The limits of left-wing inclusivity

When we put the house on the market, my environmentally conscious neighbours disappeared on a holiday so long I asked another neighbour where they had gone.

‘On a cruise,’ she said, but I thought that unlikely, because these people have a book on climate change on a shelf near their front window, so how on earth could they have gone on a ship for a month, churning out more carbon than the entire village put together?

Why would it be scary to encounter fairground people, or adventurers by the public toilets at night?

They can’t have done, obviously. But in any case, they were gone a month and when they came back they seemed very happy, wherever they had been.

The long vacation certainly had an air of celebration about it, which I thought might pertain to me moving on, because we don’t see eye to eye.

When the For Sale sign came down after the house didn’t sell, I felt almost apologetic, especially if they had spent a lot of money going somewhere exotic to celebrate my departure.