Move over Strictly Come Dancing, we’ve got a new championship in town — The Inter-Council Games of Gross Incompetence — and our two leading contenders are none other than Tewkesbury Borough Council and Inverclyde Council. It’s like watching two clowns trip over the same rake for eternity. Except the rake is our sanity, the circus is our lives, and the popcorn is antidepressants.
Now, Tewkesbury — ah, our homegrown disaster artists. These are the folks who took one look at our autism meltdowns, anxiety issues, and years of antisocial torment from a neighbour with a sound system from the seventh circle of hell, and decided the real problem was… us. Brilliant. We’ve only been quietly going insane from constant bass vibrations and Kafkaesque phone calls, but sure, slap us with a warning because we had the audacity to shout after being provoked for months. That’ll sort everything!
Oh, and Tewkesbury Borough Council seems to think we were directly threatening our neighbour. Yes, that’s right. They actually think we were out there, like some kind of action movie villain, plotting his demise with our words. In reality? We were shouting in sheer frustration at each other. Why? Because neither of us could communicate directly with the neighbour due to autism and meltdowns. But apparently, we’re a pair of dangerous criminals for expressing basic human frustration. Classic Tewkesbury move.
But then, like naive hopefuls in a bad romcom, we looked north. “Maybe Scotland will be different,” we said. “Maybe Inverclyde will understand mental health, community, human decency… basic logic.”
Reader, it wasn’t.
Inverclyde, bless them, are like the well-meaning but completely bewildered uncle who thinks PTSD is a brand of petrol. We approached with honesty, medical letters, and the distinct aroma of desperation — only to discover that if we move up there now, despite every effort to escape what’s become an unbearable situation, we’ll be seen as…
Intentionally. Homeless.
That’s right. The same logic that says “you are fleeing a traumatic environment, so obviously you’ve made yourself homeless on purpose.” It’s the housing equivalent of setting yourself on fire to escape a burning building and being told, “Well, you shouldn’t have brought matches, should you?”
Apparently, it doesn’t matter if you’re being gaslit, bass-blasted, or gradually reduced to a twitching ball of nerves who flinches every time the washing machine spins — if you leave your property without being dragged out by a fire engine or a court order, you’re “intentionally” homeless.
Because why deal with systemic failures, when we can blame the victim?
Tewkesbury says, “We don’t want to upset your neighbour by enforcing noise regulations.”
Inverclyde says, “We don’t want to help you if you don’t already live here — but don’t move here unless you already live here.”
It’s a paradox so dizzying, even a Zen master would tap out.
Oh, and to top it all off — my own family won’t help my partner. They’ve decided that, sure, they’ll help me because, well, I’m me (thanks, family). But when it comes to offering support to my partner, they completely ignore the fact that helping my partner is, in fact, helping me. Apparently, family logic works on a different, more chaotic wavelength where empathy and reason take a backseat to… whatever it is they think is going on. It’s like they’ve forgotten that “helping us” would actually mean “helping me” in the most important way possible. Go figure.
So here we are, caught in the bureaucratic Bermuda Triangle. If we stay, we suffer. If we leave, we suffer with less paperwork. But hey — at least we get to pick which council shrugs harder when we mention mental health.
We suggest flipping a coin. Or better yet, launching both councils into a bake-off-style face-off where they have to produce something genuinely helpful before the timer runs out. Spoiler: the tent collapses and nobody gets housing.
So until then — we’ll keep brewing our anxiety with a double shot of sarcasm and wait patiently for a council somewhere, anywhere, to remember that we’re people.
Not paperwork.
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