Another Triumph

Two years ago I wrote about the effectiveness of The Review Spell. It's a magnificently powerful spell, and as I wrote then has a great effect in encouraging people who know something is wrong but aren't sure what.

I have been using this on the hopeless management company of this building for some time (not everything I do appears here). I have to say, apart from the obvious reviews from employees' friends, their reviews are terrible, and include words like fraud and criminal. I left a review commenting that people can get them back by claiming compensation from the ombudsman scheme that they have to belong to by law, and this review got ten likes very quickly.

Then this weekend they wrote letters addressed to the leaseholders about revised fire safety precautions following a risk assessment. Now, normally they write by post to the leaseholders because they're not all resident: this is what they do when they demand the service charge to make sure the leaseholders get them.

Instead what they did with these letters addressed to the leaseholders was scatter them on the floor outside the flats like pizza menus. They were therefore making sure not all the leaseholders would see them. And this is about fucking fire safety.

So I took pictures of the letters on the floor and posted them on their Google review with a dramatic caption to say they were for the Health and Safety Executive if there's a Grenfell here so they would know they hadn't communicated the revised fire precautions.

Guess what, a week later I got two more copies of the letter in the post, one to the resident and one to the leaseholder. 

And it's not even like they can reply to my review because I'll point out they still haven't replied to the complaint I sent them in January. But of course I have a separate plan for that. Once you're cursed by the Hound your life just becomes more and more difficult.

Happiness is Rebellion

Let's start with a tale Snopes says is an urban legend:

Lunching with English friends at the time of her husband's retirement, Madame de Gaulle was asked what she was looking forward to in the years ahead. "A penis," she replied without hesitation. The embarrassed silence that followed was finally broken by the former president. "My dear," he murmured, "I think the English don't pronounce the word quite like that. It's 'appiness.'"

We all know one of them, one of those annoyingly superior people who know best and act as if the world is their oyster. I'm not talking about becoming quite one of them, but about the attitude. They're ok and always will be. In the UK they tend to shop in Waitrose.

We have many of them in the government and nobody else's views impinge on them in any way.

What if we take the attitude and rebel by being happy? In a stressful, conflicted world it would be natural to be depressed and stressed beyond belief. I'm also not talking about minimising any of the shit that's going on in the world.

I'm talking about doing things that make us happy as a rebellion against the nonsense. An act of self care in the face of everything, if you like. A way of changing the script slightly.

Because when you make small changes they tend to have knock on effects elsewhere, like all magical acts.

It is also my firm conviction that the world is increasingly dividing into two factions. In true Hound fashion I call the factions the people who are cunts, and the ones who aren't cunts. The cunts want everyone except themselves to be miserable, and the non-cunts want everyone to be happy. This means that being happy, making sure you can be happy by doing things which make you happy, is actually an act of rebellion against the people who want everyone else to be miserable.

And this isn't just a positive behaviour. It is actually witchcraft. If you think about the bit in the Gospel of the Witches about the feast, it says, you will dance, sing, feast, make music and love, all in my praise... and this will continue until every last one of the oppressors is dead.

That sounds very much like the sort of thing I'm getting at. Like sticking your fingers up. And strangely enough I have a soundtrack for this!

Finally if you'd like something quieter I've just recently discovered there are people (all men, apparently) who are made happy by racing washing machines! AND they even get people in the comments requesting particular cycles. 😂