It’s hard to pinpoint when, exactly, kids and teens became 100 percent plugged in — fully online, all the time. But 1999 would be a decent guess, and November 1999 an especially good one, as it marked the launch of Neopets: a kid-friendly social network that combined virtual pets with discussion forums, games, and even a stock market. Neopets ultimately evolved into something magical, and an inextricable part of many a millennial’s formative years.
We no longer identify with the “little people” looking up but with the powerful people looking down. It’s a forced perspective. We’re still surveilled but this time, by the glowing lozenges we cradle in our palms, the ones that keep our heads bowed and shoulders aching.
There seem to be three notable (and, for my money, equally enjoyable) types of murder mystery. First, there’s the whodunit, in which readers scramble to catch up with clever detectives (Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Nero Wolfe) as they solve complicated crimes committed by someone who may be standing right next to them. Then there’s the whydunit, in which a humane, contemplative sleuth (best exemplified by Simenon’s Maigret) wants to understand how desperate emotions drove the culprit (and might well drive many of us) to commit such an act. Finally, there’s the why bother knowing who did it since we’re all going to die anyway and then what does it all matter really?
Britain is a country of fields and country lanes, lakes and woods – and car parks. Roughly 20,000 of them(the government stopped counting in 2014). As Gareth E Rees writes in his new book Car Park Life, there is “an assumed truth that car parks are non-places without geography, nature, social history or cultural nuance” – and he wants to correct that.
It starts with a late-night, post-pub stroll through Rees’s favourite car park, at the Morrisons supermarket in Hastings. Suddenly, he notices things he previously hadn’t seen; what he calls the “secret lives that hide in plain sight”. Elsewhere, his finds include a dried-up water channel built by Sir Francis Drake, now located between a B&Q and a KFC (Crownhill Retail Park in Plymouth – Rees’s second-favourite facility); neolithic standing stones; a dinosaur footprint; a long history of dogging and drug deals; a tree stump ominously covered in women’s shoes; and a dead body.