Houses

Thusday pm - driving around taking photographs

There are houses being built everywhere. I keep turning a corner and there is a new estate under construction in what were fields last time I looked. It is like a giant monoploly board rows and circles of houses all exactly alike except for the colour. These are not countyside houses either, they do not sit in the landscape gently sprawling out sideways, but are modern estate houses. Each one is detached with a tiny fenced garden. Two stories, integral garage and room for the conservatory to be built on the back, you can choose "white" or "brown". Who buys them ? I suppose it is people from the city who want to live in the country, young people I imagine starting families I expect, and want to escape to somewhere nice away from the broken glass and discarded needles of Edinburgh. Of course they have brought the city with them. And in fifteen or twenty years time will these estates be full of bored teenagers rubbing up against each other and the people until combustion occurs, because there are no shops or amenities that I can see. Everybody drives nowadays so driving back into Edinburgh to Asda or Tescos is not so bad, but what if petrol prices go up ? And I worry about the countryside. I feel this is probably a blitzkreig approach by the developers - they have jumped out past the green belt and will build and build and gradually peck away back inwards until there are no green spaces left. If we keep building will there be enough farmland left to feed us all. There must be a tipping point where we have to import more than we grow, and imports depend on oil prices again.
I have a bad feeling about this.