St Helier 2008

This is a continuation of yesterday's post about my lodgings at St. helier.
It was right on the border of Trinity, on Trinity Hill.

• It was a sad home, that old farmhouse, it was one of the lady's airy-fairy ideas, to move her 'family' into an old farmhouse and make a 'real home', but it wasn't a real home, it was a crumbling farmhouse with vermin and ants, it was not anyone's home, it was in disrepair. It was a memory of the old Jersey that didn't fit with the new one, which is what the sadness in Jersey is, there are lots of lost people and inadequate support for them, there are old farms and buildings that mean nothing to the people in the finance industry who never look at or appreciate Jersey and what it was. That seems long winded and meaningless, but I will leave it in, I wrote posts a while back about 'the sadness I cannot name'.
• http://whatreallyhappenedinthechurch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/that-sadness-i-cannot-name.html#.U6LCYZRdXhE
• It wasn't a happy family home I was in, the woman was volatile and there were frequent rows in the family.
• The house was an old crumbling farm building, but inside was orange, green, incense sticks and salt lamps, it was like a crazy collision of what had been and what this woman wanted life to be.
• I remember that the 16 year old did his gliding course with Victoria College CCF, and he wanted to join the RAF and would have been accepted, but his mother told him he was going to university, no choice, she wasn't interested in what he wanted, which I thought was dreadful.

• Anyway, I was succesful in getting rid of the ants and mice from my room but not the kitchen as I didn't dare, of course.
• The only problem was, a mouse died under mu bed and i couldn't find it and it stank until I found it and disposed of it.
• But it got worse, this mad landlady woman kept coming into my room and snooping through my things, she asked why there was ant powder in my cupboards and I asked why she was going through my cupboards, and she claimed that it was becuase the newspapers in there were a fire hazard, which is not an answer at all. I had newspapers for cuttings in those days, I used to do collages, sounds sad but we all have our own hobbies, and my newspapers were not a fire hazard, the faulty wiring with mice running through it were more of a hazard and no one should have been going through my things. But this was to become a habit, that in hindsight shows how Jersey landlords treat their unqualified tenants like animals.

• Anyway, I passed my first anniversary of living in Jersey while I was in this tenancy, I stayed there about six months and it battered my self esteem, but I was not well enough to continue travelling, and had no home or job to return to in England, and I knew that claiming benefits in the UK was a nightmare, especially for someone who had been away, and I knew I couldn't get through the process, and rent in my home town of Winchester was steep even if I could find a home back there, so I remained in Jersey, trying to work out what to do.