Tuesday, 23 September 2025

Tiny houses, here and there

Back in 2018, I edited a short story collection entitled The Petrified World and other stories. It's here if you're interested. Rol's in it too. You'd like it, I think, the book. It's very reasonably priced, any profit goes to charity, all of that. Take a punt, why not?

But anyway, pitch over, back to the point. As I cycled to work this morning along car-choked roads, through yet another spiralling housing estate of identikit rabbit hutches, today's song sprung readily to mind. As did this quote from Sir David Attenborough, that I included in the introduction of the aforementioned book:

All environmental problems become harder - and ultimately impossible - to solve with ever more people.

Sorry. Downer, I know, but no less true for that. Here's the song, and an appropriately claustrophobic video shot in a rehearsal room, from Blur's Indian summer of 2015.

There are too many of us
That's plain to see
We all believe in praying
For our immortality
We've posed these questions to our children
That calls them all to stray
And live in tiny houses
Of the same mistakes we made

'Cause there are too many of us
In tiny houses here and there
Passing out of somewhere
But you won't care

There are too many of us
That's plain to see
And we all believe in praying
For our own immortality
For a moment, I was dislocated
My terror on a loop elsewhere
The flashing lights part vacated
On the big screens everywhere

'Cause there are too many of us
In tiny houses here and there
Just passing out of somewhere
But you won't care

There are too many of us
In tiny houses here and there
All looking through the windows
On everything we share
We pose these questions to our children
It leads them all to stray
And live in tiny houses
Of the same mistakes we make

'Cause there are too many of us
Oh, that's plain to see
All living in tiny houses (passing out of somewhere)
Of our own mortality (but you won't care)

14 comments:

  1. I wouldn't mind these new developments if they had a bit more space and weren't so uniformly hideous.

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    1. Uniformly hideous is exactly right. And so bland!

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  2. I think we’re now past the point where developers have stopped building homes and are churning out containment units instead. Living in a box (no pun intended), in fact.

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  3. I can happily recommend the book too. Any more likely to be in the pipeline? I'd so love to read more of your - and Rol's - wonderful creative writing.
    Lots of development going on here and a sad irony to the names they choose for them. In the last few years, after a long and expensive local battle against it, they built over some lovely rolling fields that were so synonymous with the skylarks which bred in them that they were known as the "skylark fields". And then named all the roads after the various bird species whose habitats they built on...

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    1. Thanks, C. As for writing, my little critique/workshopping group is starting up again soon, so I will have to write something, so who knows.

      As for building over habitats, the ironic road names might be funny if not so tragic.

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    2. That's good news about your little group starting up again soon - I do hope you find it inspiring. Also, in case you haven't heard about it, I've just been reading about this - sounds really unusual and interesting: https://www.universalturingmachine.org/the-utm-community/

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  4. I have a copy of the book and can thoroughly recommend it.

    My town has more than doubled in size since I arrived in the late 80s and all uniform housing estates with few or no services. The town centre is very small and looks so out of place now for a town of this size. Sad.

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    1. Thanks Alyson.

      It's happening everywhere, one-size-fits-all suburbs consuming once-distinctive towns.

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  5. If there was a song now called Sound of the Suburbs it would be bland and sung by Lewis Capaldi

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    1. I don't think it would be a song, it would just be an atonal drone.

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  6. I used to love driving to work past nothing but open fields. Barely a blade of grass to be seen now between estate after estate, bloody grim.

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    1. Isn't it just, mate. Neither green nor pleasant, in places.

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