A Catch Up

I know I've been rather absent from here, but I'm afraid I've had rather a lot on which has required a lot of psychic energy.

Most recently I have decided I'm going to move. I absolutely love looking at properties for sale and having an excuse to look at the clutter people have hidden away in their kitchen cupboards! In fact it's going unexpectedly easy so far, although since I've asked a solicitor to have a look at my lease because it's an affordable flat, to make sure I'm selling to the right person and to stop sales falling through in the future, there's still potential for drama.

The other major thing is that I'm looking to get a diagnosis for the PTSD I think I probably have. Certainly, the RCPsych page on PTSD pretty much describes me but I want to know. This has also so far been surprisingly stress free, although I am absolutely not going to have therapy with my former employers so am on self help.

This is fine of course. I have always told people that the reason the evidence is that self help is as good as a therapist is you admit things to yourself that you would be embarrassed to say to someone else. The resulting frankness makes it go better. 

Of course I'm also being witchy about it and tarot always comes to the rescue. 

Meanwhile I'm very pleased indeed that our Zack Polanski was elected leader of the Green Party by a landslide and it's always nice to see Labour immediately bitching because they're shitting themselves. Very satisfying. 

The Dodgy Tik-Tok Lawyer

I am so psychic sometimes it even scares me.

Last year we had a local solicitor stand as MP candidate here in Birmingham Ladywood constituency. He didn't win, but served the function of scaring Sir Kid Starver a bit, and screwing up the anti-genocide vote, so we ended up with the same Labour MP. Of course I voted Green and am smugly satisfied that I did the right thing.

I went round telling everyone who would listen that if Ahmed Yakoob was elected MP something would come out about him and we would have the rare experience of signing a recall petition in no time (in the UK under certain circumstances a recall petition is automatically triggered and depending on the number of signatures from constituents the petition automatically triggers a fresh election for the MP. The grounds to trigger the petition include imprisonment or suspension from parliament). In fact this prediction didn't require much psychic ability because he was already under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for spreading false claims about a teacher. So basically he attracted the anti-genocide vote that didn't care about any other standards, and the anti-genocide vote who care about honesty voted Green.

In fact if he'd been elected it would have been the best chance to get a Green MP here, because without the popular Labour MP and without an independent candidate the vote would naturally have turned Green in a by-election during this disastrous Starmerist government. The only time since 1936 anyone other than Labour has been elected in this constituency was another by-election in the sixties when a Liberal MP was elected, but they consistently come last nowadays.

Instead what's happened is he's got arrested under a wider ranging investigation of corruption by solicitors and accountants and is going to be tried for money laundering in 2027. I've had a look at the sentencing guidelines and I don't know the details of what he's charged with but the sentence can go up to 14 years in prison so if imprisoned he wouldn't likely be in a position to stand in the 2029 election and the cadre of candidates he supported for the local elections next year will hopefully be looked at more doubtfully now. 🤞

Finally, if the picture the BBC used is actually from a court appearance, if your solicitor doesn't tell you not to dress as a Peaky Blinder for a court appearance, get rid of your solicitor.

I feel like I know how his trial is going to end. 😂

This post does not constitute legal advice lol.

A Fokawolf Spell

Combining my themes of magic and spirit of place in this one because this post is about two installations by local hero, artist and national treasure (as well as *major* crush for the Hound), Fokawolf. You can find him all over social media but of course I've had to include his picture so any readers who don't know can see how dishy he is. 🥰 Plus he's been known to do his paste-ups wearing Birmingham City Council hi-vis which absolutely tickles me. 🥵

He's possibly best known for his permission work of the Birmingham Screw Driver Company sign in Digbeth, demonstrating that he definitely knows what a Birmingham screw driver is.

However many of his works also draw on magical themes, whether explicitly and implicitly, in the case of these works, the long magical tradition of using images to effe change in the subject depicted, by sympathetic magic.

In the case of his installation at Glastonbury Festival he's put the images of Netanyahu with a target in the urinal and if I wasn't already in love I would be humping his leg like any dog.

He's done a similar installation in a Digbeth pub, unfortunately closed at the moment but which will be reopening in the Autumn.

Anyone want to cross swords?

Spirit of Place: A Selly Oak Tradition

I have commented about this before and only yesterday was pointing out to someone that the spirit of place of Birmingham will look after you if you approach it right, and spit you out if you don't. Shortly afterwards I found myself walking through the Selly Oak area of the city and was reminded of an annual ritual.

I'm sure it happens in other university cities but they're outside the scope of this blog. What happens is that at the end of the summer term (it usually coincides with the Glastonbury Festival), the students' lets on their houses end and they never take all their clobber with them. So either they or the landlord put the stuff out in the street (in the streets running between the Bristol Road and Raddlebarn Road) and the locals come and help themselves to it. 

Please understand that I'm not exaggerating when I say you can literally kit out a whole house and wardrobe for free. Some friends once got a fish tank complete with living fish and had to drive it home very carefully. Yesterday there were people with supermarket trolleys full of stuff.

I didn't have a spare hand yesterday so went back this afternoon with a mental shopping list of some sort of footwear and a cooking pot, and intended to get tomatoes from Aldi on the way home.

