In order to make sure it’s US who get to eat the veggies from our garden, there are four fat-bottomed girls who need to be prevented from getting there first! We set off this morning to buy some fencing so we can keep the hens from decimating our crops now they are completely free-ranging on our garden and no longer confined to their yard.

We went to Reading, a big-ish town about fifteen miles away from home for the first time in many months. It’s a crowded place already, in fact so crowded that to drive around the town takes longer than walking because of traffic congestion, there are queues that last for half an hour or more to get into the car parks (and considering you need to pay for the car parking there in either blood or gold, that demonstrates just how many people there are who want to be there). The population suffers more and more from progressive lung disorders such as COPD through breathing in the pollution of an already too crowded place.

Despite its already overpopulated and overcrowded streets, there is so much ‘development’ work going on. The horizon is littered with cranes, building more offices and more houses and more car parking and more streets. I can’t see how that will help. Most of the new offices stand empty. In fact, the government are trying to encourage companies to develop new ways of working where people don’t have to travel so much and can work at home. To my naïve mind that means we should need fewer offices not more. Most of them are in locations that are not served by public transport so even more cars will soon be clogging up the streets.

I can’t understand how we’ve come to a time when houses are regarded as disposable in the same way as a pair of shoes. Someone moves out of a house, it gets flattened and a new one built. People don’t seem to want houses that have been lived in. Why not? In the ugly new developments there is little for the young to do – they stand around on street corners and make mischief. Two couples we know have been forced to move because of crowds of children and adolescents hanging around their homes because they bought houses on new developments where there is nothing to do and so the kids simply spent their time making a misery of the lives of our friends. At least in older areas there was some consideration given to social space.

For me, I know that one of the reasons I wanted to live in this house was its history. I love the fact that other couples before us have raised their families here – I even love the fact the last but one owners died here. Their spirits watch over us and keep us from harm. They guide me in the décor and welcome me home at night.

That may sound like claptrap to some but I argue strongly that whether or not you believe in benign spirits, their choices of windows, doors, décor, garden and all the rest are an integral part of what I love here. To me, the ancient Azalea in the front garden with its heady scent, planted long, long ago by another family is a good reason to be here. I put my key in my lock and breathe it in and it’s intoxicating and liberating. That’s all lost when the bulldozers drive in. I wonder why others can’t see the beauty of old and insist on their own virgin magnolia walls that no-one before them have painted or papered.

‘Development’ isn’t always good – why waste our precious, scarce resource on offices that no-one wants and houses that people fight over because of their newness? Our little excursion to buy a fence has filled me with anger and gloom for the future of the South East.