Home?

There is only one thing worse than renting a dump; and that is owning one. Fortunately, my rented flat is actually quite nice. True, the views suck, but apart from needing an extra room that I could use for storage, I have no complaints. I have even started, after nearly two years to accidentally use the work ‘home’ in unguarded moments; and this worries me. I have a financial change coming and I’m worried that just as I’m starting to relax a tiny bit, something will happen to ruin everything.

In the spirit of this, I thought that I’d try and do something to document the space in which I live. I thought that it was best to “do a Hockney” and make some photo collages and just one photo per room doesn’t really do it.

Quite a few of my friends also rent and it has been hard over the past few years and it doesn’t look like the impending Labour government are going to do enough to make things better. That said, at least we haven’t sunk our money into owning a horrible home. I know a few people now whose homes have been held hostage by borderline criminals who charge outrageous fees for leaseholds ‘management’ and some are in danger of actually losing their home as the fees are higher than many peoples rents. On top of that, some homes are just hideous and if you own a crap-hole, you have to find some other mug to buy it off you. At least with a rental, you can just pack your bags and go.

It’s really awkward when someone you know buys a horrible house. I find it uncomfortable enough when someone has made a bad fashion choice or has gone and had a fringe cut into their lovely hair but a bad house purchase can last a lifetime. I remember walking into someone’s owned home and I didn’t know what to say. It was a basement for a start and there was virtually no natural light, which must have been so depressing. It clearly had a damp problem, as do most basement dwellings. They even had slugs in the kitchen every time it rained and there was a near constant noise of footsteps thundering across the ceiling and of course there was the constant smell of damp. The thing I hated most was the lack of a bathtub. I went in the middle of summer and I could feel the walls closing in on me so god knows how much worse it must have been in the winter. Most basement flats used to either be coal cellars or for keeping food cool before the invention of the refrigerators; they were never designed to be lived in. Most Victorian and Georgian townhouses were designed for families with servants and their conventions have been less than ideal.

In a way, I think Britain is a prisoner of its own history. So many places, including the one mentioned above need to be torn down and rebuilt with zero energy homes that barely need heating. Sadly, our new builds are pretty crappy, with costs cut at every turn and it will come as no surprise that building companies are amongst the major donors to the Tory party over the past fourteen years. I am quite sure that the same companies will soon be throwing money at Labour MPs and that there will be little improvement it the quality of housing stock in the future. We are also terrified of getting rid of anything old, with so many listed properties, it can be like living in Disneyland, sure, it’s all very pretty but between the cold, the damp, the draughts and the lack of sound proofing, it’s just not practical.

Whenever anyone talks about building more homes, out comes the usual claptrap about how built up Britain already is… It may come as a shock to the average nimby that only 1.4% of the UK is built on… I think we could cope with a few more homes.

A great place to start would be the golf clubs. Keeping golf courses properly maintained takes an awful lot of water and energy but they contribute next to nothing to reducing co2 levels. They are an insult to both the environment and to the people in need of homes.

For the sake of all the young people putting off starting families I think it’s time that we dropped some of the crap that weighs Britain down and we need to shed some of our past to give future generations a chance for a better future.

Stupid Boy!

I know A LOT about the housing crisis. That’s not a brag, it’s knowledge bought with years of pain and trauma. I certainly know much more than the current Prime Minister, it seems. Particularly after seeing parts of his interview with Nick Robinson yesterday, it goes a long way to explaining how keeping a roof over one’s head has become such a struggle in Britain. Sunak’s genius idea for stopping people from haemorrhaging up to half their income on housing is to… knock a tiny amount of buying a first house. Erm, well done Rishi! Man of the people nails it again. If by ‘nailing it’ you mean crucifying a generation of young people.

