It’s got to be a sauna. It just has to be. Because who needs three sheds anyway?
I live in suburbia: the closest the North Coast gets to the Wisteria Lane of Desperate Housewives. My Belfast origins given away by terminology if not by accent, I’ve been reprimanded recently for calling it a street. “It’s not a street. It’s a development.” A development indeed – and what develops in developments like this makes me realise that maybe the dramatised suburban happenings which we watch on TV aren’t quite so far-fetched after all.
It’s Sunday: early. The dark chrome sea is streaked with fingertips of silver as the sun glints tentatively through and the morning rain begins to clear. A small fishing boat puts to sea in an epitome of optimism; the three men on deck are smoking and laughing and anticipating the company as much as the catch. Eyes are opening where the seaside towns reach out into the fields. Golf-clubs wait, gleaming, in car boots. The earliest church-goers rush out, running late, checking for change for the collection. Newspapers so fat that they will take a week to read are spread across breakfast tables. Living rooms are half-lit by the flicker of a cartoon, half-filled by the murmur of a political review. A black cat strolls across the road, staring you out as you stop your car, daring you to speed your pace, its indolence deliberate and obdurate. The air fizzes with the static of birdsong: sparrows and robins and finches and starlings and blackbirds in counterpoint with a percussive bass-line of magpies and crows and rooks. It’s peaceful; as calm as the shot-silk sea which can be glimpsed between the fences, walls and roof-tops. But the prevailing coastal winds can produce storms which turn this silk to turmoil, and as suburbia wakes up, its calmness dissipates. Reality sets in. We might not have the bodies under the patio or the continuity of the narrative voice-over, but our local suburbia holds its own secrets and follows its own codes.
Outside each house, the cars announce the identity of those who live inside. One car, two-car families; mid-life crises and teenage kicks. Personalised plates scream out initials and birthdays; 4X4s and MPVs remind us that there are children indoors; L and R-plates warn of teenagers; sensible, small hatchbacks are a hint of pensioners. Our driveways can be a place of refuge – caravans and camper-vans, at anchor again after a summer of adventures, can provide solace and escape from a noisy household on one of those evenings when you just want peace and quiet. A car parked in a silent, darkening driveway can be that private place which allows a moment’s thought, or quiet words, before going inside to start the evening’s routines. And in some suburban driveways now the promise of the open sea is rippling, as boats are lifted out of summer moorings and harboured back at home. Becalmed on the tarmac, the boats sit still on their trailers, the barnacles encrusted on the bright paintwork a memory and a promise of the journeys recalled and still ahead.
But what’s outside our houses reveal us in other ways as well. The detailed precision of the Sunday afternoon ritual of car-washing shows us the true perfectionist of the suburbs. The cars polished, inside and out, the powerhose is trained on the driveway, the paths, the windows and the doors. The familiar hum and splash of the hose continues for an hour or more, until everything is perfect. It seems that even the lawn has been washed. The ritual is repeated at least weekly – sometimes more often. Dirt and grime and stray leaves are never tolerated for long; those of us with less time to combat them are looked at with pity rather than judgement, despair more than distaste. The power-hose family’s garage is a precisely ordered one; no dust rests on the heavy-duty painted floor, and the impressively arrayed tools are numbered and ordered and hung up, their silhouetted outlines painted on the walls behind them.
The gardens of suburbia reveal us too. The patterns we create with shrubs, planters and ornamental cherry-trees are an accessory to that essential backdrop by which we are all judged: the state of our lawns. The perfect suburban lawn is one where no weed dares to venture. Tended daily – hourly – the dandelion or daisy which even considers putting down roots is peremptorily removed. These “alpha-lawns” are mown into perfect stripes, strimmed, trimmed and manicured with the ultimate devotion. For most of us though, the humming of a lawn-mower nearby is a twinge of conscience as we relax on a Saturday afternoon. Hearing it, we reluctantly drag ourselves out for a cursory tidy-up, in a domino-effect routine which must be being repeated throughout the country. Such is the pressure to conform on hearing a neighbouring lawn-mower warm up, that it is tempting to run the contraption at 4am on a winter night, just to see whether anyone might respond. But once you’ve done it – once you’ve cut your grass – that’s not all. The self-respecting suburban garden needs accessories. This is more complicated than it sounds: go too far with this, and you’ll be ridiculed far beyond your own area. The word will be out. People will pretend to be lost or to be looking for houses for sale, but really, they’ll have heard about that wishing well or that statue or that huge swan sculpture full of flowers in your front garden, and they’ll have come to have a look – and laugh. Nothing in our gardens is without its consequence. The roses in my back garden remind me of the need to prune, and of the cuts I’ve had from thorns; the red and white geraniums on my doorstep issue a daily nudge towards bending and repairing and sweeping and cutting and removing – the fallen petals, the withering blooms, the stems battered by the late September storms are impeding the desired effect of welcome and good cheer. Hedges and fences are our boundaries and our protections – tall enough to make us feel safe, but not so tall as to block out next door’s sea view. Hours are spent ensuring that the cut of the hedge is straight; offence will be certain if the finished hedge is the wrong height, the wrong thickness, the wrong type. It’s a serious business. Families have gone on holiday for a week, only to return and find that someone else has cut down their hedge, on their land, providing their shelter and privacy: good fences make good neighbours, but in suburbia, the hedge-cutter becomes a weapon in the conscienceless battle for competitive light and space; the desired effects of a planted architecture.
And behind our houses, hidden from view, lie the mirrors of our indoor lives. Our patios, our decks. Our garden furniture reveals us, and in the heart of suburbia it’s no longer good enough to have the basic model. When we have the sort of teak garden tables and chairs which need to be oiled against the elements twice each year, we can feel satisfied that we have something good enough to sit on, on those days when the sun shines. And in order to ensure that these “outdoor living spaces” are sufficiently used in our fickle climate, we add patio heaters and canopies and umbrellas and outdoor lights. There are fairy-lights in our trees and a blur of kerosene fumes above our heads, as we wrap fleecy throws around our shoulders in the breezy dusk, and don’t even dare to think that we might be better off inside. This isn’t just suburban life – this is suburban lifestyle. This is like something from a Sunday colour supplement. The suppressed shiver as we sip the air-cooled wine is all the proof we need of the “coolness” and credibility of our “al fresco living space”.
And then – further away from our doors, in the gardens – there it is, the new masterpiece of suburbia. The shed. No longer just somewhere to keep the garden tools, the shed is the new conservatory. We’ve extended our homes already. We’ve got the sun-rooms and the conservatories and the loft conversions. It’s time now for the Nouveau Shed – the shed as our house’s mini-me, complete with double-glazing and veranda and hot water and an electricity supply. The Nouveau Shed solves so many of our problems. It gets teenage sons out of the house with their friends and drums and guitars and X-Boxes. It gets tiresome husbands out of the way with the chaotic debris of their DIY catalogues and tools, home-brew, newspapers and all those little “projects” which are started but never finished. But for some, it’s so much more. The garden hot-tub is this year’s essential water-feature, and if a shed is set beside it, it can mean only one thing: a sauna. For the busy suburban family, soon a whole shanty-town of sheds will seem de rigeur – his, hers, theirs, and go on – we’ll spoil ourselves. We deserve it. And the neighbours will be so jealous!
And so, as the autumn moon rises over the streets of coastal suburbia, as the children go indoors from their afternoon games of street-hockey, skateboarding, cycling or touch-rugby, the blinds are drawn down on another day’s analysis of the drama of social comedy which has unfolded in the developments of the hills above the sea.
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