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.
Listen to the New Statesman podcast
Content from our partners