Of course, it is hardly surprising that a man who is richer than the king has no concept of the ignorance he displays when it comes to the struggles of normal people and even Sunak’s first flat was paid for by a loan from his parents rather than a mortgage. It is impossible for someone that removed to comprehend the reality of Britain’s housing crisis. So let me try and explain a few things to Rishi and any other fool who cannot read the writing on the wall for the state of housing in the UK right now. Firstly, for your stupid neo liberal system to function, not everyone can be filthy rich as it relies on exploitation of human labour to function, and here’s a shocker for you Rishi, not everyone can be or even wants to be. You have said yourself, Sunak, you are ‘the numbers guy’ and it may come as a bit of a surprise to you that the world is populated by human beings, not numbers. Your system, as has been demonstrated for at least the last forty years, doesn’t work.

Not everyone can or even wants to spend years saving for a deposit to buy their home and with rents as high as they are, even those that want to, can’t save up enough for a deposit. The supply of housing is too limited. Even a financial dunce like myself was taught basic economies of scale; the more scarce something is, the higher the cost and since Thatcher introduced the ‘right to buy’ scheme, no one can save up for a deposit while living in, cheaper, social housing because they no longer exist and the private rental sector just extorts more and more money from those that need a roof over their heads meaning that getting on the property ladder becomes impossible.

And your solution Mr Sunak? Another piddling tax cut… For a clever person, you are really dumb.

Not only are you dumb but I suspect you are sociopathic too.

In this world that you inhabit, where are the old, the sick and the vulnerable? Free market economics just see people like that as expendable don’t they? Someone like myself should just crawl under a rock and die. There is another, much more simple word for what you are, isn’t there Rishi? You are evil! As are the rest of your party. It’s okay though, you will have plenty of time to reflect on this when you are sitting in your Malibu mansion come July; perhaps you could spend a bit of time on self improvement between counting your millions. I sincerely doubt you will though as I get the impression that between your expensive schooling and massive ego, you already think you are perfect.

Oh! and if you have a few hours to spare (you certainly have the money) , you could always read up on the Housing Crisis in my book, Roof Less. Available here.

Man in Multitasking shocker!

Making an art book is an odd process for me. I do a load of research, work out the paintings, paint them and by the time that I have finished them and cleaned them up in photoshop, I’ve forgotten all about them again. So now, I am having to do the writing bit which means doing all the research over again.

The good thing is, I can knit while I’m listening to art documentaries all day… It’s rather nice really and everyone I know is getting cool stuff made for their children and grandchildren.

Imagine

There is a myth that Autistic people don’t feel empathy or indeed much at all. It’s actually the exact opposite, we feel far too much and then blow a fuse.

In my case, I can’t be around certain people because they make my skin crawl; I can feel their awfulness and it makes my insides feel polluted.

Here’s a little empathy test for you… I hope you will play along.

Imagine feeling terrified for a day, a whole day with no respite, you are feeling the worst threat that you have ever felt in your whole life. Have You got that? Good!

Now times that by three hundred and sixty five. You wake up terrified, you go through every second of the day under threat. You develop all sorts of illnesses and your body falls apart on you. Can you imagine that? Have you got it yet? keep trying….

Now imagine another six months of that. Go on! you’ve done so much already…

Now your mother dies!

Oh! and one your closest friends on the exact same day.

Can you imagine that? Go on! Try really really hard!

Now cope with that grief while on the same day a complete stranger is ripping your floor up and a spoilt, rich, man-child, landlord is looking at you like shit on his shoes.

Now spend six more months in noise and terror and filth and dirt… You are still with me aren’t you? You haven’t sneaked off yet? Because I can’t; there is no escape for me from this, I have to live this.

And then after all that fear, and grief, and uncertainty and degradations and pollution you finally get out.

…

…

…

Oh! No! It’s not over yet, silly!

Now imagine a spoilt millionaire is breathing down your neck for a fortune to you and pocket change to him back that they had lent you to (part) move.

And imagine that you cannot get any of the last few years’ horrors from your mind and you relive them every day and you are just waiting to lose your home again because it doesn’t feel real or safe.

Now imagine your mother had left your inheritance in the care of your sister with learning disabilities (except mum refused to believe it and never told her) and that she has frittered away tens of thousands of your money because she is so utterly clueless and that (now ex) friend is still pestering you.

Now imagine that the only way you can make sense of all this and to give it some validation is to write and illustrate about what you experienced, why it happened and what can be done to improve matters; and imagine that that action make you feel slightly less hopeless.

