Thursday, 3 November 2011
Coming Home - at last?
Confession time...
I used to love Carole King. I've always loved Carole King but in Japan this guy called Jim said "Oh my god you like her?" and I fancied Jim so I stopped listening to my tapes and never mentioned her name again.
A statutorily homeless person about to embark on a Shit School reunion is going to have old memories surface.
Mine is that a few years before Japan and Jim I used to defend my choices. I didn't give a shit if people didn't like the same music as me (Abba and Meatloaf!)
I lost myself at Shit School. As clear as the sky is grey today, that is what happened. Me and myself separated and we've had trouble getting back together ever since.
I wish I'd known earlier
I did!
Oh well, I know properly now!
I should be embarrassed, shouldn't I?
Nah!
I actually found this song yesterday as I was trawling through the net looking for songs that I could tweet the housing minister with.
I'm not sure I'll tweet him with them. Maybe. Maybe not. Shall I?
Here's the link though, there are great songs on it, just chill and listen, aaah:
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/bitchtapes-songs-about-home
Mind as you step over homeless bodies
I used to keep my housing posts short
Or play around with style
Now I ramble on and on
I bore me with my bile
It's because I'm not "in it" now
Not like I was last year
I see it but I can't ignore it
Don't you ever feel the fear?
To lose your home is horror
You can lose yourself I find
We need the bricks that shelter
Home within to ease our mind
Criminalising squatting
is a criminal act
executed by a self serving government.
Criminal not in State Law perhaps
but certainly that of the Land
Now don't mind me while I go off and have an existential breakdown.
Thankyou;)
Or play around with style
Now I ramble on and on
I bore me with my bile
It's because I'm not "in it" now
Not like I was last year
I see it but I can't ignore it
Don't you ever feel the fear?
To lose your home is horror
You can lose yourself I find
We need the bricks that shelter
Home within to ease our mind
Criminalising squatting
is a criminal act
executed by a self serving government.
Criminal not in State Law perhaps
but certainly that of the Land
Now don't mind me while I go off and have an existential breakdown.
Thankyou;)
Criminatlisation of needing shelter
On Tuesday night an amendment was passed criminalising squatting. Wow, they push through these things fast when they want to ey.
I want you to watch this footage (link is also at the bottom of this page) of the demonstration on Tuesday evening. Just take the time. It's not easy viewing but it is how it is. I'm very frightened that on the 15th when I go to protest against the future of our children's housing I will be made to feel like a criminal too, and I may be kettled and this time, I am bringing my son with me.
I'm just really sorry that our media; the bbc, Sky, don't want you to see this and so the only way we can try to understand the society we live in is by reading publications like the Guardian. They are the only bloody ones.
Politicians have pushed this through because they all have 1,2,3.4,7 houses. Many are underoccupied, others may be empty.
Empty empty, so many empty properties. In some parts of the UK, streets full of empty properties. So many people that can't afford to rent a room. So many people who will be evicted and rendered homeless between now and Christmas as they continue to enforce the benefit cuts.
I don't know how you feel about squatting. You may be a property owner, you may be a Daily Mail reader.
The truth is we have a very real catastrophe in our country right now and the crisis has just been made worse.
Another excellent article, from the Guardian once again, which explains all this so much more clearly than me.
The Emergency Housing protest is on Tuesday 15th November at 4pm outside partliament. There is no website I can put a link for you. I doubt there will be as many people that at the squatting demo but I hope so because the message is the same.
We need more housing. People need homes.
Home home home home
Take me home
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/nov/01/clashes-squatting-protest-westminster-video?fb=native
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/03/criminalising-squatting-law-trespass-homeless?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
I want you to watch this footage (link is also at the bottom of this page) of the demonstration on Tuesday evening. Just take the time. It's not easy viewing but it is how it is. I'm very frightened that on the 15th when I go to protest against the future of our children's housing I will be made to feel like a criminal too, and I may be kettled and this time, I am bringing my son with me.
I'm just really sorry that our media; the bbc, Sky, don't want you to see this and so the only way we can try to understand the society we live in is by reading publications like the Guardian. They are the only bloody ones.
Politicians have pushed this through because they all have 1,2,3.4,7 houses. Many are underoccupied, others may be empty.
Empty empty, so many empty properties. In some parts of the UK, streets full of empty properties. So many people that can't afford to rent a room. So many people who will be evicted and rendered homeless between now and Christmas as they continue to enforce the benefit cuts.
I don't know how you feel about squatting. You may be a property owner, you may be a Daily Mail reader.
The truth is we have a very real catastrophe in our country right now and the crisis has just been made worse.
Another excellent article, from the Guardian once again, which explains all this so much more clearly than me.
The Emergency Housing protest is on Tuesday 15th November at 4pm outside partliament. There is no website I can put a link for you. I doubt there will be as many people that at the squatting demo but I hope so because the message is the same.
We need more housing. People need homes.
Home home home home
Take me home
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/nov/01/clashes-squatting-protest-westminster-video?fb=native
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/03/criminalising-squatting-law-trespass-homeless?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Shitting oneself about Shit School reunions
There are so many people who hated school that I'm finding it all rather comforting at the moment, so if you're one, well you're perfectly permitted to take comfort from me, or not, as you like!
My friend Jab came by yesterday and I told her my head was full of a reunion I might go to at a Shit School I hated when I was a teenager.
