ganching

Grenfell Tower

The terrible fire at Grenfell Tower has dominated my working life for the last two weeks.  I work in the public sector and I know about social housing.  In my youth I was a housing officer and for more years than I care to admit to I've been involved in refurbishing council housing, demolishing council housing and building new council housing.  I've worked on projects that have won prestigious prizes and I've commissioned leading architects as well as working with City lawyers, planners and property developers.   Unlike many of the people I work with though I am familiar with the lives of people who are council tenants.  Half the girls in my class at school lived in council housing and my granny and several of my mother's sisters lived on estates.  As a child I felt quite jealous of my cousins who lived in the town - it was in fact a tiny village - with their access to swings and slides and other children to play with in the street.

 My granny finally got a council house sometime in the 1960s having spent years moving from one rented house to another.  I remember that house with its living room dominated by an oversized, ornate sideboard and its  smell of roast beef and cigarettes.  The house had a front and back garden and my sister in Kerry has a forsythia which came from a cutting from a shrub that was in my granny's front garden.

I have always treated the tenants I've met with respect.  Mostly they are just like everyone else except many of them have less money and some have more obvious problems than middle-class people.  When I was a child living in a Council house didn't mean there was anything wrong with your family.  Usually it just meant you were working class and had kids.  My best friend at school lived in a house which was by today's standards incredibly overcrowded. Despite this most of her siblings went to university and became doctors and dentists.  In Britain though over the last 30 years it has got harder and harder to access Council housing and only vulnerable people are eligible and possibly, as a result of this, there has been a stigmatisation of tenants.  The Tory press depict them as wasters and scroungers and run stories about how much benefit they get, omitting to say that the majority of it goes directly to their landlord.  About a third of all social housing in London is actually privately owned and much of it is rented out.  In Grenfell Tower the average private rent for a two bedroom flat was around £1,800 a month.

Something else that has changed is people's attitude to Council tenants.  The housing crisis in London means that many, many young people from wealthy backgrounds and with good jobs cannot afford to buy.  They can afford to rent, generally quite decent places, but they have to spend a disproportionate amount of their income on housing.  There is criticism of the fact that council tenants live in expensive parts of London and don't have to pay high rents.  There is a belief that they have subsidised rent which is not the case.  They pay less rent compared to private renters because their landlords aren't making a profit.   Grenfell Tower is less than ten minute's walk from Ladbroke Grove tube station.  It is now a very desirable location in which to live.  Many of the people in the block had jobs.  They will have been nurses, cleaners, care workers, shop assistants, call centre workers, transport workers, the type of jobs that are critical in making a city work and where it really helps if people live locally.

I understand how Local Authorities work, and how decisions get made.  I know about procurement processes, performance specifications, value engineering and the role of Building Control.  I now know quite a lot about cladding. I also know that not everything the residents say is necessarily exactly the truth.  There is nothing simple about this.  I don't believe that any individual deliberately specified something that they knew to be a risk but equally I guess that many of the people involved in this didn't have at the forefront of their minds that they were dealing with real people who experience everything in exactly the same way as they do.  Those residents hated not being listened to and lacking autonomy in their own lives and how their homes were managed.

Today I went and looked at Grenfell Tower and it was I think it was the most horrific thing I have ever witnessed in my life, a huge, hulking crematoria looming over the neighbouring streets and the local primary school.  I wept as I looked at it and felt ashamed to live in a country where such a thing could have happened and then I began to feel really angry.

There is something structurally wrong with how we live in London.  Over the past thirty years there has been a demonisation of the poor and a complete denial of the terrible disadvantages that some people experience.  The press has encouraged this as well as whipping up a hatred of immigrants and especially muslims.  Many of our politicians have gone along with this,  and neither the Tories nor the Blairite wing of the Labour party have done anything to counter it.  Austerity led to Brexit and to some extent has allowed a culture to grow up where the majority of people couldn't care less about people who live in tower blocks and not out of choice. At best they think they are scroungers and at worst they believe they should be moved out and other more deserving people allowed to live there.  (This view was put forward by the architect who now runs Zaha Hadid's practice.)

While I don't think anyone deliberately decided to put the people in that block at risk I believe that the Council didn't care about them, that the staff were probably overworked and unable to cope following round after round of cuts and that central Government have encouraged people to believe that health and safety is a joke and an infringement of the private sector's right to do whatever they like.

I really hope that this is a catalyst for change but I don't know if it will be.  Decent housing should be a right in what is still a very wealthy country.  Everyone, irrespective of income, should have somewhere to live that they can afford and that they can feel proud of and if this country managed to build thousands and thousands of home in the aftermath of the second world war surely we can do it today.  

I would urge everyone to think very carefully about this when you next have an opportunity to vote.  There are local elections in May next year and who knows when the next General Election will be, hopefully sooner rather than later.  If you would like to donate money to the victims of Grenfell Tower the British Red Cross are taking donations.  

