Thoughts of a Bird-Watching Man South of America?

By Stevie P Smith

By Stevie Psmith

"Men gazza round me, like moss around a phlegm."  (Marlene Dietrich)

Let me tell you about the Zocalo.

Zocalo means 'town square' in Mexico; it's where people go to at the end of the day to sit, talk, argue and flirt.  People like you, and me.

I know this because I'd read in our daily newspaper that some adventurous souls were hoping to create a Zocalo in Brighton's Hanover district for one summer evening.  Known collectively as 'White Dot' - after the effect you find when a television is switched off - they'd concluded that before people can establish a new neighbourliness and start to learn to get to know one another in a more than superficial way, they first have to abandon the household god, television.

My television set went to the scrap heap more than twelve years ago, since when a recent newspaper report on a so-called 'gated', ready-made community in Chigwell (that's right, of Birds of a Feather fame) caused me to recall a warning sounded long ago in a book called The Private Future.

According to the report, the worst fears expressed in the book are now being realised - in this, far from unique case, in suburban Essex.

The newly built, enclosed estate there employs private security guards to protect its residents from any undesirable incursions by the outside world.  Its children will - unless in later life, perhaps, they dare to venture beyond their carefully tended lawns - never know, for example, the sound of passing drunks disputing chimaeras in the night; nor, it seems, will they be equipped with the skills to prosper anywhere other than in the prison-like, sanitised environment in which they are being raised. 

A few hours' travelling time away, tree houses in Titnore Woods in Durrington are currently home to another group of people who have, like White Dot, concluded that a peaceful stand has to be made somewhere.  They foresee suburban Essex's reach being extended to Sussex via a development that would enable the provision, under one huge hypermarket roof, of cradle-to-grave services for a proposed estate of 800 houses.

In common with the local people supporting their campaign to prevent yet more macadamised madness from cutting a wide swathe through irreplaceable woodland, they prefer birdsong to be accessible to all those who care to take a walk in the woods, rather than to flock to their television sets.

Maybe, if you find that town square, or, perhaps, take a bus to join Titnore's woodlanders, your evenings, too, will be lent some new enchantment.  I hope so.