This Is Not A
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Date: 23/03/14
Home Thoughts
Holidays and University apart (and some would say that, in my case, University was a holiday as well, or so I seem to have treated it), I have only ever lived at two addresses in my nearly fifty-two years of consuming the planet's finite resources.
I was born in a two-bedroomed council house scarcely a hundred yards to the north-east of where I am sitting typing this. It was there that I spent the whole of my childhood and my early adulthood. It was a small place, but big enough for my parents and me (although it got a bit cramped during the brief period of a few months when my brother moved back in between marriages).
My parents had lived there for over thirty-two years by that time, but the council had finally decided to renovate that and adjacent properties, and so required us to move out. My mother put her foot down and stated that - whatever the council intended to do to the place to make it more suitable for modern habitation - once moved out, we were staying where we had gone to. My father was quite frail by that time, and could not realistically have undertaken two moves in the space of a year or so.
And so we made the move to where I am now. I wasn't actually here during the move; it was still term-time and I returned a week or so later to the fait accompli of the new address. The move had been confirmed before I left the old house for the last time, and I well remember how I - utterly sentimentally - touched each wall of my tiny bedroom in turn whilst uttering a silent word of thanks for its shelter and sanctuary over the years, prior to departing from it forever.
The new house was larger; three bedrooms rather than two. An extravagant move on the council's part, you might think, but the property had been used by them for some years in order to decant tenants who were having their usual residence done up, whatever the size of that may have been; we were merely the latest decantees but we were going to be the last, as the council had long before realised that attempting to go against my mother's determined wishes was an unwinnable game.
What our setting up home at the new address also was, was a re-connection with family history. The property had been built in tne mid-1920s as part of a large new estate at the top of Penygraig Hill. The first tenants didn't stay very long, but they were replaced by my paternal grandparents Harry and Mary and their large family (my father would have been about fifteen at the time, and all bar one of his innumerable siblings were younger). Mary in fact would remain at this address for nearly fifty years, through child-rearing via widowhood and on into advanced old age.
I marvel now - however large the house seemed to me when we first moved in - at how they all managed to fit in here. Even three bedrooms would scarcely have been enough for a household where the number of children would have varied up to about eight or nine at any given time. But they had moved from cramped quarters in Red Lion Terrace up at Rhos Y Coed, so it may have seemed like a little palace to them, although the key word there may have been 'little'.
(When our old place was in the last stages of being fettled up, Mum and me went up to have a nose around. The question which occurred to me immediately on setting foot in the house again - bearing in mind that I had lived there for nearly twenty-two years - was, "How the hell did we ever live in something this small?". Perspective, I suppose, even after barely twelve months of being used to larger premises).
After Nain Brymbo (as me and my brother called her, in contradistinction to 'Nain Moss' aka Emma Jones, our mother's mother) was widowed, she lived on alone at the address for another twelve years or so. Because the relationship between my father and his parents was not all that harmonious, I seldom visited the place. When I did, it seemed as gloomy, shut-in and claustrophobic as a dungeon to my childhood sensibilities.
After Nain Brymbo went into a care home in her final months, the council let the house to other people for a while before using it as I described earlier, as a bolt-hole for tenants whose own homes were being renovated. At one point, however, the decanter itself was decanted and brought up to snuff in its own right. Not that this was necessarily a big step forward in all directions; the old, small-paned, wooden-framed windows were replaced with large-paned, wooden-framed windows, but the wood used was quite obviously of poor quality and seemingly unseasoned, and the subsequent warping meant that windows had to be kept very definitely closed during the colder months (i.e., September to May) with, in some cases, newspaper stuffed between the opening bit and the frame in order to deter the draughts. In addition, the central heating - if ever it could be dignified by such a title - consisted of a coal fire (we had had a gas fire in the old house, but the council had demanded an exorbitant cost to move it, so my mother had given them the benefit of her opinion on that matter) which powered - and again, that word scarcely seems appropriate - three radiators, all of which were downstairs. Yes indeed, there was a whacking great matter-of-fact radiator barely three feet from the grate, but there wasn't a single one upstairs. Enterprising tenants during the interregnum had fitted their own radiators in the bathroom and in the smallest of the three bedrooms, but the two bedrooms which we actually used had none at all. Couple that with the gales whistling around the window frames and you can see that it was hardly cosy.
My old man died in this house at the tail end of 1988 and my mother made her last journey to hospital from here just under a decade later, leaving me as the third generation of the family to be tenant. I have to say that the council were very understanding at that time, and the housing welfare officer (or whatever she was called) was swift to reassure me that there would be no problem in transferring the tenancy. Had I not been in respectable full-time employment at that time, I suspect that it might not have been so cut-and-dried, but I was grateful for the assurance, as it was the one thing above all others which was causing me sleepless nights at that time.
