Bad company

My niece is following my footsteps and decided to move to England. She is going to live and work in Brighton for nine months. The good news is that she first stopped by my flat for a few days before her move south.
Sadly, I am not very good company at the moment because I am skint and have a bad cold. So she is left to her own devise. However, she is an independent young lady so she manages.

It turned out that she never read Jane Austen so we have spent the evenings catching up on my Austen DVD collection. I love my dear Jane!

My niece posted a picture on the mushrooms growing in my shower on her Facebook page and her Swedish friends are shocked. Life here in the ghetto is different from the high living standard in Sweden...

On Saturday night there was some commotion in the staircases at 11pm and I went out to have a look. Seriously, one day I will fall victim for the “curiosity killed the cat” wisdom. On the stairs I found six teenagers loitering about. A young couple were making out and the rest were just making noise. They all stood tall as I arrived and looked like small innocent angels, ‘we haven’t done anything’ they explained. A wee boy of ten or so said he was waiting for his mum. I told them to keep it down because some people are sleeping. It did actually get quieter after that.

The next morning I had to sweep the stairs from chicken bones and empty take away boxes. I do suspect the kids but maybe I am wrong.

Apparently I live within the area where they will have a trial period of dispersal zone for youngsters; only two can stand together without being dispersed. Should I contact the police about the kids? Is it really right? Where should they go?

Yes, I do get fed up by the noise, the litter and the fact that they nick my flowers and destroy the curve appeal. If I call the police to disperse them then they will just end up on someone else’s doorstep.
Maybe I should interact with them in a more positive way, get down with them so to speak, “give me five, man”.

Ignorance

This morning I went down to Brixton town centre where the metropolitan police had parked a van on Windrush Square. The van showed images from CCTV footage during the riots and asked the public, “Do you know this person?”
I walked up to the van to have a look, curious as I am and saw that some of the images were on children!
I think it is wrong to publish images of people (suspects) before they have been proven guilty of any crime and especially so when it involves children.
I asked the officer by the van what they are doing and he said they are trying to identify looters. I then said, “But you show images of children”.
He then responded that they are old enough to do the crime!
I then said that they are not proven guilty yet and their crime is poverty.
Then the police man said that he is poor too but he don't steal!

I get so tired sometimes. If you work as a police man you earn more than minimum pay and therefore you are not poor. However, more than 50% of the children in Lambeth live in poverty. The poverty I talk about here are children who have to go to school hungry because their parents can’t afford breakfast, children living in poor housing with mould on their bedroom walls and with various infestations and overcrowded situations putting their health at risk.

This ignorant police man actually compared his own situation with real poverty.

He then asked me if my windows were smashed during the riots and when I said no he insinuated that I then have no right to say anything because it didn’t affect me.
I nearly told him that the riots would never have happened if it wasn’t for the police murdering Mark Duggan!
But I thought I better hold my tongue or I get myself arrested! You can’t be too sure nowadays when it comes to the metropolitan police force. Besides, talking to him was like talking to an ignorant football hooligan or skinhead – nobody was home, the light was not on.

Surely the looting by the bankers cost us all far more than the riots in August.

Why don’t they show images of the greedy bankers as well?

Why don’t they spend their time finding out how Sean Rigg could die whilst in police custody at Brixton Police Station?

That this sorting the wheat from the chaff can go on without any protests or opposition is cheer ignorance to me. It is scary to have a police force that treats people different depending on their wealth. Where is the justice in that?

Weekend peace

On Sunday I had just settled down for a nice breakfast in my PJs when there was a knock on my door. I open and there was a young police officer asking if I had heard any noise last night. My next door neighbour had had her door kicked in sometime during the Saturday afternoon or evening.
There was a small congregation of worried neighbours out on the landing, they too in their PJs. I joined in and was told that many neighbours had been burgled. A worrying thought.

In this case they had only managed to steal the landline! Surely the black market for stolen landlines must be limited these days when most people only have a mobile, or? Someone suggested it must have been a drug addict or something.

I don’t care who it was, it makes me feel insecure. I can’t even afford a home insurance and neither can my neighbours. I try to save up for a new pair of glasses since I’m blind as a bat with my old ones and glasses has to come before an insurance.

It’s all because the security system does not work, people can just kick on the door’s security system and let themselves in!

I called the landlord and told them there is no security here. She said she will talk to the maintenance guy about it but I’m pretty sure nothing will come out of it because they need to replace the entire system to one that you can’t kick open.

What to do next? Buy a gun? Create a neighbourhood watch? Hope and pray it will not happen to me? What?  

All suggestions kindly accepted...

The big clean up

After being home for days resting my bad knee and feeling sorry for myself because I couldn’t go to the Nottinghill Carnival, I decided it was time for me to get out of the house. So on carnival Sunday I went to cinema and saw One Day, which was such a co-dependent rubbish.
As I came out from the cinema I walked pass a group of people that were smeared in chocolate and obviously just came back from Nottinghill after playing the mas with Pure Lime, the band I used to play with.
I was gutted so I called my sponsor, she said she will come and visit me. On the way home I noticed that the front garden was filthy with rubbish and I decided to clean it up. I’m not too keen on my sponsor to see the filth I live in.
That is how I ended up spending carnival Monday sweeping the street armed with a broom, refuse bags and garden gloves.
As I worked hard in the sun, the drug dealer from across the street passed me and tried to pretend he didn’t stare at me. I keep on bumping into him across Brixton but only when I do something weird.
I collected three bags of rubbish from the front garden and three bags from the back garden. I also cleaned the staircases up to my door. I don’t know if my cleaning makes me a mad woman or a genius? I surely hope it’s not yet another cross-addiction of mine! Gulp, is it?

Now, a slight change of topic. I always said I love Brighton because of all the seagulls there, which reminds me of Stockholm. (Stockholm is built on many islands and is surrounded by water and therefore has lots of seagulls.)
However, recently some seagulls seem to have moved into Brixton and settled down on my street. I hope it’s not all the filth that attracted them. I now realised that I hate the buggers because they have a nasty tendency to scream at 4am! Now I have to get myself a shotgun and sort the bastards out!
Maybe I can ask my drug dealing neighbour across the street?

A Brixtonian tree

There are strange trees in Brixton.
Outside the police station there is a large tree that looks like any other tree at first glance.

But as you get closer to the tree, you can see that the trunk is full with lanterns, notes and pictures in memory of Sean Rigg who died in police custody at Brixton station.

 

 

We should not have to have trees like this in Brixton!
However, I suspect we will continue to have them as long as the racist Metropolitan Police force is allowed to kill our young men without any legal actions against the killers.

• Video: Sean Rigg