Hard Standing - A Lament

At home for once on a Sunday morning (NigeCorp usually has need of me), I feel not a rhapsody but a lament coming on. Lately, it seeems to me, each time I walk the streets of this suburban demi-paradise so well known (to the point of tedium) to regular Thought Experimenters, I encounter the ever advancing scourge of Hard Standing. Where once there was a pleasant enough front garden - bit of lawn, some bedding, a few shrubs, often in these bosky parts a decent tree or two - now there is an unbroken expanse of nauseously tinted pink block paving. Unbroken, as like as not, even by the cars that are the rationale for this eco-vandalism - they remain parked perfectly happily at the side of the road. Why are more and more people who should know better having perfectly good gardens dug out, scraped, flattened and 'laid to hard standing'? Because lazily they assume that,walking anywhere being out of the question, at least two cars per household are essential (and that walking even as far as the road to get into said cars is asking too much) and that gardens are simply too much work and trouble, with all those weeds and growing grass and falling leaves. The resulting blight on the locality exposes the best-hidden nakedness of houses of indifferent quality, leaving them islanded in all their blocky ugliness. It involves not only a loss of aesthetically pleasing greenery and flowers but of yet more of the ever dwindling habitat for wildlife, from birds and mammals to the lowliest insects and worms. It is also a major menace in terms of flooding. The run-off of rainwater from all that undrained hard standing means that the slightest cloudburst, which once would have caused no problem, is now enough to overwhelm the drainage system and cover roads and pavements with water. I have only one thing to say (in the sure and certain knowledge that I'm wasting my breath) - Stop this madness now! Impose stringent conditions, entangled in the most ingenious thickets of municipal red tape, on all would-be razers of their front-of-house plot. Otherwise, all of suburbia will soon be one vast expanse of hard standing - and, much of the time, flooded.