Latest Moan From You and Me 2025

We miss out of lots being in the middle of nowhere (south), even when we ring up with a problem they can't find us on the maps we normally get a phone call and they ask for the way in even the fire brigade once had to phone

 

I like the climate in the far south. As @hailbopp says, we get great springs. I do miss never seeing snow though. Even if the whole country is covered inches deep in the fluffy stuff, the strip of land south of the South Downs avoids it. I'm not aware of any government investment down here. The A27 was promised an upgrade, being the main route from Kent to Hampshire, but the money was withdrawn.

The downsides are it's crowded and expensive. I love the scenery in Scotland, but I would miss spring ... and I'm not keen on midges!

 

I went down into Cornwall today encountered torrential rain and was amazed at how many cars were bombing along without even sidelight on.

 

Oh they are the pits, I wouldn’t live where there were the dreaded midges. They are mainly to be found over in the west and well up north.
I live in the east and not too far up north so midge free thank god. I lived over in the west of Scotland for 18 months. 1 Summer over there was enough for me. Bitten to bits and often they were so bad you gave up and went indoors!

 

It is becoming a similar picture up here @shiney. The village is in the process of having 180 houses built “ cheek by jowl” and if that was not bad enough after that lot are completed which should be quite soon there is ANOTHER 150 going to be built on land opposite around the graveyard. Like you said there is no additional infrastructure planned and I know for a fact the local surgery cannot expand having already been extended due to 75 houses that were erected 2 years ago. There is pretty much zero employment in the village so there will have to be a large increase in commuter traffic, well that is presuming the people moving here are going to work! Quite a lot of the new builds are earmarked as social housing.
As for around the likes of Edinburgh, the amount of house building is eye boggling, every time I go into Edinburgh there is yet another huge block of flats going up. Not at all sure where all the jobs for the increase in population are coming from! Maybe we will be getting your “ young couples”. Mind you around Edinburgh house prices are not so dissimilar to around your area.

 

I used to have a mate who always used the term, I'm going into the village, when doing a bit of shopping.
Actually the village was now a town but he still called it the village.

 

@hailbopp, I remember going to Loch Lomond one still June morning. Was surprised no other tourists were around. We went down to the shoreline ... and lasted about 2 mins. Midges everywhere, including in our mouths and up our noses. Impossible things.

Around 1400 new builds have gone up here in the last few yrs. i used to be right on the eastern edge of town. No more.

It's not just the lack of new GP surgeries, etc that's the problem. It is all the noise during construction. Reversing lorry alarms are a constant soundtrack from 7.30 am till 4 pm in the week and till 1 pm on a Saturday. Many of the new houses are taking up to 2 yrs to sell. Affordable they ain't. Buyers are usually retirees from
London. That means in twenty yrs or so, there will be a huge bulge in people needing care home places or other help. Our council tax is already one of the highest in the country, so where the funding will come from, I do not know.

 

Nobody would vote for a government who said they would bring down house prices.
And if they start to fall for economic reasons the builders would just stop building.
Not sure how you break the circle.

 

My nephew lives on a new build estate and they don't even have a footpath outside. Just a very small front garden and then straight onto the road. How the hell was planning permission granted for that?

 

It is tricky to do as you leave people who bought in good faith with negative equity.

 

We don't even have a street light, if we want light we have to put on an outside flood light which we have 5 all around the house

What a pavement, we don't have any and the close's to that is a grass verge, but we open front gate and straight onto the road, all we get for our council tax is our rubbish and recycling removed, we did get a resurf of the road a few years back only because we had pot hole with in pot holes but that is now geting back to a bad state because we are getting lots of roadworks to repair leaky water pipes

 

Oakville still insists on calling itself a Town even though we have nearly 180K residents here. The name is quaint but the size of the "town" is like false posturing!

 

There is towns in the UK that will have a larger population, Northampton and Luton are towns with probably over 200k population, there are other large towns like Reading and Ipswich that spring to mind.