My letter of appeal

I was going to post it to you in all its entirety but I can't. I can't bare to read it myself. You know what's in there because I've told you. But where I've taken 270 posts to tell you, I've told the council in two sides of A4.

Everything. I don't know how. "I'll be brief" I wrote and managed to squeeze in the last six years which would go some way to explain why I don't want to do the PRS, why I don't want to take my son to a hostel, why I have a fear of large estates, how it's only now I've got treatment for rape which I never told the council because I didn't want the council to know, and also why this treatment was suspended because of the impact of council and housing association mistakes. Crikey, my son's school, the community here, Zat bike, why I fought for those flats, the utter desperation that led me to write to "both Labour Prime Ministers, knowing they are too busy to help but hoping they will anyway", how depression affects my reasoning so even though I might look ok, I'm not. "I write alot," I scribbled down in pencil. "Perhaps too much, a coping mechanism I learnt as a child. Right now I'm profoundly sad." Man, everything I tell you, why I turned down the flat three years ago so couldn't bid on the same place again last week. Shit, the gambles I've taken with my son, the contemplative suicide thoughts, everything I tell you. I couldn't have written it the way I had if I'd thought about it. There was too much information. It was too honest. It IS too honest.

At a loss of how I'd write it, I'd gone up to the Heath, and tears splashed on the pages as I ripped out my own heart.

I put the typed version through Mr Grays letterbox yesterday morning. God knows what he's made of it, I don't think I'll ever be able to look him in the eye again.

When I look back upon my life, it's always with a sense of shame, I've always been the one to blame. I know, it's a sin (Petshop Boys)