Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Developers Wanted.And I Don't Mean Software

If you look carefully at the rather over-exposed image below, to the left you see a roofline.
This is a house.
One of many along both sides of the road under the wires.





What, you may wonder, were the developers thinking?
Well, a famous part of the British Disease is a perverse desire to own housing. This is then passed onto children, with the inevitable and hoped-for result that one day we all just climb completely up our own orifices and disappear from the realm of victimhood completely, possibly raising two gnarled fingers at our tormentors before the exclamation mark that attends our disappearance.
This has led, traditionally and perennially, to a sustained and chronic demand for 'property'(houses), and so they were built anywhere and everywhere, choking roads, fields, villages and so on like some sort of steroid-boosted brick weed.
And so you get cynical 'developers' throwing up their thoughtless, misery-size Barbie-houses, so that millions can spend their lives hiding from the fight and piling their possessions high.

Funny though.
There has been a rash of TV adverts in the last four to five years.
Equity conversion.
They do a reverse mortgage on your house when you retire.
They sell you deathly dignity in return for your life's work. I suppose it's alright if you hate your kids, but isn't it funny how the last, dynastic dream, the commoner's way out, is suddenly vanishing into thin air?
And at the same time, the (New Labour) government is suggesting compulsion to make us save enough for our retirements.
So they can both blame and punish the victims of their latest scam.

2 comments:

MapMaster said...

Surely you're not impugning the idea of home ownership, speaking as one who hopes to obtain that status some day. Not that I want to live in a prescribed box either. But even though, in Canada at least, home ownership is a polite euphemism for sufferance by the state, I'd rather invest in equity than give my landlord money for only a temporary return. Am I a fool?

Sky Captain said...

Hell no!
Nothing wrong with owning a home, but in the UK it is obsessive and a desperate flight from the government.
My final point was that the government is pursuing them unto the grave.