Golem Housing Co-operative

House Buying Update and Loanstock Request

2012-03-01T00:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday's post was all whimsy, and I couldn't bear to put all the boring practical stuff in it too (plus it was already hugely long), so here is a quick update of where we are up to with actually buying the place.

Lots of emails have been flying back and forth between us, the mortgage company, the estate agent, our solicitor and our surveyor. It's almost impossible to tell how quickly these emails might actually result in Important Things Happening, but so far there have been no major glitches. It would seem that our business plan works rather well, thank you, and the next big scary thing is really getting the survey done. Work on arranging that is happening today, and if last time is anything to go by, our surveyor will be pretty speedy at getting it done and reporting back to us. We'll let you know the gory details of that once it's done.

So far, we have been very lucky with loanstock, and it forms a large part of our deposit for the house. In reality we can probably make up the shortfall through a loan from Rootstock, but we would rather save the option of a loan from them for future eco-renovations to the property. Because of this, we are looking for a few more people to lend us loanstock. There is lots of information about loanstock on our loanstock page, and we are always super-happy to talk to people about it (and other co-op related things). If you have some spare funds which you are thinking of investing, then please consider lending us loanstock. We have a fine track record of providing cake to investors, and you will always be welcome round for a cup of tea once we have the house. Oh, and you'll get your money back at the end of the investment term, of course, but more importantly, there will also be cake. Our email is golem.coop@gmail.com if you feel like getting in touch.

Right, that's enough practical stuff for now. I'm off to poke people with metaphorical sticks some more.

- Hannah

Urban Permaculture and Garden Design v.1

2012-02-29T04:26:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went on an introduction to Urban Permaculture course at the Environment Centre. I've been reading about permaculture for 10 years, having found some old copies of Permaculture Magazine in the library of a housing co-op I used to live in. I love permaculture to a ridiculous degree, so this is going to be a long blogpost. Get comfy :)

For those who might not know, here is a page of various definitions of permaculture. It's hard to pin down, in some ways, and people often mistakenly think it is only about farms and gardens. Google defines it thus: "The development of agricultural ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient." This is true to some extent, but many designers are now also applying permaculture principles to buildings, communities, and their own personal lives.

I like to think of permaculture as a way of applying common sense systematically and from the start. The idea is that when you're considering making changes to something (be it your business, your garden or your own life) you invest a large amount of time observing what is already there, what constraints are outside of your control and working out what you really want to get from your project. Once you've got a good idea of these things, you start to work out how it can all best fit together so that you design a system that needs minimum inputs from outside, produces minimum waste, and needs minimum work to run.

Image nicked from Wikipedia

During years of espousing the brilliance of this idea to people, I can't tell you how many have said to me "but that's just common sense". Yes, it is, but as I've also heard it said, common sense is not very common. How many of us, when starting a project of any sort, follow patterns set out by habit and previous experience? And how many of us look at the project afresh by first seeing what we have to work with, and what would suit this individual instance best? Not many, I'd wager.

This is where permaculture design comes in, giving us a framework within which to start at the beginning again each time. Obviously our previous experience will provide us with references for what works for us and what doesn't, but it's vital to set this experience in the context of whatever it is that we are attempting. For me, that doesn't come naturally, so I appreciate being shown an alternative way.

Ooo, get me.

Disclaimer: This is just me daydreaming. Obviously we'll design the garden as a co-op after lots of thorough observation has occurred.

Celebrity pencils courtesy of Poly In Pictures* :)

So, let's have a little walk-through of this gorgeous example of urban permaculture (ahem). Starting at the house, we come out of the back doors into a glazed exterior space. This space is fulfilling lots of purposes. It's an additional area for drying clothes in wet weather, we can bring on plants here and keep tender things which need more heat and attention than they'd get outside. It also provides another link from the living room to the bathroom, and has enough space for one or two people to sit out in. Warm air from this space can also be used to provide ventilation to the living room by opening the windows (which will hopefully become french doors, as indicated here).

Leaving the sunspace, there is a large concrete area. This is already present at the house, and being as it's a lot of work to lift it, I decided to work with it instead. This area fulfills lots of needs, despite being relatively compact. There are raised beds for annual and frequently-harvested perennial crops. A water butt connected to the downpipe from the extension roof provides water for these beds. There's also a herb spiral which is close to the kitchen, with a small pond at the bottom for water-loving plants. This will help to attract more wildlife to the garden. There is also a covered smoking area with a bench under it. In my dreamworld this has a sedum roof, just because I like them (although they're also great for insects). The centre of this area is left as hardstanding so that we can use it for a multitude of purposes; bringing chairs from inside so we can eat out there, doing DIY jobs that can't be done indoors, putting clothes airers out on sunny days and growing extra things in pots, for example. The walls of this space can also be used for vertical growing, and the long kind of washing line which is affixed to poles can run across the whole space.

Moving through the gorgeous trellis wall and archway (the black and wiggly lines on the picture) planted with productive climbers such as hops and kiwi, we come out onto the lawn. This is a social and play space above all else, but it is bordered with productivity on all sides. To the left there are perennial crops in low beds, with trained fruit trees running along the sunny wall. To the right there is an enclosure for chickens. This has the compost bins in it so as to minimise the amount of trekking about with household food waste we will have to do. People can feed the chickens on their way to the compost bins, and when we clean out the coop we'll only have a short distance to transport the manure/straw mix. Comfrey is planted around the bins so we can cut it occasionally to add extra minerals to the compost. Chickens also love it as a forage food. The rest of their enclosure is also planted with plants which provide forage for them, as are the fences on all sides. This won't supply their whole diet but will hopefully enrich it and make their lives more interesting. The water butt here is for the chickens' water, and to be handy for cleaning out the coop and rinsing compost containers.

Winding our way down the garden we can see more beds surrounding the dwarf apple tree, which also provides a nice shady spot to sit in. The shape of the beds means that all parts of them can be easily reached without ever having to stand on the bed. Also, wiggly is good. Past the apple tree there is a secluded spot just for the bees, which is gated to keep small children and dogs from bothering them. The fences of this enclosure are planted with climbing soft fruit, and inside the enclosure there is lots of insect-friendly planting which will hopefully help to give us a good reputation amongst the pollinators.

Blimey! Well now that you're here, please accept my congratulations on making it through this lengthy ramble! I hope you enjoyed walking through our potential future garden as much as some of you enjoyed walking through our potential future house in Cassian's last post. When dreams become reality, I promise we'll keep you posted :)

- Hannah

Further disclaimer: I was wary of doing a design for any aspect of Labyrinth, because it would be missing the important survey and analysis stages of the design process (which I realise I've just touted the importance of, but bear with me), but I felt that the contribution to my enthusiasm for a house which I have previously not been mad keen on outweighed this flagrant hypocrisy on my part. Also, everyone else wanted to see if I really could squeeze all the stuff they wanted in ;)

I got the orientation details and the size of the garden from an aerial photograph online, and added to that my observations from walking past the back of the property many times. The dimensions might be terrifically wrong, but let's imagine they're not, and then appreciate just how much you can fit into a fairly low-maintenance urban garden.

* Poly In Pictures is Cassian's web comic. Peruse it to see more work by these rather accomplished drawing implements.

Housey plans

2012-02-27T01:45:00.000-08:00

This morning I was perusing our Future House pinboard on Pinterest. (Leave a comment if you want to join Pinterest, okay? I have invites.) It occurred to me that such a site is so inspiring and at the same time a place to put reminders of ideas. Sure, I might see a picture of some keys bent into key hooks on some other site, but then I'd forget. And then when we needed key hooks in the new house, I'd have forgotten, so I'd just go out and buy some boring normal key hooks. This is why Pinterest is amazing. If our house turns out anything like even some of the things we've pinned, it's going to be incredible. I hope the new house has the internet.

Anyway, let me show you round Labyrinth of Dreams.

Walk through the front door.

(pin / source)

Hang up your keys.

(pin)

Grab something to eat from the pantry.

(pin / source)

Walk past some nice walls or something, I don't know.

(pin / source)

I just wanted some pretty colours on this blog post, shush.

Grab a book from the pipe bookshelf...

(pin / source)

... and sit down on the sofa to read, plunking your food down on the coffee table.

(pin / source)

(I think we shouldn't have these in the communal spaces, due to they will get full of tat, but that would spoil this story so I'll leave that out.)

Nip out and play in the greenhouse for a bit.

(pin)

Then when it gets late, grab your pyjamas...

(pin / source)

...and head to bed.

(pin / source)

Radical

2012-02-23T12:30:00.001-08:00

Since Radical Routes have opened up the question of what qualifies as radical social change and how much we should do, I thought I'd show you what I've been doing. This is at Chester Zoo with my mum. I am even radical when I'm on holiday, that's how dedicated I am.

Also, I got my mum to join in. I suspect she is naturally radical and that's where I get my genes.

I've also been getting loads of companies and organisations to change their forms and things re: gender via a small-but-active armchair activism blog MxActivist, and many are starting to include gender-neutral titles Mx and Misc on their online forms. It all feels like a snowball just starting to roll down a wintry mountain, gaining weight and momentum as it goes.

It's all going into this nonbinary.org wiki, particularly this section here on UK acceptance.

We accidentally a house.

2012-02-22T13:47:00.000-08:00

So, you know that last blog post where I whinged at length about the trials and tribulations of locating a suitable house? Ignore it. And me.

Look how happy he is for us!

Focus on this news instead: we put in an offer on Labyrinth and it got accepted.

Sorry, what?

WE PUT IN AN OFFER AND IT GOT ACCEPTED.

*faint*
*get up again*
*squeal*

The long, short, and medium length of it is that we couldn't come to a decision about the two houses currently on the table. Between Labyrinth and Run-of-the-hill, we had two abodes that none of us really loved. We wrangled, we debated, and still we had no idea what we wanted to do, if anything.

And then we looked at the maths. Not the intense sort of maths that Sven's brother can do with his eyes shut, but the simple, hard-to-avoid, obvious sort that involves noticing that one house had 2 more potential rental rooms, more communal space, was the same price or cheaper, and didn't need 10k spent on it to be habitable.

That's some pretty convincing maths, even for a romantic like me. So convincing that although I couldn't bring myself to say yes to offering on Labyrinth, I couldn't block the decision either. In the end two out of the five of us stood aside. It's thanks to the joys of consensus decision making that we all felt that our opinions had been taken into account, yet still managed to acknowledge the more negative feelings of some co-op members, and productively arrive at a decision. Yay consensus.

Anyway, now comes the busy bit. There are solicitors and surveys, valuations and business plans, and all the other gubbins I am too excited to think of right now.

Wish us luck, and expect more blog posts. Finally, this could be it.

- Hannah

The Eternal Quandary

2012-02-20T01:34:00.001-08:00

Things have seemed quiet here recently, but we've actually been busy busy bees. The last few weeks have seen a Radical Routes gathering, several house viewings, the loss of one member, and one member losing an internal organ. In a planned fashion, obviously. Even I'm not that good at misplacing things.

We've been to see Run-of-the-hill again, and also, somewhat surprisingly, Labyrinth. This latter visit was mainly prompted by it dropping in price by 15k, which Sven pointed out made a rather large house come in at a rather good price. I'll admit that I was never keen on Labyrinth, but agreed to visit again with as open a mind as I could manage, as did the rest of our (now slightly diminished) co-op.

These two houses are quite different, and none of us are in love with either of them. It's so strange how houses can evoke such an emotional response, but the fact still stands that we have to make decisions based on both emotional and practical reasons. Practically speaking Labyrinth is a brilliant choice. It's got extra space to allow for future co-op expansion, and the potential to make space available for small community groups and gatherings. The communal space is a good size, and more sensibly arranged than it would be at Run-of-the-hill, and it appears to be in reasonable nick.

Emotionally speaking, for me at least, Run-of-the-hill is more appealing. It's much lighter, it has more garden, and it sits on my favourite hill in Swansea. I can't say more for it than that, which I realise is ridiculous. I do wish I could be as practically minded as Sven, at times. The funny thing is, I asked about the head/heart dilemma on Facebook, hoping to get some bossy replies telling me what to do, and got a tonne of replies from various homeowners saying that you should always follow your heart. Clearly my friends aren't a very practical lot.

So this week we will get together and sort out where to go from here, if anywhere. We'll keep you (sporadically) posted.

________________________________________

So, what else?

The winter Radical Routes gathering was held by Gung Ho co-op and Birmingham Bike Foundry. It was in an awesome building called The Old Printworks, which was utterly massive and full of interesting corners for the kids to clamber in. Cassian, Joe, Mattie, Finn and me went along, and had a good, if cold, time. Cassian mostly did the childcare so that me and Joe could go to lots of meetings. I even chaired one, which was nerve-wracking but good. Hopefully I'll get to do more of that in the future.

This was Mattie's last gathering as a Golem and his first as a Cornerstone. We are all gutted to see him go, but I know he'll have a great time in Leeds, and Cornerstone have gained a wonderful housemate. Although it's quite a big loss to our little co-op, it's great that we'll still see each other at Radical Routes, and soon (hopefully), there'll be a co-op house here for him to visit us at.

The other (rather unexciting) news is that I had my gallbladder out. Luckily it's all healed now, and the fantastic thing is that the co-op - and friends beyond - swooped in to help while I couldn't lift Finn for two weeks. Mutual aid ftw :D

- Hannah

Cwtch needs you!

2012-01-31T02:29:00.000-08:00

A new squatted community and arts centre opened today in Swansea town centre, and I am VERY EXCITED.

The most important thing to note at this point is that they're in need of an electrician and a plumber. Do you know anyone who can help?

This article has a couple of pictures and has a few details, if you're interested, and this comment is really helpful:

I am one of "these people" I have been employed and paid taxes for the past 34 years. I love Swansea and am sad to see so many empty properties scarring our beautiful city.

The abandoned Dolphin Hotel building, in the city centre of Swansea, has been turned into a COMMUNITY CENTRE for the benefit of the community from 30 January 2012. It is hoped that there will be a cafe, art, music and alternative therapy workshops... There will be a PRESS CONFERENCE there today, Tuesday 31st of January 2012, at 6pm if you want to find out more. If you would like to get involved there will be a meeting tomorrow at 12.30pm at the Cwtch Community Centre on Whitewalls (off oxford street) or get in touch by e-mail or phone on the number below. EMAIL: CWTCH@GMX.COM Please note that at present the fire alarm doesn't work and there's is a problem with the drainage upstairs, which means the toilets can't be used so the community centre is APPEALING for an ELECTRICIAN and PLUMBER to come and help. Thank you Please forward to friends and family in Swansea. PEACE, JOY, COMMUNITY.

House Viewing: Run-of-the-hill and Can O' Worms

2012-01-13T15:08:00.000-08:00

Yes, I know the house names are getting a bit bizarre. You'll just have to cope, I'm afraid ;)

You wait weeks for a house viewing, and then two come along at once. I was feeling upbeat and optimistic about these houses, and hoping to put the memory of Boat House behind us. I know I'm a soppy bugger, but let's not worry about that just now.

