It’s a beautiful day! That should be a good thing shouldn’t it?
Well, if you are autistic and you live in an urbanised (and gentrified) seaside town and it is the weekend, it really isn’t. I will be trapped in my own home today and that ain’t fun. The views from my windows are grim, high density housing squeezed in amongst Victoriana and lovely weather means cars with wound down windows, not great if they are replete with mobile pa systems in place of a car stereo; and this self imprisonment is my best option.
It will be hell out there today, Sunday in Shoreditch by the sea, the seafront cafe blaring music and spreading its furniture along the lower prom and beach like a tacky dayglo tumour, the upper promenade will be a rat run for cyclists, badly trained dogs and families walking four abreast so you are forced into the cycle lane and get abuse hurled at you… and then there are the motorbikes. If I were to have a tattoo, it would read “L’enfer c’est les autres!” Hell is indeed other people.
It is actually painful for someone with autism to be exposed to all this, not only does it hurt our ears and cause anxiety, panic and trigger meltdowns and shutdowns, it has a knock on effect for days to come.
Today won’t be wasted though, I am aware of the damage this can all cause and regretfully take precautions but it is important to acknowledge how disabling it all is. In Britain today, my own government is actively trying to belittle those with problems that are “just in our heads” and are laying out a strategy to rob us of vitally needed support. Because a bunch of greedy, dead behind the eyes and dead inside the soul tories want someone to blame, they have picked those with ‘invisible’ conditions as the perfect diversion.
I lead an incredibly limited life and while I make up for it in terms of creativity and a better than average ability to express myself due to hyperlexia, it is still necessary to acknowledge that the world I live in disables me. I only wish the government and the kind of bovine minded fools that read the right wing press would at least leave the likes of me alone.
Tomorrow will be better as most people will be back at work but it’s also expected to rain too… Erm, yay?
You can read more about my experiences of autism here.
I just came back from an aborted walk along the sea front because at the end of April, at midday, it was seven degrees and blowing a gale… and in my local park, people were living in tents. If I turned the camera around from the above photo you would see a line of fancy cars, Teslas, Range Rovers and even a four by four Porsche, many of these also had personalised number plates too. Behind the cars, many of the buildings had scaffolding up them, ready for a coat of the ubiquitous heritage paint that marks yet another house being gentrified and removed from the budgets of those that grew up here who live in slums on the edges of town and now in tents in the park.
This is what this nation has become, a polarised land of the obscenely wealthy and the shamefully poor.
The four by fours are telling too; the rich’s solution to the crumbling roads and infrastructure. Why fix the country with fair taxes when you can buy yourself out of any inconvenience this society has caused?
Five years ago today the Renter’s Reform Bill was introduced to Parliament with a view to sorting out the utter carnage that is the United Kingdom’s rental sector. It’s primary focus was to redress the power imbalance favouring landlords that happened in 1997 when section 21 of the Housing Act became law… The infamous ‘No fault’ evection legislation brought in at the request of the banking sector so that borrowers could take out mortgages on properties that they planned to rent out, safe in the knowledge that a tenant could be thrown out within a couple of months for no other reason than ‘because’.
You can do a lot in five years, you can conceive and bring a child to the point that you could have a vaguely intelligible conversation with them, you can see a blockbuster movie from an idea on a scrap of paper, through castings, pre production, filming, editing, post-productions, soundtrack scoring, to a premier, you can create a ‘triple A’ video game, build a cruise liner and all manner of things. In the last five years I have made at least 250 artworks, knitted about forty garments, moved house, lost a mother, lost a friend, gained a great nephew, made four books and am currently finalising a fifth and, in all this time, what has happened with this parliamentary bill? Bugger all, that’s what!
It is no secret that at least a third of the ruling political party are landlords, from the Chancellor of the Exchequer down to lowly back benchers, the Tories are coining it in off the labour of others in the form of rental income, as are many of their voters; why would a turkey vote for Christmas? The Renter’s Reform Bill has met nothing but obstacles at every stage of its slow progress through Westminster and it’s been watered down at every opportunity to the point that it is hardly worth bothering with and it is now reaching the stage where a new government will come in and it will just vanish along with any other unpassed legislation.
