Bye bye summer and also
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot... you'll never guess what happens next!
When my partner and I first moved into our flat a few years ago there was a car park next to the building. There was no signage, didn’t appear to be any regulations, people parked their cars there and all was fair and good.
A few weeks later my mum came round to visit on a match day. The stadium is just down the road and our road is a pre and post-match thoroughfare (I really enjoy this and will miss it). Mum went to park and discovered she could not. There was a big ole chain and padlock stretched across the entrance and two children stood by it, arms crossed. Mum texted me.
Turns out they were – or so they claimed – the children of ‘the man who bought the car park’, and were demanding payment of a tenner for my mum to park there. Perhaps this was some kind of match day pocket money scam their car park-owning dad was allowing (?) them to run before the car park was put to purpose, whatever that purpose might be… We begged these children to let us in for free because my mum is disabled and the car park down the road was full. Because it was match day. Thank you, entrepreneurial children, for taking pity.
Anyway the next day a massive fence went up around the car park and big gates were installed. We didn’t see the children again, perhaps they had nothing to do with the man who bought the car park after all.
A couple of days later they (who?) sent people to chop down the trees lining the edge of the car park and protecting us residents, somewhat, from pollution – noise and otherwise. They ripped up all the shrubs, went at the weeds sprouting defiantly up through cracks in the tarmac. All must go.
It’s been a few years now and all the shrubs are back. There’s a new tree in the middle of the car park (???) and a lot of plastic bottles and crisp packets beyond the fence.
We received a letter a about a month ago informing us that this car park – can it still be called a car park, was it ever a car park at all1 – is going to be turned into sixteen storeys of student accommodation.
A few years previous we had received another letter informing us that our three storey block of flats is going to be blessed with a four storey extension, adjoining our particular flat on two separate sides. Very cool.
The final letter came through a couple of weeks ago. The landlord is putting the rent up.
So we’re moving, which is fine. It could be better timed – I’m starting a new job on 3rd September, for example – but it’s actually properly fine. A lot of my mental space has been taken up by that, though, and not keeping up the writing habit I so dreamed of when I resurrected this newsletter. I’ll write about that then, the car park I can still see out my window, which was once something else – and underneath, still is – and which will be something else, something which will transform this area and, in the meantime, decrease the rent a landlord could reasonably expect a tenant to pay. Landlords don’t tend to be reasonable, of course, and what’s two separate building sites to a truly desperate person?
I’ll miss this place. I’ll miss seeing the stadium out my window, and opening it wide on match days to hear the chanting in, hoping to hear the chanting home again. I’ll miss what we’ve done with the flat and the walk to town and the pigeons sitting on the eaves and cooing every morning. I won’t miss the motorbike someone in our building keeps leaving downstairs with a full tank of petrol. I won’t miss the damp.
Oh, I forgot to mention! The schematics are online: the sixteen storey luxury student accommodation will have a basement floor. It’s going to be a car park.
Before I go, and before September’s mid-month football takes, here are some other small things I’ve been enjoying:
Elizabeth Cotton - Folksongs And Instrumentals With Guitar
QAnon Anonymous Podcast, which continues to be good into 2025
Hari Kunzru, whose White Tears I just finished reading and whose essay on Orientalism by Edward Said should be read, here
Watching The Summer I Turned Pretty as if it’s a gothic horror serial
Replaying Spyro yet again
Orecchiette with anchovies and purple sprouting broccoli
Reorganising the kitchen cupboards. I found a small bottle of ouzo shaped like a Greek man and a Bobby’s Mega Dip n Roll
I did actually enquire with the Council about the chain of ownership here and the land used to belong to the local University itself. We come oh so bleakly full circle and a little further off into the ever-newly twisting shapes of private capital.