 

The Weekend Starts Here

That's me done with work for the week.  I have three days before I have to go back to the office. Having worked two Saturdays in a row I was due an extra day off.  My flat is a complete mess and I haven't done anything sociable for what seems like weeks.  I did go to a ward meeting tonight which I suppose was a bit sociable.  Traybake went too and it occurred to me that being a member of a political party  is a little like being a member of a  church where you have to pretend to like everyone and sit in halls listening to people talk in a way that is as likely to be tedious as it is inspiring.

I have no idea what I'll be doing on my days off.

Things I am considering:

• Going to Portobello market
• Visiting the V&A to see the new extension
• Walking somewhere in the country
• Buying some plants
• Disposing of several items of clothing
• Booking a weekend away somewhere
• Sleeping at least seven hours every night
• Going to the cinema

It would be quite possible to do all of these things.  I really do have to do quite a lot of housework as we are now in full clothes moths season and the only way to keep them under control is to do radical hoovering that or burn your house down.

Wednesday Pluses And Minuses

Minuses

• It is absolutely freezing in London tonight and  I have been considering switching the heating on
• I went to a conference today and it was very boring
• The Government voted today against increasing the pay of public sector workers
• It is only Wednesday

Pluses

• I am not going to work on Friday so it is practically the weekend
• Soon the public sector workers will be voting out the Government - it is unbelievable in light of the recent fire and terrorist attacks that they continue to impose austerity on services like the fire brigade and the police
• While the conference was boring there were lots of interesting people there and I saw quite a few people I was really delighted to talk to
• I succumbed and put the heating on for half an hour so it is not quite so icy now

Season Of Mists

It is hard to believe that this time last week we were sweltering in temperatures of 30C+.  Today it poured with rain and it was positively autumnal.  This photograph was taken around 8 o'clock this evening when I was walking home from the bus stop.  Leaf fall hasn't started, well apart from on the horse chestnut trees which around here appear to all have some kind of disease, but it is very cool and windy and not very nice out there.

I had a much less frantic day at work although I had to do something very unpleasant involving looking up an  article in the Daily Mail.  It really is a filthy rag and I don't know why anyone ever looks at it.  In Titter of Wit Street we are all natural Guardian readers even though none of us actually buy it anymore apart from me on a Saturday.  (Traybake now reads the Financial Times on a Saturday because you can no longer buy The Irish Times on this side of the water.  According to TB it helps him work out what the enemy is thinking.)  During the week I generally look at The Guardian online while eating my lunch at my desk.  I often read articles in the Telegraph or other right wing papers if links are provided on Twitter.  I can even bear to look at the Evening Standard occasionally although since Osborne became editor I try not to.  The Daily Fail though is a paper that I never normally look at and I don't follow anyone who ever links to it.  Depressingly though I appear to be in a minority.

Tomorrow I am having a day out of the office.  

My Day At Work

This morning at work I sent the following email to someone:

I think we are going to be asked if we have done A.........

I got the following reply:

I don't think it's necessary and anyway they will be inundated with people asking for A and won't have time to do it.

I replied:

I still think you should do A so at least when we're asked we can say it's happening...

I didn't receive any reply to this.

At around five when I was considering leaving early I got a telephone call from my colleague in the press office.  He wanted to know if A had happened because the BBC were on the phone asking about it.

I am so tired this evening that I can hardly stay up to watch on the news the coverage of Theresa Maybe doing her historical deal with the awful, money-grabbing Arlene Foster.

Dead Centre

I have had a few very stressful few days at work and have been sleeping quite badly.  I woke up this morning just after five and couldn't get back to sleep again.  Despite or because of this I didn't do anything for most of the day.  Around four o'clock I decided I needed to at least go outside for a bit.  I tried to  persuade Traybake to come with me but he was too busy working so I headed off on my own.  The sky was quite dark, threatening rain, but I didn't bother bringing an umbrella. 

I wandered up the street to the park.  It was full of typical south London types; 70 year olds playing bowls, young parents hanging around the playgrounds, dog walkers walking dogs and football players shouting at each other.  At the weekends there are always one or two groups of people having parties.  They string some bunting between the trees, set up a small trestle table, organise some children's games and always appear to be having tons of fun.  I love our local park.

