Amazing – shame you don’t still do it, I’d have bought one. Two. Make rabbit pie with the leftovers, that’s my favourite”

“Aye, I know, you don’t see anyone eating them anymore. Sad.”


 
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How Much Land Does a Man Need?

12/10/2016

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We bought a three-bed terraced house in Tooting Graveney in 1995 for £70k. I had just been promoted to Head Office and we could probably have afforded a more desirable location, a two bed in downtown Wimbledon maybe and, if we had been speculators, that’s what we would have done. But actually we were completely scared at the price. Not least because we had just sold our Bristol house for £30k.

Twelve years later we moved to Shropshire and sold our beloved Tooting house for £375k. Seriously. We couldn’t believe it. There was a huge crack where the kitchen was supposed to join onto the house. We honestly thought it was pretty much worthless. 

We bought a house in Shropshire for £330k. Basically, through no effort on our part, we had effectively become mortgage-free homeowners. And this from someone who spent his twenties believing property was theft.

We’ve been in Shropshire for nine years, and the Tooting house is now worth £750k. We’re basically running out of numbers for a house that was originally designed for nurses from nearby St Georges hospital. Our Shropshire house, meanwhile, is still worth £330k, with a generous tailwind, or at least were any prospective buyers not to arrive when the farmer’s spreading the muck.

Which puts selling the London house right up there as one of the worst business decisions I’ve ever made. We sold in 2007. I knew there was a big banking crash coming and, honestly, I thought I was being clever, I thought we were getting out of peak London. What a twat.

Everyone who has ever sold a house in London and moved away feels like this. Regardless of what fortunes we may have made from what is plainly one of the stupidest, most divisive, damaging bubbles of greed and government mismanagement imaginable, we still all sit around thinking about the profits we failed to crystallise.

My mother probably put it best. She owes her good fortune in later life almost entirely to Thatcher’s right to buy, which she parlayed up into access to a middle class lifestyle. A long time before that, when I was four, my father had left her in a ground floor flat in Clapham old town; a flat she was offered but couldn't afford to buy for three groats and a farthing, and which is now worth at least one and a half million pounds. Then again, as she puts it, what you need to remember is, back then it was a slum.    


   
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Nimbyism

3/10/2016

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A couple of dog-walkers stopped me today as we enjoyed the last shades of summer and one of them asked me if it had been my cat they had seen dead on the road.  I said yes, and that it had been heart-breaking and, in that moment, my heart did break a little, as did my voice.

Anyway, conversation segued past a litany of squashed cats and onto the petition opposing a planning application along the lane. Near the Manor end of the lane is an old stable block that has been turned into an office for a small business specialising on the import and export of fresh fruit. It’s been there for at least the last five years and we all seem to rub along just fine. They’ve now put in an application for a double-storey back extension and parking for a further 13 cars.

I signed the petition a week ago, more out of politeness to the person asking me than in any particular rage against the application. When I first moved here someone knocked on my front door asking me to sign a petition complaining about the noise coming from the microlight club up the road. I declined on the basis I rarely heard them and when I did they didn’t bother me.

The man was aghast, like I’d made some massive faux pas, like I'd pissed on his shoes or something and there was a rather awkward stand-off at my front door. It was much more than just surprise or embarrassment. I was an affront to him. It was like I was declining to be a member of his club, of his tribe, of his town. It became clear to me that in future it would be much easier to just say yes and so that’s what I’ve done ever since, with one exception (see below).

But I am vexed about it. One the one hand I would never want to harm any small business, least of all one that is finding its way and thriving. Good for them, I think. After all I am, at least in theory, the owner of a small business. A very small business.

On the other hand, what was once one of the finest lanes I’ve ever seen is on the retreat. Paton’s fence-line was a ghastly act of small-minded vandalism. Increased traffic to and from the barns is another. And the fruit importers’ cars are the third. And it really does make a difference to us dog-walkers. I used to be able to walk the lane confident of not meeting a car. Now I have to keep Bobby on the lead as I will definitely meet two or three and, even though he’s nine, he still thinks he can hurl themselves at them and come off best.  Is this really a reason to oppose a planning application for a small business just trying to expand? I doubt it very much, and I expect you do to. I certainly wouldn’t have given it a second’s thought in Tooting.  Perhaps my dead cats are on my mind.  

Then again, when does a small business become too large for its environment? After all, there’s a huge site for light industry at Halesfield all of two miles away, designed specifically to attract businesses like this – there may even be grants and tax breaks to go there.  
 
Finally, there’s this. On the original planning application, five or so years ago, space was allowed for eight cars, which seemed reasonable to me and I avoided signing the petition accordingly. But ever since there’s always been around twice as many cars there – say fifteen. Whether that was deliberately dishonest on their part I have no idea, but I certainly felt hoodwinked.  Now they want another 13 spaces. So, let’s take the difference between last time’s application and the reality into account this time and double their number.  Does that mean we can expect roughly forty cars a day to park there? That certainly isn’t a small business any more, and what may not seem much in Tooting is a hell of a lot down what is basically a glorified footpath.

And with that I have become a fully paid-up, certified, nimby. Or, as I prefer to think of it, a Shifnal tribesman.    


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