You don’t end austerity simply by announcing it’s over. You have to undo the damage that’s been done

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I’ve been thinking about these suggestions that new government or leadership (whatever any of that is now) will take another look at austerity and public sector cuts, because worthies have suddenly discovered how much people dislike austerity.

A few of those thoughts:

Yesterday, I went to the South Chadderton foodbank to talk for a few hours with people who came in for food parcels.

I spoke to Emma, 31, Theresa, 50 and one bloke who’d lost his job as a cleaner after an accident and still had all his kids living with him at home.

Emma had two very young children living with her – a boy of five and a baby of six months. She’d had her benefits cut for missing a so-called “workforce meeting” that she hadn’t known about. She also had all sorts of problems with child tax credit – the HMRC was demanding several thousand pounds which it claimed she’d been overpaid back in the day. A lot of money was being deducted from her benefits – for a social fund loan that she thought should be paid off by now and other repayments and totals which she did not think made sense. She said that she was trying to live on about £105 a fortnight. That was with two little kids. Things were going about as well for Emma as you’d expect.

Theresa was in recovery and living on nothing while she waited to see if she could win an appeal against an ESA fit-for-work decision.

I took longer interview recordings with everyone I spoke to, so will post those as an update when I’ve transcribed them.

Point for now is that all these problems still rage on. I am hardly convinced that a government in chaos will undo them. I’m not convinced any government will ever undo them, if I’m honest. I don’t think a lot of people know how badly the public sector has been hit. Frontline services everywhere are in tatters. A lot of the time, you can’t even get through on the phone to council or DWP officers to ask for help with a problem or a claim. If you do get through, often as not they’ve got nothing to help with.

I know a great many people who’ve been clobbered on myriad fronts – endless ESA fit for work assessments, PIP applications which go nowhere, the bedroom tax, problems with tax credits, sanctions, council tax debts, court debts for evictions, the benefit cap and god knows what else. I am of course delighted (ha) to hear the likes of Michael Gove deliver the world of pearlers such as “we also need to take account of legitimate public concerns about ensuring that we properly fund public services,” but honest to god and really. They’ve decimated public services already. They really have. I’ve been writing about this destruction for years now, so I’ve had a good look at the mess. Where would you even start?

We consider you housed, because you have a grotty caravan to live in. This is austerity.

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This one goes out to all those politicians who seem only newly acquainted with the notion that austerity is rotten and ridiculous, and that people are very sick of public sector cuts:

I’m posting here yet another story from a frontline homelessness office which will tell you something about hopelessly stretched housing resources in austerity. It will also tell you something about the farcical conversations that homeless people and housing officers must have during austerity – ie, at a time when all sense of proportion has left the building.

In the discussion reported below, a housing officer at First Choice Homes in Oldham (First Choice provides the homelessness service for Oldham Council) told the 67-year-old man called Paul who I was with that Paul was considered adequately housed because he had a crappy old caravan to live in on a site in Oldham. Take that.

Image: in the caravan

This conversation took place in the last week of April. A month or two before that, Paul had been offered sheltered accommodation, I think it was, but he was too concerned about the spectre of escalating service charges in sheltered accommodation to go with that. Nothing is easy in austerity. Every option has a sting in the tail and/or one on the horizon. The idea of service charges – in sheltered accommodation, or anywhere – scares the shit out of people generally. Nobody ever knows how big service charges will get. Certainly, nobody believes the sky will be the limit when it comes to service charges going up. The mere mention of service charges is enough to put people off further dialogue.

As we talked about sheltered accommodation, the officer agreed that service charges were a thing: “we pass that [court manager] charge onto the customer, because it’s the customers that are in need of that service…maintenance charges, we charge those to all our customers…. communal areas,” etc, etc.

That being the case, the caravan was it.

“The advice that you got… is that you were able to return to your caravan, so you’re not homeless… that’s why they’re not giving you the homeless priority,” the officer said to Paul. So, there we were – an older bloke with a heart condition being told that living in a caravan was acceptable. We knew that this line was ridiculous. The officer, to her credit, knew this line was ridiculous too, but there we were all the same, going down together. Again. God knows how many similar conversations I’ve witnessed in the last few years. Austerity has redefined our notions of “acceptable,” and “logical.” You hardly know what you’ll hear next.