Now imagine that is what you did, you spend the best part of the years writing and illustrating your nightmares and eventually got something together that was your testament to the pain and grief and misery you ploughed through, so you may at least have a tangible human account of the horrors our political climate can do to us. Are you still there? Are you coping ok? because by then I was leaking like a rusty bucket.

Now imagine that someone who could never be in that position because of wealth, privilege and sheer dumb luck tried to steal all that from you for nothing more than their own silly vanity. Can you imagine the level of hurt that I must feel because they dared try and rob me of the one good thing to come from years of pain and horror?

Now imagine what could possibly be going through their head to allow them to think that is an okay thing to do? Imagine how you could square that so that you could sleep at night or ever look anyone decent in the eye ever again. Can you do that? Good! That’s really good!

Because I cannot.

I’ve got nothing!

I am a camera

When I first visited here, maybe twenty years ago, I fell in love with the place; the eccentricity, the thrown-togetherness and all the strange little details that made the place unique. I had been a shut in for the best part of ten years on a soulless 80’s housing estate in a northern town where I was constantly glared at for being me.

Hastings started to feature in my painting back then as almost a mythical land and the paintings I made were filled with the curious characters I spotted. The art would be fun and vibrant and I met some lovely people; and then austerity happened.

My first few years’ paintings here were incredibly jolly, I’d let my imagination run away with and from me at a breakneck speed. I felt pride to be a part of this town and the locals I met accepted me for who and what I was and I went native. There were nods to the tragedies brought about by the Torys but the people shined through and many of them appeared in my art.

People liked what I did much more back then, the vibrant colours, the happy faces and when I painted someone, they were genuinely happy about it… Not so much now… There was a time where my portraits hung on walls. now they are mostly viewed through the gaps in closed fingers as the anger wells up.

When the art you make is a reflection of what you see it really isn’t your fault when you are exposed to and start creating a horror-show. If you woke up this morning with a spot on your nose or those bags are exceptionally droopy, do you smash the mirror? Is it the mirror’s fault for what it reflects?

Something changed in the mid twenty-tens; it was partly the austerity kicking in as one support network after another collapsed and partly that a certain type of people were getting a stranglehold over the town. The DFL (Down From London) is less a geographical demarcation than a group mentality. It is a group of self-serving people that often wrap themselves up in the word ‘community’ as a wolf would wrap themselves up in grandma’s bloodied shawl. They hit a critical mess(sic) around 2016 and proceeded to change the area from the, slightly run down, seaside town to which the poor, the eccentric and the creative had gravitated into their own money making and attention seeking playground.

Like many autistic people, I can spot patterns in, what to others is, random chaos; it’s a relief to know that now as it helps to explain the level of prescience that I have to events that could previously be written off as me being a nutter. There are over 80,000 people that live here and I only ever saw the same few faces and names pop up and I wondered why…

There is something wrong with some people, they have a deep seated need for attention and they need to be seen as good or clever or talented; to be seen as such but it is not important if they actually are. I think social media helped, it allowed a lot of pretty talentless and definitely unpleasant people to bind together in common cause. Echo chambers, for that is what this was, only reflect the views of those inside them. if thirty people stand in a circle, looking inwards, it’s unlikely that they will see the other seventy nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy people outside of that who are looking at them in disgust.

As I said, DFL is a state of mind and there were a few willing locals who had psychologically burnt most of the other local people in the town and found some new friends to play with. It was hard to remember at what point and with what it started. It might have been when the illuminated bike rides became co-opted into ‘events’ and the sound systems grew bigger and they thought that blocking the roads and waking up all the children by riding through the Old Town at night was big and clever and impressed people. I know exactly what state they were in and I’m not saying 😉. It could have been when one vaguely successful (basically, where else’s was anyone going to go with nothing else on?) New Years Eve party turned into a franchise and a bunch of has-beens that had retired early and used the discrepancy between (then) London prices and here to clear their mortgages and pretend they were the next New York Club Kids or the crew from Blitz and, suddenly, all the monster egos came out.

