I grew up in a deco town of rounded corners, painted white;
A fascist version of the future, in glass and pitted chrome.
I saw it all demolished in the sixties, overnight,
When we moved and made a high-rise concrete box our family home.
She grew up in a cottage, cramped and damp, of Victorian design;
An imperial relic of the past, all polished wood and broken tile.
She saw the original features replaced with chipboard and fake pine,
When her father embraced the seventies ' a decade without style.
We grew together in a loft conversion, minimal and plain;
A reclamation of the East End from lost spirits of the Blitz.
We saw it growing gentrified from our timeshare villa in Spain,
When we built the eighties lifestyle from a set of flat-packed kits.
We grew apart in a farmhouse, built of pilfered monastery stone;
A tithe abandoned after generations, due to foot-and-mouth disease.
We saw it as a New Age retreat from the nineties, to seek to atone,
When our money brought us neither happiness nor peace.
I grew old in a bed-sit room, undecorated for decades, but for mildew;
A Regency townhouse, reduced by circumstance to inner city tat.
I saw only eye-sores through my window and thought them a fitting view,
When I became a nothing in the zeroes and felt lucky to have achieved even that.