And so it was that this afternoon Sven, Finn, Cassian, Lloyd and I set off to have a look at Run-of-the-hill. I've been stuck for a name for this all day, because despite being a lovely house in it's own way, there was just nothing remarkable about it - nothing at all. I thesaurused (now a word) 'unremarkable' and got 'run of the mill', and since it's a house in the typical local layout and style, which just happens to be on a bloody big hill, it seemed an appropriate pun.

Cassian looks all official and such.

As usual, I digress. The point is, there was just nothing remarkable about this place at all. This isn't such a bad thing in itself, when you think of some of the remarkable things we've seen on our house hunt. The wall of black mould at Mould Mansion. The shrooms at House of Why. Pretty much everything about Liberties Lodge. We've seen a lot of properties that frankly sucked, and this one didn't at all, but it also didn't have much in the way of potential and none of us particularly liked it, or felt anything about it all.

I think we could have coped, but it's on the market for pretty much the top of our (somewhat theoretical and subject to change) price range, and for that you'd like to think we'd, y'know, like to think about it, rather than being completely unable to form an opinion. Weird, but true.

After a sojourn for tea and bourbon biscuits, we went to look at Can O' Worms. This house was a squeeze for us, even on paper, but it was 60k cheaper than Run-of-the-hill and that can buy you a lot of compromise.

Not as much as this house requires though. The prize for the most optimistic estate agent patter I've heard in ages goes to the very nice lady who said "You could use these kitchen units", whilst neglecting to add "After you've disassembled them, hacked the dissolving plaster and rotting skirting boards off, remedied the damp, re-plastered, and then put the cupboards back." Perhaps she just has a talent for being succinct.

Finn is already a pro house-viewer

Anyway, the thought of what else we might find if we moved the cupboards, or tackled any of the other myriad suspect surfaces which abounded throughout, was just too daunting. We don't have the mad skillz necessary for what we could see was wrong, let alone what we couldn't, so we shall have to let this one pass us by too.

Le sigh. I often get this same feeling when I'm looking for something simple, like a pair of trousers for Finn which don't just look like tiny adult trousers*. In my head I'm looking for something terribly straight forward, which surely ought to be commonplace, and yet somehow, I just can't seem to find it anywhere. Houses seem to be similar, in that what we're after isn't something impossible, like a levitating castle with distinctly un-aerodynamic clothes drying apparatus**, although obviously that would be awesome too. Our future house must be here somewhere, but I guess we just need to rifle far enough down the back of the sofa to find it.

______________________________________________

Ooo, can you tell I'm feeling slightly despondent? Here is something random to cheer both you, and I, up. Those awesome fellows at The Burrow housing co-op, who are also the awesome fellows behind the Naked Vegan Cooking blog, can also be seen being awesome on a Channel 4 documentary about naturism. Their general loveliness comes across beautifully, and if you feel so inclined, you can support their radical nudity by ethically investing in their co-op loanstock. Win all round.

There, I feel much better now :D

- Hannah

* I just want colourful, squishy trousers, but can only find tiny-adult ones with buttons and flies and mock pockets. I know, I'm fussy as well as soppy.
** This is the castle in question, for those who have never watched anime with Sven around.

Assistance with the previous post

2012-01-03T07:21:00.000-08:00

Now you know how you're cooking and who you're cooking for... but...

What the f**k should I make for dinner? (NSFW)

Love from Lotte - happy new year!

Armchair Cookery

2012-01-02T06:19:00.000-08:00

I realised the other day that it's ages since we've just done a random post about something co-op-ey, so I'm here to rectify the situation. I've been a naughty blogger recently, but will be trying to keep you more abreast of things in the coming months, promise.

So to start with, let's talk about food.

The best way to get to the heart of anything is through its' stomach, and co-ops are no different. The cooking rota/scheme/system-of-mutual-aid that has been feeding us Golems for almost the past two years is a simple, yet beautiful, thing. Anyone with a few friends living in a small geographical area could replicate it, saving themselves time and money and building closer social ties in the process. It's that good, believe me.

For those who don't already know, this is how it works. There's a chart on the wall in the house where the majority of the cooking co-op members live. We write our names down on the day on which we are happy to cook (currently each member cooks once a week). On that day we cook a meal for everyone else in the co-op (usually in the evening, but we have also had slap-up breakfasts and picnic lunches - it can be very flexible) using whatever budget we feel happy with. We thought about having a set budget, but it works much better letting people spend what they feel they can afford. On a lean week we might cook a big leek and potato soup. On a week when we're feeling flush we might do a Korean feast with 6 different dishes, like I did a while ago. As long as there's a decent size meal, nobody minds.

The benefits of this are hugely varied. The most obvious benefits are that we each only have to cook an evening meal once a week. This saves a massive amount of shopping, cooking, and cleaning up time. The trade-off is that you have to cook for lots of people once a week, but this adds very little to preparation time, and only a little to the cleaning up.

It's also dramatically cheaper, because you're not having to buy ingredients for 7 different meals, but you still get the benefits of a varied diet. In fact, it's much more varied than our diets might be otherwise, because we have 7 different cooks making their favourite dishes, or trying out new recipes we've seen somewhere. We try to take each others' likes and dislikes into account (mostly vegan food, only ethically produced meat if there is meat, nothing too spicy, etc) but that still leaves enormous scope for a widely varied and very interesting diet. I am sure we are all healthier for it. Left to my own devices, I would never get a decent meal together every night, but with the co-op, I don't have to. I only have to be organised once a week, which even someone as wildly disorganised as I am can manage.

On your cooking day, you let everyone know what time dinner is at, and if people need to pick up food later because of work or other commitments, they let you know, and then we all get together and eat tasty nosh. This is one of the other great benefits of the cooking co-op; meals are generally social occasions, with a wonderful sense of community which is perfectly complimented by a full belly. Of course, if you don't feel like being sociable, you don't have to be. You can pick up your food later, ask someone to drop it off at your house, or eat and then leave immediately. As with all communities, it's important to respect the needs and wishes of your members. But on the whole we're a sociable bunch, and dinner might turn into a night out, a film, or a bracing discussion about feminism. Our friendships are enriched by this forced (in the best possible way) contact, and our increased interactions lead to increased outcomes of all sorts.

When friends or family visit us, they are catered for as well, provided you get the say-so from that day's cook, and many a lovely person has joined us for a chaotic, yet tasty, meal. During hard times people can ask for time-off, but are generally still provided for. When Finn was born I had a month off, but was still fed every night. I was in no fit state to do anything at the time, let alone feed myself well, and yet here I was, being fed and looked after by my little community. I wish every new mother could have such a thing.

A wee while ago some friends of ours moved to Swansea and one of the factors behind their move was wanting to be part of the cooking co-op, so we are now 9 people in total (including wee Finn). Naturally he's not cooking for us (yet!), so we have started having a 'week off' option which we rotate between us. So now you get a lovely dinner every night, and you don't even have to cook every week to get it. You save money, time and washing up, and gain social time, a more varied diet, and a wonderful sense of togetherness.

Cassian also did some interesting evidence-gathering with their electricity monitor, and surmised that cooking for more than just yourself at once saves a trucktonne of energy, so this system of feeding yourself has environmental benefits too. You can save even more energy by making use of a haybox, more on that below.

Now, I realise I've gone on at some length, but that's because I think the cooking co-op is the Bee's Knees. There are many, many ways you could organise something similar. You could cook for each other just once a week. You could have one week on, one week off. You could organise it with people from your church, your local pub, your workplace, your extended family. You could do it as a one-off exchange with a nearby friend or family. You have little to lose, and only tasty noms to gain.

_________________________________________________

If you've made it through this far, you deserve a recipe to get you started. This incredibly tasty vegan stew was cooked (mostly) by an armchair, two blankets, and a duvet in our living room. You raise the stew to boiling on a hob, and then super-insulate it for the remainder of it's cooking time. Very simple, and very satisfying, with no possibility of it getting stuck to the pan. Win all round.

We cooked this for 12, because there were visitors. It was very tasty, and cost less than £10, even with the rice we also cooked conventionally to make sure there was enough grub (there was plenty).

Middle Eastern Aubergine and Lentil Stew

For the food
A large pan with a well-fitting lid

3 large aubergines, chopped in half lengthways and then sliced into chunky half moons
400g of brown lentils
3 large onions, finely chopped
12 cloves of garlic, chopped
6 large tomatoes, chopped
Green chillis, amount to your taste, seeded and chopped
A big bunch of fresh mint leaves, chopped
3 tablespoons of tomato paste
3 teaspoons of ras-el-hanout (a spice mix available in Asian food shops, or look up a recipe online and make your own)
3 teaspoons of salt
A very large glug of oil (we used about 1 1/2 cups, which is a scarily large amount - adjust to your liking)

For the haybox
A sofa or armchair. Foam is a fantastic insulator.
Blankets, duvets, pillows - anything that can be wrapped closely around the pan to act as insulation. You need to insulate it very thoroughly, so the more the merrier. You shouldn't be able to feel any heat coming from the pan once it's wrapped up.

Make this dish at least 4 hours in advance, so it has loads of time to cook and become super-tasty.

1. Find a blimmin' big saucepan, but that will only just fit your ingredients in. For the haybox to work well, you need as little empty space in the pan as possible.
2. Put the lentils on to boil in the saucepan, and cook them until just tender.
3. Meanwhile chop everything that needs to be chopped. Marvel at your effective use of time.
4. When the lentils are cooked, drain them and rinse out the pan.
5. Chuck all the ingredients in and give it a massive and thorough stir.
6. Heat it on the hob with the lid on until it is boiling and the tomatoes are just starting to break down.
7. Take it off the heat, put it on your chair of choice, and then speedily encase it in layers of lovely insulating materials. You might want to put a tea towel under it if you're worried about the bottom of the pan marking your chair, though it should be fine. Tuck it in very carefully with lots of layers, and then LEAVE IT. Don't check on it, stir it, or otherwise let any heat out. Just enjoy knowing that it's merrily doing it's thing with no chance of it burning to the bottom of the pan. Delish.
8. Get it out just before you want it, and be prepared that you may need to give it a quick boost of heat on the hob. Usually it comes out at perfect scoffing temperature though, and is beautifully moist, with the lovely meshing of flavours which only comes from long, slow cooking.
9. Feed lots of people, and enjoy the feeling of having saved all that energy and stirring time :D

- Hannah

Sad Times On the High Seas

2011-12-29T13:53:00.000-08:00

I'm just posting this very quickly for any regular visitors to the blog who want to know what's going on. Apologies for a lack of pithy analysis or snazzy photography - Finn's a bit poorly and I'm tired.

Anyhoo, these are the haps.

We decided to make another offer on Boat House. We got excited. Christmas preparations happened. We got distracted.

The Wednesday before Christmas we rang the estate agent to put in our new offer. He informed us that the vendor had accepted a cash offer that very morning.

Crapbaggins.

This is us then, back to Square One (again).

Wish us luck.

- Hannah

House Viewing: House of Why

2011-12-12T06:48:00.000-08:00

Hello!

Well, I'm finally back with an update on our activities, and a report back from our latest house viewing. I'll start with the house viewing, because I know you all love the picturey bits the best ;)

House of Why (so named by Mattie, who is beautifully illustrating the source of this name in the picture to the right) is a 5 bedroom/3 reception room property round the corner from where we live now. It is cheap, very cheap. This explains why we went to see it.

The house is a reposession so it's on at a tempting price for it's size (around £115k), but sadly there is nothing tempting about it. Frankly, the only tempting thing is to walk around it saying "Why???" repetitively, which is just what we did. Subject to a fascinating variety of DIY projects over the years, it has fancy flush spotlights in places and serious structural issues in others. There are built-in DVD shelves and fixings for a large flat-screen TV in the same room as large amounts of homegrown fungus. I'm all for self-sufficiency but growing shrooms out of your walls is taking it a bit far.

Suffice to say that this may suit someone, but it isn't us. Another one to put down to experience then. Sad times.

General Updatery

Our final offer on Boat House was turned down and we don't feel inclined to go higher at the moment. It's such a tricky balancing act deciding what to offer, and when to walk away, and it's not something that any of us enjoy. On this occasion it's been a particularly hard decision to make, but we will find the right place in the end. True fact.

In other news, Mattie has decided to move on to pastures new. The precise location of these pastures is as yet unknown, but they look likely to be in the region of Leeds. This move may involve those notorious cattle-rustlers, Cornerstone, and it may not. It may also occur in March, but that is as yet unconfirmed.

Hang on: I seem to be suggesting that Mattie is a cow and that the largely vegan/vegetarian Cornerstone dwellers are cow-thieves. Step away from the metaphor, Hannah (however much I may think that Mattie would approve).

You get the gist though. We will soon be a co-op member down and this makes us all of the sad-but-supportive-of-peoples'-choices. What this means in terms of co-op numbers is also uncertain, but we will keep you posted.

In other, other news, the Localism Bill is now on the statute books, so we are safe and sound as regards the HMO legislation. Woop! That's a little something to cheer us on the long hunt for a home :)

- Hannah

No news is good news?

2011-11-16T07:45:00.001-08:00

Hello peeps -

I can't believe it's been 5 weeks since we posted about putting an offer in, and I can't quite believe that I still have nothing to tell you.

That's right. We are still in the process of making an offer. Numbers have been bandied back and forth a bit, but as yet there is no conclusion. It's all a bit depressing, and a bit of an eye opener about the absurdities of the house buying process.

I shan't say too much, as the internet is a small place, but we're hoping to have more definite news for you soon. Whether it will be good or bad is rather out of our hands at the moment, so only time will tell.

Apart from the whole offer process, affairs chez Golem are pretty much as usual. Mattie and Sven had a jolly time at the latest Radical Routes Gathering. Cassian has been making awesome comics and generally improving the world one gender-neutral step at a time by drawing attention to petitions such as this. Finn has had his first birthday, taken his first step, and is now capable of turning any object whatsoever into a drum. The rest of us have plodding along being awesome in less definable ways, but being awesome nonetheless.

I promise to update you further when there is something to update, or when, as today, it's been far too long. It's a good thing we're in this for the long haul, eh?

- Hannah

The Haps.

2011-10-09T13:24:00.000-07:00

Ok, so these are The Haps.

We've decided to give up on the house idea and live on a boat instead.

Sort of ;)

Oh seasoned readers of the blog, you know where I'm going with this. We like Boat House, and since Sven came up with The Plan, we are probably going to make moves towards making it ours. The Plan is an intriguing one as it involves planning to expand into another house in the near future. The Dinghy is not that house though. It just doesn't seem right, for some reason. We're all agreed on this, and we're also all agreed on our love for Boat House.

The logic is that we will get along with one communal room (and oodles of lovely external communal space) until a further house can be bought, and filled with more of our co-opulent brethren, plus one person who will have been residing at Boat House in the meantime.

I realise this sounds bonkers. We've been spending so long looking for somewhere that would fit, and whinging about how nothing does, and now we've gone and fallen in love with something which is unequivocally too small.

Cope.

