When I asked people to account for their aversion to estate agents, the responses were vague, inconsistent and often contradictory: estate agents were ridiculed as stupid and incompetent 'twits', but also reviled as sly, grasping, cunning and deceitful. Finding it hard to see how estate agents could manage to be simultaneously dim-witted and deviously clever, I eventually gave up pressing for a rational explanation of their unpopularity, and tried instead to look for clues in the detailed mechanics of our interactions with them. What exactly do estate agents do? They come to inspect your house, look around it with an objective eye, put a value on it, advertise it, show people round it and try to sell it. What is so terribly offensive about that? Well, everything, if you replace the word 'house' with 'identity', 'personality', 'social status' or 'taste'. Everything that estate agents do involves passing judgement not on some neutral piece of property but on us, on our lifestyle, our social position, our character, our private self. And sticking a price tag on it. No wonder we can't stand them. By making them the butt of our jokes and scorn, we minimize their power to hurt our feelings: if estate agents are universally agreed to be stupid, ineffectual and insincere, their opinions and judgements become less meaningful, their intrusions into our private sphere less traumatic.
GARDEN RULES
From our helicopter at the beginning of this chapter we saw that the English all want to live in their own private box with their own private green bit. Indeed, it is our insistence on the private green bit that is, ironically, largely responsible for the desecration of the English countryside, with the construction of 'relentless green suburbs' and all the environmental damage and pollution that they entail. The English simply will not live in flats or share courtyards like urban dwellers in other countries: we must have our private boxes and green bits.
However small, the green bit is at least as important as the box. Tiny scraps of land, which almost anywhere else in the world would be regarded as too insignificant to bother with, are treated as though they were grand country estates. Our moats and drawbridges may be imaginary, but every Englishman's castle has its miniature 'grounds'. Take a typical, undistinguished suburban or 'residental-area' street, with the usual two rows of smallish, nondescript semi-detached or terraced houses - the kind of street in which the vast majority of English people live. Each house will usually have a minuscule patch of garden at the front, and a larger green bit at the back. In slightly more affluent areas, the patch at the front will be a little bigger, and the house set a few feet further back from the road. In less well-off areas, the front patch will shrink to a token tiny strip, although there may still be a front gate, a path to take you the one or two steps to the front door, and a plant or smidgen of greenery of some sort on either side of the path to prove that it still qualifies as a 'front garden'. (The front garden with its path can also be seen as a kind of symbolic moat and drawbridge.)
'Your Own Front Garden, You May Not Enjoy'
In all typical streets of this kind, all of the little patches of garden, front and back, will have walls or fences around them. The wall around the front garden will be low, so that everyone can see into the garden, while the one enclosing the back garden will be high, so they can't. The front garden is likely to be more carefully arranged, designed and tended than the back garden. This is not because the English spend more time enjoying their front gardens. Quite the opposite: the English spend no time at all in their front gardens, except the time necessary to weed, water, tend and keep them looking 'nice'.
This is one of the most important garden-rules: we never, ever sit in our front gardens. Even when there is plenty of room in a front garden for a garden seat of some sort, you will never see one. Not only would it be unthinkable to sit in your front garden, you will be considered odd if you even stand there for very long without squatting to pull up a weed or stooping to trim the hedge. If you are not squatting, stooping, bending or otherwise looking busy and industrious, you will be suspected of a peculiar and forbidden form of loitering.
Front gardens, however pretty and pleasant they might be to relax in, are for display only; they are for others to enjoy and admire, not their owners. This rule always reminds me of the laws of tribal societies with complicated gift-exchange systems, in which people are not allowed to consume the fruits of their own labour: 'Your own pigs, you may not eat...' is the most famous and frequently quoted tribal example; the English equivalent would be 'Your own front garden, you may not enjoy'.
The Front-garden Social-availability Rule (and 'Sponge' Methodology)
If you do spend time squatting, bending and pruning in your front garden, you may find that this is one of the very few occasions on which your neighbours will speak to you. A person busy in his or her front garden is regarded as socially 'available', and neighbours who would never dream of knocking on your front door may stop for a chat (almost invariably beginning with a comment on the weather or a polite remark about your garden). In fact, I know of many streets in which people who have an important matter to discuss with a neighbour (such as an application for planning permission) or a message to convey, will wait patiently - sometimes for days or weeks - until they spot the neighbour in question working in his front garden, rather than committing the 'intrusion' of actually ringing his doorbell.
This social availability of front-gardeners proved very helpful during my research, as I could approach them with an innocuous request for directions, follow this with a weather-speak ice-breaker and a comment on their garden, and gradually get them talking about their gardening habits, their home improvements, their children, their pets and so on. Sometimes, I would pretend that I (or my mother or sister or cousin) was thinking of moving to the area, which gave me an excuse to ask more nosey questions about the neighbours, the local pubs, schools, shops, clubs, societies and events - and find out a lot about their unwritten social rules. In front-garden interviews, although I might sometimes focus on a specific current obsession, such as, say, the estate-agent question, I would often just soak up a whole lot of random data on a variety of subjects, and hope to make sense of it all at some later stage. This is not such a daft research method as it might sound - in fact, I think there may even be an official scientific name for it, but I can never remember the correct term, so I call it the 'sponge' method.
The Counter-culture Garden-sofa Exception
There is just one minority exception to the 'your own front garden, you may not enjoy' principle, and as usual, it is one that proves the rule. The front gardens of left-over hippies, New Agers and various other 'counter-culture' types may sometimes boast an old, sagging sofa, on which the inhabitants will sit, self-consciously defying convention and actually enjoying their front garden (which, also in defiance of convention, will be unkempt and overgrown).
This 'exception' to the no-sitting-in-front-gardens rule is clearly an act of deliberate disobedience: the seat is always a sofa, never a wooden bench or plastic chair or any other piece of furniture that might possibly be regarded as suitable for outdoor use. This flaccid, often damp and eventually rotting sofa is a statement, and one that tends to be found in conjunction with other statements such as drinking herbal tea, eating organic vegan food, smoking ganja, wearing the latest eco-warrior fashions, decorating the windows with 'Say No to GMO' posters... the themes and fashions vary, but you know what I mean: the usual counter-culture cluster.