A scene to set shepherds dancing in ecstasy

Reading The Fall & Rise Of Reginald Perrin (renamed from The Death Of Reginald Perrin after the first TV series in 1976), a classic of English suburbanism.

There are some fine suburban descriptions and evocations, aswell as treatment of a certain kind of middle-class suburb in the gap between the Oil Crisis and the 3 day week and Thatcher (although she’s coming alright, down the Groves and Drives, in the CJ figure and his sleeping army of suburban shrugging men and women, like Tony Webster).

In Elizabeth and Reggie’s garden bird coasters and “vanishing country crafts” bowls, there is the commodified/idolised recognition by the suburb of what it is built over and against.
Tom’s inappropriate blurtings on things like the “origins of Morris Dancing” show up where this mindset is learnt, forced, not natural (and thus disposable), while CJ represents that aspect of the suburban mind that embraces and celebrates, and is indeed comforted by, the sealing up of the other:

” ‘These old country crafts are dying out,’ said Tom.
‘Not before time,’ said CJ.
‘We can’t agree with you there can we Lindyplops?’ said Tom.
‘All this nostalgia for the past. What this country needs is a bit of nostalgia for the future’ said CJ.”

For CJ “His engine hummed expensively. His headlights emphasised the mystery of woods and hedgerows. But CJ had no eyes for mystery”.

But, where the woods and hedges remain, even in memory, there is still their power.

Snicket – “a passageway between walls or fences”. Reggie goes through one of these on his way to and from the station. I love these places - the nettles, sour smell of willowherbs, grass and wood avens, the hidden sounds of mowers and pressure sprayers, breeze blocks, dog-shit and stink of creosote – sometimes vestiges of rights of way chopped and like ‘cut-along-here’ lines across the suburb.