Friday 1st February

How many of your reading this will have any idea where the title for this piece comes from?  My pink half of the drainpipe – anyone?  Well it was actually a song title from the Bonzo Dog DooDah Band, who specialized in comedy or at least humourous songs.  Not at all popular nowadays and scarcely revered by anyone, but actually humour in music has a long tradition from Monty Python to Zappa.  But this is not a piece about humour – maybe another day.

This is about the sentiment expressed in the song.  My pink half of the drainpipe is about ownership and possession and dividing lines, in this case about a house and a disputed drainpipe.  And how parochial we all are about property. Disputes over fences and overhanging trees abound.  The neighbours putting out their bins so that they encroach even by a millimeter on our property sends us into stratospheric heights of righteous indignation (the strongest human emotion of all).

And as a nation we are just the same.  Parochial to an absurd degree.  Maybe because we have the sea as our natural boundary rather than a line on a map has something to do with it; we share no land borders with others unless you count Ireland, (though most of us do not really consider Northern Ireland as a part of us).

Maybe also home ownership and the concept that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’ has something to do with it too, in most other countries home ownership is a far lower percentage.  This too is rapidly changing here as more and more young couples are forced to rent as house prices and deposits are still out of reach for many.

But what is home ownership really?  Very few of us live in the same house forever, so in a way you are only ever a temporary resident.  And owning a house is not like owning a CD or a book which can be disposed of easily, you always hand your house over to someone else.  In a way you are nothing more than a caretaker of the property, hopefully improving it, until someone else takes ‘ownership’ and becomes the new caretaker.   So why do we care so much about who owns the drainpipe and whether they have painted over our half?