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Kirsty and I used to live on a short street whose name is compressed into superscript on most maps. Socially it approaches Aneurin Bevan's postwar hope that the development of public housing would mean that "the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer" would share a life in the same streets. The public nature of childrearing and driving our tank of a triple pram round (with the constant battles against car owners who view pavements as car parks), gave us a social status on the street from which we still both benefit.

The other day I found a huge, deformed vehicle perched on the pavement about two feet from the front door. The size of it, the way it was parked, the mixture of wealth and arrogance and ignorance it expressed, flared an anger in me. I wrote a gritted teeth note saying that as neither of us own a car they are welcome to use the space outside the house to park, but that it would be nice if we could see at least some of the pavement. I put it under its wiper, walked around Kirsty's front room muttering more articulate versions of my complaint to myself, then took it back, unsure of how I would control myself in an argument with the people to whom the car belongs.

I know them because I used to do some voluntary work for a well-known charity which aims to remove children from stairwells, and used to meet the female half at its frustratingly sober meetings. The social ecology of Acacia Avenue is poised harmoniously but precariously. We know someone who can come in and feed the cat whilst on holiday; we spontaneously host each others' children when their parents are detained at work and there's constant chatter which works to create social bonds.

The vast, taciturn owner of the car, lacking the imagination to know what to do with money but to find ways to increase it, owns four properties on the street. They rent them out to students who have no investment in its life. Girl drivers in black makeup smile forcedly when they see me and Jenny playing cricket in the street, making a palimpsest of an apology as they shoo us by threatened might onto the pavement. They're aware that they ought to apologise for disrupting a scene of street life, whilst in truth thinking that street games should be swept into social history. They unload single-use plastic bags from a supermarket less than a mile away.

I don't like what this couple are doing to the street. Their wealth, their assumption that they can appropriate more and more houses to themselves, the way they see our street as a financial resource. And most irritating of all, their huge out-of-proportion car jammed up against Kirsty's front window, with Mr Silent's oafish bulk at horrible eye level when he lumbers his unthinkable bottom into the passenger seat.

In Other News: Sexylooking from Ovineton amusingly gives me the brush off, informing me that a man came around to do the gardening and got rather hot. I told her I hope everything came up beautifully.

Arty from Glasgow has gone quiet for a week now about an email mentioning my trip up there on Tuesday / Wednesday to try to get to see her plan my latest "artistic" cavorting project.