By that point, I had been living here for over fifteen years, and it was home. No, I'll revise that; it was Home, and so it has been these past fifteen, sixteen years as well. This very week marks the thirtieth anniversary, which is why I have been prompted to write this guff now.
The concept of a Home is one which seems to have been in decline in recent times, with a strong tendency now to refer to the places where people live - be they houses, bungalows or flats - as 'properties'. This has been the direct result of Property in general having been made the New God of the Age, an object of veneration, yea even unto a mass fetish thereof. And so we have had all the talk of a 'property-owning democracy', with the strong underlying inference that those who don't own property shouldn't really be allowed to partake in Democracy at all, because they are quite clearly feckless (advice to those who believe this: try defaulting on your mortgage after falling ill or unemployed; you'll then see in short order exactly who owns 'your' property. Hint: it isn't you); in the name of Gazumpia, Goddess of Unsustainable Mortgages, we have had a constant pandering to the cupidity of those rapidly-expanding parasitic growths of Landlordism and Buytolettery, whereby the fortunate avaricious can acquire a 'portfolio' of buildings, subdivide them and let the subsequent warren of cupboards at extortionate rents knowing that the population at large will pick up the tab via Housing Benefit; we have the bizarre inversion of reality whereby inflation (considered the very devil itself when an excuse is needed further to impoverish those who are already on their knees through having to be dependent on the least generous social security system in western Europe) is deemed to be the ultimate good when applied to property prices ('prices', note, not 'values'; another problem of our age is that people have forgotten that those two attributes are seldom the same); and in the same way, we have had the outbreak of Property Porn as the only socially-acceptable form of the genre, filling every television channel and newspaper with the orgasmic screams of hacks as they encourage people - some of whom may even regard themselves as socially 'progressive' - to get it on by moving up (or vice versa) to another bricks-and-mortar albatross, or to take advantage of lower prices in another part of our increasingly savage forest by moving to somewhere where they don't really belong. thereby preventing local people, especially the younger ones, from staying in the places where they really do belong.
And all this is on top of the greatest warping of all, the consequences of the so-called 'Right To Buy' policies instigated by the Thatcher régime, in which homes - sorry, I mean 'properties', of course - which had been built with public money, and the rents on which constituted a large chunk of local authority income, were sold off to those who were sufficiently wealthy, sufficiently pushy and/or sufficiently deluded to think that this was the way they could become 'middle class' by the standard British definition (an adjunct to the typical British definition of class in general, which states that it isn't how intelligent you are, or what actual contribution you make to society which decides your status, it's only what you own; like, say, a large tract of Buckinghamshire).
Taken all in all, the results of all these events and tendencies have been deeply damaging to the very concept of 'society'. It has led to people - and not just the young - being unable to find any place to live in the areas where they were brought up, forcing them (in combination with the deliberately-encouraged de-industrialisation of many areas) to move halfway across the country, only to find that there's no suitable accomodation for them there either; it has led to a large-scale population transfer especially (though not exclusively) in rural areas, where those whose families have lived in the place since time out of mind find themselves over-run by people whose values, attitudes and even language are not their own, and who make a living either out of polluting down the main road to an office eighty miles away five days a week, or by opening chee-chee 'lifestyle enterprises' (Shiatsu massage and poodle-grooming, possibly simultaneously) and turning what was once a productive local economy into little more than a series of tourist attractions for the broadsheet- and spreadsheet-reading classes, before moving on to the next 'opportunity' somewhere else; it has led to a degree of rootlessness in both directions which means that any notion of social cohesion is now all but impossible in many areas, with the concomitant sense of anomie and dislocation which, in my view, lies at the root of much of the dis-ease which characterises both our society and many of the individuals within it.
In short, all this has had a similar effect to that ultimate capitalist weapon, the neutron bomb, in that it has destroyed - is destroying - people, but is leaving property entirely unscathed. The people, especially those who can shout as loudly as they can but to no effect because no-one is listening (or, at least, no-one who is deemed to count is listening) are considered all in all no longer to exist in any meaningful form. And when the rare occasion arises when those who are deemed to count cannot help but hear those who have been handed the wrong end of the shitty stick which is government-by-corporation, then the proposed solutions seem to be either mere tinkering, or missing the point, or simply likely to make things worse. And so we have policies which claim to address the so-called 'housing shortage' by building on more and more of what is left of the countryside, even on flood plains where the properties can no longer be insured; in order to address rampant and ramped-up property prices, bribes of taxpayers' money must be handed over to people desperate to get themselves up to their oxters in debt to those mighty machines of economic probity, the banks; and in order to address what is largely a non-problem - that which is termed, in language which comes straight out of the Bollocksese-English Dictionary, 'under-occupancy' - the support payments made to people whose homes are deemed by some official somewhere to be 'too big' for them are to be capped and cut, thus underlining the trend of those who claim to be economic liberals decrying the very existence of The Evil, Bloated State™ when it is suggested that its powers be used to rein in egregious behaviour by The Owning Classes (such as imposing rent controls), finding such forces coming in very handy for kicking those who are considered to be in no position to kick back. People are to be, to all intents and purposes, forced to leave 'properties' which may have been their homes (I do apologise for using such an archaic and unfashionable term) for twenty, thirty, forty years or more and - another euphemism - 'downsize' to a two-room flat owned by a slum landlord who's raking it in in all the ways I described earlier. The trouble being, of course. that there simply aren't enough such smaller dwelling units to take them all, even in the public sector, where new building has been at a standstill for a generation or more, largely because Whitehall grabs a large proportion of the local authority's rental income every year, thereby preventing that money being used for investment in more social housing.
