A boxy future

Like I have told you before, I live in a savanna grassland. Behind our house the grass stretches out for quite a few kilometres, with a swamp somewhere in between. And then just a stone’s throw away, breaking up the noise of the birds busy building their homes and raising their children in the acacia trees we have enormous, towering, concrete apartment blocks. 

Yup, for every bird call there is the blare of construction cranes and machines whipping up concrete as fast as they can. I have nothing against apartments, actually, but there’s something about their uniformity that makes me sad. Why do they all have to be box-shaped? 

Why do we have to walk sideways into the loo? (I speak from personal experience). 
Why do they build kitchens for six-foot giants, when in fact the majority of women, who are usually the ones spending the most time in the kitchen, only hover around five feet? Do the architects have any idea that there are shapes other than the rectangle and square? How about a hexagonal garden or a round window, just to break up the monotony? 

It makes me wonder what kind of world my children will be living in—the same children who have never encountered a rotary telephone! Maybe by the time they are in their late 30s there will be no detached houses. 

Maybe everyone they know will be living in a similar box block going forty stories high (God forbid—if the lift stopped working, you’d be homeless!). Maybe we will have gone the China way and started farming and rearing cows and goats in storeyed apartment blocks: sheep on the ground floor, cows on first and goats on the third, with the herders’ bedsitters on the upper floors. Maybe the only available land will have been turned into farmland. 

Maybe the demand for land will be so high that the government will finally wake up and make the extreme northern parts of our country secure and habitable, instead of the bandit-infested, arid, no-man’s land that they are now. 

Cheers to the unpredictable future!