There are changes coming. There will be reform, the whole system will be appraised, modified, made better. Arbitrary evictions will cease, so they say.
This weekend my friend made me dinner. Beers were taken. Dancing was done. Conversations rippled on steps, on make shift dance floors, in kitchens and bathrooms. We spoke of our eviction stories. Tales and fables of the gruesome upheaval of women with their children, all over Scotland. It is women and children, don’t think otherwise. The instances of men being evicted are not as prevalent.
I don’t want to move. I don’t ever want to move. I like my home, wherever I am, it’s my sanctuary, my comfy lovely place to be braless. The only place I ever regularly dance naked to very loud music. This weekend I met seven other women who say exactly the same thing.
We are regularly and without warning forced to quit our known way of life. For little or no reason we are forced to move on. Christy Moore sang “move along, get along, go, move, shift’ and this is the theme tune to my life – and to many many hundreds and thousands of other women. Landlords, house owners, housing providers, estate agents rarely have to quantify or explain their actions publicly. They don’t have to give a valid reason for the eviction of a mother and child, they simply sign the form and tidy their desks. there’s no come-back, no problem for them. They have no need whatsoever to justify their actions.
My crime, mea culpa mea culpa, was to ask for the gas hob to be repaired. I had noted on the inventory when I moved in here last January that it wasn’t working, that the knobs didn’t fit, that the flames couldn’t be well regulated. The housing provider sent me a bag of knobs from Amazon. They didn’t fit. You’ve all heard it by now, in some form or other, from me or from a pal or the lady down the road.
I had over three thousand hits in two days on my last blog. Hundreds of women messaged me. This situation will change, but it’s going to be slow. I have a plan. Can you send me your stories? Are you able to write down your eviction tale and pass it over to me? Yes yes, we will need the male voices, for balance, for fairness.
I face months in temporary accommodation with my cat in foster care and my furniture in storage, according to our current system. Please understand that I have no intention of doing that. What did you do? Did you do what they told you? Did you exact revenge? Did you lie down and take it and not say a word? Let’s blow this folks, let’s start telling our eviction tales.