Is the death penalty the solution to my problems?

I am firmly against death penalty but last night I seriously felt it was appropriate to bring it back as a practical way to deal with noisy neighbours. There is a Nigerian lady living above me and she has an extraordinary loud voice. It’s goes through anything and she does enjoy talking or in her case it’s more a question of shouting. It’s unbelievable how much noise she can produce just by sitting down and having a chat with a friend.

Last night she had the telly on loud and at least one other woman over for a visit. It sounded like there were five or more fishmonger wives having an argument and over the entire racket you could hear a poor child crying his lungs out. He probably just wanted to sleep, like me.

I decided to go up and knock her door, thinking that she might be unaware of that the volume of her conversations is disturbing in the night. I knocked the door and she opened. I asked her if she could keep the noise down a bit because people are trying to sleep. She just snared, “I don’t disturb people”, and slammed the door in my face. It was then I felt death penalty would be a good option.

I went back to bed and tried to read but her conversation made it impossible to concentrate. Instead I started to fantasize about different scenarios for my revenge. My favourite was that I went up there with a bazooka and said “Shut up, your mother fucker”, and blow her off the planet. Other options involved the police and social services, collecting names from the whole neighbourhood for a petition to get her evicted. Somewhere there I fell asleep.

The lady upstairs behaves strange in other situations as well. When she had a water leak in her bathroom, which generated a rainfall in my bathroom, she refused to let the maintenance guy in to fix it. She said she didn’t have a leak!

When water poured down from my roof in the sitting room the same thing happened. When the maintenance finally got access to her flat it turned out she had a leak from her freezer and had not noticed the pool of water on her floor!

The woman is insane. She even looks mad because she has shaved off her natural eyebrows and painted in fake ones with a thick black pen, which make her look like a cartoon.

I pray for strength to live through this. If I am lucky she gets pneumonia and dies...or even better, I get some acceptance in my life and accept that we are different.

 

Live and let live!

Brixton Splash

Here in Brixton we celebrate Jamaica’s independence with the Brixton Splash once a year and it all kicked off again yesterday. The weather was great and I think it was the largest splash so far.

The food was great:

 

 

 

 

The crowd was out:

 

The road was blocked:

 

And the music good man!

Today, Brixton was back to normal and there was no sign of the party however Gresham Road was closed by police. Is it possible that there has been a crime in Brixton?

 

Cabin Fever

I recently came back from a trip to Norway where I visited Brenda and her husband. I have never been there before and I was totally unprepared for Norway. I mean, I know they have mountains and fjords but I didn’t realised that the whole bloody country is build of it!

When Brenda told me that I have to take a bus and then a ferry, I thought it sounded like a small mini adventure. God, I was so naive.

I flew into Bergen which is beautifully located by the sea and surrounded by mountains. At this point I thought that was picturesque.

I arrived to the central bus stop in Bergen 30 minutes before departure of my bus to Kvanndal ferry station. I felt slightly restless by waiting and as a shopaholic I managed to track down a shopping centre within two minutes of arriving to Bergen. I rushed in, thinking I could find a nice folklore or Viking inspired winter coat. I do like to impress people in London with my Scandinavian dressing style.

I found a shop within seconds and there it was - a bright red coat. I tried it on and it fitted! The shop did actually cater for huge sizes. I bought it and run out just in time to catch my bus. When I settled down in my seat I started to think about the exchange rate and brought the calculator out. I had just bought a blooming coat for £220! Shit, I can’t afford that. In London I could get three coats for that price. Sometimes I get so tired of myself.

To make things worse, when I came home I tried my old coat on and realised that I wasn’t as large as I thought I was so I still fit into it. The whole purchase of a new coat was a waste of my scarce cash.

I had a nice front seat on the bus and enjoyed the view as we passed mountains, fjords and waterfalls. In most countries they run over mountains or around them but not in Norway – here they run through the mountains. I never seen so many tunnels in my life and they can be two kilometres long! The Norwegians are a truly tough people.

