I’ve lived in ten different houses since leaving my family home back in 2005. This averages out at a move almost once a year for the first decade, as I rotated through student houseshares in Leeds and then the London rental shitshow with my partner. We’ve been in our current home for almost seven years now and it’s almost strange to contemplate moving again.

I moved house a few times as a child too, including a big relocation from Merseyside to Nottingham when I was five years old as my parents decided to start a new life on the other side of the country from their family and friends. Now I’m the parent of a five year old myself, I struggle to imagine what that must have been like for them, especially in the days where you couldn’t just join the WhatsApp group for your kid’s new school and get to know the local parents. Does this mean people had to go and talk to each other?!

As safe as houses

Yesterday evening, just before we started to round the kids up for bed, my five year old son Ted uncharacteristically curled up on the sofa in silence. He sat there hugging his knees while we tidied away the remains of dinner, and it soon became clear he was concerned about something.

He wouldn’t tell us what it was because he was worried we’d tell him off, so we let him go to bed and didn’t push the issue: it’d come out when he felt able to tell us.

This morning, we heard the full story:

At school that day, he bumped into another kid who apparently “loves killing bugs”. Ted suggested to the other boy that he should, er, eat a woodlouse alive. “Because that would kill it too,” Ted explained to us.

Do you remember the time before Google Maps? The geospatial dark ages, we might call them.

If you wanted to travel somewhere in the late 1990s, you could put your faith in primitive online navigation sites like Multimap.com, printing out reams of step-by-step directions which may once have accurately resembled the roads in question.

Alternatively, you could stick to the tried-and-tested AA route planner and road atlas, once a staple of every glove compartment. I remember sitting through my Duke of Edinburgh planning class as a teenager where we learned to use Ordnance Survey maps to plan a route through Derbyshire farmland which would hopefully bring us to a soggy campsite after several hours of confused hiking. Is this a lost art?

Maybe I experienced a premonition, or maybe I’m just naturally nosy. Either way, I had a feeling that the van was going to hit my car.

I think I was expecting a delivery when I noticed the large white van manoeuvring outside the house. I walked to the window and was surprised at the unusual angle the driver had wedged their vehicle into. Sometimes the Amazon delivery guys park at a 45 degree angle on the pavement while they jump out to make a delivery, but this guy looked like he was trying to reverse back out again. Hmm, if he carries on at that speed he’s going to hit—

CRUNCH

The Guardian published an article this week called “The rise of Britishcore: 100 experiences that define and unite modern Britons”. I groaned when I saw the title: as my friend Jon observed: “100 things is a terrible number of things to try to write about just for the sake of doing a bit.”

Benji pointed out how the article doesn’t make a single reference to LGBTQ culture, and Pete posted a great thread breaking down his feelings about the piece: “I find it scary and disconcerting, a bit like visiting a deeply conservative town and realising you don't belong.”

Let’s be clear: it’s a frothy, light-hearted listicle that’s jumping on the Very British Problems meme train several years after it left the station.