Bad Penny Rebate

The doorbell rang on Sunday. It was a guy I'd helped out almost ten years ago when he was suffering abuse from his Thai wife who, once she'd become a mother, told him how she was going to kick him out of their house and make him pay for it until the kid was 16. He was a friend of a longterm lodger. When I met him his wife attacked him regularly- I took photographic evidence and I contacted various social support oganisation and social work officials on his behalf all of whom were poised and ready to deal with a very real issue that men up here refuse to acknowledge. He did nothing. He refused to contact these people who were waiting to help him. I literally took it to the point where I couldn't do any more- he would have to step up. Eventually the various officials, two of whom were embarrassed at their work because of this told me there was nothing they could do any more. I was left feeling VERY exposed, embarrassed and quite annoyed.

I didn't cut ties with him immediately, but I was cautious about further contact. He is one of those people so used to being a victim he has no other way of operating. According to him; EVERYONE in his life has actively fucked him over. His family despise him because his mother remarried and he is seen as his father's son. -But he managed to contact his birth father who stopped contact after a while because he couldn't deal with this guy's coke habit. At the same time; he will do things that put other people at a disadvantage if not actual danger- after all; he is used to nothing really happening to him. He has a perfect beaten dog face that gets him out of most scrapes. One day he called me when he wanted something from a housemate and was VERY uncool about the way he asked for it. I commented that one does not discuss the sort of things he was talking about on the 'phone and he got aggressive with me at a moment when I'd no more time for his crap and told him so. It turned out that the housemate had deliberately blocked him for the same reason.

So six years later; he turns up at my door because he is "going mad" that nobody wants to talk to him and he is couped up alone in his house etc and he though I was unlikely to turn him away. He does a perfect line in Pathetic, but (with great preparation, disinfecting and distancing) I had otherwise self-isolating visitors and was unwilling to let him in. I gave him my number and told him to call after my friends had left. He came round, I made him sanitise and sit on towels and keep his distance and listened to the latest installment of how badly the world was treating him. What struck me was how familiar everything he said was right down to his protestations that this time it would be different and he'd turned his life around etc etc... etc.

At least I found out why he'd not followed up what I'd aset up for him years before: he'd not told the whole truth; he'd played down his addiction to cocaine, which he'd characterised at the time as a coping mechanism for the abuse he was experiencing, and played up his wife's gambling addiction whilst playing down her difficulties in bringing up a child with a coked up dad. Part of his "thing" is to be self-deprecating and to agree with anything sounding at all like a criticism with great enthusiasm. I learned -from him probably, that people who do that aren't really listening, they are instead ingratiating themselves more with the speaker and actually abdicating from any actual action. I listened to a tale of a man who everytime he gets himself off Rock Bottom, sticks all his money up his nose so he can spend marathon  sessions of all night porn. He has sold everything he had to fund his cocaine habit except an AM/FM radio. He has no computer and hasn't been able to access one since the closure of libraries etc. He doesn't know/understand what is going on. It was hard to get him to understand that the pandemic means that ALL businesses are affected. 1m people signed up for state assistance last week, 97% of freelancers are earning no income, the old rules simply do not apply at the moment.

I allowed him to come back last night so he could catch up on contact with Universal Credit etc. I was aware that he was wearing the same clothes he had three days earlier. As soon as he left I was wiping down everything I thought he might have touched and where he'd sat. 

There was a huge "supermoon" last night in a cloudless sky. My cats refused to come in one just sat on the doormat with a look of "Are you crazy?". This morning I noticed something on the path from my gate. It turned out to be two small white eggs presumably from a (swift?) nest in the Leyland Cypress tree at the gate. One was broken, the other dented but in tact and cold. I don't know why, but that find prompted this post.