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Can real problems like homelessness get more than fleeting attention these days?

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Let’s start this one with a story from the large collection in my Nobody Gives A Stuff If Women And Children Are Homeless file:

Image: dead mouse in the bathroom

I’m talking at the moment with a young Newham woman called Chantelle. For some time now, Chantelle has been living in a private-rental craphole. She has a three-year-old son. Cockroaches and rodents roam around their rotten flat. Chantelle told me that exterminators have visited a couple of times, but that they may as well have saved themselves the trip. The roaches and rodents have always come charging back. Wonder if they’re galloping in through a hole in a wall somewhere. Chantelle took some pictures of the roaches, which I’ve posted above and below.

Image: dead cockroaches in the flat

A couple of months back, Chantelle’s landlord told her that she had to leave the flat. Chantelle says that she doesn’t have rent arrears and hasn’t damaged the flat. Her landlord just wants the place back. Sometimes, landlords want to charge somebody else even more to live (should I say “live”) in a flat. Who can really say.

Chantelle went to Newham Council to explain her troubles and to ask for help. You can guess how fulfilling that visit was. Chantelle would’ve been better off waiting for December and writing Santa for a tent. The council was supremely unhelpful as councils can be these days. It hardly matters where you go. Frontline officers have no resources, which means they have no answers. You hit a gatekeeper as soon as you arrive at reception, or send an email, or make a call, or whatever. The opening line is often Goodbye. Some put this more politely than others, but that’s the essence. I’ve seen emails from the council which demonstrate that was the essence here. Chantelle was advised to look for cheap places out of London. People don’t know how to fight for more.

At the very least, councils give people instructions that they find almost impossible to follow. Chantelle says Newham told her that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be helped as a homeless person until she was actually evicted, or the bailiffs were at her door to evict her, or her notice expired, or something to that effect. She still wasn’t entirely sure when we talked and anyway: technicalities. The technicalities mean little to people when it comes down to it. Everyone still ends up at the same place – ie, nowhere. The long and the short of it was that as far as Chantelle was concerned, she was told to wait, to try and find herself another flat out of London (she has no chance of that now in London’s private rental sector, which she can’t afford) and to only come back to the council when the bailiffs were racing up the road after her, or something along those lines. I’d ask Newham council to clarify the situation, except that Newham council has refused to talk to me for several years on account of my Focus E15 housing campaign stories and general attitude to press offices and life, etc. Those guys can really drag out a grudge.

Chantelle’s understanding was that if she left the flat before she was thrown out of it, the council would say that she’d made herself intentionally homeless. This is the kind of understanding that a lot of people are left with these days. I went recently to First Choice Homes in Oldham with a 67-year-old bloke called Paul who was told while we stood there that he was considered to be adequately housed because he had a tiny, rotting caravan to live in. He was also told that he would make himself intentionally homeless if he left the caravan voluntarily – ie, without being chucked out of it by whoever owned it and/or the campsite. True story.

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Why we’re on strike: Eastern Avenue jobcentre staff out against jobcentre closures

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Staff at the Eastern Avenue jobcentre in Sheffield are on a PCS strike today in protest at the government’s proposed closure of Eastern Avenue jcp and a raft of other jobcentres around the country.

People are furious about these jobcentre closure plans. As readers of this site will know, local people who claim benefits have told me that they can’t afford to travel to jobcentres in other towns, that public transport to other jobcentres is patchy at best as transport is cut and disappears, and that they worry they’ll have no access to computers to use locally to search for jobs if local jobcentres close. People say they can’t always afford internet access on their phones.

Local people also say that these non-stop closures of public services in their towns are destroying smaller places. Post the Brexit vote, government is supposed to be deeply concerned about people in the regions who feel left behind, but you wouldn’t know that from government’s ongoing removal of local services.

