“OK fine. Where d’you want to walk to?”

On walkability and the people who just don’t get it.

My wife and I spent the last few months of 2021 becoming significantly more familiar with southern Californian suburban real estate than I had ever wished to be.

For reasons that had presumably made sense at some point, we’d decided it was finally time to make the leap into the world of home-ownership, and to help us get there we retained the services of a local realtor recommended to us by a friend.

It quickly became apparent that said realtor and I had grown up on different planets — she in the characterless, manicured neighborhoods where LA County meets Orange County, and me in… well, the opposite of that. The string of properties she took us to see gradually led us to the realization that no amount of protest on our part was going to disabuse her of the assumption that the former are the kinds of places to which middle class couples shuffling into middle age should aspire.

I don’t ask for much when it comes to living arrangements, but one thing I do ask for is a neighborhood that lends itself to getting out and about on foot. After around two months of our realtor roundly failing to grasp this concept, eventually — with an eye-roll so magnificent it seemed almost certain we were about to be fired as her…