Will the Tories mark two (What is left of the Labour Party) do anything for renters? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that they are clearly in the pay of big business and they seem to be focused on meeting the needs of the highest bidder rather than the most needy and I don’t see them being any different in this manner than any other.
Today is not a day for candles and cake, five years of poverty, fear and vulnerability is not a cause for celebration… let’s hope we aren’t in the same boat in five more.
You can buy Roof-Less my illustrated book about the housing crisis here.
It’s been a rough couple of months; It’s been a rough decade, truth be told. This, though, is something I can’t really solve (although someone pointed out a pattern to my current problem that might solve itself, given time) Anyway, one thing you learn after going through years of trauma and that is, if you want to keep your friends, you need to make use of mental health services from time to time. And so, I had to make a couple of phone calls today. I spoke to one service and it seems that I’ve fallen off their ‘books’ because they hadn’t seen or heard from me for a while…
There used to be a time where if you’d been quiet, you would get checked on, you’d get a phone call to see if you were okay. Now, it’s seen as a reason to put your file in cold storage and bump you off the live cases system… (Probably not the best turn of phrase, thinking about it.) Part of the problem is that many support services now want to see groups of people at the same time which is absolutely useless if you are autistic. Neurotypicals feel better for socialising and group activities are viewed as beneficial for their mental health, for autistic people, it can have the exact opposite affect.
What I need is someone I can talk to with whom I don’t have to regurgitate all my history of horrendous occurrences and all the reasons why what has just happened has knocked me off my perch. (one of) The problems with someone like me is if you have spoken to enough mental health professionals, you spot when some rookie is using their newly acquired skills on you; I don’t need someone to repeat back exactly what I’ve told them in a slightly different order. Sometimes you need someone to acknowledge how awful things are, sometimes you need someone to make you laugh and today I just needed a neutral party to acknowledge that I’m not going mad and a situation has been as awful as I’m thinking it was / is. And yes, the situation is awful, the person causing it is out of order and I am right to have been upset by it.
I have been gaslit in the past, including by the person causing me problems right now and once that has happened to you, you end up being unsure of everything; I needed a second opinion and I got it.
So after finding out that I’d been put in suspended animation at the mental health drop in, I thought I’d better get a proper check up from the neck up and book myself a mental health review at the doctors, only to discover that I have to now ring back tomorrow at 8am for a pre-booked appointment in two weeks time… There is even a mad scramble to talk to the mental health nurse it seems.
The thing I have come to realise since my autism diagnosis is that I would be perfectly fine if I didn’t have to engage with this world or indeed, the people in it and it’s other people’s untreated mental health problems that cause me more trouble than anything else. Whether it’s the sociopathy, psychopathy or narcism of politicians or the borderline personality disorder and covert narcissism of people closer to home, it’s their unwillingness to get themselves treated that causes no end of hurt to myself and everyone else.
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!
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.
Fun fact, Ray Winstone, star of the film Scum used to cuddle me as a newborn baby. He went to school with my much older sister.
How many times can we legitimately say the that the Tories ‘sank to an all time low’ now and for it to mean something?
Yesterday’s latest wheeze was to compare the Tories being called ‘scum’ to Tory donor Frank Hester’s racist comments about MP Diane Abbott and suggesting that she needed to be shot.
Thanks to Iain Duncan Smith, aka Dr Death, and his twice failed attempt to get two protesters prosecuted for calling him ‘Tory scum’, we have a legal precedent. Tories are indeed scum. Indeed the name Tory is a mutation of the Gaelic word Torai, meaning thief or bandit, a perfect description for those guilty of the most heinous corruption and damage to the United Kingdom.
In a lot of ways, scum is quite mild as it means ‘a layer of dirt that floats to the top’; it’s a fairly accurate of the parasitical nature of the rich in general. I’m always mindful of a line that Phil Moorhouse of the Youtube channels ‘a different bias’ and “Labour Social” uses and the Conservative party. “When the Tories get into power, people die.” and that is the harsh reality of the situation.
