My Faceless Housing Estate is about to become yet even more faceless, with even less character. An enormous industrial / housing estate application, originally thrown out, is currently being rubber-stamped through by an MP as I write this. This development will be, quite literally, in 'my back yard'! With the immanent expansion of my housing estate, subsumed further into the urban sprawl, I have found myself temporarily lost for words. I have already written a long and rambling blog entry only to delete it when I discovered it wasn't exactly fulfilling the original aims of the project, "...to discover hope and beauty in the mundane and banal".
Worse still, in recent weeks my beloved perambulations about the estate have been completely curtailed due to an ongoing and as yet undiagnosed pain in my foot!
It is in such a depressed state of mind that the blog reader finds its chronicler. Nevertheless, I wanted to put a few things down, some crumbs of hope and beauty. Firstly, it is spring at long last and the blogger can look forward to celebrating the suburban landscape come alive. In particular, I am eagerly observing a Wisteria that clings to a house along my route. This magnificent tree hugs the entire front of the building, curling its craggy branches around windows and under eaves. Bare, woody and stark all winter, each spring it suddenly bursts into an explosion of purple and blue with its heavy flowers dangling everywhere. Bricks and sticks transform into a riot of violet, a transformation of an ugly built environment into a beautiful bucolic one. And if that, at least, is not a reason to be cheerful, I don't know what is.
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