Point-less

I was wending my way to church last night when I was overcome with grumpiness. And a tiny amount of scorn and contempt, with just a dash of snobbery.


You see, I was walking along the cycleway, past Bulli and McCauley's beaches en route to Austinmer. It's a new commitment of mine, this walk to church. It takes me about an hour, I get to walk past lovely beaches, past DH Lawrence's house (where he wrote Kangaroo), up and down steep-ish hills, and it gives me time to think. The thinking is usually a Good Thing, seeing as how I have very little time to myself normally. Except for yesterday, when I turned my gaze from this:

(heh - that's not me jogging to church, but IS the cycleway)

to this:

with an emphasis on this:

Yes, I was stupid enough to look upon The Point, and it (almost) ruined my walk. Apparently all these houses are the result of

"Design guidelines (which) have led to attractive, complimentary, contemporary housing designs with a distinctive coastal character."

Bahhhhhaaaaaha. Yeah, bullshit. They're boxes. With bits added on. And one particular example, billed as 'award-winning architectural design' (or somesuch tarramadiddle, I can't quote verbatim) looked exactly like a shoe box which had been oh so gently squished forward. Like a Rhombus. Now I know architects, I even have friends who are architects, and even they think The Point is the essence of ugliness. It just beggars belief... One of the houses even has an entertainment area on the roof. Full sun all day long and no protection at all. And most of them have managed to squish a pool onto their 20m² block. Even though they are seriously metres away from the beach...

And another thing: They're all windows.... massive panes of window. With no shading (unless you call a piece of timber stuck out at a bizarre angle covering an exact 14% of the window shading...). And they're about 50m from a beach. Facing the beach no less. And as I have mentioned before, beach-facing windows tend to get very filthy, very quickly. Even as I walked along, with the wind blowing but a very light breeze, I could feel the salt and sand sticking to my glowing* skin...And in these water-conscious times, is it very Green to be washing your windows every second day???? No, I don't believe it is.

Oh! It gets me foot-stamping cranky so it does!

*well ok, I was just slightly sweaty. I blame the humidity. And luckily it was only MrB sitting next to me at church...