This house is within budget, allowing lots of scope for eco-renovating it, fits almost all of our far-ranging criteria, and has a sexay garden which is much bigger than we could ever have dreamed of. How could we not?

We're hoping to have another viewing before next weekend (still some unanswered questions and unphotographed corners) and then move on to the whole offer/valuation/survey rigmarole.

Fun times ahoy!

- Hannah

Sven’s slightly but not entirely made up recipe for Apple Ketchup that Mattie and Finn helped with

2011-10-07T13:06:00.000-07:00

(as yet untested because we only made in 2 hours ago)

Makes 10 mostly big jars of various shapes and sizes.
Takes some time

1. Volunteer to do roofing at Crabapple a few times, making sure that you take enough cloth bags to bring back 3.5kg of miscellaneous apples. Get one co-op member to meet you at the station to help carry them up the hill. Mattie reckons that the mutual aid adds some sweetness to the ketchup.

This is too many, 'k?

2. Chop the apples up into reasonably small chunks, removing the cores but leaving the skin in because you have to sieve it all anyway and peeling them seems like FAR too much effort. Get someone with eyes of steel to slice 800g of onions. If possible choose someone who’s in need of a good cry anyway, it’s a great excuse.

3. Pop the onions and the apples into a large preserving pan that someone had for Christmas last year (festive connection not mandatory for the recipe). Add 1.7 litres of cider vinegar and 300ml of malt vinegar that you saved from some pickled onions because it seemed a waster to chuck it.

4. Feel pleased with how things are going.

You should aim to be about this happy.

5. Add 3 heaped teaspoons of ginger powder of questionable provenance, along with 2 heaped teaspoons of cumin, some oregano, 5 drops of Tabasco sauce (Steady!), 1 ground nutmeg, 2 teaspoons of salt, 2 teaspoons of black pepper and 50g sugar.

6. Give it a good stir and then go read the Good Shopping Guide with Finn for a bit because it’s taking ages and he likes books. Alternate these two activities, taking care not to stir Finn or read to the ketchup by mistake.

7. Eventually your house and everything in it will smell of vinegar and the ketchup itself will look very bog like and smell tasty. At this point, turn off the heat and put the mixture through a sieve, regretting not peeling the apples in the first place.

Acursed sieve clogging fiend

8. Jar and leave to its own devices until one night you really want some ketchup and think you might as well give it a try. (Sven says ‘At least 2-3 months’.)

9. Feel the love.

Mattie and the Golems

House Viewing: Boat House and The Dinghy

2011-09-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

This is why it is called Boat House.

So, we went to see Boat House again. A week ago. I suck.

We also went to see the house opposite. It's for sale by the same vendor, and would address the fact that Boat House isn't big enough for us. We would need to expand the co-op, which is a whole can o' worms, but we're generally open to the idea. Hence our nosing at this intriguing property.

Aren't they all intriguing?

The Dinghy is technically down as a 3 bedroom house, with 3 reception rooms. I don't know how estate agents decide this stuff, it's fascinating. It's been previously let as a 5 bedroom HMO, with the large basement reception room as a lounge, presumably. This takes up the whole lower ground/basement floor, and has a small bathroom and garden off of it, as you do. The garden was so overgrown we have no idea how bit it is, but the answer is likely to be "not very".

There's another garden which is totally paved (see left) which is at lower ground level but inaccessible from the lower ground floor. Why of course! This makes perfect sense! So to get from the living room to the main (for which read, bigger) garden, you have to get up the stairs and then down the outside stairs again. Hm. The paved garden was nice though, if seriously overlooked. No naked sunbathing here, then. (With a co-op like ours we need to consider these things.)

The bedrooms were suitably non-descript, the kitchen was pretty tiny, and there's a garage. There's not a lot more to be said really, although that is coming from me as the least keen member of the co-op. I do see the benefits of having two houses, and this house is OK, but I like Boat House much, much better.

After looking around The Dinghy, we had another quick peruse around Boat House. Bless the estate agent, he didn't seem to mind our epic nosiness. It did help consolidate the layout in our minds, and also allowed us to answer a few questions we couldn't resolve from memory. I still like it, and everyone else seems keen too.

There are obviously things which wouldn't be ideal with a two-house setup: one house would have a bigger kitchen, dining room and living room, and would be better suited to communal eating. It also has ALL the garden. Does this matter? I don't know, but we need to think about these things. Having the two houses would create a wider range of possibilities, but also a lot more roof to maintain.

We need to cogitate.

To aid both myself, and anyone else who might need it, with their cogitations, I leave you with this picture of Mattie looking ~~uncomfortable~~ sexay.

- Hannah

House Viewing: Boat House

2011-09-03T03:58:00.000-07:00

Finally, another house viewing! It's been quiet over the summer with no new sitings of potential houses, but this one has been sitting on the market for a while. We actually got the particulars the same day as those for Labyrinth and The Tardis, but the excitement of those two meant this one got lost, quite literally, down the side of a chair. A massive toddler-proofing clearout of the living room at Golem HQ led to it being rediscovered, and we trundled along for a look this morning.

Boat House resides at the top of a rather steep and well-known hill, and has epic views to prove it. It also has possibly the nicest garden we've seen on a house yet - terraced but sizeable to both front and back. You can see the sea from just about everywhere. J'approve. Incidentally, it's called Boat House because the terraces at the back have awesome rope hand rails. My bad that I forgot to take a picture, but take my word for it that it feels sufficiently deck-like to warrant the name.

The awesome garden-ness was a lovely surprise, and provided an interesting contrast with the outside space at The Tardis. It's funny how seeing one house really makes you re-evaluate others, and for me it was interesting to realise how unhappy I am with the the outside space at The Tardis, and how important it feels for Finn to have a lovely garden to grow up in, even if it does have ALL THE STEPS. Our fitness levels would greatly benefit from living here, though, it must be said. Either that or we'd soon be installing a stairlift. Joking aside, we were hoping to have an accessible property to those with mobility issues, and this will never be that. We're doomed to constantly be trading one thing off against another; such is househunting.

We knew from the particulars that this house does not have enough rooms, no matter how we rejig things internally. Without extending, there is no way to fit in all of our basic list of requirements, but we went to look because the whole thing is within budget. That potentially gives us the option to extend/modify a house to suit a little better, so it seemed worth a look.

The interior was a total surprise. This house has another huge hallway, and a big sweeping staircase which I am dying to swoosh down. Much to everyone's astonishment, few of the rooms matched the sizes on the particulars, and the interior space is generally lovely. It helps that it's light, with a tonne of south-facing windows. Win all round. Everyone liked the bedrooms, which is a pretty rare moment in our house-viewing history. Cause for celebration there, methinks. There is space for a co-op office in the hallway, and a lean-to utility room/pantry in the generous side-return, if only to reduce the amount of stuff that would have to live in the kitchen.

Because unfortunately, the communal rooms are another story. To be fair, there are two great sized bathrooms, so no problem there. But the kitchen is small and surprisingly triangular - less than ideal for mass-cooking, storage and dining. There are three rooms on the ground floor, two of which would have to be bedrooms, which leaves only one communal/spare room. Although technically this could work, discussions following viewings of similarly under-endowed houses have led us to believe that it would be anything but ideal to only have one communal room. Some of us felt that this was possibly mitigated slightly by the large garden, but that feels slightly tenuous and I'm not sure any of us were totally convinced. As always, pros and cons.

There is some extension potential (the house is already extended quite radically on one side) but at the moment we can't quite see a way to make ourselves fit. Also, it has some interesting smells/cracks which might account for it's intriguingly affordable price. Still, we all have a good feeling about it, and it has led to some interesting re-evaluation about The Tardis (more on that below). We've decided to let this house sit on the backburner for now, and to re-visit it at a later date if it still doesn't seem like a write-off. Sven has a slightly bonkers plan regarding how we could make this house work, but I am saving it for a later blog-post as we need to get more information. Mysterious!

In related news, we tried to book another viewing for The Tardis, but were heartily put off by the estate agent. It looks like it is not going to be on the market for a while, and so he is reluctant to show us around. Doom biscuits all round. We're still considering it though, and at the very least, it does provide a good contrast property for anything else we look at.

Secondary Rules Progress

We've been working on these for quite some time. I don't know how long, it feels like forever. We are making progress though, yes indeedy. It's just the slow, consensual type of progress which we are becoming accustomed to on our journey as a co-op. I meant to type up a list of all the things we are aiming to have secondary rules for, but Finn has just woken up, so I shall instead give you some quick examples: income, children, bills, visitors, joining/leaving and grievance procedures, rents, bills, decorating, pets - the list goes on. We even have Rule 7 (disappointingly our particular Rule 7 is only the third definition on Urban Dictionary) to cover pretty much all eventualities that we don't manage to cover in the myriad of other rules.

This might seem like dramatic overkill, but we think it's an important way to shape the culture of the co-op. Radical Routes thinks that they are important too, and having a set of secondary rules, however simple or complex, is a requirement of membership. Respect and common sense come from peoples' behaviour, but it doesn't hurt to have something to point at when something doesn't quite feel right to the rest of the co-op. Agreeing these things while we are all on great terms with each other is also better than trying to thrash them out when there's a emotive issue on the table.

The secondary rules also serve as a good way of outlining what living in our co-op will be like, both for ourselves and for future potential members. When they're done, we will also post them on the blog so that you can have a nosey at them in all their verbose glory. For now, have a gander at these from Mary Ann Johnson Housing Co-op and Rhizome Housing Co-op to get an idea of what we're up to.

- Hannah

We're back. Sort of.

2011-08-25T13:45:00.000-07:00

Hello lovely people!

As Lotte so brilliantly told you in their prior post, we have been away in fields in various places across the country. This has included adventures to Earth First camp, Dance Camp Wales, Women In Tune and the Radical Routes Summer gathering, to plug but a few. We're all glad to be back in our own beds.

And they're still the same beds, because we still don't have a new house yet. Sad times indeed. The search continues, and so do various other machinations of the co-op process. We have another secondary rules workshop (click here to see the secondary rules of an established housing co-op) planned for next week. We also have a repeat viewing of The Tardis and a viewing of another interesting property on the cards next week, so we're not just sitting here twiddling our thumbs. Well, we're managing to squeeze that in too.

We had our first meeting in quite a while this evening, and although it was slightly fraught (tense issues were discussed), we slipped back into consensus decision-making and honest discussion in a way which felt affirming and brilliantly familiar. For those of you with a dread of meetings, I cannot recommend consensus techniques enough. I miss them when I'm in meetings where they're not used. Go and have a read about them, and see if they could make your meetings less arduous.

Right, I'm off to be a Viking for the weekend with this shady lot. Although I'd like to think that swapping modern society for a societal structure from a thousand years ago counts as radical social change, I have to admit that really, I just like dressing up.

We'll post soon about our house viewings and progress on the secondary rules. Fun times, even if we don't have new beds yet.

- Hannah

honkshu (by Lotte)

2011-08-13T05:18:00.000-07:00

Our co-op is slightly on hold a little bit. Due to festival season (commonly known as Summer in colloquial language), and therefore many of our members being in fields in far distant lands, sometimes as far as England, it is difficult to be looking around houses. Especially Tardis houses that are technically not at all for sale.

I can assure you that we are not completely asleep, though. I don't feel able to speak for the others, but for me, I am mostly banging on with the gender activism. My latest exciting thing is convincing the UK Deed Poll Service to offer a gender-neutral title on their documents, thus convincing hopefully many more organisations and companies that genderqueer people do exist and won't accept Miss or Mr or whatever.

I also somehow ended up in Lesbilicious.

Leave a comment if you want a signed photo, people.

Starting as we mean to go on...

2011-07-01T14:18:00.000-07:00

We have already written the bulk of our secondary rules, and the gist of most of them is that it is the co-op's responsibility to help and encourage it's members to be socially aware and responsible people. Part of this means finding ways to help each other to get involved in things we may find challenging - whether that be doing the co-op's accounts or attending a demonstration - rather than admonishing people for not taking part.

Today this manifested as us going on a picnic in order to discuss the concept of social change. A tricky subject, and thus best accompanied by a tasty lunch and a nice view. As members of Radical Routes (RR) we have promised to be involved in radical social change, but what this really means is a hot topic of debate both within RR and our own co-op. Personally I feel like I have an understanding of the concept of social change, but one person's radicalism is another person's every day, and arriving at a working definition is fraught with difficulty.

To try to work out what radical social change means to us, and how we can help each other to do more of it, we took ourselves up to Rosehill Quarry, assembled lunch on a bench and tried to get our heads around the matter. We used one of our favourite meeting tools - the go-round - to find out what it is that interests us as a group. Queer issues were at the forefront, closely followed by environmental ones. Parenting also got a look-in. We pondered whether our aims involving these things were radical, how we might support each other in campaigning on these fronts, and what we could work on as a group to provide a focus to our activities.

What struck me about these discussions was that they come from a solid foundation of wanting to support each other in our own interests. We thought through ways to use the co-op structure as a basis for forming a wider group, and devised ways in which to lend weight to each others' plans.

Predictably, some of these plans involve cake.

What we end up doing is still open to discussion, but we have ideas, and know that we will have others to help us. We each stated what we were prepared to do, and we have a full spectrum from letter-writers to those keen on more direct action. Change takes all sorts.

Sometimes I think about the notion of the housing co-op, and it seems like a lot of work for somewhere to live. I already have somewhere to live, and so does everyone else in the co-op. We could stay where we are and save a lot of time spent in meetings. But in the short time we have existed, and without us at any point owning a house or even all living in one place, we have already become much more than just a group of housemates. We cook and buy food together, share childcare, help each other with all manner of projects. We are learning about consensus decision-making, non-violent communication, and the compromises and strength that co-operation brings.

Having the co-op as a focus enables us to do far more than just dream of living in a non-landlord-controlled property. I don't know if any of this counts as radical, but our society would certainly be changed for the better if we were more able to share, work together and resolve issues peacefully.

As a rather over-used, but still true, Gandhi quote goes: "You must be the change you wish to see in the world".

Hannah

House Viewing: The Tardis and Labyrinth

2011-06-22T09:17:00.000-07:00

Since Mould Mansion we have not had a house to view which in any way fitted our size/price criteria. We've been to look at some nonetheless, but always with the knowledge of their inappropriateness in the backs of our minds. Sad times, indeed.

The other day Finn and I had a borrowed baby sling to try out, and so we went on a trawl of the estate agents to see if there was anything interesting about. We drew a blank, but a few hours later one of the agents rang saying he had a house that had just come on that would suit, and that the owners lived in the same street and were thinking of selling their house too, and did we want the particulars?

Er, yes!

When they came through they were incomplete, but very intriguing. Both houses are within our price range, and have enough rooms and random bits of space for communal good times as well. In fact, there seemed to be far too many rooms for what look, from the front, like quite narrow terraced houses. Oh yes, and one of them has a first floor conservatory, too. Random.

And so, today we embarked on a very exciting house viewing of these two properties; the Tardis, and Labyrinth.

