What is your world?
According to British Gas, you live on a tiny planet that consists only of your house and its garden. Your home, it seems, is your world. The vast darkness of deep space separates you from the least distant of your fellow human beings, who live in their own entirely detached homes. There don't seem to be any worlds on which people have near neighbours - in terraced streets, in blocks of flats, or in big Victorian houses chopped into bedsits. Instead, having been freed long ago from the debilitating confines of public ownership, the dynamic and wildly successful utility company pays its handsome dividends entirely by serving a solar system of customers living prosperously in splendid isolation.
How did you end up so far away from everybody else? How did interplanetary distances open up between the former components of defunct 'communities', 'neighbourhoods' and 'society'? Did you (or your parents) rise up in the glorious dawn of the property-owning, share-owning democracy? Did you get on your bike in the pursuit of betterment, peddling away from slackers who lack the moral fibre of aspiration?
Buy your own planetoid and stay there. Shrink the state. Treat adults like adults and stop nannying them with addictive, enfeebling public services. Volunteering and public-spiritedness will fill the vacuum when it comes to the genuinely needy and the genuinely vital tasks. After all, it works across the pond, doesn't it?
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