Our street taken early morning during a recent bizarre spring blizzard.
I love our street. So does my wife. For that matter, so does the wee Hen, in so much that he can't actually talk yet but does enjoy exploring it with his mommy or daddy or auntie or uncle who love around the corner.
There are a number of very good reasons to love our street. Let me list the ways.
Firstly, it's about a five minute walk to the centre of Hometown. the centre of Hometown contains a bakers, chipshops, pubs, a Woolies, some banks, quite a few historic buildings, an ancient abbey and lots of proper Norfolk folk who do stuff like wait for buses and stand about gossiping. You always bump into someone you know and it's often a hive of activity and conversation.
Secondly, and this is absolutely crucial, Our street is a dead end. That means we have no through traffic. No hustle and grind of quickly moving internal combustion engines.
Thirdly, there's a bunch of kids aged between six and nine who take complete advantage of the dead end/lack of through traffic situation and spend every possible moment outside in the street whizzing about on bikes, skateboards, scooters and generally running about, messing about, playing games, having arguments, making up, kicking balls about , singing stupid songs and living the kind of life many kids can only dream of. They also whizz about at the back of our house (connected to our street by some passages and an alleyway) and create a wonderful atmosphere of kid related mayhem.Then their mums call them in for their tea and they all go running home, sometimes leaving bikes and toys in the middle of the street only to reappear to collect them before they are allowed to eat.
Fourthly, the people are nice, some are a bit mental, one can only communicate with her son by yelling at him, one dresses as a mediaeval foot soldier in reenactments of the Wars of the Roses (he has a real longbow!) but on the whole they are an agreeable bunch and we have even got a bit drunk with some of them at Christmas time.
So that's it. I just wanted you to know that our little house is a happy place, in no small part because of the groovy little street it's on where the kids run about making noise and the neighbours are OK.
3 comments:
i want to move there. that place sounds like heaven.
Ha! The difference between Brooklyn and Norfolk is if any kids gets called in by his mom for tea will get his ass kicked the next time he goes out
You're living a lovely life :)
Our kids grew up on a street like that, it was much easier to be a parent knowing that they were relatively safe and the worst thing to happen would be a grazed knee. Then we moved to the states for a few years, Katy, Texas on tehedge of Houston. It was a good experiance but a significant shift in lifestyle. And language. the word WHIZZ for example can have quite a different meaning!
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