First, The Tardis*. This house looks a little different to others on the street, both inside and out. The owner has had great fun moving walls about inside, creating an awesomely wide and light hallway. There are 7 bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen, 3 bathrooms and an awesome basement with two windows. It also has a small garden, conservatory, a sun terrace on the second floor, and a large study area on the landing. The basement is enormous, and gets extra points for being the only one I've ever been in that doesn't stink of damp. In fact, it didn't smell at all - and neither did the rest of the house. A house in Swansea with no visible/smellable damp? You can imagine how impressed we were.

This house is different to others we've looked at on many levels. For one, it appears to have been reasonably well-loved and looked after. The owner seemed quite proud of it, and he didn't seem like a blagger, which made a nice change. The house felt; well, it felt like a home, and that is something I know our house will feel like. It was hard not to like it. It doesn't have any massive bedrooms or any teeny tiny ones. We'd all get an OK-ish amount of personal space, and lots and lots of varied communal space. Whether this suits everyone is still up for discussion.

We next went down the road to Labyrinth. Despite their similar size and location, the two houses couldn't have felt more different. Labyrinth has been HMOdified**, which is to say that every door is a fire door and thus shut all the time, that there are numerous extra internal walls making even large spaces feel small and boxy, and that the kitchen smelt weird. Such is the way of the HMO.

It's currently split into two flats, with the bottom flat having a huge living room, small kitchen and bathroom in the basement, and then 3 bedrooms on the ground floor. The top flat has 3 bedrooms, a kitchen and bathroom, and a living room. The room sizes are more varied here, but there weren't any absurdly small rooms, just some a little smaller than we'd like. There was a bigger garden here, but no other extraneous areas.

Were we to live here, we'd have the whole ground floor as communal space, which would be awesome. In The Tardis the space is more split up into different areas, but there's also more of it. It's so hard to work out which is more important sometimes, but such is the way of buying houses. We are always trying to think of what will work best for the long-term of the co-op, and that does mean making tricky judgements.

After the viewing we went back to Cassian's for a debrief/squeebrief***. This involved, amongst other things, deciding the houses' names (for bloggity purposes) and determining that choosing between them was somewhat akin to a fight between David Tennant and David Bowie. Cue rubbish artwork.

Less importantly, rough floor plans were drawn and pros and cons debated, and it turns out that we see merit in them both. We're going to go for second viewings, and try to get more detailed measurements for The Tardis, which had some hilariously inaccurate ones in the particulars. We're going to do some investigating of market values, and re-work the business plan to see how it goes with both houses. We're going to have a meeting; the first of many, if we decide to go for one or the other.

As Joe so pointedly said, here we go again.

Hannah

* It's not only named for the TARDIS because it's bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside, but also that if you painted it blue, it would have a slight similarity. Honest.
** I made this word up today, and had to use it :)
*** Another word I made up today. Clearly I'm on a roll.

MOVING HOUSE MAKE HULK SMASH ANGRY

2011-06-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

So, I am moving house again, for will be the 4th time in just over 2 years. This makes me sad.

Artists impression of the Author.

Mattie! I hear you cry, what does this have to do with us? We are here to read whimsical exposition on mould and Babies, not hear you whinge about your personal housing situation! Well PAH! I tell you. This is about social inequality, unstable housing and the benefits of stable, mutually organised housing managed by tennants. So there. Listen to my whinging, oh invisible audience.

The situation is this.

Well, are you?

My current landlord has issued myself and my 2 housemates 2 months notice to scarper and find somewhere new. In a way this is nice, because in all my 8 months of living there I have <ILLEGALITY WARNING> not been on the contract. While partly because of disorganisation, mostly this is because I cannot find £160 of non refundable 'going on the contract' money. The only housing security I have had is that my housemate is awesome and not some form of baddie.

My housemate - Not Skeletor

Swansea has very odd HMO rules that mean that should you want to live anywhere near anything ever you have to be less than two households. Otherwise HMO housing. Lovely, expensive student housing, in short. So far, the estate agents that we have spoken to have either said 'no, we don't do small HMO properties', 'we have houses but they're filthy' or 'we have a good house, but you'll have to pretend that there are less of you than there are'.

Due to being on 16 hours a week I will have to claim housing benefit. This means that upon moving into the next house I will need to pay contract fees and a bond. For living in a house. How demanding am I.

Not this demanding though, God kids!

Now, this may just be me, but as a bond round here can be up to and beyond £300, contract fees £160 and a months rent around £180-250 before bill seems a bit steep for somewhere to live. You know, living, that thing that people do.

Start a housing co-op, take over the rental market. Make sure that I am part of the last generation that haemorrhages money it doesn't have into private pockets for the privilage of a roof and 4 walls.

But of course, private rental landlords, follow the advice below.

.
Bad Advice Chimps

Being the Change (by Lotte/Cassian)

2011-05-23T03:18:00.000-07:00

In light of recent discussions at Radical Routes, the definition itself of "Radical Social Change" has come into question. Since I feel like a bit of a freak, and not for want of trying to be otherwise, I thought I'd pop in and say a little bit about my radical social change at the moment. (To recap: as members of Radical Routes we're required to do 16 hours of radical social change per week.)

The thing is, I don't really feel like I have a choice. (Technically I do, in that I could just lie back and stop trying to have basic rights, but there we are.)

I'm genderqueer. I feel a bit weird saying it out loud even now! Everyone has a different definition of this word, but for me it means that I feel like I don't have a gender at all. My preferred pronoun for myself is singular "they/them" and I'm happy with anything that's not he, she or it. Don't get me started on a genderqueer wardrobe when you're committed to secondhand clothing, you're on benefits and you've got a chronic illness that prevents shopping.

I did a Google image search for "Queer bra" to break up

the enormous block of text that is this post.

This is my favourite of the results.

No, I don't understand either. Why are they lying on a car?

So, all that is fine. Having worked out yet another thing that is freaky about myself, I feel relieved for having worked it out. But when people say things like this are a choice, I want to stab them with forks (perhaps a Genderfork?). And when people imply that I would want to choose it in order to be difficult, I want to stab them with rusty forks. To do so may count as social change, and on their part it may count as suicide to disrespect me in this way, but despite these motivations I hold back. I think time spent not stabbing people with rusty forks maybe should count towards my social change.

People who're out and proud speak of coming out as being not one big event, but as infinite smaller ones. The same is true of being genderqueer, only more so, because I have to come out to many people more than once. I'm female assigned at birth (FAAB, dahling), and basically look (at the moment) like a tomboy. I'm really trying to look less like a woman, but most people don't realise that there's anything aside from man and woman. Upon meeting anyone I'll be seeing often, or who needs to know these things, I will explain that I'm not a woman but I'm not a man either. I will explain the pronouns, and about not using "she." My new acquaintance will appear to understand and be sympathetic. Some time later, unless the person is queer-savvy or particularly thoughtful and respectful, they will use "she" or refer to me by my feminine birth name.

My bank insists on me having a gendered title on record and on all correspondence. Don't you think it's strange that there's one title for men, three titles for women dependent on marital status, i.e.: relation to a man, but NONE at all for people whose gender is unclear? In written communication, that seems pretty lax to me. I have asked to change my name from GenderedName to Cassian Lotte, but they refuse because I want either the title Misc or no title at all. (Edited later to add: They've now changed my name, and this is some kind of awesome stuff they say about titles.)

When I go to a restaurant or cafe, chances are there won't be bathroom facilities I can use unless I want to wave the disabled card. Underwear for FAAB people assumes that I want breasts to be big and obvious, or at least supported, but I want mine to be not there at all. (I had to spend a lot of money on a chest-binder from overseas.)

For something like gender that's so basic to human life and yet irrationally has so much meaning, every moment of my life is radical. Every time someone makes an assumption about me I am committing an act of radical social change to speak up and be myself. Why yes, you're right, I do have a vagina. What does that have to do with what we're talking about? Oh, I see, it means that the clothing I buy, the TV shows I watch, the people I fall in love with and the food I eat is affected by my vagina. Thanks, I'm glad you let me know, because here was me ignoring my vagina in my day-to-day life. And now I can tell people about my genitals through the act of dressing, watching TV, falling in love and eating. How kind of you to tell me over and over again when we've only known each other for five minutes.

Fortunately, there is a bright side.

The phone rings. It seems to be a telemarketer.

Me: "Hello?"

Them: "Hello, is this the lady of the house?"

Me: "Not exactly. Who's speaking, please?"

Them: "Is your mother or father in?"

Me: "I'm 24, I live alone. Who is this, please?"

Them: "Could I speak to the lady or the man of the house please?"

Me: "There are no men or women living here. WHO IS THIS?"

*beeeeeeeep* as they hang up.

I'm accosted in the street by a Christian who wants to talk to me about God.

Them: "Come into this church and listen to my talk! You'd be very welcome."

Me: "Thanks for the offer, but I am Pagan and very happy in my faith! I hope the talk goes well, though."

Them: "Even more reason to come on in!"

Me: "Well, I'm not exactly resistant to hearing what other people have to say, but why not give me a bit of an overview before I head in, so I can decide if it's something I might like to hear?"

Them: "Okay! Well, finding a common ground might help. Do you feel that there are some things, some acts, that are fundamentally immoral?"

Me: "No, I think we as human beings ascribe morality to meaningless acts."

Them: "But there are things that everyone can agree are wrong. Take, for example, adultery."

Me: "I'm polyamorous."

Them: "But that's deceit!"

Me: "No, I'm very honest in my relationships. A basic part of polyamory is the idea that everyone understands what's going on and everyone is consenting. There's no deceit. You could argue that there's less cheating than in monogamy, though that's not always true."

Them: "But you must, in your lifestyle, feel that sleeping with two people is dishonest, and you can never truly love someone and be happy."

Me: "You can, but for the most part that doesn't apply to me. I'm asexual."

Them (with anger/disbelief): "So you're polyamorous and you don't have sex??"

Me: "My sex life is none of your business, but for asexuals in general, relationships are very much not at all about sex."

Them: "Hang on, talk to this man about religion."

They then refer me to someone who proceeds to tell me that I am doing everything wrong and I am wrong as a person, that I shouldn't want to be the way I am naturally, that I can change who I am, and that his entire way of life is correct and right and good because he believes it is and that makes it true.

It feels like a battle, but it's one I'm happy to fight, because it's harder and more painful to pretend to be a straight, sexual, monogamous woman.

Edited to add:

I was joking earlier at Golem HQ about how this post is a block of text that needs pictures, so I added the photo above that I found on Google Image Search for "queer bra" - it was my favourite result. :D However, I also found this excellent Autostraddle article on buying bras when you're a great big queer. I thought you should know.

HMO Progress. Hmogress?

2011-05-22T14:40:00.000-07:00

A small update on the campaign by Friendly Housing Action to fix the Housing Act and make it so that fully mutual co-ops don't need to have HMO licenses. Basically the good news is that the government has yet again admitted that co-ops should be exempt, and that it intends to fix the issue. They don't want to open up any unintentional loopholes in the law for other types of landlord/organisation though, so further advice is going to be sought about how to word it, etc. Although this doesn't mean the battle is over, as I imagine a tremendous number of small, yet important, things slip through the cracks at Westminster, it is a significant achievement and Friendly Housing Action deserve a massive round of applause for their work.

Full text from Hansard*:

"Andrew Stunell: My hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington (Mr
Leech) has tabled new clause 26, which relates to a specific situation for
fully mutual housing co-operatives. By a quirk of the legislation, they are
caught by the houses in multiple occupation requirement for licensing and,
sometimes, planning permission. The Department has been lobbied by the
Friendly Housing Action campaign group to secure an exemption for fully
mutual housing co-operatives, and I am very sympathetic to the campaign, as
such organisations were never intended to be caught by the licensing
provisions.

We have to be careful to ensure that in granting an exemption we do not
inadvertently allow other categories to slip through the loophole, so I am
asking for further advice on how we might achieve that. I hope to return to
the issue at a later stage, so I hope that my hon. Friends will not feel the
need to press new clause 26 to a Division. "

This is a signifiant step forward for the campaign. However, we now need to
carefully manage the passage of the amendment through the Lords. We should
probably hold a meeting during the next gathering to work through this.

* I'm hoping to get a video of this glorious moment, which I will embed as soon as I have it.

How To Buy a House

2011-05-16T14:01:00.000-07:00

So far, we are nowhere near being experts at this. In fact, none of us have ever bought one, and although it feels like we've been close, there are no doubt an enormous number of other doomful things which we will encounter next time. Still, in the spirit of encouraging, informing and inspiring the formation of other housing co-ops, we thought we'd share the Golem Guide to How To Buy a House - or at least, How To Get a Bit Closer To Buying a House Than You Probably Are Now.

Snappy titles are not my thing :)

1. Try to give yourself more than three weeks for the process. We can honestly tell you, from our highly-frazzled experience, that house-buying is a lengthy endeavour. Everything will take longer than you expect, even if you over-exagerate your expectations. The universe knows, and will alter the amount of time things take. That's how timey-wimey works.

2. All situations are open to change, often at short notice. In fact, situations WILL change. Accept it, and try to remain flexible.

3. Make friends with any trades people that you can. Find builders, glaziers, plumbers, electricians and gas engineers (you might be surprised to find that you already know people who fit the bill - we were) who are happy to come and look at things for free, and if you find a house you like, take them along. We were really lucky to form some good contacts during the Mould Mansion saga, and will be revisiting these relationships when we next find somewhere we like. All of this free advice is still not as awesome/legally important/project-nixing as a survey, but it will give you a better idea of the property before deciding whether to fork out for one.

4. Temper your enthusiasm, yet be enthusiastic. We wouldn't pretend that we have got the balance right within our co-op, but there is clearly a balance to be sought. Downright pessimism does no-one any favours (after all, you have to have a bit of optimism to be a group of low-income people trying to buy a house in an over-inflated property market) but neither does raging optimism, fun though it is.

5. Surveys are worth the money. Also, they're fascinating. We learnt so much about MM from the survey, and most of it is applicable to all the Victorian housing stock in Swansea. There isn't much over-estimating how useful a survey is to a group of people without a huge reserve of cash sitting in the bank. If we had bought MM, we would have at least known all the major flaws of the property. No big surprises can only be a good thing, although still expect lots of little ones.

6. Get a valuation before doing your survey if you can. Basically these two things both cost hundreds of pounds each. The valuation was what thwarted our hopes of buying MM, and because of time restraints, we'd done it after all the other stuff, including the survey. If your mortgage company won't lend you anywhere near the asking price for the house, move on to pastures new. Or haggle.

7. Once you've discovered that you can actually purloin the funds for the house, get a survey and write a proper business plan. We have worked out a basic budget for what we can afford, knowing in advance what the maximum rent is that we can charge. There's a lot of fine tuning to be done in business plans, but if you can't get an appropriately sized mortgage in the first place, save yourself some time. This is also where your awesome survey comes in. There might be some surprises that need to be accomodated in the business plan, but you can get quotes and include them before submitting everything to your mortgage company. This should hopefully lead to annoying them less and saving you a lot of work. That's what we're hoping for next time, anyway.

