Common Ground

Ashley is a disaffected geography teacher. Jay is a printer in a community arts project. Their house, like their street, is crumbling around them. "The cracks are everywhere", writes Ashley, "wide enough to swallow a man, or woman, or both at once. Providing neither is pregnant, of course...". But Jay is pregnant and not about to be swallowed up by motherhood. As her pregnancy develops, she becomes increasingly active in a campaign to block a new highway on the outskirts of their city that will pass through the ancient woodland of Hogslea Common. Ashley begins a correspondence with his brother, Douglas, who is backpacking around the world. In response to Douglas's dispatches from exotic places, Ashley confesses the joys, pains, and comic failings of his newfound domesticity. In the end, Ashley is forced to choose whether to adopt the values of his parents or, like his brother, abandon a society he and Jay find increasingly precarious and menacing.