I remember a conversation with one of them at the time, saying that they neither had any comprehension of poverty or any of the damage that they were doing to the town and their reply was this, “Yes, we did move down from London and buy a big house, so what? The rich have made London expensive for us so it’s only natural that we will move down here and pass that onto someone else. That’s how capitalism works!” That was said to me by someone who now volunteers with a housing pressure group…

Once the DFLs had taken over the town and firmly wedged themselves in the arts, media and all the community groups they branched out into good causes. Well… perceived good causes… They would wave banners, spray shit up shit and, for some bizarre reason, everything had a choir for a while.

This is where my disgust fully sets in as many of the problems they claimed to be fixing were exacerbated by them in the first place.. If you spend years buying up the houses and specing them out for Londoners with the fancy kitchens and grey London paint jobs and you encourage your greedy mates down to buy everywhere that would have been bought by first time buyers and rent it back to them at a premium, if you gentrify the area and get funding money to pay yourself to tart up all the brownfield sites and put little community gardens everywhere that only you go to, then don’t be surprised when the house prices sore and the locals are priced out. This wasn’t helped by all those with chums in the London media rubbing their hands in glee as they came down for a weekend and went back with glowing reviews because all they saw was what their DFL friends chose to show them; not the drugs (well only the sort they like) not the poverty and hardship, just a narrow spectrum of exactly what they left in London and we got the name “Shoreditch on Sea”… Lucky us!

As things got grimmer the virtue signalling became more grotesque, public school ‘socialists’ not explaining how their massive house was paid for by hiring their London pad out to a chum’s film crew for three seasons of a comedy show. The one that spent their time not protesting working as a landing strip for yet more DFLs and funnelling them into all the cushy projects in return for her own ancillary services. The town grew more and more choked with nice ‘London types’ tapping away at their laptops in every cafe with wi-fi discussing funding, grants and social funds and the best way to extract money from them.

The projects got more and more grandiose, a festival for this, an event for that and pretty soon the town was a cut price Disneyland where all the locals were merely ‘colour’ and just unpaid bit-part actors sent to starve in their garrets now that the big wigs have moved to town. (but only as their weekend home of course)

I saw all this and I heard even more, like the people who let a child choke to death on sick and then did much worse than nothing, someone ‘helping’ the homeless that got the council to pay their mortgage with a very interesting little wheeze, I saw a wannabe working class hero let their partner struggle while they puffed themselves up in public. I saw the most damaged and depraved exploiting the most vulnerable. I saw greed and fraud and cruelty and infidelity and every single one of the seven deadly sins writ large…

As I said, I am a camera… my lens is wide open, I documented it; and then a lot of people got upset. They got upset because they recognised what they saw and did not like it; because they saw what I saw staring at them in the mirror first thing in those few picoseconds before the shutters go down and they start to believe their own lies again. Of course it didn’t help that someone lied about me a lot to cover up their seedy behaviour and they got their flying monkey chums to put the word out on me too. That’s the thing, while honesty is supposed to be a virtue, no one really wants to hear the truth.

Suffice to say, my art no longer sells that well. It rarely flatters and it doesn’t lie. And that’s about it for today.

I talk more about gentrification and the housing crisis in my book Roof-Less, available here.

Is this cool?

I was shocked to discover after years of housing trauma and terror that I’ve been counterfeited as well.

It wasn’t enough to get ptsd, breathing problems, see my heart problems get worse, have autistic skill regression and to have constant nightmares about no longer having a roof over my head but now I’ve got a snide, Sunday market, knock off, stealing my thunder and they can distract themselves from themselves and bathe in the warm glow of another bunch of idealistic kids and the odd (emphasis on odd) desperate adult… Who knows, they may even pull again.

I had a trip down mammary lane yesterday. No that wasn’t a spelling mistake, I was indeed looking at a bunch of tits. All waving their anti- austerity flags. Holding up their placards… making backups of evidence for posterity… It was fascinating, the sheer amount of effort, all the meetings, all that furious spraying and stencilling. I’m trying to remember back to 2017. Did austerity end? Hmmmm! Don’t think so. It’s a such a shame, all those meetings all that noise, all the pacing around behind daft buggers prattling on about nothing and looking all serious. and then… nothing.

