Middle Class Problems: Why are British homeowners obsessed with plantation shutters?

Oh, here they come. The people who paid more than half-a-million pounds for a house (we checked on Zoopla). So they gutted the place. Fine. We're all glad to see the back of that white plastic front door.

But after five months of builders we're looking forward to the job being done. And done it will be – at the point when the van arrives to fit that crowning glory of middle-class window-treatments: the plantation shutters.

What happened to this generation of homebuyers? Did they all spend too many long Bank Holidays hypnotised in front of Gone With the Wind? Or did they just take notes while wandering through west London, where nary a home lacks this characteristic touch of, er, Alabama?

No, explain the plantation-shutter fitters. It's because people these days don't want nets. Ah, I say, a dawning light in my eyes. So it's just another permutation of the endless British obsession with making sure that no one, under any circumstances, could do anything so totally catastrophic to human happiness as Look In Through Your Front Windows.

I'm thinking of organising an appeal, actually. Let us work day and night, for years if that's what it takes, until we have reached our goal: to ensure that every single little soul in these blessed islands is welcomed home by a front door painted in Kelly Hoppen's Boiled Wool. With an etched glass doorlight above the fitted doormat; walls tastefully painted in shades of taupe; and, thank the Joint Gods of Louisiana and Tennessee, plantation shutters.