Let’s be real about this, however nice your local Tory MP might be to you, and I’ve spoken to a few nice ones myself over the years, they will vote for policies that will either directly or indirectly kill someone to help rich people keep more of their wealth. You vote, Tory, you are complicit in that. Sorry if that seems harsh, but it’s the truth.
To be fair though, I’m looking at Rachel Reeve, Keir Starmer and Liz Kendel right now and unless they face facts and admit that Britain needs a massive redistribution of wealth, they will get people killed too and I shall be calling them scum too soon enough.
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.
Last night the inappropriately named Home Secretary, James Clevery, came out with a statement that the Pro Palestinian protests need to stop and that there needs to be a police crackdown on the protesters. He was swiftly backed by, our second unelected Prime Minister in a row, Rishi Sunak. Apparently, some MPs are feeling afraid…
Now where do I start?
Apparently, a couple of MP’s have taken to wearing stab proof vests in public because they are in fear of their very lives… To these I say, “Welcome to my world, sunshine!”
According to the most recent estimates, adding up, the suicides, the deaths through exposure, starvation and deaths through minor illnesses that have escalated to deadly infections because of neglect because vulnerable people aren’t being properly cared for, around a million people have died in the uk due to the Conservative governments austerity policies since 2010. It should be the top story on every news report, every day, “Today, the tory party killed another 274 people!” If every day, half of the tory MPs walked out into the street and stabbed a random stranger, how long would that be tolerated? A day? Two? But because their victims are an amorphous blob of, to them, unimportant poor people, no one cares.
Frank Herbert’s Dune comes to mind, the way to get past the personal force fields people wear is to attack them with a slow blade that slips in through the kinetic defences. “The slow blade penetrates the shield!“
The slow blade came for me 2011 when I was robbed of help for a year by a sham medical company and it came for me again in 2013 but I managed to dodge it faster that time, aware as I was what was coming. The knife came again in 2018 in a slightly different form. Each time the blade came for me it caused wounds and scars, existing health conditions worsened and psychological trauma increased, but I survived; at least, for now.
Austerity is the ‘slow blade’ of Grate Britain’s poor and vulnerable and it will feature in next week’s budget, as it has in every other one over the past fourteen years. More cuts will be made and more blame will be pointed in the direction on the UK’s poorest as the slow blade of Austerity comes for us once more. I wait and see if, this time, the wound will be fatal.
There are few things as despicable, I find, as rich people trying to pretend that they are poor or somehow still one of us despite their wealth.
Being poor is vile, you feel constantly vulnerable, you can never relax for a single second, every letter landing on the doormat has the weight of a lead lined coffin and every mystery phone call is the arming system of an atomic bomb clicking on.
If I had my own home and a regular income without more heavy lifting than the odd cup of coffee or a pen, the last thing I’d want to do is pick up the rotten horse dung of poverty and rub it on me until the stench claws at my nostrils.
When poor people attend a meeting, they wear their best clothes. Why? Because they never, ever, want to be seen as being poor. That respect is everything and yet they are mocked by the wealthy seeing charity shop clothes as a choice. Wealth isn’t a choice we can make, because, if we could, we all would, instantly.
Poverty eats away at you, it pockmarks your lungs, brittles your bones and smashes your teeth. It eats away at every dream and every hope evaporates and turns to black mould when it hits the cold walls that close in on us.
I don’t want it, they don’t want it, so why, on earth, would anyone else?
Is it ignorance? Is it guilt? Is it shame? Is it contempt that brings them here?
Or is it some sick and twisted idea that the poor actually need them?
Whatever it is, whatever garbage they are selling, they can keep it.
We don’t want it and we don’t want them,
When the rich make themselves feel better at the expense of people like, myself, they might as well crack open our jaws and steal that gold tooth left from when the welfare state last worked.
Do not think that we like them, just because they act all matey around us, we keep our last shred of dignity by not telling them to go to hell.
Christopher Hoggins Artist 
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