Thursday 31 August 2017
Home from Home
I have been scrambling about under the furniture, searching the sofa and counting the pennies in the cider jar trying to put together sufficient money for a deposit on a house. So far I have £32:23 pence and a one Shekel coin! I am unsure this will be sufficient.
The thing is the man downstairs is moving out After ten years or more of little contact (we fell out quite easily years ago) he has scraped together money enough to buy something somewhere. This was helped by bumping off a relative quite recently and obtaining a good amount to enable the purchase. I hope all goes well for him but I hope more for a decent newcomer into the building and not a couple of loud young folks pretending they are married, that always leads to noise, argument and the rest.
The local rag tells us the average cost of a home around here is now £293, 251. They also helpfully inform those willing to pay such an amount what they will need to earn thus: "Braintree, hourly wage £19.13, weekly wage £717.38, yearly salary £37,303.50." That's £19 an hour! OK, you take along a girl friend and ensure she is working but you still require £10 an hour and to also ensure you can keep your job. Sickness, unemployment, pregnancy and other unfortunate events will surely hinder the income somewhat and we have not mentioned food, bills or life itself yet.
Just how do people manage to buy?
This all goes back to the vile Thatcher, the woman who sold off all the council houses as well as most of everything else and forced the nation to rent expensively or pay through the nose for accommodation they could not afford. This led to the inevitable as people sold when prices rose, moved into more expensive homes and when the economy collapsed they were out on their ear and called scroungers by the Tories.
Harold MacMillan, a Tory who understood deprivation, was responsible for creating three million homes in the aftermath of war, he watched as she sold them off and began another era of deprivation.
The daughter of Thatcher, one George Osborne, a man deprived of her intellect which tells us something, knew how to make personal money and took her policies to their logical conclusion by ceasing to spend on public requirements, privatising them all and cutting aid to those who need it. Under he and his toff pal David Cameron the number of food banks operating at life's bottom end rose from a mere 66 to well over a thousand and it is still rising! What is worse is that the working poor are making use of them not just the benefit scrounger (@Daily Mail).
Two things strike me as interesting here, one is the fact that in this county our area is the cheapest! You require more, much more, to buy elsewhere in the county up to almost £49 an hour in the dearest areas. Where do they get the cash?
Now obviously nearer London the Rock guitarists, actors, and celebs you wish to avoid can splash out on mock Tudor mansions costing a million or two, those laundering money from abroad may wish to remain near the airport and others come from money dating back to the days of the wool trade and know how to fiddle the books in a manner unknown to those of us from North Edinburgh. Even so the number of ancient houses once the lodge of farm labourers that are priced at around half a million is enormous and folks gazzump to by!
I see little opportunity to obtain one of the houses I have eyed up recently and I have put my name on the local Housing register in case something happens with my landlord, decent though he is his age is in the 80's depending on who you speak to and what may happen we know not. A brief glance at the available properties on offer show none in this town and all with many people ahead of me in the queue.
What I require is my sister to keep buying those lottery tickets, win a fortune and pass some on to me. This was a hope for a while now dashed as she now puts the lottery money on the mantelpiece and saves it! The good Lord will however look after me and I have had 21 years of relative peacefulness in this place. It has been a vast improvement on London and I trust him to lead me on. That said Brexit will lead to much deprivation in the land and this place will soon be a palace in comparison to those losing their homes and filling cheap boarding houses. I have been fortunate so far, have you?
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12 comments:
When I go to London I stay with a friend in Kensal Rise which has recently become gentrified...if that is the word for people who mess up the pavement by running along with wires in their ears; women - also with wires in their ears - pushing baby carriages which resemble tanks who expect priority over the Untermenschen going about their business, and the inevitable organic produce shops whose margins must be tremendous given the prices.
Edwardian terraces sprout huge extensions which destroy the gardens which made havens for the birds and some new owners have excavated huge underground bunkers - which in my view risk destabilising their neighbours`houses.
When you think that these terraced house go for over a milion quid you do indeed wonder where the money is coming from.
They can`t all be owners of organic produce shops...
The real world is indeed a very hard place for a former Sex Pistols' groupie to live in. Could you move downstairs into the vacating apartment? I would think that it would be easier on your knees.
The only way I will ever be able to afford my own house again will be to win a major amount in the Lotto...I'm not holding my breath.
Jerry has a very good suggestion there. Perhaps we all need to pool our loose change and buy a lottery ticket.
In London it's always been a nightmare. The people I know who managed to buy in my youth were always those who had a lump sum to start them off, or who lived in unfashionable (cheap) parts of the country and had steady jobs, to be fair most people did. You could then get a mortgage for 30 years and many did. Today,many I know just don't buy, they can't even rent their own place, they have to share with other people into their 40s. Or else they buy part shares in tiny ugly flats which will lose all their value when there is a slump, and are not suitable if they want to have kids. It makes me see red that so many London council estates are being "renovated" and the unfashionable poor people who lived in them have been "relocated" on the very outskirts while their renovated ex-flats are sold on for eye watering prices. I was talking to someone today who works with the homeless and he saw many from the Grenfell disaster at his centre. Don't get me started on this, actually.
Remind her sister she is supporting many good causes by buying a lottery ticket. SO many great things I have seen lately have been supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund. It's almost as if we have a moral duty to buy a ticket now and then.... :)
Don't feel you have to actually publish this comment but I have been trying to track down A Surfeit of Palfreys by the way, could you put out the word please? Fly in the Web is obviously still there! I don't know if she has stopped blogging.
Fly, I know that area well and just checked. The houses I knew now cosy a million and upwards!
A once kind of OK but rough area, Queens Park was always OK, is now too expensive for normal mortals. Jings!
Jerry, Moving down would mean people above me, I am not having that!
Lee, That is the only way, and I don't buy tickets...
Carol, Tsk! Jerry never has good ideas! Pool change is good idea, you buy and when we win I will send my change...
Jenny, You are right, Boris encouraged the expulsion. Even the well off cannot afford to live there.
Jenny, A moral duty to risk winning millions? Hmmm I must dwell on that one a while.
Jenny, Fly has been having troubles with Leo, he has been breaking things like his leg etc. She also has had to travel to Englandshire for a variety of reasons and will return once she gets a few moments. She requires a good rest actually!
Thank you for the sympathy!Much appreciated.
I am recovering...slowly...in the intervals between looking for things that have mysteriously disappeared...
How could anyone lose two rolling pins, for example...
Kind of Jenny to ask!
What a great post and hits the nail on the head. House prices are rocketing and the means to afford one reducing. It's all just a nightmare and don't get me started on London house prices.
Warm greetings!
Fly, I am trying not to smirk at you efforts to renovate the workplace! So glad you are back after your 'rest.'
Blog, Where I once lived it would cost almost a million for a one bed flat in London.
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