According to the council’s Conservative opposition leader Kingston is being overrun with betting shops and estate agents.

Too many estate agents, eh? Houses must be all the rage. The next big thing as they say.

Or are they, as the late George Carlin once said, just a place to keep your stuff?

Because as we accumulate more stuff we need to store it somewhere. And then we can stick most of it in the loft until we die.

And then, when we shuffle off, we can leave our stuff to someone else to deal with.

And then they can buy a house to store that stuff – added to their own stuff – and then when they die, they can pass it on again... you get the idea.

The whole concept of getting a mortgage and buying a house is pretty crazy when you think about the big picture. This obsession with getting on the property ladder. And then spending our whole lives paying for it.

Most tribes gather wood from a forest and build a house – costing no money, obviously – and then live there comfortably, rebuilding it every so often.

But the rich nations have come up with a better system. Let’s borrow loads of money, buy a house and then spend our entire lives working to pay it off. Something’s gone wrong there hasn’t it? Something’s not right surely?

I wrote in a previous article that I could easily live in a caravan, yurt, tent, box.

And a former colleague of mine has done just that. No, not a box. He’s gone to live in Spain and is building himself a yurt for his family to live in.

Good luck to him, that’s what I say.

 

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