Well, someone got their leg over, someone got all huffy and complained and a big feud kicked off, I guess that’s something.

I wonder, do people like that meet up and talk about the good old days? “Do you remember when we failed to bring the government down?” “Which time? There were so many!” Is there a revolutionaries reunited site? Missed opportunity there…

Oh! There was one thing to make it all worthwhile. A screenshot of a buy-to-let landlord holding up a sign saying “Homes for all!” Oh how we laugh! Well, I do anyway. I’ve had years of mileage out of that piece of comedy gold.

I wonder, when someone does something like that, does something click? Does a little warning bell start ringing? Whoop whoop! Irony alert! Like when someone pulls a classic Shure SM58 vocal mic off the stand and suddenly remembers about photoshop…

And then…. And then….

Nothing!

Suddenly everyone’s driving to the station, parking up and getting on a train and going one stop to look like they’ve gone to a funeral for fossil fuel while being all ecological on public transport to save the planet (as Britain’s poor just weren’t enough)…. Well, that and it was another leg over opportunity.

Was environmentalism suddenly trendy? I guess it must be. Same people, same stencils, different logo. Out with that tired old austerity virtue signalling and in with rebelling against extinction; the new, improved, virtue signalling V.1.2… Or course, it didn’t stop the short hall flights…. Lots of mini breaks… but it’s the thought that counts isn’t it? Or more the perception.

Of course! I must have looked totally old hat by then. What with my old fashioned, so last year, PIP appeal and another year of being miraculously cured by Atos. I must have seemed so behind the times selling off stuff my father bought me on eBay to pay my rent when I could have been waggling my placard before hopping on a plane for a holiday in Europe. Sooooooo uncool Chris, soooooooooo uncool!

I don’t remember anyone else suffering much with the austerity though. They all got to go on holidays and dates and days trips and dinners out and booze…. Lots of booze…and all that stuff that does terrible things to your teeth…. What was it? Oh yes sweeties! That’s what it was! Brush your teeth kids!

I don’t remember going on many dates…. Well, except that one that was 20 years younger…. Not than me though… by… who was it? Silly me ! I forgot! That was interesting though, where they lived. Just across the road from… Oh my memory is really going; something about the police constantly turning up and about another neighbour dying in agony with a brain tumour while the spoiled brat next door was just incapable of shutting up…

But just as I was thinking I was really uncool; I was the velvet loon pants and gold lame boob tube of the misery stakes and I pulled a blinder and got myself thrown out in the most dramatic and spectacular fashion and there I am, I’m up on top being super cool again. It was like the ’66 cup final of victimhood. Chris tops out the disappearing rainforest by getting his home sold because the landlady couldn’t be arsed anymore. Yay me! Go team Chris! Victimhood win! Erm, yay?

Of course, it doesn’t last for long and everyone is dropping that, oh so last week, environmental nonsense and getting themselves a rental, a Rigsby landlord and their very own section 21 and it’s, elbows out, “Out of the way Chris! We’re back and better than ever!

I can imagine the conversations, “Oh! Well, you all look very enthusiastic. You’ve got your banners? Good? Stencils?” looks down, “Oh yes! very good! Face mask? Dark glasses? Those spray paint cans… That paint is non toxic? The cans recyclable? Oh! Silly me! Of course! Environmentalism was last year wasn’t it?”

“Right! Here are your new posters and banners and the T shirts… Yes, I know, red doesn’t suit many people… maybe a bit of powder so it doesn’t reflect on your face so badly? NOOOO! not that powder! Okay, later, in private.”

“Oh! by the way, is there anyone we should avoid? Him? He looks harmless, he’s even made that book about being made homeless! Are you sure? That could be a real asset! Oh! He tells the truth does he? We can’t be having that! And he has his own mind? Yikes! And he doesn’t follow group think? Oh Dear! Can’t have that! And he points out when people are massive hypocrites… Oh, does he? You are crying rather a lot… Is this normal? Are you okay? Would you like a tissue?”

