The Hound of Hounslow has taken the lid off the suburbs’ hidden wild side

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/24/hound-hounslow-suburbs-wild-side

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A 36-year old trader, Navinder Singh Sarao, is challenging his extradition to the US, where he is accused of artificially manipulating the market. Using an illegal technique known as spoofing, the trader succeeded in making, it is thought, £26m. It is claimed he brought about a temporary collapse of the stock market, removing £570bn from the value of US companies in May 2010.

All this is not very surprising, these days; and I don’t suppose that £570bn stayed lost for very long. (In five minutes the Dow Jones lost nearly 1,000 points. Twenty minutes later, it was almost back at its starting point.) Nor is Sarao’s confident response to the reminder from CME Group, sent to him on the same day, that all trades must be legal. He is said to have told them: “Kiss my arse.”

No. The enchanting detail is that all this was supposedly carried out from Sarao’s bedroom in his parents’ semidetached house in Hounslow. And he has a brother who is an optician. Why, people seemed to be wondering, would he live with mum and dad in a semi in Hounslow if he’d just made £26m. Well, perhaps he likes it there.

The usual reaction to the suburbs and anything that happens in them is a contemptuous one. The idealistic movement, springing from William Morris, that hoped to remove ordinary people from urban drudgery and give them gardens, clean air and pleasant, picturesque surroundings didn’t stay idealised for long. The entrancing developments themselves, such as Letchworth, Onkel Toms Hütte in Berlin, Hampstead Garden Suburb and Port Sunlight in Liverpool, caught on quickly. But with them came the opportunity to point and laugh.

Anyone who envisages unconventionality in sexual behaviour has a most unremarkable sort of mind

It’s quite hard to find accounts of life in the suburbs that abandon the sneering tone. Bertrand Russell wrote fiction that placed Satan in a suburban setting; EM Delafield had Messalina living there. Ever since then the predominant image has been one of oppressive orthodoxy from which the heroic rock star/poet/actor must escape to live out his wild destiny, possibly in Hoxton. Malvina Reynolds’ song Little Boxes and albums such as Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs continued the theme. The best that can be said is that this crushing conventionality conceals an enthusiastic sex life, as in the American series Desperate Housewives.

It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that this particular flavour of contempt for the suburbs is one of the most conventional attitudes anyone could adopt. Anyone who envisages unconventionality in the first instance in sexual behaviour has a most unremarkable sort of mind. The occasional, authentic expression of love and interest in the suburbs comes rarely. It can be startling and powerful.

GK Chesterton’s fantasy The Man Who Was Thursday begins with a rapturous account of the beauty and picturesque wildness of the first garden suburbs: “The extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the whole insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud.” Chesterton was writing a novel about the poetic power of the everyday, and he saw that suburban people might, in fact, be anything at all. “The stranger,” he writes, “who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them.”

The great product of the English suburbs, surely, is boredom

That has gone on being the case. I was born and grew up in the suburbs; nowadays, I live in what used to be dismissed as the epitome of suburban existence with the phrase “the man on the Clapham omnibus”. My heart leaps indecently when I glimpse a rockery in a front garden, a burst of cherry blossom, a mock-Tudor semidetached frontage, or any suggestion of individual fantasy. I feel about crazy paving much as Dickens evidently felt about the life Wemmick lived with his Aged P in Walworth, with his drawbridge and his castle and a tiny lake with an island in the middle “which might have been the salad for dinner”. It seems to me that in the suburbs anything at all might happen.

The great product of the English suburbs, surely, is boredom. For years before you can learn to drive, you are at the mercy of your parents or the unreliable bus service; you could walk down to the rec and play on the swings or go and see if your mate Pete is around. But the appalling suffering of uneventfulness that the suburbs inflict on the young imagination is richly rewarding. The mind soars towards possibility.

Some minds remember with gratitude and enjoyment the small pleasures of suburban existence. A rare contemporary hymnist of these is the novelist Shena Mackay, author of novels with beautifully evocative titles, such as Redhill Rococo and Dreams of Dead Women’s Handbags.

Others inhabit their suburban milieu with occasional exasperation, recognising the imaginative energy it incites. No literary imagination was more daring than that of JG Ballard, who lived in blameless Shepperton all his adult life. He would have recognised the feat of imagination that could make £26m and destroy the American stock market for 20 minutes while sitting in the bedroom of a semi in Hounslow.

From the children of the suburbs, one never knows what to expect.We may think of those brought up in communes by impossible radicals, conceptual artists and urban guerrillas as leading the more exciting and enviable lives. But we might as well face it: one always knows exactly what that sort of person is going to say about anything. Keep an eye instead on the gentleman who grew up in a respectable semi with a well-kept garden, and who quite likes it, and who wouldn’t mind going on living there for the rest of his life. The life lived with one eye on the Japanese maple in the front garden is not a conventional one. That man is truly dangerous.