Clare Goonan, PCS rep and Eastern Avenue jobcentre worker (she is jobcentre’s disability employment adviser and has worked at the jobcentre for 12 years) said on the phone from the strike this morning:

“We [at the Eastern Avenue jobcentre] offer a personalised, one-stop service… people can pop in from local, whereas if it was closed, they’d have to get on a bus, or two buses, and go online. We have a lot more interviews than what they would do if they were in town.

“And the jobsearch and computers – we’ve got 12 computers [at Eastern Avenue] that customers can come in and use if they want on internet. What people would have to do [if the jobcentre closes], is to pay to go into town, because there is no other services around here.

“There is a library, but the possibility is that the library won’t stay open, because of cuts, so if we don’t – we [at the jobcentre] send a lot of people around there [to the library], so if we are not sending people around there [if the jobcentre closes], they [the library] may not stay open. [We have] more a personalised service than town.

“It costs £4.90 a day to go into town [on the bus]. The cheapest ticket is £15 a week, is the cheapest one to go to town.

“Not sure on the reimbursement of travel… in town, there would be a lot more reimbursement of fares. If we get a customer to come in and it’s not their signing day, then it would be to their expense, so they would have to claim it back. [People need to pay for a ticket themselves first].

“[We are striking] to show management that we are standing together. At the moment, there are no members gone in [to work past the picket line] as yet. We’ve not seen any staff go in, apart from higher management that usually go in, we’ve not seen any staff go in as well. The office is not definitely open yet. We want to show management that we’re serious about it, we don’t want the community to lose the last public services that around here. If it’s [the jobcentre] is closing, then this area, which is one of the most deprived areas of Sheffield, will lose its last public services.

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You don’t cure addiction by insisting that addicts are trash

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This post is about drug and alcohol testing for people who claim benefits – and a worldwide government enthusiasm for encouraging loathing of addicts and alcoholics who claim.

I had a few thoughts on this a week or so back when reading about a ridiculous drugs-testing-for-benefit-claimants concept that Australia’s caring government (ha) plans to trial.

You read about such targeting of drug and alcohol users a lot, of course. The general global theme is that you treat addiction best by treating addicts harshly (and, needless to say, that there are votes in being seen to treat addicts harshly). Here is America and Australia extolling drugs testing for people on benefits. Here are various UK press outlets moaning (in chorus – I presume they all took delivery of the same press release or story on the same day) about the number of addicts and alcoholics who claim Employment and Support Allowance. Pursuit of the marginalised is a global game. There are no borders when it comes to free movement of ideas such as screwing social security recipients for political gain. The message is as clear as it is hopelessly simplified: all addicts take the piss, so cut them loose. It’s a message which is particularly suited to our times: mean-spirited, small-minded, based in vindictiveness rather than fact, and the exact right size for a tweet. Long gone are the days when society accepted that there were some people it should just support and had grownup discussions about that.

Anyway.

I’ve been thinking about this, because I’ve been spending a lot time in Oldham recently with Vance, 43 and James, 50 – two blokes who’ve been in and out of street homelessness and trouble at least in part on account of the drink over the years. Vance says he’s done the odd stretch in Strangeways. Both guys have been banned from malls and lunchrooms from time to time on behavioural grounds. Whatever. That’s how addiction and alcoholism can look. There’s good in there as well, as there often is. Vance, for example, invited James to stay with him in Vance’s housing association flat when James was street homeless. Vance found James sleeping on the concrete landing outside his flat and invited James in.

“He was sleeping outside on the landing. I can’t see that, because I’ve been homeless meself…I did if for years meself.” You find a mix of good and bad behaviour right across the social classes, as any AA or Al-Anon attendee will tell you. The only difference between well-appointed addicts and guys like Vance and James is that well-appointed addicts and/or their families have resources to paper over the cracks.

Pool table at the Salt Cellar

Image: At the pool table at a Salt Cellar lunch

Back to the story.

Lately, there’s been a twist to things. Vance has started to become ill. On some level or another over the past few months, we’ve all been watching Vance get sicker and sicker from the booze. I’ve known Vance and James since about October last year. We talk on the phone and meet up in Oldham’s free lunchrooms to play pool and to make snide remarks about the world. I’ve enjoyed this, because I like Vance’s and James’ company, we’ve had a laugh and there’s much to be said for snide remarks.

