Help!

Can someone please get me out of this dump, I can’t stand it anymore! Sadly, I have no choice but to stay put since I can’t afford to move out. It’s a disgrace that housing could be this poor.

First we have the external area to deal with as in the road the house is located. For example, the other evening when I came home at around 10 or 11 there was a girl across the road. She was wearing only jeans and no top. She was topless!

She was banging on a door and shouting at the guy inside to let her in. She was high as a kite but I was concerned about her wellbeing. Another neighbour came out and talked to the girl. I left it at that and went into my flat. I then looked through my window and more people had come out to discuss the situation with the topless lady. Eventually the guy came out and threw her clothes at her. I can seriously live without the drama.

A few days later the a police car arrived at the halfway house across the street and the dude living there was out on the street shouting at the coppers about some guy kicking the door in. A police van arrived and officers ran into the house and came out with a young man in cuffs. Later a housing association car drove up to the house and boarded it up. Now I wonder where the guys in the halfway house got to live. I hope they are not homeless!

It’s not any better in the back of the building. I try to clean it up every now and then but it just keeps getting filthy. But I don’t give up and I am quite proud with the result. (See the before and after pictures.)

Before cleaning:

After cleaning:

 

When you have tackled the external environment you enter the building itself and are met with a huge pram park. We have at least ten to fifteen prams in the entrance hall. People are clearly overcrowded in the tiny flats!

 

As I walk up the stairs to my flat I have to evade the hoodies that use our building as a hang out place when it rains or is too cold to be outside. After all those obstacles I finally reach my dump of a flat.

I used to think that I live alone but not anymore! I share my little space with mice, cockroaches, spiders and some dumb insect that surprisingly have not been extinct yet. It’s a tiny black little bug that hardly ever moves so it’s dead easy to kill it. Strange little creature. And finally I have my little fungus mushroom growing in the bathroom.

I had enough of this - can someone please get me out of here? Cameron?

Bob Marley

I went to Ritzy and saw a preview of the documentary Marley. It was brilliant. I have seen many documentaries about Marley before but none of them has been as moving as this one. It brought up the darker sides of his character like his problems to trust people, his perfectionism and the effect it had on the people around him and how hard it was for his children to grow up with the phenomenon Bob Marley. It was a loving portrait of a man who lived a difficult life and I balled my eyes out when it came to his illness and death.

It is funny but I just recently saw a documentary about Queen and Freddy Mercury. The two films and the two men had some resemblances. Both had difficult childhoods, both were extremely gifted and talented and both were committed to their music. The tragic is that they both died when they were on the top of their greatness and on the verge of divine proportions. Don’t miss this film!

I think it probably takes a nutter to become really successful. An extreme workaholic, perfectionist and obsession to succeed. All this usually means disaster for the people closest to the genius in question like the partners, children, parents and friends. It’s a good thing I’m just an average person, I am too lazy to be a genius or even going close to develop my potential. I think we all have it in us but as I said it takes a nutter to fully live it out.

In the film, Marley talks about living in Trench Town, the ghetto in Kingston, Jamaica and how people from the ghetto were treated, particular dreadlocks.

The relationship between rastas and the police in the Caribbean are very similar as the situation in the UK between the police and black young men. Brixton has about fifty-fifty of white as blacks and everything in-between but in the ten years I lived in Brixton I have never seen white young men being stopped and searched by the police. But never a week passes without I have seen young black men being stopped. If this is not harassment then I don’t know what is.

I am lucky to never been stopped in this way and if I would I would feel like I have been abused and like to make a complaint somewhere. But for the British people with brown skin colour this is a daily experience, either on personal level or it happened to a friend, a brother, partner or son. This has to stop!

The other day when I was walking back from my GP I saw a road block up the road by the police. As I came closer there were 11 (!) officers investigating a young black man. He was standing on the pavement being questioned by two officers whilst the others were standing around being intimidating. In his car there was an old man sitting in the front, probably his granddad or something. I am pretty sure the two of them had done no crime what so ever. How can this be allowed?

