Hollington

 The place I live now is called Hollington.

The red dot shows our house.

It used to have a pretty front garden, like this —

— but when our tenants (who lived there before us) had a joy-rider smash into their car and ruin it at 2am one night, we turned the garden into a parking lot (reminds me of Joni Mitchell) to keep their car safe. So now it keeps ours safe too.

Hollington is mostly a large housing estate that was settled into a country village on the edge of Hastings in the 1930s for London overspill people. Our house was built in 1937, a mock-Tudor style very typical of that era of architecture. It's one of those things where you never notice how many similar houses there are in the local area until you live in one yourself. What we in our household (Tony and me) think of as the Morris Minor effect — you don't notice them at all, then you get one and suddenly they seem to be everywhere. Though not now, of course. Morris Minors are very vintage cars nowadays. These days we have a little red Smart Car. It's smarter than I am, actually. I need everything set permanently to auto, and I even struggled to get the fuel. cap off to re-fuel it, but the man from the garage helped me. Pleasingly, the emojis on the internet include this for their image of a car: 🚗 🚘. Yep; that's our car! 

But I digress.

I had no aspirations to live in Hollington. It has a reputation as a rough neighbourhood like Shady Lane where the weasels lived (if you ever read Alison Uttley's Little Grey Rabbit books when you were small).

I don't mind rough neighbourhoods. Some of the people there are rough diamonds, others merely flint all the way through, but they are neither better nor worse than the more well-to-do — which are likewise a muddle of diamonds and flint, but polished.

Even so I had no high hopes of it being a great place to live, but it has taken me by surprise.

The people here are friendly and kind. If I go for a walk in the evening, there are often people out with their dogs who enjoy to stop and chat (both the dogs and the humans). When the dustcart has been by to collect the garbage, if my neighbour is going out to her car she'll bring my wheelie bin back for me, right up to the house not just at the edge of the path, as well as her own.

When our kitchen sink was being repaired and the water and electricity were turned off, our neighbour the other side said to come to them if we needed anything — and he meant it, too.

Today I had the car parked on the front yard while I carried in the groceries, and when I went out to get a pack of bottled water (6 big bottles), a young man passing by with his dog stopped to ask if it was too heavy for me and if I needed him to carry it in to the house.

That's the kind of neighbourhood it is. A place of quiet kindness.

When we moved here, from a house that backed on to a long strip of parkland full of trees and wild animals and birds, I was sad to be going somewhere with just roads and houses. But — but but but! — I hadn't grasped that right behind our house runs the Hollington Stream, where the streams from higher ground flow down, and trees grow along the banks. If you click on this aerial view, can you see how if I come out of our house (red dot) and turn right and keep going right until I'm round the back, I have a lovely evening walk alongside the stream with its trees and green spaces? Can you trace on the picture the little path that runs along the greensward and goes under the trees, from right at the end of Coventry Road where we live? That stream with its trees will always be there, because you can't build on it. 

❤️

There's a verse in the psalms that I remember worded from the Book of Common Prayer (we always sang the psalms at Evensong back in the day), which says, "My lot is fallen in a fair ground." (Psalm 16.6)

And so it has. Hollington turns out to be characterised by loving-kindness, and trees, and a stream, and what more could you want?