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...