In the only tiny closet in the house, the under-stair cupboard, you have to choose whether to put your shoes or the vacuum cleaner or the sewing machine.
Or you try to squish everything, as I do, but then you no longer use anything you have squeezed in there, because you get anxious just at the thought of opening that door (you are scared of dying pierced by an umbrella or crushed by a suitcase filled with other suitcases).
You don't have a room large enough to contain a proper wardrobe and your clothes are folded in a chest of drawers.
In a tiny cabinet you have 6 blouses on each hanger, the bags are on the floor in a corner because you wouldn't have an idea where else to put them.
In the summer, you hang your winter coats behind the kitchen cupboard hoping nobody notice it.
The panties are divided into groups of 3 and are in the jewellery box in the bathroom.
Children's games are accumulated under the bed because in the little room you certainly cannot add any piece of furniture other than the aforementioned bed. You practically live in a camper, but ...
… you have a 200 square meters garden.
What is it for?
Who knows.
First of all, to make the city unnecessarily large. Cambridge has 100,000 inhabitants and the same size as Los Angeles.
Then, apart from that, I couldn't find any other reason to provide each house with one hectare of land.
It's nice to have a little garden behind the house, don't get me wrong, it's useful for doing lots of things, for barbecuing when it's not raining, it's good to hang out the laundry when it's not raining, children use it to play football (even when it rains: Italian children are now English).
But the dimensions are anomalous.
A narrow and very long strip of land. At the bottom there is a shed, where you try to cram all sorts of objects that have not found a place in the house, but these are things you will never see again. The shed is at the bottom of the long garden, you will never go there, especially in the dark, and in any case everything will be eaten by mice.
The problem with the very long garden is that, even if you don't do anything with it, you still have to take care of it.
No one has time to keep up with one hectare of land, so gardens are often a disaster. Tall grass, all half rotten, inflatable swimming pools bought in an afternoon of utopian optimism and now devoured by lichens, the inevitable gigantic trampoline ...
And then the real anomaly in the anomaly: the miserable wooden fences. The same across the UK. Nice, very sober, but for some reason they last 6 hours, then they start to fall out and to be holed.
It’s a show of pure decadence, like a Ken Loach film.
Houses that cost a month as much as all your internal organs on the black market, but they look like the allotments in the suburbs.
I give you a piece of advice: don't look at it.
In my house the kitchen window above the sink, the one overlooking the garden, is obscured by a blind that is never raised. NEVER. Out of sight, out of mind. Problem solved, all right, let's go on.
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