There is an ad for a hyper-expensive watch brand that runs something like “You never actually own a Patek Phillipe watch\u2014you merely look after it for the next generation”.<\/p>\n
Increasingly, even though we buy our houses at a greater rate than previous generations, we increasingly have less sense of ownership. It used to be argued that one advantage of owning your own house was that you could “do what you like with it”. However, all of the weirdo TV house programmes that my mother watches incessantly convey the impression that, despite living in a house for years, you are really just looking after it until the “real owner”\u2014the next buyer\u2014comes along. They, of course, will take the same attitude towards the following owner, …<\/p>\n
This has strange consequences. My flat has an odd cod-wrought iron fire surround with images of happy workers toiling in the field embossed into it. It is as horrible as it sounds (now, had it been done in a soviet futurist style, that might be different…). My mother agrees with me that it is horrible\u2014but when I proposed getting it replaced with something more tasteful and understated, her response was “I don’t know if you should do that, perhaps the people you want to sell it to next might like it.”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is an ad for a hyper-expensive watch brand that runs something like “You never actually own a Patek Phillipe watch\u2014you merely look after it for the next generation”. Increasingly, even though we buy our houses at a greater rate than previous generations, we increasingly have less sense of ownership. It used to be argued […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[14,5],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":338,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions\/338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}