The regular meetings, though, mean I’ve been in a position to note Vance’s deteriorating health over the months. He lost an awful lot of weight very suddenly. By March, he’d reached skeletal. He was shaky and clearly concerned. He sometimes didn’t turn up to lunch, because he was in pain. His health seemed very bad on some days and better on others. He’d improve and deteriorate and deteriorate and improve. That’s the way things rolled for a while. I’m not a doctor, or any sort of addiction expert, so I don’t suppose I know exactly what I’m looking at.

I do know about conversations and events that stick with me though. There have been a few of those:

“I got to cut it [the drinking] back, but it gets worse when I do,” Vance told me one Tuesday in March as we walked to the King Street tram stop after a lunchroom meeting. That day, Vance and James were drinking Frosty Jack’s from the big plastic bottles. Vance said that the week before, he had tried to go without a drink for a bit. He was in pain and he’d lost a great deal of weight, as I say. Hospital appointments had been booked. So, Vance cut his drinking down for a day – and promptly, he said, had a seizure on the concrete in the Oldham shopping precinct. He was still upset about that, as well he might be. People don’t find illness, seizures, or – if you will – concerns about impending death easier to accept just because they’re addicts or drinkers. Certainly, those things are not easier to watch, or hear about first-hand, just because a person is an addict. There’s nothing like sitting in a cold tram-stop with someone who is damned with or without the bottle of rotgut he’s clutching to leave you with a dim view of governments that want to abandon people in these situations for political gain. Continue reading →

Meanwhile in the real world… rent arrears and Universal Credit

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For all those wondering about causes of homelessness and housing problems in Manchester, Oldham, etc…

Below is another example of fallout from government’s brilliant (not) decision to pay rent money directly to tenants rather than landlords when people claim Universal Credit. I’m working through a collection of recordings I’ve made this year with people who have benefit and rent problems. Thought I’d post this one, because it’s an example of the sort of silent fall that people in the real world continue to take while elections rumble on and online factions scream at each other:

A couple of weeks ago, I visited one of the Oldham lunchrooms which is attended people who have benefits, housing, addiction and money problems. A charity gives out a free lunch at this location every week. I go along to talk with people as they have their lunch. I’m being vague about the location and charity on this occasion, because the woman I recorded the conversation with below said that she already had problems with people in the area following her and targeting her:

“I’ve had every Tom, Dick and Harry in my flat… They’ve robbed phones, robbed money and they even took the food out of my cupboard… it’s me own fault with my head being a bit…”

This woman was small, frail-looking and cold – as in not dressed warmly enough. She’d come to see if there was a winter coat among the free clothes that the charity sometimes hands out. I took some pictures of her in a coat she found. I might pixelate and post them another time.

Anyway. This woman – let’s call her Kelly – was 49. Kelly was in trouble with rent arrears. She said that she her debt was £400 and counting. She also said that she had a letter which told her that eviction was on the cards. Her conversation was hard to follow in places. Kelly was confused, under the influence and obviously unwell. She was struggling to cope, she said, after a recent bereavement.

Kelly said that her rent situation started to become a problem when she was moved onto Universal Credit. She’s paid a lump sum of benefit money directly each month and must pay her rent out of that.

Kelly said that she was finding this level of management too hard:

“What they have done is they have changed my benefit. They put me on Universal Credit. [I’m] struggling. I got to pay the rent and I’m in arrears. They pay me every month.”

I asked Kelly why money management was difficult for her. She kept saying, “because of my bereavement… It’s my head… because of my bereavement this year…

“My rent is about £380 a month. I need to talk about a repayment plan… with my bereavement and that, my head’s all… I haven’t got children.”

The conversation was hard to follow, as I say. These conversations often are.

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DWP: “Closing jobcentres will improve the service.” People who use jobcentres: “No it won’t”

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Another interview from people who use jobcentres:

I recently went back to Clay Cross, where the DWP plans to close the local jobcentre.

People who use and work in the jobcentre are furious about the closure plans.

