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No. 16183
Anonymous
11th August 2014 Monday 6:07 am
16183
Notes from the Underground
This is probably a bit of an obscure one, thinking about it. I used to live with my mum right up until I got kicked out this March. Seeing as I was 17 at the time and was suffering a bit of a drug problem, the powers that be placed me into the magical world of Supported Housing. For those that haven't heard of this (I.E pretty much everyone), this is one of the routes you go down if you're deemed unable to take care of yourself for one reason or another. This means that I live with a pretty diverse group of people, and by diverse I mean complete fucking nutters.
My next door neighbour hears voices and sees demons and it's not uncommon to hear him talking to himself in the shower, the guy next door to him beat up his elderly grandmother after she refused to fuel his gambling addiction. Further down is a guy who has completely lost the plot (drug-induced psychosis) after years of Ketamine and MCAT, who regularly accuses people of stealing his drugs/shagging his on/off missus and seems to enjoy telling us that we will go nowhere in life. Pretty rich from someone who bitches about being kicked off an adult education course because he couldn't be arsed to show up on the first day. His neighbour was a bloke who had quite the affinity for sharps to the point where we'd be finding knives down the back of sofas, in our rooms, in the toilet, pretty much everywhere but the kitchen. He's currently in prison for an armed robbery, god bless his soul.
Downstairs we've got a girl who is the thickest and most obnoxious person I have ever met in my life. She's joined by an MCAT addict who keeps forgetting to wash, another bloke who flat out refuses to wash and stinks out any room that he enters and someone who decided that robbing the lead from the shelter roof for weed money was the best idea ever.
Obviously this "diversity" leads to frequent.. er.. tensions. This isn't helped by the fact that the staff are terrified of any visits from the Police or Environmental Health checks, because the conditions are so poor that it's starting to look like we might get closed down. Imagine a 21st century permanent adaptation of Lord of the Flies that you also have to live in, day after day and you'll see what I mean. I came back from a funeral a few weeks ago to find human shit in the kitchen sink, which had apparently been in there for a while since nobody could be arsed to clean it up.
I feel really isolated from the outside world as well. Somehow, when people hear about your circumstances, they stop returning your calls and messages. I spend most of my time browsing imageboards and news sites through an internet connection created with the help of a password reset disk, a .bat file and ICS.
Oh, and this also costs the taxpayer in excess of £300 a week in rent alone, not counting staff or the endless array of social workers and similar services that are layed on by the council or the crippling debt that most of us are in because the council, in their infinite wisdom, pay Housing Benefit directly to the shady housing association that owns the place. You'd think that this would work well, considering the state of the people who tend to occupy these shitholes, but somehow things are never that simple.
This doesn't cover half the shit that goes on in these places, if anyone wants a deeper insight from the other side of the coin, a guy who used to work in the industry wrote a brilliant blog and book on the subject (Winston Smith - Generation F).
Ask away if theres something in particular that you want to know.
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