Finding Nana's House

           

This is not Nana's house, but it was built in a similar period, and is architecturally similar.

     I write concerning a great many subjects.  I suppose I just never got to a point where I stopped caring about people, and simply centered on myself, as seems to be the case, all too often with politicians.  This week, had some grime removed from my computer, and I was told afterward,  to "try it out".   I actually didn't need to do anything, and so I resorted to running some google searches on addresses that were familiar to me. One of them was the address of my grandmother's home, outside London.   She lived in a middle class neighborhood which was relatively easily commutable to London via train. They owned their home from the time it was built in the nineteen-thirties, until the nineteen-nineties.  I don't know what it cost when built, and I'm not sure how much she sold it for, but when I ran the address, it was up for sale for  five hundred thousand British pounds sterling !     My first thought was how amazed she would be.   It was a tudor styled stone with stucco home, common to the region, with three bedrooms, a sitting room, a living room, an eat in kitchen, and one and a half bathrooms. It had a large private fenced yard and a lovely potting shed. Consistent with the era and the region, it is a semi-detached home, which means it shares a common wall with another home which is very similar to it.   Since my grandmother owned it and raised her family there, there have been some changes.  The lovely front garden she had behind the front gate has gone.  It has been paved to allow off street parking for two small cars.  It also now has a small garage which matches the house, and is located where the gate to the garden at the side of the house used to be.  There are now skylights over the bedroom I used to occupy when we stayed there.  The interior pictures are quite different.  My Nana had some lovely furniture that conjured the days of Bertie Wooster (in the series in which Hugh Laurie played Bertie, called Jeeves and Wooster, yes, after the books)   She also kept the home as neat as a pin.  Today, some of the walls I recall have been removed and it sports a new and open design.  It also has french doors which open to the garden.  The garden does not look as spectacular as it did in Nana's day, though quite pretty and a selling point..
       
      I do understand that as we live our lives and move past them that the homes we occupied become someone elses, and that their claim on that home is as valid as our own once was.  What I don't understand is how someone in England, in what has always been a middle class neighborhood, can afford to buy a home which in US dollars translates to $835,650  !     How can anyone the ages of my kids purchase a home in England, let alone the London area ?    If I had remained in England following the portion of my youth in which I went to school there,  I would not have been able to afford to buy a home there.   I am well aware of how well Nana's house was built and of the wonderful cold larder she had for kitchen storage.  I remember the storage under the staircase which was a little room itself. In the times I was there, she used it to store the vacuum cleaner, brooms and buckets, but during the war, the entire family hid there during the bombings. I do recognize the value of her home.  I do not recognize why inflation has taken the cost to the equivalent of eight hundred thousand dollars plus !