On the day I attended just before Easter, Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centre people were collecting signatures for a petition to keep the jobcentre open. It was one of the easier petition exercises I’ve been involved in over the years. Everyone signed. Even the jobcentre’s G4s security guard was happy to see people out the front collecting signatures.

“Oh, good,” he said when the petition was revealed.

The reason for this unity was obvious. People are angry about service closures in the area. The jobcentre is not the only local target at the moment. The Clay Cross Lloyds bank branch is due to shut. People also said that they worry generally about the local library staying open in the long term and/or about library hours being cut, because local councils are under such pressure. I got the impression that a lot of things feel tenuous.

Not that the architects of such closures give a damn about that, of course. Those people don’t even make sense a lot of the time.

“We’ve been clear that this is about improving the services we deliver, while making best use of taxpayers’ money,” the DWP told me when I asked last month about the impending closure of Clay Cross jobcentre.

Closing a service improves it, eh? I love this sort of line from officials who are trying to justify service closures. I really do. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I would argue that it’s not actually possible to improve a much-needed service by closing it – certainly, locals never think it is – but government is always keen to argue that such a concept is perfectly logical everywhere. I’ve been interviewing people about service cutbacks for over a decade and I’ve never once heard anyone who uses jobcentres/libraries/banks/hospitals/whatever say “Yay – our local jobcentre/library/bank/hospital is closing. That’s a step forward for the town. That’ll make life easier.” Closures don’t make life easier for people who actually use the services. No doubt that’s the point.

Certainly, locals think that’s the point.

Take Mark, 46, at Clay Cross. I spoke to Mark outside the Clay Cross jobcentre for about half an hour (there’s a transcript from this conversation below).

Mark signs on for JSA at Clay Cross. He said that he would have to travel the half-hour by bus to Chesterfield to sign on if Clay Cross jobcentre closed (the return trip costs £4.20 and Mark did not think he’d be reimbursed for every trip. The DWP says that people won’t be reimbursed for signon trips: “claimants will only have to pay fares when they sign on – on other occasions if they are called into the jobcentre, fares will be reimbursed,” the department told me. I’m not sure how people who must sign on daily and so on will handle this. I suppose people who make a trip to a jobcentre to ask a question or get a form, etc, particularly when they can’t get through to the DWP on the phone, will have to fund their journeys themselves. There can be no doubt that people with support needs will find themselves on the rough end here. It’s definitely my experience that people with support needs who struggle with the DWP’s complex phone and form systems prefer to drop in to local jobcentres to try and get face-to-face help. Continue reading →

You can’t apply as homeless without an address. What.

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This week’s bureaucratic classic:

Yesterday, I was in First Choice Homes in Oldham with Paul, 67, who is homeless. He lives in a caravan at the moment (see pictures below). Joy.

Paul had to make a change to his homelessness and housing register application/record (they’re both on the same form, we were told). He needed to add medical information, because he had a new letter about his health from his doctor. He had to do this online as you must do most things these days. We were ushered over to First Choice’s computer bank as soon as we mentioned the change of circumstances at reception.

So.

Not long into the computer session, we hit a screen which demanded Paul’s address (again). There was, of course, a big and very immediate problem with this. Paul doesn’t have an address BECAUSE HE IS HOMELESS (he wasn’t able to fill in the House Type field either, given that there was no Caravan option in the menu). An address field on a homelessness form would surely be an optional extra in his case – and for the many people I meet who sleep rough, or sofa-surf all over the place, or whatever.  But no. The form would not submit unless the address fields were filled. This is the point where you have to cast about for any old shit that might work in the form fields – maybe a friend or relative’s address, or an older address if you have one. That hardly reflects your situation, though. It doesn’t give you much confidence in the process, either, given that the process doesn’t give accurate insight into your situation.

SIGH. Here’s a shot of the screen not working. It’s fuzzy, but you get the idea. The red fields and exclamation marks are as usual:

I can’t tell you how often my head is done in by public service applications and screens these days. There really does not seem to be a single benefit or housing application process which doesn’t involve a major hurdle or nine. Phone calls to the DWP and councils take ages/go nowhere. Online forms don’t work, or they demand information people can’t easily give. Some processes look and feel as though they were built in technology’s dark ages.

