I'm a no-frills guy who's happy with a simple home, except for one thing

People are always going on about their dream homes: they’re never happy with what they’ve got. They want some mammoth seaside residence with a dozen bedrooms, two dozen bathrooms, a vertical garden down one side, a vertical pool down the other.

They want a cutting-edge Brutalist bunker built out of concrete and steel and glass and stone and wood and yarn and ribbon and oven-dried Fimo (the air-dried stuff gets a little crumbly).

They want a historic Great Gatsby mansion with a fountain out the front and a Cab Calloway jazz band in the foyer and a drunken floozy named Myrtle who’s always hanging around the parlour.

But not me, I don’t dream of that stuff. I’m a humble, no-frills, low-key guy who’s happy with a simple home. Just somewhere with a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, and – if it doesn’t sound too indulgent – a roof. In fact the only thing I’ve ever dreamed of, the only thing I’ve ever pined for, is … a slightly nicer driveway.

My driveway is not so good. It’s a scungy one-car space with a bunch of bins down the end, which I use as my “night-parking impact-buffer”. There’s an old car tyre leaning against the fence: I call it my STD (Solitary Tyre in Driveway), because I can’t get rid of it and I have no idea how I got it.

The brick paving is awful: I did it myself, laying red bricks in a herringbone-pattern, but I got confused, then I ran out of bricks, and now it looks like a giant game of Tetris that I lost. And growing between all those badly-paved bricks are thousands of weeds, giant un-yank-out-able ones, living on nothing but the oil leaking out of the bottom of a 2007 Subaru.

So, while others dream of dream homes, I dream of a dream driveway. Something with slightly nicer paving: maybe that stamped-concrete effect that’s supposed to look like tiles, but it doesn’t, it looks like stamped concrete – but who cares, no weeds can get through.

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Also, I wouldn’t mind a slightly wider driveway, big enough for two cars – I don’t have two cars, but it’d be nice to park my car sideways now and then, just for a change.

Actually, if we’re going to go to all the trouble widening the driveway, maybe we could make it U-shaped so I can drive straight in and out – I hate backing out of my driveway, I’m always terrified of running over a neighbour’s kid, and then I won’t get invited to the street Christmas party, which would be sad.

You know what? If I’m getting a U-shaped driveway, I kind of need a fountain in the middle for symmetry – just a small gilded art-deco one, very unassuming.

And now that I think about it, a 1929 Duesenberg Model J jalopy would look smashing parked beside my fountain.

And if I’m getting a fountain and jalopy, I might as well get a Great Gatsby mansion to complete the package, old sport. But a humble no-frills low-key mansion. With a humble no-frills low-key floozy named Myrtle.