One evening I got disturbed by noise outside my window and I, curious as I am had to take a look and there was a police van that had stopped two black teenage boys. They checked their ID and their pockets and then let them go. How does that make you feel? No wonder we get riots ever now and then. There is an anger brewing in our society and the police are increasing the heat under the pot.

Or as Bob Marley express it: “These are the big fish who always try to eat down the small fish...”

Swenglish

I have lived in England for almost fourteen years now and it makes me feel Swenglish, particularly when I go back to Sweden for visits. The contrast between England and Sweden is enormous. It’s not like travelling between two countries is more like going to a different planet. It takes a lot of time for me to adjust to planet Sweden and I feel like a moron, completely out of touch with how things work.

The living standard in Sweden is so much higher than what I come across in England. I am sure there must be some poor people lurking about somewhere it’s just that I never see them. All my friends and family are firmly middleclass and live in nice houses or flats in amazing neighbourhoods.

Whenever I come to my sister’s house I can spend hours just playing with the water tap in the bathroom. The cheer joy of a tap that actually blends the water! With an easy press the water comes out, mixed to a comfortable temperature, not boiling hot or freezing cold just perfect mix of the two. The toilets always flush with a soft touch on a button. You don’t have to spend five minutes flushing and praying to God that your excrement will disappear!

The first day or so in Sweden, I struggle with the language and usually make words in half-English and half-Swedish. Luckily most people in Sweden do speak English so they are able to decode my homemade Swenglish. My nieces and nephew used to find it hilarious when they were little.

My sister also told me that I use an English sentence structure rather than a Swedish. Strangers must think I am retarded or something. I mean I look Swedish and normal but act as a moron.

The technology is also very advanced. I am not even sure I can manage to do food shopping on my own anymore. It’s too technically advanced for me. I therefore love to go to the supermarket with my sisters. Everybody bring their own bag, designed to fit perfectly into the shopping trolley.

You often start your shopping by going into a side room where you can dispose your empty pet bottles, glass bottles and cans in specially designed holes in the wall. Everybody do exactly as you are told and are very careful not to put the pet bottles in the can hole and so on. For the trouble you get paid in form of a receipt that can be deducted from your total bill at the till. You get about 0.10p per bottle.

When you disposed your bottles you walk into to the proper shop and there you grab a scanning machine from a wall full of scanners and then you simply scan your items before you pack them into to your purpose designed bag. When you come to the till you use another machine to read your scanner and then you slot your card into the machine and out comes a receipt and your shopping is completed. I am amazed!

You can also choose to use a manned till if you do not wish to use a scanner but even then you are met with machines where you slot your coins and so forth and I feel like I am at an attraction at Disney World or something. As a Swenglish person I always do all this things in the wrong order and get confused and that is when I feel like a moron.

My last visit to Sweden was over the New Year and the nature was fantastic. I went up North, about three hours car ride North of Stockholm to a county called Dalarna. My sister is part of a commune there. One of those shared homes that were so popular with the lefties during the seventies. This is a sort of commune second home. It is lovely located on the top of a mountain.

And the views are fantastic!

We slept in bunker beds and each room can fit up to six people but I only shared with my sis and her hubby. You have cute little curtains on your bed and I felt like I was in the film Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe.

The cute sink

My sis I woke up early and had breakfast to the most amazing sunrise in the quiet kitchen heated by a wood burner.

When I opened the cupboard I saw something in the corner of my eye and it turned out to be an exposed little mouse. Since I had opened the door the mouse couldn’t get away so we stood there looking at each other for a while until the mouse made a kamikaze jump down to the floor and disappeared under the sink.

After our breakfast sis went out to collect wood and sort out the pine tree that fell over an electric wire during the storm a few nights previous.

On New Year 's Eve we grilled our meat over the open fire in the dining room and had a great meal over a heated political debate. At twelve we went out and sent off lanterns over the woods and I was terrified we would cause a forest fire!

That’s it. 2011 is over and 2012 is here and my new life is supposed to start.

I’m still waiting...

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?