You can set aside a whole morning or afternoon to make calls, or fill in forms these days and get absolutely nowhere (I’ve set aside two afternoons this week for such calls and forms, and emerged no further ahead on both occasions). You inevitably conclude that all aspects of the system are designed to put people off applying. Certainly, very little seems to be designed with the real-life needs of real service users in mind. Can’t wait to see how much further things deteriorate as more and more public money is diverted into endless Brexit departments and projects. Out in the real world, this is how life goes. Continue reading →

“Rich get richer and poor get poorer… The greed is becoming demented greed.” More views from people on benefits

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More views on politics and benefits outside the bubble:

Each Tuesday from 11am, a group called The Ark puts on a few hours of free sandwiches, coffee, cake and bible readings at the Salt Cellar resource building in Oldham. There’s a pool table in the room which is popular as well. People from all walks attend. Some are in and out of street homelessness. Some have alcohol and drug addictions. Some have mental health problems. All worry about money.

A sign at the salt cellar

Image: A sign at the Salt Cellar

Many people at the sessions are affected by welfare reform. They have problems with housing, benefits and paperwork. I attend the Tuesday sessions every few weeks to record interviews on these and other issues. We talk about all kinds of topics: politics, Brexit, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, benefits, service cuts, housing, street homelessness, addiction, jail, family, aspirations – the works.

The transcript in the second part of this post is from a February interview with James, 50 and Paul, 47. I’ve spoken with James and Paul at length before.

For this post, I wanted to ask the guys for their views of people who must live exclusively on benefits – people such as themselves. Everyone else in the world has very strong, and often very negative, views of people who receive benefits. I like to ask people on the rough end what they think.

This can be hard. Not everyone wants to talk politics. Westminster is a world away much of the time.

When I arrived at the Salt Cellar, James and his friend Vance, 43, were out the front of the building, pushing bottles and belongings into their rucksacks.

Vance, James and I have known each other for about six months (you can read more about their stories here). They often ring me very late at night for a chat.

We all laughed as they put their bottles in their backpacks.

“It’s my Lucozade,” James grinned.

We sometimes meet outside the building. People who drink must drink their alcohol outside and behave when they go in. They don’t always. They get chucked out of lunchrooms if they’re pissed and/or aggressive, or when they bring in booze in backpacks. Different lunchrooms have different views on enforcement.

I’m for turning a blind eye to the boozing. I understand that people who run lunchrooms need to keep order – people bring babies and little kids to these places and you can’t have people smacked out on spice or booze or whatever – but there are dimensions that are hard to ignore. Sickness is one. Vance is definitely getting sicker. He’s lost so much weight in the past six months that I don’t like to ask him how he’s going any more. It’s obvious how Vance is going. His health sits in the mind. He’s skeletal. He looks pinched and pained around the eyes.

There was something else going on around Vance’s eyes that Tuesday, too. He had deep, bloody scratches under both of them.

“Jesus,” I said, pointing at Vance’s face. “What happened?”

Vance laughed. “Fuckers threw a cat at me,” he said. “If I find that cat, I’m going to fucking eat it.”

“He coulda lost his eyes,” James said. “That cat is really scared of the owner.”

“Bet it is,” I said.

Vance and James have neighbour problems. They live in a central Oldham flat. Vance was placed there by the local homelessness office in 2016 after years on the streets. James has lived at Vance’s for several months. Before he moved into Vance’s place, James was street homeless. Vance found James trying to sleep on the concrete landing outside of Vance’s flat, so Vance invited James in to stay. Says Vance: “He [James] was sleeping outside on the landing. I can’t see that, because I’ve been homeless meself…It is very cold and wet. You can’t sleep.”

There are dealers, users and all sorts in the neighbourhood. Smooth sailing is rare. A few months ago, a bunch of guys beat James up and threw him out of the flat (you can read about that here). I don’t know how the cat incident came about. I do remember that a couple of weeks after it, James turned up to lunch with a black eye.

“Relationship breakdown,” people usually say when I ask how people end up street homeless.

Pool table at the Salt Cellar

Image: Pool table at the Salt Cellar

Continue reading →