In Memoriam

I have very recently lost a friend to death. A was only my age, and that makes the chill winds of mortality blow stronger.

Despite a clear intelligence, A belonged to probably the last generation of women to be prevented and discouraged by their families from education and a career. She married very young, and had two daughters. Nursing, which she would have liked to pursue, was no longer a practicable choice, so once the girls were grown, she became an untrained Care Assistant. And I am sure she was a good one.

I met her through the voluntary work we both did. By this time A had embarked on a University career, which was sadly cut short by increasing ill-health. Not discouraged, she threw herself into the voluntary work, accepted further training, and by her own efforts raised literally thousands of pounds for charity.

She was about to commence a new career when the illness took hold, and this time it would not be denied. A died peacefully with her family. She leaves a loving husband, two daughters and a grandchild. She was a good woman, wife, and mother, and a good friend. She will be much missed.

Where do we go from here?

Where I live we have a very good free paper The Blackmore Vale Magazine. It is packed with all kinds of local information and of course advertiesments, which are what pay for it to be free, of course. It comes out on Fridays (or later, if the lad who delivers them on our road can't persuade his mother to do it for him when he doesn't feel like it) and I like browsing through the various sections, ending up with the Property section at the back. We have no intention of moving, but you know how it is.

At this time of year in any rural area the property market is active, because rural living looks much more attractive when there isn't mud all over the place and silage spreading. I find myself amazed at the prices being asked for properties in Dorset now. Until Poole became a major port when containerisation developed, Dorset was a very poor area, with farming and tourism its only industries. So house prices were pretty low, and they remained like that right up until the 1990s. We have no motorway (thank goodness!) and only the one rail link along the south coast (Waterloo to Weymouth) and one along the northern boundary (Waterloo/Paddington to Exeter). So we were free from the worst of the London commuter overspill.

All that has changed with the coming of internet working. One of my neighbours worked in London for a while and commuted daily via Salisbury. It nearly killed him and did not do his home life any good, so he now workes for less money in Poole. But other neighbours work in the City part-time and the rest of the time via the internet, and yet others visit the US to work regularly, although they all consider themselves to be "Dorset residents." And that's not counting the thousands of second-home owners who found they could not afford to buy in the New Forest or the Cotswolds.

The local estate agents have been quick to capitalize on this. Some of them boast that they have London offices or affiliations, so that they can get London prices. I cannot understand why anyone would think this a good thing? That means that you have to pay London prices when you buy as well as when you sell, with knock-on results that we can now all see. I estimate that over half the village where I live is now owned as second-homes. The shop and the garage and the Post Office have closed down. Nearby villages show the same pattern. "Starter homes" are an unbelievable price even when new; if you want to buy anything period, even if it needs "total refurbishment", ie is derelict, the price tag starts at £200k and climbs.

And all this has happened so quickly that local wages just haven't caught up. When we bought this cottage, nine years ago this year, we paid under £100k for it and it is detached and has three/four bedrooms and a good-sized garden, although admittedly it is on a main road. The cottage over the road, with much less land but a similar size, was marketed at the same time for £65k but we didn't want it because of the lack of garden. That was a second home, incidentally. The person who bought it kept it for several years, did no improvements, then took advantage of the boom in prices and sold it on for £295k!!! Okay so it is a first home now, but the present people will want to recoup their outlay when they sell on and this must be happening everywhere. In this little free magazine, I see many properties for sale at over half a million, and a quarter-million seems to be an average price for anything larger than a boot cupboard on a bypass. I do not think that, this week, there is anything advertised at under £100k, and that includes flats.

Thinking about all this, I realised that actually the house market in Britain is behaving normally. To own your own home has always been an impossible dream for most people, except when Margaret Thatcher promoted the right-to-buy of Council houses. That released millions of properties into the private market, but more importantly, it promoted a change in people's expectations.

When I was young I went from school to university, which meant I left home, and after university I entered a profession. I expected to have low salaries for years as I worked my way up, and in consequence to have to live cheaply, in bedsits and rented, shared flats. Everyone lived like that if they didn't live at home until they were married. People in their twenties never dreamed of owning their own properties. Working-class people, if that is not an invidious term, knew they never would. That was what Council houses were for. Nowadays people feel aggrieved if they can't in youth "get onto the property ladder". They seem to accept levels of debt commitment - a mortgage on top of repaying further education fees - that would have scared the pants off my generation. Not that anyone would have lent us such vast sums anyway.

But the Council houses are not there any more. And if you look at the private rented sector, costs are again unbelievable to someone of my age. I see properties in the Magazine on the market for over £2 000 per month!! Who on earth earns that kind of money, that they can pour it down the drain, because that after all is what you do when you are renting. Nevertheless, estate agents will say that somebody must be able to afford these sums of money, because they are paid, and you don't see Hoovervilles or shanty towns of the homeless next to every town. I remember the big prices crash of the early 1990s, although most people seem to have blanked it out. There were crashes before that, occurring regularly back into the 19th century, whenever the bubble burst. Whether our society with its crumbling welfare system would be able to support the consequences of another crash, is another matter.

Sans everything

I would like to devote this blog against disablism specifically to be against disablism when it affects the elderly.

I confess a special interest here. I am approaching the sell-by date for a woman (age 60) and I have noticed that there is a particularly pervasive disablist ageist attitude which is found, to their shame, even amongst disabled people themselves.

This is the attitude that "oh it's only wear-and-tear. It's your age. It's only to be expected. You are not disabled as a young man or woman or a child is disabled: the quality of your life is of less importance because you are old. So put up with the pain, or the impaired senses, or the restricted mobility, and shut up about it. Do not expect any adjustments, let alone reasonable ones. Do not expect public money and research effort to be wasted on easing the effects of geriatric impairments. And above all, do not insult me by confusing
me with an old person, just because I am in a wheelchair or use a stick or a white cane or a hearing aid." It is the assumption that this confusion is an insult that saddens me. What does it say about the person's unconscious attitude to the seniors in his own family?

There's one thing that is for certain in this life, and that is, that we are all going to grow older. Some of us may not grow old, but that's another story. And as we sow, so shall we reap. Every jibe about useless old crumblies, every bit of tut-tuttery about them blocking beds (because their home adaptions haven't been done) and pavements (because their mobility is dependent on chairs and scooters), will come back a thousandfold, when it's our turn, because what we are doing is nurturing resentment against the old now.

In your own self-interest, if nothing else, do not refuse to make common cause with the old. You have in common with them your humanity, and the disadvantages that disability attracts in this society. Don't let ageism cloud that perception.

And I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to an unlikely contributor to the cause of disabled people - the late Benny Hill. Benny Hill had two long-standing relationships with disabled women, whom he would visit and treat as well as he could:

"paying for a chauffeur-driven car to bring them down to London, taking in lunch at the Savoy and an afternoon matinee at the theatre, or the cinema if there was a new James Bond film."

Any rich man could do that, but,

"He would visit restaurants in advance to check wheelchair access and establish whether the ladies' toilet could be reached without stairs."¹

How many able-bodied people let alone young men, would even think about those details, preserving his guests' dignity?

¹Mark Lewisohn: Funny Peculiar: The true story of Benny Hill, London, 2002