"Are you going to shit yourself for the next two weeks then decide not to go because that's what I'd do!" and we laughed, because it is funny, especially when you're as old as we are.
"Yes," I said to her. "I think I will but I also think I might go."
I feel I have no choice in going. I shit myself every time I think of going to that school. I spontaneously shield myself or cry when I'm in the vicinity of it. That is so shit, that memories, ok, fucking shit ones, who fucking cares, have such power over me.
I didn't tell you did I? Or did I? I think the reunion is in the school. It is a feast day and I think there is a High Mass. I think a point of the reunion is to go into Mass like old times then go to lunch (lunch? In that awful soulless refectory with those long wooden tables where I couldn't eat a morsel of toast off those white plastic trays?).
i went into the school website yesterday and had a proper look around it for the first time. There is a teacher still there. I remember that name. Was it him or the deputy head who told me I couldn't go into the church because "God doesn't want you there." ?
Thank God I've been to church between then and now but the whole day feels like a baptism of fire. I'm feeling distinctly uncomfortable already.
I asked myself yesterday, who would go through something like this?
Then I remembered lying in a hammock in Phnom Penh, Cambodia having spent the day in the Killing Fields and a guy asked me: "Do you want to have children one day?"
I'd answered: "Who in their right mind would bring a child into this world?"
The answer to both came clearly to me yesterday.
Me.
Believe me when I say to you, that anything I can do, you can do too (even if I'm not convinced at this juncture that I can actually do it. I might combust through shitting myself).
There comes a point when you need to make peace with your past. You will know when that point it because you will feel it.
Walk through the fire and drink the water that awaits you afterwards
(or in my case of course, get pissed,,,well, Jesus did turn water into wine, didn't he? Why yes he did!)
My friend Jab came by yesterday and I told her my head was full of a reunion I might go to at a Shit School I hated when I was a teenager.
"Are you going to shit yourself for the next two weeks then decide not to go because that's what I'd do!" and we laughed, because it is funny, especially when you're as old as we are.
"Yes," I said to her. "I think I will but I also think I might go."
I feel I have no choice in going. I shit myself every time I think of going to that school. I spontaneously shield myself or cry when I'm in the vicinity of it. That is so shit, that memories, ok, fucking shit ones, who fucking cares, have such power over me.
I didn't tell you did I? Or did I? I think the reunion is in the school. It is a feast day and I think there is a High Mass. I think a point of the reunion is to go into Mass like old times then go to lunch (lunch? In that awful soulless refectory with those long wooden tables where I couldn't eat a morsel of toast off those white plastic trays?).
i went into the school website yesterday and had a proper look around it for the first time. There is a teacher still there. I remember that name. Was it him or the deputy head who told me I couldn't go into the church because "God doesn't want you there." ?
Thank God I've been to church between then and now but the whole day feels like a baptism of fire. I'm feeling distinctly uncomfortable already.
I asked myself yesterday, who would go through something like this?
Then I remembered lying in a hammock in Phnom Penh, Cambodia having spent the day in the Killing Fields and a guy asked me: "Do you want to have children one day?"
I'd answered: "Who in their right mind would bring a child into this world?"
The answer to both came clearly to me yesterday.
Me.
Believe me when I say to you, that anything I can do, you can do too (even if I'm not convinced at this juncture that I can actually do it. I might combust through shitting myself).
There comes a point when you need to make peace with your past. You will know when that point it because you will feel it.
Walk through the fire and drink the water that awaits you afterwards
(or in my case of course, get pissed,,,well, Jesus did turn water into wine, didn't he? Why yes he did!)
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
School reunions - Does one face the horror?
Very cool? Yes it was. She was embarrassed while I was relieved. Dodgy memories are part and parcel aren't they.
This reunion though, is in a different league to that one.
Thing is, I don't really remember anyone. I don't really remember anyone because I blocked them all out. Well done me.
I remember the school though. I remember the priest. I remember the deputy head. I remember the housemistresses. I remember feeling exactly what I'm feeling right now actually, impossible to articulate as tears stream down my face. I remember the girls coming into my room one by one saying 'I've heard you've been bitching about me.' and me saying nothing because it was true. Will they be there? Will I say something decades decades later? "Yes, your best friend started it." Better not to go, surely, regardless of whether my 'best friend' or any of those girls are there or not. Better not to go, surely, if I know I will walk into the chapel and cry.
It's been months I've been thinking about this. On and off. Off mostly because on seizes my chest as memories surface that I can't get rid of.
Astonishing how something can be so alive in you when you've tried so hard to kill it. Told yourself a thousand times you are over it. Tell yourself a thousand times you accept it and are moving on only to find yourself right back there in that moment which doesn't exist anymore
I don't know if I will go. For the first time today, I have written the message to people I don't remember which I've posted on the facebook page. To keep in touch with no-one, except the father of your child, that is something. I never joined the facebook group when I was invited last year. What does that tell you? Tell them? Should it bother me even?
My friend Em lives nearby and said we can stay even though she and her hubby will be out Friday and Saturday.
I can only go if she takes me. Drives me there, drops me off. A male friend of mine offered but I said no. Em has seen me cry before.
I think people are going with their partners
Fcuk
See, I can't even speak anymore.
I may get back to you about all this
For now I must let the feelings pass
Breeeeeeathe
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