It was very beautiful but after 2,5 hours you are getting tired of the winding roads. I was happy to arrived in one piece at Kvanndal ferry station so I could stretch my legs and let my nausea settle down.

I got on to the ferry and enjoyed the fantastic scenery and after 20 minutes I finally arrived at Utne.

Brenda picked me up and finally I had arrived after nine hours travel! Amazing trip in a way, I had used all means of transportation. I walked to Brixton, took a tube to Victoria Station, took a train to Gatwick where I took a flight to Bergen. In Bergen I took a bus to Kvanndal where I took a ferry and finally Brenda picked me up in a car. I was exhausted on arrival.

Brenda’s house was fantastic and the view from her sitting room was amazing.

 

 

When you stepped out from the front door you faced a huge mountain with a waterfall on the top. You could hear the water from the doorstep. Powerful stuff!

On the first day Brenda and her husband had to work so I explored Utne on my own. Obviously it was a bit of a trek since everything in Norway is a trek and needs careful planning and proper outfit, which I didn’t have.

You have to struggle to find enough flat land to make a football pitch! I am not surprised the Vikings chose to conquer the Atlantic, they must have been desperate to find some flat land. I was quite prepared to go to sea myself at this point.

But Utne is a beautiful place.

 

 

However, downtown Utne seem to lack something for a Brixtonian like me. Where is the action?

Utne has the oldest hotel in Norway, closed for the season, a food store with ridiculously expensive food, one restaurant open on odd hours and funny enough a museum! Hardanger Folk Museum. That was all the action so I joined in and visited the museum that showcased traditional folk-dresses and they also had an out-door museum with old houses.

They had a longhouse like the Vikings and it was really cool.

On the Friday night Brenda suggested we go to Jondal for a meal out at the local pizza restaurant. Said and done, we got into the car and drove 45 minutes through the winding roads just to find that the restaurant was closed for the season! It was only to get back into the car and drive back to Utne.

On the Saturday, Brenda and I took the ferry to Kinsarvik where we went for a forest walk. With my short, fat legs I am not able to do more than a stroll. Needless to say we were surpassed by Norwegian couples in full trekking gear marching by in a super speed. They horribly fit those Norwegians and no surprise there when you live in a place where you have to trek to the local shop.

 

 

 

The cabin Fever started to set in. I found myself in the middle of nowhere and I dreaded the long journey back to civilisation. But luckily Brenda worked as a GP and she gave me some motion sickness pills for the bus ride back to Bergen.

In May I fancied myself moving to the countryside but I have now reconsidered that and I am quite happy to stay in my dear old Brixton.

As I came back home I got a nice surprise, all the prams blocking up the entrance hall were gone and the space is like a huge ballroom now.

Maybe a should through a house party in the hallway?

Poverty

My mushroom farm is steadily growing, spreading its spores in the air and I have now developed asthma! I really need to move but when you are poor you don’t have any choices but to stay put despite the damage to your health. Show me a landlord that will accept a tenant on housing benefits and with no regular income...

I am not alone in this situation. Everybody in this house lives here because it’s all we can afford. The stink of rising damp is suffocating as you enter the building. And now it’s even damp outdoors with this shitty summer weather, sigh.

There are no affordable housing around and less so now when the middle classes can’t afford to buy a property and has to rent instead which pushes up the rent costs. All new-build flats in Brixton are luxury apartments to buy and the poor people are pressed out of the area. Or, as in my situation, stuck in a dump.

I have contacted the landlord and they sprayed my farm with pesticide (some anti-fungus) which made me cough and reach for the inhaler. Then they sealed the area with some white stuff. So now it continues to grow on the inside of the wall and God knows where it goes from there. I felt their solution was a bit dodgy so I also contacted the council and the environmental health will contact me, any year in the future.