So of course I found some work boots (about £60 in the shops) and a pot immediately before loads of unopened tins of food. So I got all that for free and am going back tomorrow because there were still landlords putting stuff out on the pavement. There's nothing more I have in mind but I'm sure I'll find something I fancy.

See, the spirit of the city does actually look after you if you approach it right.

Urban Grimoire: The Review Spell Revisited

Magic has been described as the art and science of causing change in accordance with will, and all acts have been defined as magical acts. I have posted here before about the remarkable magical strength of leaving reviews on the internet. Whether good or bad, your review does have real power online. Now I'm aware that businesses often manipulate their image by posting fake reviews. However, I'm also of the opinion that the public are far more clued up on identifying fake reviews, false information, and what have you, than we used to be. The problem with filling the internet with false information is that people get wise to it. For example, bot comments on social media are now met with a chorus calling them a bot. 

Actually, I quite like to call commenters bots when they're obviously not. If they've left a particularly cruel, inflammatory, or hate-filled comment, the explosion which follows calling them a bot is bound to be good.

But to the subject of the post. It was about the management company of the leasehold flats I live in. The utterly incompetent directors don't involve the other leaseholders and have, for the ten years I have lived here, used the same individuals to do the day to day management, but they've moved through several companies in that time.

Clearly, there's something wrong there, and if I was hugely rich they would be in the tribunal, but there is no hope of creating a mass action out of the 460 flats and there's legally a limit to the power leaseholders can do.

But under the last management company there was a peak of dissatisfaction among the residents of several buildings they manage and people used the power they had, by leaving bad reviews.

And they were absolutely atrocious. If I say that mine was one of the more restrained ones, it should give an idea of how dozens of people were not holding back. They left comments which really can only be described as libellous if they're not true, such as accusing them of running off with people's money and other crimes. My own contribution was to comment on how to take them to the tribunal.

And I'm delighted to say that my efforts mean the company's Google reviews are now headed up by the picture which illustrates this post. 🐴 As I commented in my last post, laughing and ridicule is a really good way of moving power around, and that is pure witchcraft.

Of course I knew the company was rubbish, but this was confirmed by the way they dealt with this barrage of critical comments. They didn't even know or care, that what you do when your professional reputation is assaulted like that is to be pink and fluffy in public and leave sympathetic replies asking the commenter to contact you (see, I could work in comms), but be hard as nails with threatening solicitors' letters behind the scenes. 

What they actually did was leave obviously fictional comments which were even funnier. One of them described two of the staff as the Mulder and Scully of house hunting. I personally edited my review wondering which of the two was so spooky that nobody would work with them and which has been impregnated by aliens.

Their online presence is ruined, and it's hilarious. They've even stopped posting on their social media because of the comments they're getting.

Last week, to nobody's surprise, the leaseholders got letters to say they've sold the property management part of their business to someone else and that's who will be looking after the building from now on. Job done.

Agony Hound: AITA for Faking a Haunted House To Get My Boyfriend to Move Out Because He Refused To Leave After We Broke Up?

High time I intruded and ruined someone else's life again in my role of agony aunt, and this one's a beauty.

(My source for this was somewhere on Tumblr).

The Hound says:

Hon, this isn't ethically questionable. The default position, unless you're exceptionally good friends and have agreed this in advance, is that the one who doesn't own the place moves out when you break up. If someone is clingy/inadequate enough not to do this, they're breaking a major rule of social engagement and all bets are off.

Also, your method of getting rid of him is worthy of a witch, never mind an Oscar. Well done, I couldn't have done it myself. In chaos magic an essential banishing ritual is to laugh at things and this definitely works with taking the piss as well.

Another interesting aspect is the ferret. Perhaps it's a good idea to ask a prospective partner about their ferret, see what they say and demand to see it if they claim to possess one.

What *is* being an asshole is to fake a haunting for years simply to frighten someone, as Noel Gallagher famously did for years to his brother Liam:

The Mirror​ has reported this morning that Noel Gallagher has tormented his brother for years over his fear of ghosts, essentially… by moving furniture about in his bedroom to shit him up.

In Noel’s words, “If we were ever anywhere remotely spooky, we’d tell Liam that the house was haunted, particularly his bedroom.”

“When he’d get up in the morning and go and have his breakfast, someone would go in and turn the pictures back to front, or fucking move a lamp beside his bed across the other side of the room. He’d arrive pale: ‘Have you been in my fucking room?’ ‘No, why?’ ‘You’ve been in my room, because now the fucking lamp is in the toilet.’ ‘No way, fucking hell. Wow.’”

The report also notes that the brothers, in their rock’n’roll heyday (or, “When they were constantly off their tits”), suspected bizarre conspiracies were surrounding them during the 1996 sessions for Oasis’ third album ​Be Here Now​​, which took place at The Farm in Surrey. Noel explained: “Because it’s on a farm, there’s lots of farm people knocking around, we’d always be suspiciously looking out their window, admittedly high as a fucking kite thinking, ‘Sheep’s got a camera. Don’t like the look of that pig.’” Source

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