8. Look after each other. Primarily we failed on this front by letting individuals take on major jobs with no back up. One person was responsible for all the mortgage company contact, another for all the number-crunching, another for getting all the quotes. Although we did a brilliant job of comunicating with each other, this did mean that if, for instance, the business plan person was ill, or knackered and unable to eloquently explain the finer points of day one work and it's effects on rents, we were all scuppered. Having a second person involved in each task means no one is carrying the entire weight of something. Since we're a co-operative, we're meant to be co-operating, but it's easy to forget when there's so much to be done.

9. Eat cake. Socialise with each other even when there's lots of work to do. Insert lots of innuendo into your meetings (hurrr!). Feel free to stop the entire process at any point if it's all becoming too much. Eat more cake. Look after yourselves and each other, and no matter whether you have a house or not, you will still be improving the net amount of co-operation on the planet, and that can only be a good thing.

So there we are, How To Buy a House from the beleagered mind of someone who has never bought one. This might all be tosh, but our hope when starting this blog was to provide something so that other fledgling co-ops and interested parties can see what a daft, frustrating, awesome experience being a housing co-op can be. We're taking you along for the ride, and that includes all the bits we know nothing about. Everyone has to start somewhere, after all.

If you're interested in doing similar, or are already doing it, or like the idea, or have any good cake recipes to share, then please get in touch.

Hannah

"BLEEEEUUUUUURRRRR" TO AV!

2011-05-05T09:02:00.000-07:00

AV is so sensible, even six month old babies can do it. Admittedly, the urinal booths are still a little bit high up for Finn's leetle leggies even on his second voting mission, but he still had fun and found the whole situation laughable. I.e.: Why do we even need to discuss this? The solution is clear.

When interviewed about whether or not he thought AV was a good solution, six-month-old Finn from Swansea said, "Bleeeeuuuuuuurrrrrr!" Professional translators agree that he is heartily in favour of AV.

"Although I don't think AV goes far enough, there isn't an option on the card which says, 'I'm voting no because AV isn't good enough.' Since a 'no' vote would be a field day for the Tories, I'm voting 'yes.' It is ironic that in order to avoid helping the Tories we have to vote tactically," says Hannah, Finn's mother, 29-year-old brunette from Swansea.

His uncle made this video, and you should watch it.

He also made this, which is lolarious.

House Viewing: Igor-To-Sell

2011-04-23T09:04:00.000-07:00

Another quick house viewing post, and I promise it's not an exciting one. In the period of gloom between giving up on Mould Mansion and the auction, Sven spotted Igor-To-Sell on Rightmove. It turns out Lotte had seen it before, but we'd not been keen to see it as it was over our budget and doesn't have much garden to speak of. Still, we needed cheering up and you never know what lies behind the front door of a property, so we decided to give it a look. The estate agent described the vendor as "eager to sell". This bit is important later.

Bless the man showing it to us (the eponymous Igor), he was a very good guide around the property, and to be fair, it was quite nice (in places). It's actually owned by a company of some sort, who currently let it out (and please bear in mind that it's a 6 bedroom house and one bedroom flat) to one woman, because it doesn't meet the HMO regulations. They currently use the downstairs flat to store more tea towels than I've ever seen in my life. That bit never got explained. Neither did the fact that the estate agent hadn't mentioned the attached double garage which doesn't come with the property, even though they share a flat roof.

Hmm.

Size-wise it was fine, but it had no garden and was too expensive for us. On top of that, it's not for sale.

Say what?

Yep. On the way out Igor told us that, bemusing though he found it, his mad scientist masters had put the house on the market to "test the water". They're actually in the process of getting quotes to turn it into either a HMO or self-contained flats. It was only put on the market (and at what seems to us an over-inflated price) to see if they could get silly money for it.

Eager to sell, indeed.

This seems to me to highlight, rather neatly, yet more of the foibles of property as a speculative commodity. In order to see if they could squeeze unreasonable money out of someone, on their way to squeezing a lovely rental profit out of some other people, this company has told the current tenant that they might have to leave at any time. Her housing situation is insecure in either case because some distant company, apparently against the advice of their local Igor, wants to make as much money as possible. Because of their unwillingness to spend money to upgrade the property, a 7 bedroom property in a popular (and expensive to rent in) area has been occupied by only one tenant. Something is wrong here.

I cannot wait until we have a co-op house, and can hopefully inspire there to be another housing co-op in Swansea. And another. And another, ad infinitum.

A picture says 1,000 words.

2011-04-20T12:56:00.000-07:00

Or in this case, 155,000 words.

Find more artists like Cradle Of Filth at Myspace Music

PS: The awesome lady on the left is Molly, musical genius.

Edited to add:

Auctiontimez (by Lotte)

2011-04-20T06:15:00.000-07:00

So, a couple of us are off to the house auction where Mould Mansion will probably be sold, in about half an hour. In the highly unlikely event that it doesn't sell, I will post in about 2 hours with many CAPS and excited exclamation marks, because that's the only situation in which we have a tiny chance of getting the place.

However, if I reset the blog layout to have lots of black and crows and skeletons on it, the house sold for far too much money and I'm highly depressed and listening to Cradle of Filth. My hair and fingernails are probably also black.

NB: We're all coming to terms with the fact that Mould Mansion isn't right for us, so neither of these things happen, it's because the house sold to some other bugger and I'm too lazy to whine about it on the internets.

House Viewing: Rebound House and Liberties Lodge

2011-04-18T06:22:00.000-07:00

Two quick updates about house viewings we have had in the last few days. I'm afraid there are no pictures as both houses are occupied, and although this means you often get to nose about in other people's book collections, it also means you can't take photos and post them on the tubes. Sad times.

Anyway, these were both unsuitable - on paper and in reality - but they did remind us that there are more houses in the world and that we will find one soon, honest. Rebound House (I couldn't think of a pithier name) was a reasonably bog standard Swansea terrace. Three stories high, split into 3 flats and currently a HMO, it was one of the nicer versions of rented accommodation to be seen locally. This lack of mange was reflected in the price tag, unfortunately, but had it been gorgeous we could possibly have stretched to it.

Alas, a thorough look round led us to the inevitable conclusion that it just isn't big enough for us at present, let alone having any space to expand. Biscuits of doom. The undeniably keen estate agent seemed to enjoy telling us that we could never possibly get a house to fit us in the area, and we'd have to settle for something smaller. Alas, we know this not to be the case, and I'm afraid I went home wishing that Mould Mansion could somehow be ours, yet again.

Liberties Lodge is called that because the vendor is, quite frankly, taking liberties. This was a strange house for us. Set in (what appeared to be) large grounds approximately 5 miles out of Swansea, it's an ex care home with 16 bed rooms. These are all rented out, although they share only one kitchen, but because it's out of town and only on two storeys it is exempt from HMO legislation. Nice.

Although there were a ridiculous number of rooms and a surfeit of conservatories, there was also a smell of mildew, little natural light, and the Strange Case of The Missing Garden. The vendor also owns the property next door, and her drive runs through the garden of the Lodge. She has, in her wisdom, decided to keep the driveway (not unreasonable) and all the garden on the other side of it. Essentially Liberties Lodge sits on the little island of it's own garden, marooned in a sea of someone else's. Bizarre. I hope she finds someone who's not keen on gardening to buy this place from her, but it clearly won't be us.

A couple of us are going to the auction on Wednesday to see what Mould Mansion goes for. This might be slightly torturous, but I can't resist my own morbid curiosity to see what might have been. And of course, it may not even sell. Hope springs eternal, eh?

And in the meantime, the search continues, so if anyone happens to find a 7 or 8 bedroom house down the back of the sofa, please do let us know.

Hannah

Moulder and Wiser

2011-04-15T14:19:00.000-07:00

Dear readers, I am gutted to let you know that we have had to abandon the quest for Mould Mansion.

I can't pretend this is a post I'm pleased to write, but I will be doing my best to focus on the positive. Frankly, there's nothing else for it. After the most frenetic period of activity in the year long history of Golem Housing Co-op, we had a meeting last night to formally agree that we could not realistically go to the auction for Mould Mansion. The mood was curiously upbeat, which I suspect was mostly down to the relief of finally knowing something for certain after so many weeks of uncertainty. It's just a shame that the certainty was that we are likely to remain an un-housed co-op for some time.

To re-cap, Sven spotted the magnificent mouldering edifice that is MM on Rightmove some while back. Some of us were keen, others less so. Why was the start price so low? Did we really want to deal with the vagaries of the auction process? Could we possibly ever afford such a large house? A viewing was arranged for those of us keen to have a closer look, and we duly saw that though undeniably mouldy, it was (spacially, at the very least) the perfect house for us.

Excitement set in and a second viewing was arranged. Could we, dare we go for it? More viewings and more discussion led to the unavoidable conclusion that we had to try, and so off we embarked on the incredible rigmarole that is attempting to buy a house.

And this is where the process defeated us, for at the end of the day, for all of our enthusiasm and determination, we cannot manufacture time. Quotes take time, valuations and surveys take time, finding investors takes time, and fitting all of these things into a workable business plan which gets approved by mortgage companies all takes precious time, which, in the end, we did not have. With a normal house sale there would be time to do these things consecutively, but with the auction deadline looming, we were forced to do them all at once.

Clearly, this approach did not work, but I feel proud that we tried, and amazed at how much we have learned in so short a time.

Focusing on the positive, (which I promised I would do), we all now have a clearer idea of the complexities of the house-buying process, and it's pitfalls. We have built relationships with surveyors, builders and trades people of all sorts, solicitors, guarantors and investors which will stand us in great stead when we next see a suitable property. We have all learnt that we can push ourselves to get things done to tight deadlines, have three meetings a week and not go mad (even when two golems are at work on dissertations). On a personal level, I have learnt more about damp and insulation than I, for one, ever expected to know. I can give you a rundown of energy-saving home improvements by cost and effectiveness in a way that the geek in me is unspeakably proud of.

Most importantly, we are all still friends. We still eat together. We still fill our meetings with innuendo. We still make pots of tea and hold babies for each other when needed, and we still want to continue in the unpredictably emotional process of buying a house together, which is surely the most positive thing of all.

Onwise and Upwise

To fend off dejection and ensure that our collective thoughts remained focussed on finding a house in which we all shall live, those non-dissertationing golems amongst us will be turning our energies towards one of the major stumbling blocks we face as a co-op: The Housing Act 2004. This mighty embuggerance legislates for Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs). It's meant to protect tenants from unscrupulous absentee landlords, sub-standard and dangerous living conditions, and other such perils of rented accomodation.

For this, we applaud it. But our applause ends abruptly when we consider that it also applies to housing co-ops. As a co-op you are both tenant and landlord, and as such, mightily unlikely to keep yourself in sub-standard living conditions. Not only this, but certain characters at Westminster have openly admitted that housing co-ops were never meant to be included in this law. Indeed, there was meant to be an exemption for them, but somehow it got forgotten. A minor oops in bureaucratic terms rendered many co-ops illegal overnight, and the co-op movement has been trying to get this situation rectified ever since.

Some golems have already been lending their weight to a campaign by Friendly Housing Action to get an amendment made to the Housing Act, and in the pursuit of a home to call our own, we will now be working on ways to persuade Swansea Council to clarify the situation in our local area. If you're interested in the issue and want to help out, then do get in touch.

Hannah

The Calm Before The Storm

2011-04-08T13:57:00.000-07:00

The mood here at Golem HQ has been a strange one of late. After a flurry of activity, late night meetings and intense bursts of decision making, we are left to wait for other elements of the house-buying process to slowly grind into place. Completely out of our control, we can only hope that they respect our tight timescale and get a blimmin' move on.

Ahem.

This week, amongst other things, we commissioned a survey of Mould Mansion, and are awaiting the results with baited breath.

There will undoubtedly be surprises, but rather like waiting for the MOT result on an old rust bucket of a car, it's inevitably going to be worse than imagined. You panic when the mechanic does that sharp intake of breath that only mechanics (and builders, I suspect) can do, and brace yourself for the worst. When it comes, you suddenly look at your car as though it were some death-trap on wheels which could tear itself apart from the inside at any moment, and wonder how you ever got it to the garage in one piece. How have you survived your daily travels in this perilous conveyance?

Then you take a step back, breathe deeply and realise that the car is no more dangerous than it was yesterday. The difference now is that you know that the suspension is shot, the exhaust needs welding and the head gasket is blown. You know the cause of the strange banging noise when you go around tight corners, and why you can only park on hills below a certain gradient.

None of this information makes the car more dangerous, and when you can stop panicking for long enough to appreciate it, the exhaust clears and you feel better for knowing what is wrong and how to fix it. Even if there is nothing for it but to scrap the car, the certainty can be an unfathomably welcome relief.

This rather lengthy allegory is meant to demonstrate the atmosphere here at Golem HQ when the survey is mentioned, and how I hope it will be responded to once it is received. None of us has even been involved in this process before, and I, for one, had never expected it to be so emotionally involved as it is. And as we wait for the diagnosis of Mould Mansion's health, it is hard to stop imagining what we will do if we manage to get our mitts on it. The garden is being planned, Sven and I are getting over excited about insulation and DIY solar air heating, and Lloyd is contemplating the best places for sound proofing in his bedroom/studio. Indeed, we have to keep imagining and dreaming these things, because if we do win the Mansion at the auction, we will have only 28 days until we get the keys, and that 28 days will be a period of such intensive physical and mental activity that there will be no time for dreaming.

So, with crossed fingers and crossed toes, we wait by the letterbox for the heavy tome of the survey to arrive, and until it does, I'll be planting fruit trees against the back garden wall.

Hannah

What we are up to in our personal lives. With visual aides.

2011-04-01T10:02:00.000-07:00

Like A level students dashing to complete their coursework on time we lunge madly at mortgage providers, builders, loan stock people and the like, collecting together the necessaries. And we're doing pretty well, all in all. So far we have worked meetings, mortgages and more meetings around babies, protests, goth nights, university, jobs and chronic ill health. We are officially awesome.

Here, for you dearest invisible audience, is a summary of what's going on in the intimate private lives of Camp Golem.

Lloyd - An artists impression

Lloyd is getting on with his second year like a ninja. He's recording with a lovely and exceptional artist called Molly for about a month soon, his manipulation of sonic waves for audible pleasure continues to amaze and entertain. The advantage of a co-op set up is that we all live together, an so all get to be the test audience. Here is a song that he and the Glorious and talented Molly made last time she alighted at the Golem Citadel.

Find more molly zacharias songs at Myspace Music

Joe, the second of the three wise men at University, is approaching the end of the 3rd year, meaning assignments all over the place. He was recognised for all his LGBT activist efforts with the 'Greatest Contribution to Liberation' award from his uni, and quite right too. He is currently cooking us a big ol' dinner, potato wedges and home made veggie burgers for >9000 people. Shame there are only 7 of us.

No cuts to the NHS!

Mattie's still meandering along with work and a reasonable pace whilst being the co-ops pet typist and paper chaser. Turns out she's pretty skilled at pestering mortgage companies daily. She's also pretty excited at an impending MRI scan (nothing too seroius, dear readers), as she's seen Tron and has decided that there's a link between the two.

