If, after thirty years' absence, you come off the A12 at the A414, and drive eastwards towards Danbury, you will be struck by the quantity of trees. It's very green here, the wider roads and the flat horizon concealed by mostly young trees planted close in to the road. Even the familiar houses and landscapes concealed by the trees.
    A one-word policy decision by the road-builders or the council: trees.
    As if everything new is to be hidden by trees, with collateral concealment of the old not considered.
    But Danbury.
    The Bell has a big italic B that wasn't there on its roof-line when it was just the pub, and there's a black turtle in the pond at Eve's Corner. The main road through is busy. But the yacht chandler is still there, The Griffin as well, and the church and churchyard haven't changed. Take one of the first lefts after you pass the village sign and state-of-the-art road maintenance ceases to be an issue within a few yards - the trees are old, the houses are visible behind their hedges, and the road surface has character.
    Find your way to the main bridleway through Lingwood Common, and the new world asserts itself for just a moment - there's a sign bearing a lengthy explanation of what's being done to help nature along. But if these are the woods where you grew up, what you will really notice is that all the old ways, the secret paths and hiding places, are all still here. The head-high bracken has been mostly replaced by waist-high new trees, but if you were younger and smaller, you could push a tunnel through this foliage just as easily.
    You had to be lifted into this tree once, to start climbing.
  

So what I think is, we need to be careful about the forced classification of people. We've had serfs, peasants, working class, middle class, "We, The People", the proletariat, capitalists, hard-working families, immigrants, minorities, I heard "young British Muslim men" discussed the other day, the unemployed, people who say "As a writer, I..." or "As a woman, I...", and many other classifications into which it is often convenient to push people. The poor. The voters. The fans. The public. Minorities.
    There's a danger here that we lose sight of the individuality of individuals. We talk about "the middle class" as though they're out there somewhere hogging public services. All of them, simultaneously. We talk about "immigrants" without necessarily thinking about the great variety of pressures that brought them here. It's convenient and no doubt it's necessary. But anything done in the name of "The People" that excludes "This Specific Person", whoever that might be, is problematic, surely?
    Whether we're running High Speed [insert number here] through somebody's back garden because it will "create jobs" (incredible, the confidence with which that outcome is promised), or embarking on some other social-engineering project in the name of (say) the people or the unemployed or young British Muslim men, we could usefully start by reflecting on (1) whether we've actually consulted any of them, and more importantly on (2) whether, if we did get them all together in a room and ask them first, they'd agree on an answer.
    Impossible to do right by everybody, but necessary not to forget that there are individuals, with the same human rights as everybody else, who don't fit neatly into any of the classifications. Once their rights are ignored in the cause of the majority, we're in danger of resorting to cliches: it's a slippery slope, et cetera. The term "human rights", since I seem to have started using it, is meaningless unless it refers to the individual as much as, if not more than, the group.