Thank you so much! I write it all the time - ie I choose which events to go to, then I write them up and submit them to the editor and she edits them and puts them on the website. As I don't get paid I can choose how much or how little i do, but it takes up almost all my time because I love it so much. However, I have only been doing it seriously this year, so time will tell. I'm just back from a talk by Val McDermid, who was absolutely brilliant - so funny, so down to earth and such a good speaker. Now I'll need to find time to write it up, which is always more difficult as the weekend approaches, as my family do not see this as a 'proper' job....
Tomereader - a council house is the old name for housing built and provided by the local authority (eg in Edinburgh it would be owned by the City of Edinburgh Council.) The people who live in this housing pay a much lower rent than private landlords can charge. Your eligibility for housing is based on need, but of course there has always been masses of controversy about the definition of 'need.'
During Margaret Thatcher's era, the 'right to buy' was introduced - this meant that vast amounts of housing stock were sold off to residents at knock-down prices (you got a discount on the valuation of anything up to 60% depending on how long you'd lived there, and the valuations were in no way commercial ones to start with.) This system was of course royally abused - lots of people paid for their aged parents to 'buy' their properties, so that as soon as the parent died they could sell it on at vast profit. This happened especially in London, where any property within a 10 mile radius of the centre (as many of these flats were) is worth a small fortune. Huge profits were made and the housing stock was almost totally depleted. Belatedly, some councils are now stopping the right to buy scheme - Scotland as a whole is really putting the brakes on.
In my youth, however, there was a huge amount of council housing around London - my mother was born in the council house that her mother died in. Of course when my grandmother acquired the tenancy in the 1920s, there was real need - they were living in 2 rented rooms with a shared toilet and they already had 5 children and no reliable income, my grandfather having been gassed in WW1 and rendered unemployable for the rest of his life. Apparently my grandmother went to the housing office and said she would sit there until they offered her something. People were supposed to be given the choice of three properties, but as soon as they gave her the keys to the first one she said she would take it, she didn't need to see anything else. It was actually a nice, well-built house, much better than many commercial new-builds today. The area was OK-ish and now, of course, is quite smart as it's only a few miles from central London, but after my unmarried aunt died the tenancy was given up.
Sorry, that's a bit of a lecture!
Rosemary
