The Red Dragon

We primates are social animals. We need interaction with others in order to maintain our sanity. People who shun other people are often berated or feared. The old hermit, living at the edge of town. Most of us like the company of the majority of our friends and families, neighbors and co-workers.

But we never stop to think much about the groups of people we regularly hang out with...familiarity breeds complacency I guess. Think about the people you see in an average day. If you are American, you may be spending most of your time with people you work with during the day and maybe your small family in the evenings. You may occasionally see friends on weeknights or weekends. And a rotating roster of people at stores that you don't know. And once or twice a year you may come in contact with a larger group of family and friends to celebrate holidays. But for the most part, it's co-workers and your nuclear family. And if you don't work outside the home, you are exposed to very few people during the course of a day.

A cat might like that, but humans, like our canine buddies...we most decidedly don't. That's called isolation and mean people use it as a torture device for a reason.

Now think about how different your life would be if you lived somewhere else. England for example. Longstanding tradition has endowed the average Brit with a device that gives them a day containing far more interaction with others. That device is the neighborhood pub.

At just about every street corner there is a place where families gather in the evenings to be together. Pubs tend to serve a neighborhood, that is, you are there with people you know, not a bunch of strangers like you would find at a bar in the US. And the whole family is invited, from the smallest kids to the family dog. Leash optional.

Imagine how different your life would be if you had a whole new slew of acquaintances that you saw every day. Talking, catching up on gossip, eating together, laughing together. And since they are your neighbors, you would get, as a bonus, a huge support network of friends that all live close to you. This is a huge social structure that we simply don't have here. For us, even if we have a block party and invite all our neighbors, it is a rare event and the interactions are on a more formal level. You don't really get to know them.

Don't get all excited and try to open a neighborhood pub here, our zoning laws are very strict and regimented, and specifically designed NOT to allow things like this. Just as the American invention of the subdivision dictated that you must drive everywhere you need to go (your grocery store is at least a mile away, placed safely in a non-residential zone far from houses), it has also cut you off from a big and friendly bunch of people who would love to know you, and who happen to live on your block.