But for how long? Will the Housing Crisis as a cause celebre keep on trucking? Or will it all be dropped for something else? Maybe something a little less energetic next time? After all, isn’t everyone looking old now… I’m wonder why?

And in all that time , from austerity, to the environment to housing… I wonder if anyone is looking at my autism and thinking, “Ooh yeah! I’m gonna have me some of that sweet neurodivergent action. Whack it on a banner, get myself a puzzle piece sprayed on something, Barge their way into Chris Packham’s house for a selfie and sign Susan Boyle up for the latest neurodiverse choir. Maybe this one will get us an OBE or two; and we will definitely get a bit of funding money out of it too.

That’s what it all boils down to, to be honest; money. Not one of these people has anything close to a proper job where you work long hours and have genuine responsibilities. Why do that when you can spout crap and drink coffee on expenses?

And look at all they’ve achieved Just look! Well, erm… oh! Let’s forget about that shall we?

Talking of achievements, some of us actually have something useful to show for the last decade. You can buy my books here.

The Baby Screams (Gigs part 6)

It’s now and my best friend is sat with her grandson on her knee at the piano singing nursery rhymes. He is 9 months old and he occasionally bashes the keys enthusiastically, excited at the joyful noise that he makes. I live by the sea now; the last few years haven’t been easy and, given the political climate of Britain right now, I doubt that they will get much better soon.

Two years ago my mother died and a year before that I discovered that I was autistic and with having to fight to keep a roof over my head as well, it’s all been a bit too much of late.

Regardless of all the crap, there are good people in my life, one friend found me a new home and another lent me the money to cover the move.

Knowing about being autistic has been a godsend, it’s given me an instruction book on how my mind actually works and what I need to do (and not do) to maintain a functioning life. I wrote a book about it and one on the housing crisis too but my quirks make promoting things incredibly hard.

Understanding what I do, I know what has made my life so hard, I honestly don’t know if I can make my life much better but I can certainly stop it getting worse.

I’m watching this scene, a child and his grandma and think how precious this moment of pure joy is.

This is the best gig I’ve been to and I have plenty of options should I wish. A close friend is related to rock’n’roll royalty and a childhood friend is in one of the biggest bands in the world, I have have an old friend that is the PA for the Cure and between them all I could be in the front row of any gig I choose and I choose this one. I’m sitting on this sofa, tea in hand, knitting on lap and I’m watch these lovely people having fun. From secret gigs to the Albert Hall, this is the best venue of all.

Roof Less – The Housing Crisis in Words and Pictures

On the 31st of January 2020 my world fell apart (again). I came home on a beautifully sunny day to discover that my home of the past 13 years was being sold and I would have to move out. What followed next was two and a half of the most hellish years of my life, in the middle of which my Mother died and I was too busy dealing with an onslaught of builders , property developers and estate agents to even grieve. (Oh! and I also discovered that I was autistic). After attempts to seek help and support from the council and housing charities ultimately failed, it was my friends that saved me from years of rotting in temporary accommodation while my world slowly decayed in an overpriced lock up.

I could have left it right there, buried it with the rest of the PTSD fuel that I have experienced in Austerity Britain and tried to pick up the pieces of my shattered life and pretended that it was a bad dream. But I didn’t. I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.

On the 30th of January 2020, I was completely oblivious to just how bad Britain’s housing crisis had become and I suspect that many people are, as I was, living in blissful ignorance of that fact. I knew that I had to do something that might genuinely make a difference. Being autistic, I am not a people person, I’m not a waver of banners (and that rarely makes any difference anyway, I find) but I am a doer and a truth teller. So, I decided to tell MY truth about the housing crisis.

Much that is written about housing is dry and academic, it’s written by people on the outside looking in and is full of references to yet other works by academics. I wanted something that a lay person could understand and I wanted it to be deeply personal. After all, it doesn’t get more personal than losing your own home.

I spent the next eighteen months, reliving my worst nightmares (drawing them in point of fact) so that there was at least one first hand account of Britain’s self created housing disaster by someone that has actually experienced it first hand.