I do my best and try to keep the spirit up and I made a new flower arrangement for the bathroom using my great grandmother’s soap dish as a base. I am quite happy with the result.

I rolled a towel in a black plastic bin bag and put it as a cover over the gap under the door in a desperate attempt to keep the mushroom spores in the bathroom and out of my bedroom. But now I keep forgetting it’s there and trip over it when I go to the loo. Hopefully I learn before I break an arm.

 
Your housing will affect your health as I am now very aware of and it doesn’t really take a brain surgeon to figure that one out! However, Kings College has completed a research project about the health of people living in Lambeth and the result showed that “socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals” (nice formulation) have poorer health.
( Research ) so now it’s scientifically proven. However, I suspect this will not change any of Cameron’s splendid ideas to change NHS.

Now I spend most of my time trying to come up with a scheme to help me to re-locate. Mostly it involves Internet surfing cheap flats for rent in Brighton, Oxford and central London. I let you know as soon as I find something...

A life in the country side?

I just got back from a creative writing course in Headington, a village shortly outside Oxford. It was fantastic to get out of London.
As I got off the bus in Headington I was hit by a wall of smell. I could smell flowers, grass and soil. I was in the nature!
I could smell the nature, despite standing on the busy London Road that leads out to M40 from Oxford.
Then it entered my head for the first time in my life – maybe I should move out to the country?

 I walked through the cute village on my way to the college. It was lovely with the peace and quiet. I passed pretty cottages and started to dream about a slower life.

 

I got a great room with en suite and the college grounds were beautiful.

We were only four students in the class and the teacher was brilliant. However the three other students were very different, if I put it that way.

There was an 83 year old man that had a slight touch of dementia. He had a constant look of surprise on his face and he got lost all the time. He also could wander off in the middle of the class. Funny enough he was sharp as a pencil when he wrote and gave feedback to the rest of us. There were also moments when you could actually have a full rational conversation with him. But in-between that he was lost.

There was a lady in her seventies that had a walking stick and arthritis and she also got lost. She was in pre- Alzheimer’s and she was aware of it. Her memory was patchy. She had a pair of red shoes that was broken and she called them her fancy shoes! She constantly spoke about how she should have brought her walking shoes instead of the fancy shoes.

She had only brought one pair of socks and the other lady in the group was complaining about her feet being smelly. I didn’t really notice but then again I had a cold. Her jumper and trousers were dirty and the second day she showed up in a skirt with a missing button so we could see her underwear through the hole. She was constantly talking and it was difficult to get her to stop. The teacher however was quite good in getting the lady to focus. The last day she turned up in her nightie and said she had nothing clean to wear!

The third lady was really strange. She had anger outbursts and was over sensitive to everything. When the teacher told her to stop rustling her papers and listen to the Alzheimer lady, she got a fit and sneered that she will indeed go out next time she need to sort her papers. As if we cared. Later when I started to cough she said, “So, it’s ok to cough in class then but not to sort your papers!”

She was overactive and couldn’t sit still, she shouted at me once. But again, there were moments when she behaved normal and you could actually have a conversation with her. Then of course, I was in the group...

Despite the strange company I actually warmed to them after four days and was sad to leave them.

One evening I decided to attend the healing mass in the village church. I thought it would be a great way to join village life. But alas there were only three old ladies attending, which made me feel old too. Despite the low attendance the priest wore the full regalia and followed the whole ritual as if the church had been full.

When the healing thing started I joined the three other ladies kneeing at altar as the priest started to put his hand on the first lady’s head. In my head I started think that the priest saw us as his bitches. It took the seriousness out of the situation.
I am in deed a heathen.

The week went fast and before I knew it I was back in Brixton. As I came up from the tube station I was met with the sirens of police cars and the Brixton Road was blocked off because a young man had been hit on his head and there was blood everywhere. His girlfriend was in chock and a police woman spoke with her as the boyfriend was driven off in the ambulance.

Home sweet home, or?