[Ben Reeve Lewis tells about Texas…)
I’ve always fancied going to Texas since my old mate and regular Texas visitor Davy Myers told me about the state habit of taking dead Armadillos in the gutter and wedging empty bottles of Lone Star beer in their lifeless paws to give the impression they are on their backs, drunk.
A vegetarian in Texas
Dave, a lifelong vegetarian said that on his first visit he went into a diner, picked up the menu and asked the waitress what vegetarian food they had.
She stopped chewing gum, looked at him askance and said “Honey, you vegetarian in Texas, you don’t eat”.
From a distance Texas does seem to have a distinctive and evocative sense of humour. Witness the song titles of ZZ Top “Arrested for driving while blind”, “Heaven, hell or Houston” or as Billy Gibbons once described their music, sounding like “4 flat tyres on a muddy road”.
Texan Slumlords
Whilst surfing through this week’s news I came across a useful Texan phrase we haven’t caught up with, the term “Slumlord”. Much better than rogue landlord don’t you think?
Texas seems to have their own form of landlord licensing, meeting the same resistance when they try to enforce standards against slumlords.
The Dallas News this week reporting of notorious local players the Khaistra family trading as HMK Ltd who are throwing their toys out of the pram by evicting all 305 of their households because of the council committing the Cardinal sin of ordering them to make their properties safe and habitable.
English quibbles
Mind you, the wording of the article leaves a lot to be desired from an English point of view:
“Almost every person living in an HMK rent house, including a lot of families with little kids, will have to get gone by no later than Halloween. That’s one hell of a trick.”
Struggle as I might I cant imagine Baroness Hale or Lord Neuberger saying “They’ll have to get gone” in a House of Lords appeal, anymore than I can imagine the Ermine clad ones uttering “That durned fool aint got the sense that God gave Lettuce”
The continuing odd phrasing goes on to say:
“Best I can tell, HMK is blaming the Dallas City Council because it had the audacity last week to approve new rules that will allow code inspectors into rent houses for the first time ever. What gall — wanting to make sure houses are habitable.”
Sorry I’m no stranger to a casually worded phrase myself and certainly no expert on grammar but “Best I can tell”???????? c’mon my American cousins, next you’ll be voting for Donald Trump, and how unthinkable is that?
A man with a quarter of an inch of brain negotiating with Putin and the like. A Man perhaps more suited to lying on his back in the gutter cuddling a bottle of Lone Star beer while an Armadillo sits in the White House. Now there’s an idea.
The article sums up the mutual problems separated by 8,000 miles of sea from the UK’s tenants when the journo went to interview affected tenants:
“She said her neighbors don’t want to talk, that they’re scared of a constable showing up with eviction notices. Better to suffer in silence, in squalor, than be homeless altogether”
As in Dallas, so in Dorking.
Regular readers will know I am selling up and moving to the East Midlands ASAP, due to spiraling housing costs in the city of my birth. I read somewhere the other day that over 70,000 people have deliberately left London to live in cheaper areas in the past year.
So I was intrigued to read this piece in City AM reporting on a published study by on line estate agents Emoov that it is cheaper to buy a house in 7 UK cities and fly down to London to stay in budget hotels while you work than it is to buy in London. The cities being
- Glasgow.
- Newcastle.
- Manchester.
- Belfast.
- Edinburgh.
- Leeds.
- Newquay
The article points out the advantages of living in a different city with a better standard of living and on a London wage, which is exactly my plan, although I will be cutting back on my rogue landlord chasing and learning to make ice-cream to sell on farmers markets.
That’s the plan. Ice creams in the summer, soups in the winter, whilst in between, defending the odd possession case in court and kicking in the occasional door with environmental health.
Far fetched I know. I get the economics but who would want to spend the week in a Travelodge at the back of Rotherhythe tube?
Useful illustration of the ridiculous inflated nature of the London housing market though.
Tenants groups on Glasgow
As somebody who has helped several tenants rights groups get started and always bemoaning the difficulty of uniting tenants around common themes I was surprised to read of a world federation of tenants, representing 29 countries who will all shortly be meeting in Glasgow.
The World Congress of the International Union of Tenants will be debating rent control and tenancy issues from diverse countries including Russia, Canada and Portugal.
The event is sponsored by TPAS Scotland, supported by the Scottish government.
Personally I would love to go too but on the allotted weekend I shall be ferrying boxes back and forth to the storage room to usher in the end my own personal, over-priced tenant hell.
What made me smile this week.
If you are a book fan you will know the strange combination of blessing/curse that comes with discovering an author who you love.
Blessing because of the joy of having a massive back catalogue to read your way through and curse when you have read them all and have to wait a year for the next one to come out, if at all.
A few years back I discovered Phillip Kerr’s fantastic Bernie Gunter series, private detective/homicide cop/SS officer set against the backdrop of the transition from Weimar Republic, through third Reich and burgeoning Cold War, mixing Raymond Chandler style world-weary cynicism and wisecracking against a background of real historical events.
The 11th in the series was published on Thursday “The other side of silence”, I had it in my hot and sweaty the same day.
The blurb goes:
“Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers”
Bring on the hats, the trench coats, the cigarettes, the guns and the sardonic one liners. Bernie is back and will be spending as much time as possible over the next few days wrapped in a dressing gown, eating biscuits and pretending I am Robert Mitchum with a German accent.
See ya next week…..or as they say in Berlin “Sehen Sie Nachste Woche”
Shame you can’t make it to Glasgow Ben. I’ll be there, wd have been good to meet you.
East Midlands is it? Best I can tell, (ahem) you’re wanting some of that Leicestershire beauty, esecially in that Churned-Wood area (ed: Charnwood, actually, the best village allegedly in the UK to raise children (2nd ed: and probably chickens too) is Quorn, coincidentally very close to where I was raised as living proof).
Now Ben, i don want you anywhere near that awful place, Nodding-ham, it’s awful grim, kinda’ like a Victorian Dee-troit.
Ha, Jon I was born and brought up Deptford, the old docks area nestling at the bottom of the Old Kent Road, even by South East London standards its always been considered a grim place. Its where ‘Nil by mouth’ was filmed.
so Nottingham to me seems like paradise, although we are looking to the villages like Papplewick or even over towards Derby.
Reason for Nottingham is the multi-cultural thing. Coming from London all white areas seem weird, plus me missus is black and needs to get to the black hair shops selling the chemistry set that keep her hair doing its Funky Thang!
Yes Nottingham is a great city. It was always the place to go as a kid – they had an ice rink, and of course Rock City where many a good gig was had! Leicester has improved in recent years (but out in the shire you can still hear the lilting notes of Duelling Banjos drifting across the air in certain parts)