The Octopod menace

Anyone finding themselves upon one the major thoroughfares of leafy suburb Jesmond the other night may have seen a pony-tailed dark trenchcoated and becapped figure picking up small objects from the pavement.  What could it be?  A performing/fine arts student working on their latest project/happening?  Well, that would be the normal explanation for this part of Newcastle, but no, it was I.  And what was I picking up?  Well, conkers, obviously.

I have spoken of this before.  Basically, I was gathering conkers because last year I was told that they keep spiders away.  Now, I don’t know if this is true, but I certainly seemed to have less spider activity in my flat since putting down conkers last year in dusty corners and behind bookcases etc where the enemy foregathers.  It could be coincidental but given my problematic past relations with those malicious fly-eating arachnids (faults on their side only) any defence against them will be utilised.

And, rather brilliantly, unlike last year, this autumn has been good for conkers, or bad for conker gathering children, whichever, and so I have this time been able to gather a goodly number.  A very goodly number in fact.  Perhaps a few more than I actually need.

Never mind, the fact that I can barely move for conkers detracts from the possibility that their presence may spare my heart from one of those nerve-jangling octopedal forays across the carpet.

And that's a price worth paying, surely.

Ratepayers Against Bloggers Inciting Democracy (or R.A.B.I.D)

As of midnight tonight squatting will be a criminal offence.

And hurrah to that I say.  At last an end to all those times I’ve been out to get some milk and come back to find an anarchist collective has moved into the flat.

Because that’s the odd thing about this.  It’s an issue that a lot of people are very scared of, but which rarely if ever seems to actually happen.  I mean, how many times has a family returned from holiday to find strangers living in their homes?  I venture to suggest hardly ever.  As it happens the only incident I ever came across was in my legal days when we had a landlord client who took the opportunity of his tenants being on holiday to move another family into the property.  The first family came back from wherever to find their possessions piled up in the hallway.  And you have to admit, that's not quite the same thing.

It is a sure sign of a bad law that it sounds like it’s been drafted in response to a slightly drunk middle aged middle class man in a pub.  You know the ones.  They prop up the bar complaining about things that don’t actually happen. ‘So there was this Muslim bus driver who refused to let a old woman on board because she was wearing a cross’ or ‘some council has banned Christmas because it’ll offend the Hindus’ or ‘And of course all you need to do is walk into the dole office with a slight limp and you’re on disability benefits for life’ and so on and so on.

The last law I can remember being formulated in response to golfclubman (as I like to call him) was the poll tax which was introduced to Parliament in response to a lot of dreary moaning about the rates and so the incompetently unfair poll tax was brought in and, in the fullness of time, destroyed Margaret Thatcher as a political force.

For those of you too young to remember the rates, they were a local tax which was set according to the value of the property.  They had a weird fascination for a certain type of small-minded person who used their status as a payer to somehow suggest that their opinions carried more weight than others.  A local group where I live, the Jesmond Residents Association (whose sole raison d’être as far as I can make out is to ensure that we never again have a chippy in the area) was originally the Jesmond Ratepayers Association.  And the main opposition to the Greenham Common Peace Camp was a group calling itself Ratepayers Against the Greenham Encampment (or R.A.G.E., see what they did there?) thus announcing that their status as payers of a local land tax gave their views greater weight than those of equally effected residents who did not (eg dependents, students, children, the unemployed etc) and while there were issues around Greenham Common* it seems strange that greater weight to the debate should have been given to those who paid the rates.  It’s as if they were still smarting from the removal of the householder qualification from those eligible to vote.

*the most bigoted people it has been my misfortune to meet have been a couple of BNP skinheads I once advised in the police cells and a Greenham Common veteran

Personally, rather than criminalise the squatters, I would increase council powers to claim properties abandoned or forgotten by their owners and put to use as social housing.  But then that would be a step towards the alleviation of poverty and, as the last two governments have made abundantly clear, being poor is a lifestyle choice that should not be encouraged.

And I suppose that putting squatters in prison is one way of solving homelessness.

What Lies Beneath

The Ouseburn Valley separates East Newcastle from the rest of the city and acts as a natural barrier between the cheap(ish) and cheerful Heaton and the expensive and dour Jesmond, which skulks fearfully behind the ranks of the Residents’ Association. Four great bridges span the valley but at one point no bridge is necessary. It’s been filled in.

For years I wasn’t aware of it. I knew, of course, that the valley was not continuous but I had assumed that the blockage was natural and geographical. The adjective igneous doubtless came into it somewhere I thought. Then I found out that no, it had actually been filled in and again I vaguely assumed that this would be with rubble from the railways or some such Industrial Revolutionary source. Again no. Two months ago, almost to the day, I found out that the valley was, in the early twentieth century, filled in with rubbish. That's rubbish. Garbage. Detritus. Not the sad but necessary spoilage from the engine that drove the empire but just rubbish. Now I’m as proud as any Geordie of having won life’s lottery by being born in Newcastle upon Tyne but there are times when your local pride takes a knock and this discovery was one of them. Apparently the mayor and corporation decided they’d had it with building bridges across the valley and so decided to fill it in and then build housing on top. Not surprisingly, once the rubbish had reached the requisite level it was found that it was not suitable for building housing on so it was grassed over and is now a pleasant green space. The '60s visionary nutter, corrupt vandal and, oh the sorrow to us, council leader, T Dan Smith, whose dreams for Newcastle remain current nightmares, decided to build a stadium there but that wasn’t on either. It’s still marked on the maps as ‘City Stadium’ but all that’s there is a solitary running track which I think is a touch misleading. Now while all this makes for a good sermon (for lo your stadia are built on garbage) or metaphor, it is mildly embarrassing for a proud northerner like myself. You can just hear the southerners telling each other: ‘No point in giving them valleys up there, they’d just fill them with rubbish.’ Still, at least we didn’t stick a railway platform over Boudicca’s grave so I suppose it all evens out in the end.