There goes the neighbourhood

Sure, your home might be your castle, but Fiona Barber liked it better when them next door were just over the fence, not behind a dirty great wall.

There’s a new sound in the hood. It’s the roar of buses winding through the backstreets picking up local kids and ferrying them to private schools on the other side of town.

It seems that this little suburb is now suitable enough to buy into, but as for the local schools… they’re too scary by half.

It’s part of a new pattern that goes something like this: Buy house. Super-size it or bowl and rebuild. Rip out scruffy little hedges and waist-high chain-link fences neighbours have chatted over for decades and replace with impenetrable walls. Install electronic gates with push-button entries. Bypass local schools so close your kids could walk there with neighbours and friends, in favour of… well, somewhere more suitable.

Let’s be honest, it’s a wall by another name. Makes me wonder, why move here? If you want a gated community, why not just buy into one? If you want your kids to mix with people other than those who live in their community, why not move to another suburb?

It’s the walls and electronic gates that really flummox me. What or who exactly are they trying to keep out? Must be designer doggy-doos or charity door-knockers because last time I looked, the hood wasn’t exactly overrun with rampaging crack-heads and gun-toting gangs

(though – quelle horreur! – there was P house round the corner, but that was torn down and replaced with a smart

XL-size townhouse quicker than you can say pseudoephedrine precursor.)

Unless, of course, I’ve missed a demographic shift and we’ve had an influx of

“bad hombres” requiring

Trumpesque fortifications (but if that was true, surely we’d have street parties that were way more interesting).

In fact in this patch, these days, you’re more likely to run into strife by failing to trim your hedge to within an inch of its life or by parking your aged (non-European) vehicles on the street. This results in something I wouldn’t wish on anyone: The. Pursed. Lips.

In terms of horrors, I’d put this cat-bum look of disapproval right up there with Vogon poetry, which anyone who has read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the

Galaxy will tell you, is the third worst in the universe and employed as an instrument of torture.

Why stay then? Simple. Someone has to uphold traditions.

By the way, the hedge is thriving and the middleaged Toyota is doing just fine. Thanks for asking.