(It's rather like the story I heard about an environmental scientist addressing a conference, who started off his speech by saying, "I have some good news and some bad news. In fifty years' time, sixty-five per cent of the Earth's population will be drinking untreated sewage". "What's the good news?", came the call from the audience. "That is the good news", said the speaker, "The bad news is that there won't be enough untreated sewage to go around.").
What social housing does remain in any concentrations has become little more than a series of ghettoes wherein the desperate, the anomic or the downright unsocialised can be concentrated and left to rot disregarded except at those times when the Owning Classes (and those who aspire avidly for membership of same) are in need of a handy folk-devil to hurl its bile upon, whereupon the inhabitants of those areas dubbed in the propaganda-speak 'sink estates' can be blamed for the shortcomings of policies over which they had no control, policies where the generational hopelessness engendered by macro-economic ideologies which favour the profitable moving about of 'wealth' which has no corporeal existence over the creation of real things by real people has eaten so deeply into people's lives that the despair and disconnect thus produced has burrowed seemingly into their DNA its very self.
In short, m'dears, the whole thing is fucked almost beyond redemption. An increasingly transitory population; the continuing triumph of narrow, short-term, individualist self-interest over the essential wider concerns about what sort of country we wish to live in; the consequential breakdown in the real everyday connections between people (do you know who all your neighbours are nowadays? I don't, and some of them probably won't be here a few months from now anyway) and in the cohesiveness of what we are obliged to call 'communities'; all of these have combined to form a toxic social chemical which is dissolving much of what is left of what we knew and once seemingly valued.
I can see no likelihood of a real solution either; not whilst the political and ideological barometer seems permanently set to 'Screw You'. This typhus has sunk deeply into the wells of common discourse on the subject. Last year, when the current régime extended to social-housing tenants what its fellow corporate cheerleaders in the preceding administration had imposed upon tenants in the private sector, I made some comments on the now-moribund Liberal Conspiracy website about how it might at some future point affect me. The responses were overwhelmingly hostile, in which I was excoriated for having the sheer, indecent gall to live in a property which made me 'over-bedroomed'. No argument on my part for the importance of a sense of 'home' rather than of just 'residence' was considered valid; nothing, but nothing, could be permitted to stand in the way of the reductive, value-free and dehumanising 'logic' of 'property as profit-centre' which is the dominant gospel of our times; anything else was deemed to be sentimental rubbish. And all this from people who no doubt regarded themselves as being social liberals and even economic progressives! I despaired. Are all truly human values to be subverted so that someone with an eye to the main chance and with no vision beyond the ends of their own noses can profit?
To apply all of this to my own situation: I intend - should I survive that long - to retire at sixty, in order to enjoy my gold-plated pension and my lottery-level lump sum. Once I get there, I will have only that to sustain me until I can claim my thoroughly-devalued State Pension at the age of sixty-six. I might not even get that far, and my state of health may require me to cease work sooner and try to exist on whatever social security payments may be available for the chronically ill (private companies engaged at public expense for the express purpose of denying support to such 'skivers' permitting, natch). Whichever way it runs, I will be deemed at that time to be carrying an unsupportable burden of one or two bedrooms too many, and I will be forced by a deliberate act of policy either to move into someone else's spare airing cupboard somewhere, or to try to battle it out, get into arrears with my rent and be forcibly evicted with no prospect of being re-housed at all.
Either way, I suspect it would be the death of me. I have a sense of rootedness here, it is central to who and what I perceive myself to be, and it is the main thing in my life which gives me a sense of well-being, the knowledge that I have somewhere where I truly belong. In short, it is my Home, not merely my residence. My removal from it, by either force of financial circumstance or force of law, would so undermine my sense of identity that I suspect I would not even wish to carry on.
But I still hope to triumph over these things, so that the only way in which I will ever leave here will be horizontally, supervised either by paramedics, the undertaker or the riot squad. This is my home, you see.
