Like many kids in the ’80s, I was free to wander fairly far from home and was often disappearing off to a friend’s house to play. At the tender age of six, I learned that friends from Mackenzie Road were very lucky indeed. They were the offspring of doctors, teachers, craftsmen, American and Belgian businessmen, engineers, estate agents and local entrepreneurs. Their relative affluence afforded them small luxuries that were exotic to me and doubtless started this insatiable fascination of all things foreign, original, and quirky.

A walk up their street was a lesson in house design that filled me with ideas and aspirations for the future. Far from the uniformity of the beige, terraced council blocks that the rest of us lived in, the comfortably-off occupants of these angular homes had double garages, piano lessons, an outdoor pool, double-glazed sliding doors, extra rooms, a backyard big enough for a proper game of rounders, and award ceremony-style staircases that were almost as grand as something out of Dynasty (my reference for grandeur at the time). Old friends moved out and moved on, but I still enjoy a walk up the street and past the pines up to the white rectangular house with the yellow garage door. If the For Sale sign goes up here again in the next few years I might just be tempted…