Its fifty eight pages feature over 30 illustrations, some in watercolour, some in pen, documenting all the factors that I discovered had a bearing on the housing crisis, including the obvious stuff like Thatcher’s Right To Buy scheme and the advent of the Buy-To-Let mortgage to odder things like the lack of bungalow builders.

This is the book that I actively want to go out of print; I never wanted it to be necessary in the first place. I have been in discussions with some leading figures in housing and I was hoping that the Renter’s Reform Act would have made it irrelevant before I even got it proofread. Sadly, this was not the case and it seems like it will be necessary for a lot longer.

If you want a copy, it is currently available on etsy and I will be dealing with physical stockists soon.

The myth of the ‘nice’ buy to let.

I’ve been deeply disturbed recently by the idea that’s been put about that you can be a responsible, even nice, buy-to-let landlord and, in particular, the intention by organisations supposed to help renters, that should know better, to focus instead on the evil that is the short stay holiday let.

Whilst online , short term, lets are a blight on the housing system, they are merely taking advantage of the slowness of governments worldwide to catch on and respond with effective legislation to combat the problem. Like many online business models, online holiday lets are a loophole that needs closing up immediately.

Buy to let mortgages and those that exploit them are another matter entirely. The changes to the British banking laws that forbade them to sell mortgages to other parties than the person who would actually be living in it were an act to stimulate the financial services industry and make them richer than they were already. On top of this act of naked greed, the bankers demanded that it would be much easier to market such mortgages if the punters knew that they were free to boot out tenants whenever they felt like it. Thus was born, section 21 of the Housing Act.

The section 21 or, as it’s more commonly know, ‘no fault’ eviction allows property owners to boot out their tenants with a few months notice for no other reason than ‘because’. You complain about a leak, Out! you complain about the draughty windows, Out! you support the wrong football team, Out! If they want to jack the rent price up beyond a fare level, OUT! The renter is a sitting duck with no security at all.

If someone takes out a buy-to-let mortgage they are complicit in one of the worst miscarriages of justice in recent history. make no bones about is, you are, if not actively evil, then, evil adjacent. You might as well buy cheap gold teeth from a concentration camp and make yourself some jewellery.

People are dying across the country right now because of the housing crisis, through freezing to death, starvation and suicide, money can only go so far before something has to give and, eventually, it does.

Regardless of this odious legal byproduct, if you buy a property specifically to rent out, you are no better than a ticket tout or scalper as the Americans call them. You are taking a property out of the housing market that would have been bought by someone getting on the housing ladder.

The housing market is supposed to ebb and flow depending on supply and demand and when buy-to-let landlords are part of that demand, the market keeps rising and the people who would be buying their first home are now haemorrhaging their deposit money on ever increasing rents. The sick irony being that they are paying that money to those that have stopped them getting a forever home in the process.

Telling everyone that you are a ‘nice’ buy-to-let landlord is the equivalent of being an exceptionally pretty flea or handing a concert goer their 300% mark-up concert tickets in a fancy envelope.

If you think you are one of the mythical ‘good’ landlords, sell your properties at below market rate to a housing association and go reenact ‘that’ scene in indecent proposal with the cash.

Sunday Morning

It’s a bright but cold Sunday morning by the English seaside, light is twinkling on the unbroken surface of a calm sea and the sky is a lovely shade of blue and I am thoroughly pissed off by it all. Lovely weather and weekends here mean only one thing… Out come all the arseholes.

The seafront is akin to trying to get out of a tube station in central london, waiting for a break in the human traffic to get on the promenade. You have to dodge the middle age men in lycra and the hipster joggers with their man buns bouncing up and down. Past the hated fake edgy seafront cafe that is slowly taking over half the beach as well as the walkway and blaring hideous music from its pa system. You have to change lanes as you walk, taking care not to be forced into the path of an irate exercise freak in the cycle lane. This is the second home to many of these people, leaving a family of locals to struggle in poverty, stay permanently with their parents or end up on the streets so some privilege git can get in my way on a day that the sun happens to be shining. They are nowhere to be seen when the sideways wind lifts rain directly from the sea to throw at you, but today, they are everywhere… I wish you weren’t here.