Housing in the UK is broken. It’s either too expensive to buy, too expensive to privately rent, or, if affordable, in a bad state of disrepair. My flat falls into the latter category. My situation I live in social housing, in a small housing cooperative managed by a large housing cooperative. I have written before about how important and transformational having a home has been for me, but it has not come without struggle. Struggle to obtain it (a different story), and struggle with the landlord over disrepair for the entire time I have lived here. I obtained the keys in February 2021 and immediately reported signs of water ingress in the hallway. I followed this up the next day with photos of how the paint I applied had literally rolled off the walls due to water saturation and damp. The landlord’s managing agent acknowledged the report and said they had
One of the reasons I don’t do much more than look at the headlines of mainstream media, is because when I read the actual articles, I usually get enraged by the logical incoherence of the article in the context of the overall narrative framing of the moment. For instance, we have the tragic story of Awaab Ishak, who, a coroner has determined, died as a result of black mould in his home. Black mould is a serious health hazard, especially to people with respiratory conditions, and plagues a great many (rental) properties in the UK. One of the properties I lived in was so damp that maggots had somehow gotten into the foundations of the flat and literally ate their way out of the walls. Yes, you read that right: maggots came out of my walls. The bedroom was particularly affected, with two of the walls being so damp that they were
On Monday 11th April, I started writing morning pages again. This is something I first began in my 20s and kept as a habit for many years. I no longer remember why I stopped but going back to them has led to a more general experiment in trying to remember who I was then. I have been re-reading books from both my childhood and my early twenties to try to remember and recover a self I think I abandoned at some point in my early 30s: the moment when I ‘quit writing’ and almost deleted this website entirely. (Although, I realise now that I never actually quit writing, I just traded more creative writing for academic writing.) I hope I never stop writing morning pages again because there is something profoundly grounding about waking up, making coffee, feeding the cats, and then curling up on my couch with an A4 notebook
Nowadays I don’t think there are many private landlords dumb enough to not protect their tenant’s deposits since the law has been in place for well over a decade. However, just in case your landlord is as much of a slumlord as my previous one, I thought I would recant my experience of successfully doing a deposit reclaim. Especially because I found London Renters’ Union and Shelter to be utterly useless in terms of help and advice. (Although Shelter’s legal website is very useful and informative.) I discovered my deposit was not protected at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. I was living in a house-share and one of my flatmates was a zero-hours contract, minimum wage retail worker. When lockdown suddenly happened, she had enough money in the bank to pay her rent or to eat, not both. Since we had no way of knowing how long lockdown would last