The First Steps From Then to Now.

I haven’t simply forgotten about the story of Our House. That’s impossible as we are all living the story as it unfolds. But things are changing a little deep down here – a small ray of light has started to reach us.

The past 19 months, since the Old House finally shook itself and got ready for a new lease of life, have been so eventfull, so compelling, and so full of drama that half the house is now on anti-depressants.

But out of all that, maybe something good is happening right now. I think we might just have taken a small step for humanity. We’ve become an Association…

And so – to go back to the beginning…

This completely gutted and re-vamped Victorian villa, which comprises 16 households, is the product of a scheme undertaken by Seaside Homes in conjunction with Council, to assimilate People Like Us into the community: rather than confining us to the ghettos that ring that community.

So the building and surrounds had to meld into the middle-class spic n’ span-ness of the area. If you listened hard, you could hear the sighs of “There goes the neighbourhood” from behind various twitching curtains the day we all moved in.

All of us lot were euphoric at our lot. Jeez! We had carpets and everything. (Most people in Council housing don’t, you know.)

So we made wry references to teething troubles when the place started leaking and flooding like a colander in the mid-Atlantic. We shrugged and were understanding when we didn’t have hot water and heating for far longer than the periods in which we actually had them.

We did get a little testy, however, as we all realized that the kitchen counter-tops were just a tad too low for appliances to be fitted under. (To this day my immediate neighbour can’t get a washing-machine into the space where it has to be plumbed, and has to lug all her clothes to and from the Laundromat.)

But we had real food for thought when one of the chippies (who has since gone to pastures new) told us that Mears, the contractors, had been told this problem when the specs. were first released. But told the workers to carry on anyway. (Meh! What would People Like Us know, anyway? We only want cookers so we can do druggy things on them while our babies squall, unattended, in the corner.)

So we just thought about this– completely unsubstantiated – piece of information and began, gradually, to swap stories. And the old one concerning the probability that if something looks, smells and tastes dodgy, it could actually be dodgy, occurred to more than one of us.

Comments

How I Turned into an Acorn.

....in the beginning. I came to England directly from China where I'd been Lecturing for 7 years. A chap who contacted me while I was there & said he was doing so because he was a friend of a friend of mine at the British Council,, suggested we work together: he had the premises for a school in Eton and I would bring over a couple of teachers & contacts from China to help teach at the school. It was all lined up & I saw this as a kind of Wonder-Job: I couldn't wait to get started. (And the plate glass windowed flat high up at tree level was all blonde wood & brushed-steel kitchen appliances.) The fourth day of being in England my putative "partner" declared bankruptcy. And I also discovered that the person whom he'd cited as a mutual friend at the British Council had never heard of him.Thus the whole reason for me being where I was, at that time, suddenly disappeared. And now I had no accommodation,

re cycling

The Brighton & Hove Circular Economy Action Plan 2020 - 2035 https://www.brighton-hove.gov.uk/business-and-trade/brighton-hove-circular-economy-action-plan-2020-2035#tab--promoting-circular-economy-activity-across-the-city This jargon-filled mission statement regarding recycling is published by Council. Full of momentary fashionable misuse of perfectly simple but unexplained concepts such as 'stakeholders' and 'circular economy', it is not aimed at local residents, small business and shop owners, those for whom English is a second language, or, importantly, the 'average' person . It is a mangled word-fest presumably aimed at other Councils, as was so much of Brighton & Hove Council's public communication under the previous administration. So as is usual with many of Councils "public" documents, two thirds of the population are confused - and bored stiff - by them; others are intimidated, and still oth

I finally Get why Alice's sister Fell Asleep in the Shade!

Yes, I do mean Alice as in Alice in Wonderland. She who, 150 years later, was to inspire plot-lines for Soaps and B-Grades with the (now) evergreen It Was All a Dream- ending for years to come. And the reason I am referring to Alice is because, until those hot days we had recently, I never had completely understood how, on a hot summer's day, anyone could really fall asleep under a tree? Not that I ever breathed this puzzlement to a soul: nothing I had ever read, seen or heard over an increasingly longer period of time, seemed to indicate there was a flaw in this reasoning. Everyone else obviously understood. As this has undoubtedly been the status quo for around three quarters of a rather peripatetic life, one sometimes one has to get a grip on asking too many questions. The line people draw between eagerly intelligent fact gathering, and total imbecility, is shorter than you may realise. But now, finally, like a bucket of iced-water over the head, I discovered that shade

Benefit Street, Brighton.

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