For the last couple of years, I have mentally been in a sort of siege mentality.
This has been because persistent ASB (anti-social behaviour) threatened to stop me and others selling up and leaving the neighbourhood. I had managed to get the problem contained enough to sell up, though I still live locally. However, the ASB started to pick up again.
This week, in two ad-hoc meetings between my residents groups, the police, the housing association, the property managers and the developers, we managed to get agreement to end the ASB. It should not have taken so many years.
But a huge weight has been lifted; indeed, earlier I suffered various random stress-related seizures and other maladies like shingles. And now it seems to be over.
Likewise, the service charge on the flat was controlled by an unaccountable, unelected body, namely the property managers mentioned above. I have led efforts over the last few years to have management responsibilities transferred to a company controlled only by the owners of the flats, and today we had a board meeting to appoint solicitors to carry out the process. I had not prepped enough for the meeting, and took a few hits to my pride, but in the end we carried the day.
That simply living in a new build neighbourhood should require years of alliance-building and campaigning and lobbying, just to be undisturbed in one's own home, is completely ridiculous. It has left me disaffected with this country and its borderline-sham institutions.
Anyway, there is a lot more to life than residential property disputes. And so I'm going to try the #100DaysToUnload challenge, which I understand to mean writing an article every two or three days for a year. I don't know where that will lead me, but some will be aware that I have a weekly gemlog post about "Heterodox Technology", which just posts 5 links from my subreddit. Geminauts will likely find them congenial.
On the alternative tech front, I have written off Misfin, and am looking into NNCP, which has been discussed of late in this parish. I've also re-organised some of my own Gemini capsule, which is a sort of digital garden.