Sven is at the cruddy end of a fair amount assignments, but on the bright side is off on a day trip to Tenby. Something to do with old houses, I'll find out when I get my postcard, no doubt. He's been doing a pretty incredible job of keeping the business plan in shape and generally enthusing about insulation whilst being a highly amusing Pa to young Finn. As you do.

Overlockers hate everyone

Hannah now owns an Overlocker sewing machine. We are all terrified of it, as it follows none of the usual rules of sewing machines and could easily break at ANY MOMENT. Oh noverlocker! Her enthusiasm has lead to me having new and most excellent pants, Finn having excellent bibs and the co-op having glazing quotes.

Lotte is still fully ensconced in facilitating a gender revolution, changing pronouns, educating the masses while knitting a very nifty sock yarn blanket. The work they are doing online and beyond is proving popular and they're getting quite a following. They're also still writing the rather awesome Poly in Pictures web comic, and a co-op cooking blog. Read them, they're part of your 5 a day.

Snazzy Aardvark

Finn is doing very well, he's learning to sit up and we suspect giggles may be just around the corner. He has also forged a deep and hopefully lifelong bond with Misc. Corduroy Aardvark. He is mostly unfazed by the co-op based mayhem, as he is too busy trying to eat juice cartons. An up-cycler already.

So there, that is what we are up to, with visual aides. Normal informative service will resume soon, but until then keep safe, be seen and have a good'un.

Mattie Rose

Anarchist task-division (by Lotte)

2011-03-18T03:31:00.000-07:00

It is ALL going on. Srsly. There are a lot of things we need to do, and we've divided the tasks up in a fabulous and apparently random way.

Back in the early days of the co-op, I was somewhat apprehensive about organising something in an anarchistic fashion. If tasks were assigned according to personal skills and enthusiasm, I thought that there'd be an unfair division of labour. Some people will be naturally more enthusiastic about helping the co-op, and some people will just sit back and let them take that work on. Perhaps some things just wouldn't get done. I thought this would annoy me, and it was one of my (few) anxieties.

However, this is so far not the case. Other people see things differently, I'm sure, but this is why I think it works so well at the moment.

Everyone in the co-op is really passionate about getting this project off the ground. Failure isn't an option! If something needs doing, someone has to do it, and so someone will volunteer. This might not always be the case, but it is now.

Also, some people in the co-op can't volunteer for much because they have a lot of work to do in their own life and/or they don't have the energy to spare. This is what I thought I'd get annoyed about, but actually, that's fine too. We all know each other well enough to know that if we can't take on much work it's because of other factors that can't be helped, and so I don't resent people who can't work. This seems to have happened without me noticing.

Even the people who don't do much still do something, and it's something essential. If it wasn't done, we'd be doomed, I tell you, dooooooooomed. Like, I'm a bit of a hermit and can't go out and about to meet people and make lots of organising phone calls, but I can learn about and understand things thoroughly and be a point of contact. So I've happily taken on the task of organising the solicitor, and if it gets more social/travelly, someone else can help me. Others are good with numbers and have attention to detail and will handle the financial aspect of things; others are good at talking and knowing who to talk to, so they're handling the people-organising. And even the people who aren't doing any of this don't worry me, as there's always plenty of varied stuff to do, and they'll find ways to help later on in the process. Even now, everyone's cooking for the co-op, and I think that helps more than we all realise.

Some people are taking on loads of stuff, because they feel able and because they're good at it; hopefully later on when we're settled in a home, be it Mould Mansion or somewhere else, they can take a well-earned break and let others keep things ticking over.

So things are a little quiet here, blogwise. But IRL, we're doing loads. We've got something co-op-related going on every day for the next three days, and that's just what we've planned so far.

It's all very exciting, and we've not even put in an offer!

Golems Are Go!

2011-03-12T00:48:00.000-08:00

After getting to grips with posting regularly on the blog, it may seem like we went quiet on you again rather suddenly. All I can say is, we've been too busy to blog, and this week has been one of the busiest in our short history for one very good reason: we've decided to make an offer on Mould Mansion.

I'm not sure we ever thought the right house would come along, but now it has, we are having to mobilise very quickly to try and make it ours. There is so much to do, and it's at times like these that I am most accutely aware of how lucky we are to have six people sharing the work. There are quotes to obtain, appointments to make, spreadsheets to tweak, and emails and phone calls flying off in all directions. Two of the six golems are in the last few months of their degrees, with dissertations to work on and coursework to hand in. Another works full-time and is fitting all the co-op work and meetings in around the job. One has uni work and has just been offered an amazing, time-consuming, career-furthering project which will run over the next few months. My days are usually spent juggling a small baby in one hand and a basket of washing in the other. The last of us needs to rest a lot, and has to manage their time very carefully. But thankfully we can distribute the things that need to be done between us, depending on what people find the easiest to manage along with their other commitments. This is one of the many reasons that co-ops are awesome.

As part of this epic activity, we need to make sure we have the finance in place to buy the house and to make it the lovely (for which read: habitable) home we all envisage. That means knowing that if our offer is accepted we know what we need to do to fix it up, how much it will cost, and how we are going to pay for it.

And this, dear reader, is where you can get involved with this brilliant adventure.

We are looking for further loanstock, and for guarantors willing to provide a guarantee for sections of the loan we will be applying for from Radical Routes. For loanstock, you can loan anything from £500 up, and choose your own investment period (3 years plus) and interest rate (up to 4%). Further details can be found on our loanstock page. Loanstock is unsecured, but co-ops are typically a very safe investment, and by investing in a co-op you will be helping to provide long-term affordable housing which no individuals can personally profit from. Ethical or what?

For guarantors, we would only need you to put your name to £1000 of our loan, and you would only be actually required to provide the money if the housing co-op failed, the house was sold and it's sale price did not cover our outstanding debts (thankfully a rare occurrence, and an even rarer one for co-ops which are part of Radical Routes). You can offer to guarantee more than this if you wish, though to guarantee over £1,000 you will need to provide proof of savings. As soon as is possible we are planning to have the house revalued so that the guarantees are no longer needed, so this is more of a temporary back up so that we can get started than something we imagine being called upon. When we have raised the value of the house, your guarantee has supported us without you having to pay a penny, sothis is a fantastic way for anyone who would love to help us out but has no money to buy loanstock with to get involved. Happy times.

If you're interested in helping us out with either loanstock or a guarantee, then please contact us. We're happy to talk about it and answer your questions, and if you decide it's not for you, that's no problem at all. These are very exciting times, and if we can make an offer that is accepted by the vendor, things are only going to get more exciting. Sharing these developments on the blog is hopefully something that might get some of you more interested in co-ops, and if even one of you chooses to get more involved with the co-operative movement in whatever way, then all of our rambling has been well worth it.

That's it. Ramble over. I'm off to read more about different types of insulation, just in case;-)

Hannah

House Viewings: Hippy Haven/Mould Mansion Revisited

2011-03-04T14:24:00.000-08:00

We had two house viewings today, topping off a busy week of co-op activity. What with three house viewings, a meeting, our usual co-op meals, a referendum and Bi-Fest Wales tomorrow, it's a wonder we've managed to keep so on top of the blog. Go us.

So, first up was Hippy Haven, a new house to us, and one which we already had a good idea wasn't suitable from dissecting the particulars. It was, however, considerably under our budget, and so we went to see it with a view to assessing the potential for extension.

This house is vendor-occupied, so I didn't take pictures, but we did get to meet the fabulous lady who lives there currently. Essentially she's Mattie in 35 years time, which means she's awesome:-D The occupant prior to her was an Italian called Monty, who sounds like a future version of Sven, having planted in the garden, amongst other things, some grapevines, a brick pizza oven and a still.

You can tell the vendor was amazing because we know all this.

Anyway, the long, short and medium-length of it is, the house is too small for us and an extension would be possible but logistically a nightmare. I was sad that we couldn't offer to love this house, if only because the owner is so sweet and so enthusiastic about co-ops. It will be a fantastic home for someone's family, but sadly not mine.

Somewhat later in the day a small party of us revisited Mould Mansion. Sven and Lloyd had not been able to attend the first time, but the enthusiasm shown by the rest of us made a return visit inescapable. Me and Finn went along for the walk, and to have a proper nosey in the garden, and because, essentially, I couldn't resist.

Can you tell I like it?

The strange thing is that the mould downstairs was not as bad as I remembered, though I stand by my replaster-the-whole-kitchen-or-I'll-never-eat-a-thing-cooked-in-it stance. Lloyd made it clear that he approved, in his quiet way. Sven took lots of notes, in his building geeky way, and pronounced it to be not as bad as I'd made out. Some blocked gutters may be causing some of the problems, and a lot of things that need to be done could feasibly be done by us, apparently. To get a second opinion on this, we have a third visit booked on monday and are taking a builder friend along.

Can you tell we like it?

We fit into this house, and it feels like this house fits us, and we are fit to make it fit for us (!). All of which wordplay leads us to believe that we might be drumming up loanstock pledges again some time soon. Watch this space!

Hannah

Fun voting times (by Lotte)

2011-03-03T05:23:00.000-08:00

Today I did some social change by posting a random-act-of-kindness to a woman who runs a kids' knitting group, which was satisfying. I also VOTED. And if you're in Wales, you should too. Polls close at 10pm, and even if you don't have your polling card your name will still be on the list.

Here's my satisfyingly gloominous and gothic polling station entrance for your perusal.

The haps are, and I thieve shamelessly from the BBC:

At present the assembly can pass legislation in 20 devolved policy areas, including health and education.
A Yes vote would mean it no longer needs to apply to parliament for law-making powers on a case-by-case basis.
Voting is until 2200 GMT. The count starts on Friday morning, with a final result likely in the afternoon.
A No vote would keep the existing system, while a Yes would mean the assembly can pass laws without first seeking consent in Westminster.
However, if there was a Yes the assembly would not gain powers over new areas.

House Viewing: Mould Mansion

2011-03-01T10:27:00.000-08:00

As promised, here is a post house-viewing post. I thought I'd start putting pictures into posts, so you get a glimpse into the diversity of properties we're looking at, and also to break up my long-winded rambling and many-comma'd sentences:-) All photos are courtesy of Lotte on this occasion..

And so, I shall call this property Mould Mansion, for the straightforward reason that I have never seen such levels of mould and damp in my life. It was extraordinary! The interesting thing was that this property - a three floor Victorian terrace split into 3 flats - was really a trip through the extremes of the property market. The top floor flat was really rather well-appointed, with nice floors/wallpaper/giant picture frames with armchairs in (ok, that last bit was unusual). You'd never know what lay below. There are 4 rentable private spaces up there, a bathroom and a door to the fire escape/garden. Lovely sea views too. One of the rentable spaces is 2 ajoining rooms, which could well come in handy for some of us.

The next floor down is about the same standard as a lot of rented accomodation round here. A bit mouldy, in need of decoration, with some strange choices of carpet - all par for the course, really. This floor has a bathroom and 3 rentable spaces. Again, 2 of them are ajoining spaces, which means the space sizes end up being pretty ok all round. The joyous thing about this house is that we fit, which makes us very, very excited.

Excited... but daunted. Because on the ground floor is the most fascinating mould-based civilisation, spanning the kitchen, bathroom and part of the dining room. Oh my word, it is immense. Truly, fascinatingly immense. I shan't show you photos, you'd re-visit your dinner.On the plus side there are some great-sized communal rooms, and everywhere you look you can see the potential for this to be a fantastic home.

Much to my delight there are decent gardens to the front and back. Mattie is rather beautifully modelling the back garden in the photo to the left:-)

Even more pleasingly, we'd be making sure this rather posh, yet neglected, house would be available at affordable rent for years to come. To further highlight the wondrousness of this possibility, another woman was viewing the house at the same time as us. Mattie and I asked her what she was looking for, and she said "A bargain that I can make some money on". I felt a sneaky sense of pride that we would be creating a longer lasting, and more community-minded, legacy if we were the ones to buy the house.

We've a meeting tonight where I suspect we'll decide to do a second viewing, hopefully with a builder friend in tow. The house is up for auction (a whole other level of complexity when applied to co-op finances) so there's no knowing the price, but I think we will be following this one very closely whatever we decide to do as a group. I just hope that whoever buys it gives it the TLC that it deserves.

Hannah

'Ouses, 'Ouses, 'Ouses*

2011-02-26T03:24:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd write a post about house viewings, since that's a huge part of what we're doing right now. Finding houses that fit our criteria exactly (or even closely) is pretty tricky. This isn't because we're hideously demanding and want a hot tub in every house (although there was one in the last one!), but because there are a lot of us and we can't afford very much. Necessity being the mother of invention, this means we are usually looking at houses that would need a lot of jiggling and poking to fit the bill.

The last house we looked at (mentioned in my last blog post) was one of a pair of 1930's semis just round the corner from where most of the golems live now. Unfortunately one of them had sold the night before we were meant to go and look, but we carried on with the other viewing so we could establish whether two neighbouring houses might fit the communal bill. In truth, I wasn't expecting it to be suitable, but was presently surprised to see that we could probably, maybe, make it work. One delightful thing that became clear from looking at the two house scenario was that some of us felt that even being neighbours wouldn't be close enough, and that without bashing holes in the wall to connect the two houses we would feel split in twain. How twee are we? Very, is the answer - but then I suppose we wouldn't be buying a house together if we didn't want the chance to see each other on the way to the bathroom in the morning.

Anyway, we had a ~~meeting~~ informal-chat-over-dinner this week to re-establish what we wanted from our future housing, what had changed after lots of house viewings, and how we felt about the process. Sadly Mattie couldn't make it as she was at work, but the general consensus between the other 5 of us was that things were going well and that we are prepared to be patient waiting for the right house to come along. Phew! Room size is still an important issue for most of us, and I think will be the thing that settles us on one house over another when it comes down to it, but there was agreement that we were all prepared to view houses and assess each one individually rather than writing them off because the particulars don't sound promising.

With this reassurance reagrding our aims, there will hopefully be a slew of house viewings. We have one on monday (subject to a minimum of 3 golems being able to attend, as per our consensus agreement on the matter) for a large house, currently split into 3 flats. We like properties like this, as they have extraneous kitchens and bathrooms which can be brought back into use as bedroom spaces for individual people, rather neatly pointing out why it's more energy/resource/space efficient to live in larger groups than smaller ones. Huzzah!

This particular house is up for auction with a ridiculously low start price, so there's no knowing whether it's in budget or not, but with the very friendly auction lady to lend us a hand, we feel confident enough to go and have a look.

Intriguingly she also informed us that the house that we nearly went for never did sell as the vendor wasn't happy with the price he got at auction. This made me think more about the whole house-as-asset thing, and how glad I am that we will be removing a house from the market. If it is ever sold then at least the profits (if there are any) will be retained within the co-op movement, so there's less incentive for us to waste a lot of people's time and energy selling a house and then changing our minds because it doesn't personally make us enough cash.

