State of Independence

I spent this afternoon with M round at her new flat, which she won’t now be moving into today.

They’ve made a right mess and have even stolen the internal doors, the basic tools she had acquired over the months and even trashed half the kitchen cupboards and work surfaces whilst removing the appliances.

We do what we can whilst there, but we really need to wait until the council do their stuff.

Hopefully the promised new front door for the flat, will be made of something slightly better than the current plywood affair. It’s not hard to see how having somehow got through the communal front door, they were able to simply force the entire lock out M’s flat’s door.

On a positive note the guy in the flat opposite was really friendly, offering us brews (had to translate that expression for M!) whilst we worked, expressing his sympathy and telling us that the council had at least been round to measure up the flat door. It turns out his flat was similarly stripped a while ago, whilst he was away serving a term at her Majesty’s pleasure...

The bit that made me saddest of all about this whole thing, was when M confided that she had planned to invite myself, Phil and Sarah around to help her with the flat and then surprise us by having it all done herself and serving us up a meal instead. This was clearly going to be a huge step of independence for her, a clear moving on in the terms of our relationships. The bastards have stripped her of this as well.

Luckily it takes considerably more than this to break the spirit of someone like M and already the upset has turned to anger and a determination to fight on regardless.

For now though, she’s back to doing it with borrowed tools for a while longer.