Many years ago, I bought my first house. In those days it was quite feasible for a young person in an office job to save up a few quid, hop down to a building society and get an agreement for three times their salary, then go shopping for very affordable houses. So, apologies to all you young people out there, but life was a bloody sight easier in lots of ways then, and that was just one of them.
So I moved in, and after a few years I met the woman who was to become Mrs E; she started her nurse training, which meant that she got accommodation at the hospital for £35 a month (sorry young people), but pretty soon gave that up so that we could live together. We were young, getting on with our lives, and blissfully happy. Our neighbours kept themselves to themselves, but we’d chat to them now and again, so we were a bit surprised when we saw a for sale sign in their front garden. It turned out they were off to retire somewhere down South, and the house market was pretty buoyant at the time, so we expected to get few neighbours to say hello to very soon.
And so we did. The guy who had bought the house was on the vanguard of the buy to let boom, and he’d bought it as an investment. And he’d let it out to social services, who decided to use it as a halfway house for kids coming out of care. Individually, they were great, we’d chat to them sometimes and they were all trying to get on with their lives, but together they were an absolute nightmare; they got really drunk at night and they made so much noise that just rattled through the paper thin dividing walls. I was away on business for a few days and got a call one night from Mrs E, who was in tears; she’d just finished a late shift and had an early shift to follow the next morning.
‘You won’t believe it’, she said, ‘theyve installed a bloody PA’
And they had. She actually held the phone away from her ear and all I got was ‘1, 2, 1, 2 testing, f***ing testing’ etc.
The rest of our neighbourly relations don’t necessarily matter here, the nightmare continued, teeing us off on a daily basis, but eventually they all moved out. The landlord started letting out to students, who were all great, and quiet, and mindful of other people, and, to the best of our knowledge, didn’t own a death metal PA system.
And that’s the cautionary tale bit. We had an absolutely miserable time living in the shadow of some really inconsiderate, selfish and uncontrollable people. And when the boring neighbours moved in we just got on with living our lives.
Today, we all get to vote, and I truly hope we can say goodbye to the biggest group of mendacious, self-serving, corrupt and untrustworthy politicians that have ever been in charge of the country. It’s, by all accounts, a done deal, and the criticism of the labour party is that they might be a bit boring in comparison. Well, I preferred the neighbours who were boring, and who let us just get on with our lives.
On July 5th, the big issues that were there today will still be there. Climate change, Putin, Gaza, child poverty, the NHS (not many of these have been front and centre in the weeks leading up to the election) will all be in a critical state, as, potentially will be the situation in the US and France. And there’s no way that slightly shifting the centre-thinking agenda is going to really turn any of that around especially quickly. But if there’s any chance that serious people who understand the concept of principle and service can be in charge, that’s got to give us a bit of hope.
The Emu 