Lotte and I have been plotting what sort of things should go on the blog, and we're hoping that every time we have a viewing we'll put up a little post or a huge one, like this) about how it went and what we got from it. I'm hoping that some of the people reading this blog are thinking about setting up co-ops and want to know what's involved, and that we can provide a little window into how a group of individuals with very little prior knowledge find a way to sustainably house themselves.If you are thinking about it, please get in touch with us for a natter. It's n secret that I dream of running little workshops in the living room of our house, sharing our experiences and inspiring others to do the same, so that there can be lots of pockets of people living in tenant-owned housing in our local area. Happy times:-)

Hannah

* This is a reference to a rather brilliant song on the first album by The Imagined Village, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone.

Rarrrrr!

2011-02-18T03:12:00.000-08:00

Or rather: RR! We are now proper members of Radical Routes!

Things may have been seeming quiet here at Golem HQ, but we've actually been busy, and not just with pulling faces at the baby to make him smile (although that is currently at the top of the daily agenda for most of us). Work has been ongoing with making us more Official (with a capital O), and we now have shares in the co-op, and will soon have share certificates, or Cher certificates, if Mattie has her way. (I must say, I like the idea of the latter - although "Do you believe in life after landlord-owned rented accomodation?" is a less catchy lyric by anyone's standards).

Some of us also attended the Spring Radical Routes gathering in Brighton. The 'some' in question comprised Lotte, Mattie, Sven, Finn and me, all squeezed into a small hire car for the journey, and then all kindly housed at Out Of Town housing co-op for the weekend. This was my first gathering and I really enjoyed it, but it did bring home to me how tricky things like long meetings are with a very small person to look after. I only managed one workshop attendance, and that was down to the fabulous baby-wrangling skills of Lotte and Finn having a fortuitous nap. The rest of the weekend involved me and Lotte eating cake in great proportions thanks to the Cowley Club, and squeezing in fabulous conversations with fabulous people. Oh, and pulling faces at the baby, of course:-) Mattie and Sven volunteered for everything ever, and Lotte and I wrangled our way into the Children's Working Group. Yay!

In other news, we've had a few house viewings. Well, one recently and one today. The recent one was a fabulous wreck, complete with tonnes of ridiculously lovely original features and fascinatingly studwall-divided rooms (including one which had been divided diagonally), but it was over our budget and quite, quite delapidated. The house we're viewing today is one of a pair we were hoping to look at, but sadly one has sold. Sad times. We're still looking at t'other one though, so if similar houses come up we will know whether they could be the right place for us.

So, apologies for the rambling post, probably full of typos as I'm breastfeeding at the same time, but I thought you'd appreciate a hello:-)

Hannah

Our agendar, let me show you it.

2011-02-03T09:55:00.000-08:00

Hello!

Since we're having a meeting tonight, I thought I'd keep it fresh in my mind by telling you about how we structure our meetings. We find it really helpful to keep us all on the same page, and to make sure we regularly talk about the things that need talking about.

We can keep it pretty simple because our co-op doesn't have a house yet. Once we've bought somewhere and moved in, we'll probably need to have sections for maintenance, accounts and loanstock, bills, all that jazz. But for now, here's how it goes for a simple start-up co-op.

Treasurer's report. Every month we all put a bit of money into the pot to cover expenses, such as stationary, travel costs and (hopefully) future Radical Routes payments. In this bit, the treasurer just squares the accounts book and tells us how the finances are looking. The exact figure goes into the minutes.
Social change. Even though we're not in Radical Routes, we like the social change dedication aspect so we've adopted it already. We're all trying to get in our 16 hours a week, and here we share what we've been up to and any ideas or events that others might like to participate in. It's in the form of a go-around, to give everyone a chance to say everything they want to say.
ALL THE STUFF. Things from the last meeting that we planned to come back to, and things that occurred to us in between times that we told the secretary about with enough time for them to add it to the agenda. This might include potential houses to view together, travel plans for Radical Routes National Gatherings, bank account stuff, loanstock information or anything else that needs bringing up.
Any Other Business. The words of dread. Stuff that randomly occurred to us during the meeting, or just before. Fortunately, these often tend to fly by, as they're simple things mostly.
Homework overview. Some of us will have volunteered to complete tasks for the co-op before the next meeting; this is just to make sure that everyone's clear on who's doing what.
The next meeting. Choosing the chair and the date/time. If we don't arrange it now, we'll keep faffing and putting it off. When we're all sat around a table together, that's the best time to find out when everyone's free.
Queue for bathroom, followed by cups of tea.

Our Spring Radical Rumours Article

2011-01-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

For those of you who may not get to read Radical Routes' rather excellent Radical Rumours newsletter, here's the entry we've sent in for the Spring edition, written by Sven and Mattie.

___________________________________________

This is a bit of a sneaky entry as as of yet we aren’t Radical Routes members. Maybe if we’re really stealthy, you won’t notice...

This past year has been a pretty busy for us out West. It’s a year this January that the Golem Housing co-op grew from an idea into a group of people, and then into an FSA registered entity. So far we have held regular meetings, sometimes very long, but mostly productive. We still look forwards to them, which can only be positive. The food co-op between members is still running, where each member cooks for the group once a week and is fed for the rest of the week. Communal eating has become an important part of how we work as a group. Our first co-op Christmas was wonderful, especially for those of us who were experiencing our first away from home. Plenty of handmade gifts, a festive Aloe Vera decorated by Mattie at some ungodly hour, and a group showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show were some of the experiences that marked a good season well spent. Last October we came within a gnats crochet of buying a house, only to be thwarted at the last minute by the owner filling it with sitting tenants. While disappointing at the time this has come to be viewed as a minor setback, and an education. A fair chunk of the secondary rules have been written (although we learned the hard way that rules involving money are not, in fact, easy to write.) Our new co-op’s visit was brilliant, and re enforced our collective belief that Radical Routes is what we want to be involved in as an organisation and as individuals. We have had guests from around the Radical Routes network, and in turn some of us have been guests ourselves. The feeling of community that we have encountered has been incredible.

Individually plenty has been going on in camp Golem. Hannah has been expanding her already prolific creation skills, including dying her own wool with a microwave and food colouring, recording with Lloyd (more on that later) and making the mini Golem Finn appear last November. Her knowledge of environmentally responsible baby wrangling is ever expanding, and so far both mother and baby are doing very well. He is very cute, but then we would say that.

Finn has been tirelessly taking part in pro-breast feeding direct action since November.

Joe, our Treasurer, is still Chairman of Bi Swansea. He’s currently helping to organise Bi Fest Wales in Cardiff this March, an event offering networking opportunities and workshops on Bisexual issues for people across Wales and the rest of the UK. He has taken training in LGBT activism in the past year, and has been knee deep in a dissertation on mental health within the LGBT community. As the most central owner of a table in the co-op he has also spent the past year graciously hosting many a lengthy co-op meeting. Thanks Joe.

Lloyd is often ensconced in recording. Left to Bees, the band that consists of Lloyd, Hannah and a plethora of instruments, brought out a home made E.P last year called Bones. He has also been pursuing his own projects under the name Vesperite. One of the more recent creations was a version of White Rabbit as Lotte’s Christmas present. Ingenious use of violins abound.

Lotte was the main thrust behind the Swansea UKUncut protest this December, which was held outside our local Vodafone store. Information was dispersed to busy Swansea shoppers, chants were chanted. The store closed within minutes, and remained closed until we left a good while later. Lotte also started a polyamory based web comic called Poly in Pictures late last year which has gained itself a tidy following.

Sven is in his last year of a building conservation degree, and therefore a dissertation looms. This has lead to him expanding his understanding of post oil economies and the imminent threat of peak oil. As a result, the rest of the co-op (and indeed our social circle) has had their understanding on the subject expanded. Plans for a potential workers’ co-operative are forming, perhaps there will be more news by the next Rumours. He has also been putting some hours into helping FHA with their HMO legislation work. His main activity of late, however, has been fatherhood, and quite right too.

Mattie has moved house 3 times in the past year, and this has reinforced her belief in co-operatives as the most practical way of living, ideology aside. She is slowly but surely educating herself in the way the world around her works, and isn’t best pleased. Perhaps an activist will be made of her yet. For now secretarial work for the co-op, cooking for the food co-op and general information gathering, combined with working in a bookshop take up her time nicely.

A happy Rumours to you all, and we look forwards to seeing you all at Gatherings to come.

Golem Housing Co-op

Post National Gathering (by Lottie)

2010-11-24T17:20:00.000-08:00

In the end I didn't acquire talent, because I couldn't go to Manchester. But what I hear from Sven, who did go, is this.

It was our third National Gathering; six weeks ago we applied for membership. Our application didn't make it into the agenda, so we couldn't be reviewed by the other co-ops beforehand, and so we're not members of Radical Routes. But we're going to reapply, and lots of us are enthusiastic about getting to the next meeting.

I also hear that the food was amazing! I wish I could have gone. Maybe I can convince Sven to blog about the gathering!

The National Gathering (by Lottie)

2010-11-12T16:39:00.000-08:00

Ohai,

I'm scared. The National Gathering in Manchester is just a week away, and I hear there will be a talent show. My two talents that I can think of are knitting and owning a cat who likes to climb in the fridge and/or eat vegetarian bacon. MUST. ACQUIRE. TALENT.

The Littlest Golem

2010-11-10T03:05:00.000-08:00

Hello again -

We've been a bit quiet for a few weeks, but with very good reason. Our seventh Golem has finally arrived in the world, and we're all just a little bit excited - and thus distracted from even co-op-y goodness- about it.

So, in the way that birth announcements are usually phrased, I shall give you the details. Finn Frederick Andrew Buddle-Kay was born on November 4th 2010 at 3:56pm, weighing 7lb 9oz.

He's very hairy, and not just on his head. He has a very sweet dimple in his chin, and it's hilarious when he hiccups. He only likes sleeping in his rainbow blanket, kindly knitted by Joe. Sometimes he does jazz hands in his sleep. These are the tiny things we have been enjoying in the 6 days since he was born, and that's why you haven't had any blog posts;-)

I'm not sure how anyone gets through the first days with a newborn (especially post c-section) without a herd of golems to help out. I've been fed and had things carried about for me, and Finn has been the receptor of an almost non-stop stream of cuddles since he got home on Saturday. There is seldom not someone else about to help by holding him, which makes an enormous difference. He's had a few outings in his sling, which have been very successful, but it's marvelous knowing there are so many adults around who care about him so much. It feels like he's truly a co-op baby:-)

Today we had a visitor from Random Camel, the lovely Gemma. She had a few hours in Swansea between a ferry and a train, and called in to Golem HQ for breakfast. Lloyd and Joe had to rush off for lectures, but it was lovely to be visited by someone and to start feeling like more of a proper co-op.

There was some baby snuggling, and some exciting co-op talk, and I think it brought it back to us that there are other things to do in life than stare at newborns - although that's important too. Hopefully we will soon be back in the swing of meetings and looking for houses, only this time it'll be knowing who the 7th golem is :-D

I'm off to give the wee one some grub, and hopefully to have a nap, and to generally revel in his newness.

Social change this week (by Lottie)

2010-10-27T08:43:00.000-07:00

I've been working on this new webcomic, which is a bit polyamorous and genderly interesting. I'll share a link when I've got a few more comics up; I hope to do another today. I also went to a great skill-sharing, crafty get-together with some of the Transition Crafts people, and I went to a Bi Swansea meeting, and a Golem meeting. Then there was shopping, cooking and cleaning up for the co-op. So not as much as usual, but more out-and-about things.

This week I am ill with this evil cold that's floating about, and I'm also going to Paris, so goodness knows how I'll make my 16 hours...!

The Joy of Meetings (by Hannah)

2010-10-17T15:37:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many hours I've done this week which could count towards my social change quota, but I do know that they have virtually all been in meetings.

Meetings are the means by which things get done in almost any organisation or movement, and they are also the bugbear of almost everyone involved. Their reputation for being long, torturous, contentious, stressful or just plain boring precedes them by a mile, and puts a lot of people off the thought of getting involved in a project in the first place, however marvelous they might think that it could be. Very few people enjoy the prospect of a good juicy meeting, and even fewer the reality.

Fortunately, I am one.

I don't know when I first started to love meetings, but I do know that I first started to go to them regularly when I was living at a housing co-op in mid-Wales. When we got ourselves together to have a meeting, it would sometimes be wonderful and sometimes be dire. Since you never knew which way it would go, it was hard to look forward to them, and although a lot of productive things got done one way or another, a lot of time was spent feeling frustrated that your point was just not going to be listened to. I still loved them though, because when they did go well, we all felt good about ourselves, and our community.

Meetings can bring joy.

The next meetings I routinely encountered were for a community woodland project near to the housing co-op. A few of us from the co-op went along from the very start, excited that plans were being made to increase the usage of the beautiful woodland at the end of our track. Over time it became clear that these meetings were hierarchical in the extreme, with secret financial elements which were held before the time given for the start of the meeting, so that finances were disclosed, discussed and decided upon by a select few before the main proceedings started. It was deemed by these few that it was irrelevant for us to know what was going on as we wouldn't find it interesting, and thus we immediately felt disempowered and cut off from understanding the full nature of what we were involved with. After attempts to change this unusually secretive method of decision making, we simply didn't feel able to continue involvement in the project.

Meetings can bring doom.

And so to the two radically different types of meeting I have been involved with this week. The rush of excitement brought by discovering that a house that we very-much-liked-but-couldn't-afford-previously was up for auction meant that the Golems had two meetings this week. Since our first encounters with Radical Routes we have been trying to incorporate as many aspects of consensus decision making into our meetings as possible. At first we giggled at the hand signals; now we have invented two of our own and often slip into using them outside of meetings if it will improve the flow of conversation. We're a funny bunch, I know.

Because of the urgency around the auction date, there was a lot of Very Serious Stuff to be discussed at our meetings. Emotions ran high. Opinions were asserted, confronted, and shaped before our very eyes. Conflicts arose, were debated, and were dealt with, and at no point in all of this did we raise our voices. The tools of consensus decision making meant everyone was heard, and every issue addressed, without the need to talk over each other to get a word in. With someone to 'hold' the meeting, to ensure that no one was left frustrated or shouted down, we not only got things done, but all left the room as friends. We're not at all perfect, and the whole thing took hours, and to be fair, by the end of it we were all knackered, but we still wanted to live together, and that's the important thing.

Learning that we can disagree, sometimes vehemently, but get through it, and still be able to live, work and socialise together, is one of the most incredible exercises in building trust which I have ever been a part of. As a tool for building community, bringing a sense of achievement, and dealing with all the nitty-gritty that any ambitious project entails, meetings can be second to none.

Meetings can bring people together.

Which brings me to the meeting I attended today. I shan't give many details, except to note my sadness that it gave me the opposite of the wonderful feel-good vibe that meetings have been imbuing me with of late. The organisation it was for has a history of long and difficult meetings, but I go because I love the end result, the people involved, and the ethos of the project enormously. I stick with it because those things are important, and meetings have to happen for it all to come about. Sometimes I even enjoy them.

