5 February 2025

The wisdom of residents’ associations

There is a term used in the council for people like this: solutionisers.

A call from my good friend Ben who, as I might have mentioned, lives on the top floor of a tower block in Kemptown, Brighton’s funkiest area. Today he is calling me to vent. Ben has a strong sense of civic duty. In the past this would take the form of keeping scammers on the phone for as long as possible, spinning improbable and highly involved fantasies for his own amusement until the scammer hangs up in disgust. His finest moment, I think, was when he invented a grandmother called, I am afraid, Nanny Toggle Tits, who had an old Haig bottle full of 20p bits which he was going to rob so he could hand it over to the scammer. The transcript went on for pages and was so good I sent it to my children, who were deeply impressed.

Those days are over now: they’ve got wise to Ben and no longer call him so often. So a few months ago he volunteered to be head of the residents’ association for the block, which means he has to curb his impulses for sarcasm and off-colour humour. The position is, after all, a responsible one. It is also onerous: for months now, the block has been covered by scaffolding and netting, in a laudable effort to renovate the building’s exterior. Unfortunately progress is glacial, and what’s worse is that the scaffolding makes it easy for the local junkies to gain entrance and shoot up in the stairwells and common parts. The council has not been keen to take immediate action, so he called the police, because he was also tired of the junkies using the place as a toilet. When he’d raised the issue with a housing officer from the council, it was suggested that the excrement in the stairwell was in fact the responsibility of the residents.

“Are you seriously suggesting,” asked Ben, “that the occupants of the flats themselves, who all have perfectly functioning toilets, nip out to go to the bog on the stairs instead of staying indoors to do their business?”

“You’d be surprised,” said the officer.

“Surprised? Too right I’d be surprised. In fact, I can’t think offhand of anything that would surprise me more.”

He mentioned the heroin use to one police officer.

“Well, you can’t prove it’s heroin,” he replied.

“Can’t prove it’s heroin? Well, it could be a vitamin supplement, I suppose. Or, I don’t know, a small gin and tonic. Like when you come round and I say, ‘Hello, Nick, pull up a chair and make yourself at home while I fix us a nice gin and tonic in this bent spoon. Here’s a syringe and a cigarette filter to strain out the impurities.’”

That said, the attitude of some of the residents has also been exasperating him.

“There’s one person who’s 78 and disabled, and it’s awful what she has to put up with, so she wrote a letter to the council but ran it by me first, thank goodness. It started off with some rather strong language, but the worst bit was when she offered a solution. She said the way to solve the problem was to inject a chip into the residents’ necks so that only they could open the front doors of the block. She said: ‘Well, you can do it with dogs.’ I must say, I was tempted either to say, ‘But we’re not dogs,’ or, ‘What a brilliant idea, the council will leap at this.’ But in the end I said that perhaps it would be best to leave any solution up to the council themselves.”

At this point Ben went into a reverie.

“The things they say at residents’ meetings,” he said. “It reminds me of the loonies who call up LBC phone-ins in the middle of the night, pissed out of their minds, asking why, when they sit down and pull hard on the chair, they don’t fly up in the air. There’s one guy, a Bangladeshi man who lives in Coventry – I’m not even going to try the accent – and they let him go on and on for ages because he’s the only caller who’s sober. But eventually they have to move on to the other callers queuing up, and it’s back to their mental way of dealing with football hooligans. Do you know what the solution to that is?”

“No,” I say.

“This bloke said: ‘Get a flamethrower and turn it on the crowd.’ And as he pointed out: ‘You only have to do it once.’”

There is, apparently, a term used in the council for people like this: solutionisers. The best ones get read out aloud in the office in order to break the monotony of the working day.

Ben can’t do this as he doesn’t work in an office, so this is why he calls me up. Of course, there are helpful council employees and police officers, but it’s all too easy to get shoved from one department to another and then back again. “It’s Orwellian,” says Ben. “No, Kafkaesque.” After a while he calms down. But it does make one wonder how anything is ever going to get fixed in this country.

[See also: Thought experiment 6: Twin Earth]