Lost Suburbs

We have a dog now, a puppyish JR, the first dog in the family for over 30 years. I have never walked as consistently and may even have lost a bit of weight already.

On our shorter evening walk I have taken to heading up the avenue into a neighbouring suburb I had never ventured into before. It's a quiet little cul-de-sac, mostly bungalows steeped in leafy middleclass privacy, a deep sense of hush.

Instead of retracing my steps I exit via a kind of mini-park (pictured above) with a pedestrian-sized gap in the wall around the corner.

I like detouring into this lush little dead end, despite the colossal frantically barking setter that tends to come to the gate of one of the houses (even though I'm careful to keep to the opposite side of the street). It's while walking through such tucked-away places that I have a keen sense of all those alternative lives I might be living at the other end of the universe: whole wardrobes (hell, attics) crowded with them. Forget the American Dream or The Irish equivalent, forget all those localised pockets of tribalism. Here, next door, is the human dream, the one carpeting our planet, the one we're all so separately and unfathomably immersed in.