I carried on through the park up the hill and down again and then crossed the road and went into the cemetery which I have only visited a couple of times before despite it being only a 20 minute walk away.  It is a Victorian cemetery which is still used but I'm guessing very few people have been buried there since the second world war.  It is very overgrown and was remarkably quiet when I was in there.  I wandered up and down the paths pushing my way through shoulder high cow parsley disturbed only by the noise of blackbirds rustling in the undergrowth and green parakeets chattering as they flitted from tree to tree.  A couple of graves were completely covered in wild flowers and there were fuchsia-coloured sweetpeas everywhere, which had self-seeded and were growing like weeds.  I considered picking some to bring home but decided against it.  There were lots of butterflies, pale Blues and  chocolate brown ones which I later identified as Ringlets.  The sun had come out and it was so peaceful; I didn't see a soul the whole time I was in there.  For the first time in about five days I began to feel quite relaxed.  

After taking several photographs I started to walk back to where I thought the gate was.  It occurred to me that I wouldn't like to spend the night in a graveyard and I remembered hearing a story about how some of the Hammer horror films had been filmed in this very cemetery.  I found the gate within a couple of minutes.  It was padlocked shut.  I will Draw A Veil over the next ten minutes but it involved hyperventilation, whimpering and the searching for a part of the wall that I could clamber over.  I remembered there was another gate and made my way there praying that it would be open.  It was locked.  However there was a young family on the same side of the gate as me and much to my relief they had a key to the gate.  They lived in the gatehouse and explained that the cemetery shuts at 4.30. They let me out.

I made my way back to the park where I had to buy myself a large ice cream in order to calm my nerves.

I am not looking forward to going to work tomorrow.

The Saturdays

Normal people on a Saturday in June do all kind of enjoyable things.  This morning the train was packed with people dressed up to the nines.  All the women were wearing frocks and hats or fascinators. (There is a rule that any woman wearing a fascinator is herself far from fascinating.)  This crowd who my mother would have referred to as a Rough Crowd were on their way to Ascot.  When I saw them, just after nine, I was on my way to work.

This crowd seemed to be much more refined.  They were standing outside Islington Town Hall waiting for the bride to emerge.  I am guessing that at their wedding venue they had flowers in jam pots and somebody probably played the ukulele before the evening was over.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I literally fell asleep in the middle of writing this.

Best Laid Plans

Tonight I was due to meet Traybake and Soda Farl in a church crypt to eat apple crumble and custard and then we were going to go to another church to listen to some Brahms.  Instead I ended up staying at work until just after 8.  Over the past few days we have been dealing with a mega problem that is not unrelated to a very big news story.  This is why I am also going to work tomorrow.  I am very tired and very fed up.

I did meet a member of the public tonight who was very sweet and we discovered within about 3 minutes of talking to each other that we are both learning to speak Irish by using Duolingo.  I made a joke about turtles and he got it as only someone learning Irish via Duolingo would. This was the highlight of my evening.

I do not know what the Irish word is for honeysuckle but I have only just downloaded my photos from my trip to Ireland so here is a photograph of a scenic stonewall and fence on the Dingle peninsula. 

Thursday

 

I had the most horrid day at work. I sent my first email before 7.00 a.m. and at 7.00 p.m. as I walking to the station I was still on the phone to my manager.  As I was talking to him I watched a rat go in and out of a hole in a wall.  The only good thing about today was that it was less hot.

I'm now watching the news and frankly it feels as if I am still at work. Over the past week I have become very, very conscious about fire safety.  This morning I was five minutes away from the house when I suddenly stopped to ask myself whether I had switched off the iron.  I knew I had but I still turned round and went back to the flat to double check.  I know this is anxiety and I don't like it very much.

Tomorrow is Friday and I have a ticket to go to a classical music concert which is a very pleasant way to end the working week.

 

In Which I Meet A Famous Person

It was another hot, hot day in London.  The temperature reached 33C.  At lunch time a few of sat under a tree and then we went for a little walk.  I was minus a hat and suncream so this was a very bad idea, it was also my idea.

Immediately after work I headed to the West End.  I had been invited to a work related do in the Savoy.  I arrived early and sat in the front reception area and watched the people coming and going.  The dress code in the Savoy is remarkably casual.  Some people looked like they had taken a wrong turning on the way to Glastonbury while others were in dinner jackets.  I was wearing my "good dress" which is only six years old so didn't feel too out of place.  After about ten minutes it dawned on me that no-one else looked like they were going to the same event as me.  I checked with reception and realised I was in the wrong building.

When I found the right building there were lots of people milling around.  In the lift two separate people spoke to me, an old woman and an old man.   I didn't recognise either of them and then they reminded me who they were and it struck me that if they look ancient then so do I - both these people are younger than me. The other thing I realised is that I am exceptionally bad at recognising people or remembering names.

Anyway at least I recognised the people I was due to meet.  

I cannot tell you who the famous person was who I  met but he told quite a good joke involving a mix-up between the Commodores and the Communards.

When I left just after ten the streets around Charing Cross were still packed with people.  London feels very odd when the weather is like this as if it has suddenly become a foreign city where people sit around in public places late at night and no-one wears coats.

I have a very busy day at work tomorrow.