Today was particularly difficult, and as yet none of us know what the repurcussions will be. Wires were crossed, and some of those involved felt that their only choice was to leave. I dearly wished that as a group we were able to hold the space better, to perhaps use hand signals or an equivalent, to speak using non-violent communication, and to give everyone the space they needed to express their opinion freely without everything becoming impossibly tense. Maybe in the future this will become possible, and we do have a consensus training weekend planned in the new year, but in the meantime there is a lot of repair work and conciliation that needs to take place, diverting precious energy from the main business of the group.

The gist of all this navel-gazing, such as it is, is to allow you to contemplate the meetings that take place in your own lives. For most people, and particularly those of us who try to be, in some small way, the change that we wish to see in the world, meetings are inevitable. Whether attended through choice, through gritted teeth, or because we must, the way they are held - and the way we hold ourselves within them - is something that we can make choices about.

Meetings can be empowering, they can be productive, and above all they can be joyful. For this to happen we need to accept that they are a skill to be worked at, and not a test to be endured. We need to come to them with open hearts, yes, but we also need to engage our heads and make the conscious decision to give them our best, and most patient, selves.

In summary; meetings are the solution, and not the problem.

I have rambled too long, but I shall leave you with a positive wish:

May your meetings be wonderful spaces for discussion and debate, may the work of your meeting be done to the satisfaction of all involved, and above all, may your meetings be joyful.

- Hannah

Social change again (by Lottie)

2010-10-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

Helloo, :)

This week for social change I've done 17 of my 16 hours thusly:

The last of the tiny hats, various co-op meetings, leaflets and publicity for loanstock, going to view a house, and shopping and cleaning up and cooking for the co-op. I've also been ensconced in co-ordinating the co-op for a Suma bulk order thingy, which is going quite well.

Hurrah! Not very radical, but a bit radical.

Learning from experience (by Lottie)

2010-10-15T04:36:00.000-07:00

Today we went to have a look around the property we love so much, and because the academic year has started the rooms were full of students. We could only look around two of the eight bedrooms, and the students have signed contracts to stay in the property until June 2011. Not ideal, as tenants must be members of the co-op, so we couldn't let them stay there and pay us rent until June either.

So what we've learned is, before we view a house, to ask the estate agent to confirm with the vendor that the house is empty or can be empty right away. Twice now we've arrived at a house to have a look around, only to be told by the estate agent that the house is occupied!

We're not ruling it out right away, but it certainly looks like we won't be moving house any time soon.

Golems - or "So why are you called the Golem Housing Co-op anyway?"

2010-10-14T09:23:00.000-07:00

Well its a bit of a long story.

We're forming a co-operative because we don't like the idea of a house being an asset. We don't care about how much the thing is worth in 10 years time - we just want somewhere to live. We'd be pretty committed to this idea regardless, but the current state of the housing market in the UK seems to be emphasising our point. House prices are too high. The reasons they are too high are numerous - we're a densely populated island, we have strict planning laws and a shortage of land. But the big one driving all of this is speculation. If a house is seen as an asset then its value as a useful item is irrelevant to how much it costs. People will keep on paying ridiculous prices for houses so long as they think that in the future somebody will pay even more. Though fortunately this may be finally changing.

So as well all of the other benefits of setting up a co-op, one really good ancillary effect is taking a house out of this crazy speculative market. This house will never need to be bought or sold again. It can go on being a housing co-op until its no longer a house. Plus, once the mortgage is paid off, the money made from rent can be used to buy more houses, to transform them from assets to homes. We like to think of it as a socially conscious, very slow revolution.

Now I'm going to take a bit of time out from talking politics, to tell you about Terry Pratchett. Terry Pratchett writes about the discworld, a semi-comic fantasy world where all the mythical creatures you can think of are real, and are looking for jobs. The golems of discworld however, are property. As virtually indestructable beings made of clay, from ancient times, their ownership has been passed on for far longer than anyone can remember. The golems for the most part seem to accept their lot in life, existing primarily to work. Then one day a man buys a golem, and gives that golem his own receipt.

After some initial ill-thought out destruction vested upon his former owner's business premises, the now free golem seeks employment. Seeing as he is a large clay statue, he has no need of his wages, and so saves them until he has raised enough to buy another golem, and another. Soon there are dozens of free golems, all working not for their own benefit, but to extend the freedom of their race. A truly socially conscious revolution. If they are property, what stops them from buying themselves out of the market?

Well, if it works for golems, why not for houses?

Leaflet: We has it. (by Lottie)

2010-10-13T15:11:00.000-07:00

Ohai,

So today me and Sven wrote up a leaflet telling people about loanstock, why we want it and how much it helps us. Here it is on Google Docs ; though the format is a bit different, it gets the message across quite well. If you feel inspired to print it off and give it to friends who might be interested, please go ahead! ;) We've put posters and leaflets in our Environment Centre and the Dylan Thomas Centre.

We also checked out the Nationwide Building Society account for organisations, and it was pretty limited. Our search for environmentally-minded, co-op savvy solicitors hasn't advanced far yet. As Hannah mentioned, we'll surely have more news for you after our next meeting!

Lottie

Busy Bees (by Hannah)

2010-10-13T07:48:00.000-07:00

Everything's gone into overdrive here, since we discovered that a house that we liked but could previously not afford is now going at auction. Last night our planned Secondary Rules workshop (click here for an insight into the idea of Secondary Rules) was usurped by a four hour planning meeting, in which I learnt more about the process of buying a house than I ever expected to know. Impressively, I found the whole thing fascinating, especially once we'd written a timeline and thuswise made sense of it all. There is so much for us all to learn.

The process may be complex, but the beauty of working as a co-op is that people can take on roles most suited to themselves, and there is always extra support available for tricky jobs. Sven had two volunteers to help with creating the loanstock flyer, and though Lloyd was happy to work on the provisional business plan by himself, there are two volunteers to help him if he feels that he needs it. Me and Lloyd's mission today was to research potential bank accounts with the Co-operative Bank. Sven and Lottie were dispatched to Nationwide, as some co-op members bank with them and we wanted to ensure we had several options. I haven't heard the Nationwide feedback yet, but I was pleased to discover that the Co-op Bank has a special bank account for co-ops. This is perhaps unsurprising, as they are a co-op themselves, but they will not give mortgages to housing co-ops, so before we went along I wasn't 100% convinced they'd be able to help us. We'll be deciding which to go for at a future meeting.

We all came away from the meeting with jobs to do, and I'm sure there will be more progress and exciting news before the week is out :-)

House. House house house.

2010-10-11T04:24:00.000-07:00

Just a little update to let you, dear followers, know that we have found a prospective house. Number 1 Oaklands Terrace is our new belle, and a beauty she is at that. At £165,000 she is not a cheap date, and we will have to make the money appear pretty fast as she will be going to auction on the 17th of November. But there is a viable chance that we will be able to do this. Which is pretty exciting.

If only enthusiasm were currency...

On that note, if any of you dear readers would like to add to our loanstock then please have a peek at the 'Loanstock' section (which I am currently building) to see how and why.

Keep safe, have fun.

Mattie Rose

Social Change this week (by Lottie)

2010-10-11T04:04:00.000-07:00

I probably won't blog every week, but anyway. I've been keeping track of my social change stuff, and it's quite weighted in the tiny hat direction. Voila:

18 tiny hats: 14 hours.
Housing co-op meeting: 1 hour.
Shopping, cooking and cleaning up from cooking co-op: 3 hours.
A random act of kindness online: 30 mins.

Total: 18.5 hours.

Soon the tiny hat challenge will be over, so I'll be forced to find other activities! Probably a good thing...

The Cost of Cooking (by Lottie)

2010-10-07T12:19:00.000-07:00

For me, the cooking co-op is a really life-changing system. Energy-wise, I have CFS, so walking around the corner a few days a week for a good home-cooked meal is a huge difference from shopping, preparing, cooking, eating and clearing up after a meal. Not to mention there's less risk of the burns, cuts and other general hazards of food preparation that are a daily occurrence for someone whose brain and body don't work as well as they should!

But if it weren't for that, I would still be very enthusiastic about the cooking co-op, and I'll tell you for why. I am constantly broke, and the cooking co-op saves me bucketloads of pennies.

Cooking a meal for myself, something simple and sensible like rice with stir-fried vegetables, costs me about 15-20p in electricity, according to my smartmeter that I got free from British Gas. Cooking for five people costs me about 20-35p for the same meal. Supposing the cooking co-op happens on all five possible days of the week, that means I save that solo-cooking amount on four of the days, in exchange for the five-people-cooking amount on one of the days. This leaves two days of ordinary solo-cookery. Ie:

Monday: Co-op cooks for me, £0.
Tuesday: Co-op cooks for me, £0.
Wednesday: Co-op cooks for me, £0.
Thursday: Co-op cooks for me, £0.
Friday: I cook for the co-op, £0.35
Saturday: Solo cookery, £0.20
Sunday: Solo cookery, £0.20

So in one week, instead of paying [Solo cookery x 7 =] £1.40, I actually pay the above-calculated amount of £0.75, and I save just under half. That's a saving of £2.82 per month, or £33.80 per year. How awesome is that? (It doesn't sound like much, but every penny helps me. 50% of my electricity goes on my fridge and I don't really use it.) And that's just electricity; it's a lot more when you factor in that buying in bulk is cheaper, and when you're cooking for more people there's less food wasted, and less packaging...

I'm not going to calculate the carbon produced, 'cos I think that is a fudging stupid system. That is a long story, but this amusing video goes a little way towards explaining why.

In summary: Start a cooking co-op.

General Social Change Stuff (by Lottie)

2010-10-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

Ohai,

I've been pondering social change, lately. For your co-op to be a member of Radical Routes, each member needs to do 16 hours per week of work towards social change. We're not members yet, though we hope to be soon. So I'm trying to get myself motivated to get the hours done. I've got a piece of paper attached to my kitchen door, where I'll keep a log of how many hours I'm doing and how they're being spent. Generally speaking, here's some of the stuff I do already; it's not very energetic or radical, but I'm working on it. I'm going to blog here about anything really interesting I find, in case you're looking for inspiration.

I do some gardening. I grow a few of my own veggies in my 12 x 14 foot raised-bed-like area. Here's some Flickr photos of how it looks when it's tidy and productive! I compost most of my food waste, and a lot of my non-food waste too.
I knit a tiny hat every day for Innocent Drinks; for every hat on a smoothie that's sold, 35p goes to the awesome charity Age UK. I blog about it; the deadline approacheth, and I am way behind.
I take part in the co-op cooking rota. Every week we all cook once for everyone. At the moment, I am really enjoying learning to cook new dishes. I plan to do a blog post working out how much money this saves.
I do lots of little things; I use and talk about my Mooncup, I turn down plastic bags all the time, I recycle everything I can, I make things from other things so I don't have to pay for them, if I have good stuff I don't want I leave it on the side of the road for someone else, I buy only second hand clothes, and when I can I go to various community events.

I have this illness that means I can't get out and do things as much as I'd like, but when I have the energy I take part in protests and rallies for radical change. I like excuses to go to London on the train!

In the near future, I plan to take part in more community events as energy allows, especially sexuality and skillsharing gubbins. I'm very open to craft-related social change ideas and ideas for direct action, so bung your thoughts in the comments if you feel like it.

Thanks for visiting our blog!

Welcome To Our Blog (by Hannah)

2010-10-05T15:59:00.000-07:00

Hi there -

We've been talking about setting up a website for some time, and it's been decided that, for now, this is the most straight forward way to do it - so here we are!

The Golem Housing Co-operative is a small, fledgling co-op based in Swansea. At the moment there are 6 adults, and we have a new member on the way in November as I am currently 34 weeks pregnant. We're hoping to be able to buy a house for us all to live in, so that we can provide ourselves with affordable housing. We're also all fans of co-operative living, and have been learning about things such as consensus decision making to help with this.

Currently four of us live together, one lives in the next street and one lives about a 20 minute walk away, but we are doing all that we can to build the sense of community between us until we all live together by doing things like having a cooking rota so that we can eat together most nights, buying food together through a Suma order, and having lots of lovely meetings. :-)

Living in shared housing is often seen as something that people do when they're young, and it's usually presumed to be a stepping stone on the way to renting our own place and eventually buying our own house. This is generally seen as the cultural ideal, but does it always make sense? As a group we enjoy lots of aspects of communal living. We can share costs for bills and repairs. We can all do our bit around the house. Sharing cooking saves energy and makes more efficient use of everyone's time. By sharing space we are making better use of already existing housing, reducing the need to build more. When we need someone to talk to, there's often someone there to have a cup of tea with.

The social, environmental and financial benefits of living together are enormous, and we are hoping to take this to the next level by becoming our own landlords too. This will mean that we can make long-term improvements to the property we live in, and build a stable, long-term community where we can support each other.

This blog is a place for us to write about our journey towards buying a house, building a community, and expanding and sharing our skills and interests. We'd love to hear from anyone interested in housing co-ops, the environment, reskilling, or just about anything else. :-)

Much love,
Hannah

Golem Housing Co-operative

House Buying Update and Loanstock Request

Urban Permaculture and Garden Design v.1

Housey plans

Radical

We accidentally a house.

The Eternal Quandary

Cwtch needs you!

House Viewing: Run-of-the-hill and Can O' Worms

Assistance with the previous post

Armchair Cookery

Sad Times On the High Seas

House Viewing: House of Why

No news is good news?

The Haps.

Sven’s slightly but not entirely made up recipe for Apple Ketchup that Mattie and Finn helped with

House Viewing: Boat House and The Dinghy

House Viewing: Boat House

We're back. Sort of.

*honkshu* (by Lotte)

Starting as we mean to go on...

House Viewing: The Tardis and Labyrinth

MOVING HOUSE MAKE HULK SMASH ANGRY

Being the Change (by Lotte/Cassian)

HMO Progress. Hmogress?

How To Buy a House

"BLEEEEUUUUUURRRRR" TO AV!

House Viewing: Igor-To-Sell

A picture says 1,000 words.

Auctiontimez (by Lotte)

House Viewing: Rebound House and Liberties Lodge

Moulder and Wiser

The Calm Before The Storm

What we are up to in our personal lives. With visual aides.

Anarchist task-division (by Lotte)

Golems Are Go!

House Viewings: Hippy Haven/Mould Mansion Revisited

Fun voting times (by Lotte)

House Viewing: Mould Mansion

'Ouses, 'Ouses, 'Ouses*

Rarrrrr!

Our agendar, let me show you it.

Our Spring Radical Rumours Article

Post National Gathering (by Lottie)

The National Gathering (by Lottie)

The Littlest Golem

Social change this week (by Lottie)

The Joy of Meetings (by Hannah)

Social change again (by Lottie)

Learning from experience (by Lottie)

Golems - or "So why are you called the Golem Housing Co-op anyway?"

Leaflet: We has it. (by Lottie)

Busy Bees (by Hannah)

House. House house house.

Social Change this week (by Lottie)

The Cost of Cooking (by Lottie)

General Social Change Stuff (by Lottie)

Welcome To Our Blog (by Hannah)

honkshu (by Lotte)