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?