What

Some years ago I drove past a new housing estate on the outskirts of a town which is famous for nothing but its cooling towers. The designers and planners had obviously been told “to make each house as individual as possible”, with disasterous results.

There were mock-Tudor houses. There were quasi-Georgian ones. There were imitation Victorian-Gothic ones. There were bad copies of bad copies of Lutyens houses. All this, mind you, in an English housing-estate where the houses are less than 6′ apart, and the back yards are only 20′ long. It was a bad trip on lego.

There was no underlying theme for the mind to latch on to.

We had just driven past the closed-grounds of the power station with its barbed wire fences. Warnings were on my mind and I have a weakness for puns so I turned to him and said “Danger of eclectic shock”.

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