My life is tough, but at least there isn’t a crack den on my street

And these people are not the nice, polite kind of crackhead

Photo by Stuart Brill/Millennium Images, UK

It has been a slow news week in this column; all I have done is go back and forth from Brighton to East Finchley, with daily trips to the Whittington to check on my mother, and hourly visits to the kitchen cupboard to pour Sheba into the cat’s bowl. Even I am getting bored of this and until there is a new development I don’t see how I can get an amusing, or even interesting, column out of it.

So let me instead take you by the hand, dear reader, and drop you in Hartlepool, a town where I suspect this publication has only the smallest footprint. Specifically, to the house, and street, in which my friend B— lives. Here is another kind of Down and Out.

I have known B— for years now – easily more than a decade, I can’t remember. She first came to my attention as a poet, which can be a loose description, to put it politely, but she can write double acrostic sonnets, in which not only do the first letters of each line spell out a phrase, but the last letters of each line do too, and both phrases have to have something meaningful to do with the subject of the poem, and the poem must rhyme (and scan) as well. I can finish the NS crossword puzzle about three weeks out of four and I think this makes me a genius, but it’s going to be a long wait if you want me to write a double acrostic sonnet.

B— was working as a cinema attendant in Swindon at the time. She took the pressure off the job by fencing, and let me say that a poet who can buckle her swash like that is someone whose style I like.

At one point she got a break and started a teaching job in China, and would regularly astound me with reports of how well she was doing and, more importantly, how well her students were doing, for it turns out she is a gifted teacher.

For reasons which need not concern us, she moved to Hartlepool, and, because she had saved up she bought a house. You do not need many savings to buy a house in Hartlepool, especially if it is tiny, and before it came on the market had been stripped of pretty much everything apart from the walls and the roof. But she managed, with extremely limited funds and a lot of elbow grease, to make the place habitable. She makes what living as she can by being a supply teacher, to children who often scare her, and she is not easily scared.

Only there’s a snag: one of the neighbour’s houses is, in short, a crack den. The words “crack den” are often thrown about loosely, but this involves actual crack, with people knocking on the door at all hours of the night, and I mean all hours.

These people are not the nice, polite kind of crackhead, who are mindful of the neighbours and tap gently when they drop in at three in the morning and whom you could introduce to your mum. This lot tend to make a bit of a racket and care not the hour. They have also threatened their neighbours with violence, have stolen people’s post, and have thrown dog shit in the street. They also bang on doors along the street behind which are the families, often fatherless, but with children, of immigrants.

Despite paying £165 a month on council tax she has been told, by the cops, that they don’t bother with that part of town because “it’s that sort of area”. One of the neighbours, because he is a good person, went to cap off a gas leak at the crack house and found the occupants smoking the stuff beside the leaking pipe. But the council will do nothing.

I could fill another page with the outrages she has to endure.

I can do little to help but swap funny Star Trek memes with her and bung her, very occasionally indeed, the odd £50 when I can afford it.

“Have you written to your MP?” I ask. Yes, she replies, five times so far, and there has been no response.

I find this very odd indeed. Her MP is Jonathan Brash (Lab) and according to his Wiki page, he says “being an MP is a full-time job”, which helps explain why he has not found any time to answer the complaints of one of his constituents. For a start, he chairs the all-party parliamentary groups on swimming and council tax reform, and those must eat up many hours in the day. The only other logical explanation that I can think of is that every postal delivery person who empties her mailbox gets murdered, because it’s that kind of area, or there is an email glitch.

Anyway, I know this magazine, and even this column, sometimes gets read in the corridors of power, so if someone could drop a word in Mr Brash’s shell-like, I, and particularly B— and her more deserving neighbours, would appreciate it.

[Further reading: Britons give more when we have less]