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Friday 21 May 2021
A little while after the moving boxes were collapsed and stacked in the attic of our new house, I joined the neighbourhood WhatsApp group. It’s a bullion cube of local preoccupations the mental ticker tape of an estate village with only 300 people. I scroll through it on most days, sometimes while waiting outside the one-in, one-out post office, leaning against a defunct red telephone box, or when I’m warming up to do something I’d rather not, like wash my hair. I don’t think it’s indiscreet to tell you that there is a lot on there about visitors parking where they shouldn’t, and some medium-to-dark stuff about running them over. There are notices from the parish council about tree trimming, requests to borrow extension leads, best wishes for happy birthdays, and reminders to set out bowls of water for the hedgehogs. If a mysterious alarm is going off, you can be sure that we, as a group, will get to the bottom of it ping! If someone is making wild
Friday 9 April 2021
Jo Rodgers
My parents think it’s a kooky idea, I reported, unwrapping a Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut. We were beetling through the Blackwall Tunnel under the Thames, and everybody was doing their part: Andrew was driving, our toddler was rapt by a programme called “Helper Cars,” and I was enlarging on the morning to friends via text. That day we’d gotten up early to see our would-be rental house in East Sussex, on which we had offered a two-year lease at the asking price without ever having been inside. But that wasn’t the kooky thing.