It’s hard to believe I’m fifteen minutes from the motorway, standing in front of this new house in the woods somewhere in Surrey. The map shows the road petering out in a big patch of pale green, the hallmark of a top-end, not tap-end, development. The owner and designer of this house is also the founder of the construction company that built it. So he’s going to get what he wants, like a cosmetic surgeon giving his wife a boob job.
Plots like this one don’t come up for sale very often and the house that stood here was demolished to make way for his new vision. It’s clearly the plot that he was after and who can blame him. An acre or so surrounded by tall pines at the end of a muddy track, here and there the spent leaves of interspersed deciduous trees drift like snowflakes onto the lawn, or what will be the lawn. The deep blue iridescent tiles of the swimming pool beckon me in, I lean toward it, feel my head slipping under, cool, clean, sub-marine...
“What you here for mate?” a skinny bloke in an ill-fitting leather jacket breaks my reverie.
“Uh, can you tell me where the site office is?”
“I’m it.” he says, “Are you here to see about the pool?”
“Er, no, it’s the air test...I’m the air test guy.”
He turns out to be the aforementioned owner, a nice enough guy, a bit of a geezer. I’m here for free on the basis that his company will continue to give us lots of work. It’s a perfect example of how good fortune self-replicates, once you reach some kind of critical mass.
The test goes well and pretty soon I’m bouncing back down the track to the main road. It’s nice out here, really nice, and I’m in no hurry to leave. I would have liked to have stayed a while and asked a few more questions but any over-eager vicarious appreciation might have made him feel like I was eyeing up his girlfriend or something. He just wanted the job done and everybody out so I cut it short and kept it businesslike, although my role justified a visit and therefore a nose in every room.
An hour later I’m wandering down Farnham High Street in search of Guitar Village and I’m looking at the faces of the people passing, wondering if they know how lucky they are, how goddamn lucky we all are? We wake up and go to sleep knowing that we can carry on waking up and going to sleep for a very long time before any unsolicited change might be forced upon us.
We’re warm, fed, secure, and well entertained, free to set and follow our course in the knowledge that no one is likely to step in and take it all away at a moment’s notice. Women will remain unmolested (unless they go in for a bit of a ‘struggle cuddle’ of course) and our kids will attend school uninterrupted. Perhaps having a new baby has made me soft in the head but the sheer good fortune of this place, it’s infectious and it's really got under my skin.
There are a lot of nice houses tucked away in the countryside, I see them all the time when my work takes me off the beaten track. A whole bunch of people have clearly done really well for themselves and they're generally very discreet about it. Are they embarassed about their great good fortune, I wonder, or simply worried about crime? Or is it more symptomatic of an apetite to disconnect from the wider world and it's tawdry in-your-face issues? Whatever it is, I think I’m pretty much the only one who is smiling on Farnham High Street, which is crazy.
