Grove (and the garden centre Buddha)

How did I end up here?

Lockdown forced us out of the house we were outgrowing. We found affordability and space in an estate being raised from the clay earth. A former US army airstrip far from anything bombable. 

The bookies closed down. Bookies never close down. 

When there’s enough of you - residents, that is - the infrastructure will be built - schools, shops, bus routes… It’s not worth doing until there’s enough… of you.

The salesman’s trousers were stained from his lunch. Scuffed shoes. A divorced sadness of a man who’d taken too much for granted. 


It was a time of being inside and then outside as far from people as you could get. I dug a garden through rocks and clay to give us green against the deadening ochre of brick and fence that extended everywhere. A meditating Buddha sat atop a stack of chalky rocks. His peace divided us. 

These are good people. I grew up in community, shared struggle, unlocked doors and every grown up being an uncle or an aunt. I feel that here too. In our middle class homes we felt the passive aggressiveness of a bin left out for too long, grass unmoved for an unreasonable length of time and the cold chill of having asked to not hear a regular Coldplay karaoke late at night. 


But this is the part of a country you never see as a tourist. A few cottages for hundreds of years and then hundreds of brick buildings built in labyrinths in the 1970s. Open prisons. White Bear. Front doors facing onto an empty shared green. Simulation-proof.

How do we get stuck here? Or is my garden Buddha communicating something else to me? 


Unhear the chorus of anger of adults and children stuck in homes too small for them. Unsee the monotony being built around you. Accept what life is when you are in pursuit of more. Ascetism and Stoicism should mean finding a peace in yourself with what you have. Be a content garden centre Buddha. 

But garden centre Buddha, I grew up in an 8-bit Slough and then saw more of the world. You sat under a beautiful tree looking out on nature with no credit card bills, council tax, road tax, money for children’s hair growing, feet growing, legs growing, tastes growing. I’m sitting outside a brick building looking out on hundreds of other brick buildings with life knocking on my credit score. 

I always sleep on the very edge of a bed. Its nothing to do with the mattress, its about the free air of the edge - of being between two places. This is a middle of the bed place. The mattress is sagging over time, memory foamed to our bulks. I need to be able to fall out of a place into another. 


Garden centre Buddha, I’m moving out. I’m going to leave you here. I know you understand. 

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