http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/opinion/sunday/hell-is-other-britons.html?ref=opinionHell Is Other Britons
By TOM WHYMAN JUNE 25, 2016
ALRESFORD, England — IN summer, the land around Alresford, the rural market town in the south of England where I grew up, blooms in a way that seems almost terrible.
My parents’ house stands in the middle of a 1980s housing development of suburban ugliness, all detached red-brick blocks and generously proportioned driveways. There is not supposed to be nature in the suburbs, but in Alresford (pronounced AWLS-fud) nature is still powerful — every year the grass at the top of the road will suddenly grow tall, and fill with wildflowers, hedgehogs, little birds of delirious and unusual colors. Every morning the birds wake you up at 4 with a chorus of hoots and trills.
But no sooner has nature started to assert itself than the grass gets cut back and the mornings return to being silent and still. Alresford becomes human again. Human in a normal, provincial English way, in a place where people own homes, save for pensions and vote to leave the European Union — as 55 percent of the population of Hampshire county did on Thursday.
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