Treasury chiefs were thrown into a tizzy last week when they realised that one of chancellor Gordon Brown's aides had left vital documents in a London pub.
Those of us who pored over the small print of the comprehensive spending review, trying to find the details for housing, now have a much better idea where they are.
The news that Treasury staff take work to the boozer would also explain why the sums didn't quite seem to add up.
Prescott takes to the skies
I had heard that housing has been shooting up the political agenda of late, but London Mayor Ken Livingstone really seems to have taken this to heart. Members of the London Assembly – the GLA's regulator – were shocked to learn of the extent to which Livingstone's obsession had gone. In his absence during a two-week summer break in France, Livingstone has left his unelected special housing adviser, Neale Coleman, in charge. Whatever next, John Prescott as deputy prime minister …
Horse whispers and fowl play
The true origins of the urban myth about the horse stuck in the 13th-floor flat trot ever closer. Former Tamar Housing Association chief Peter Milligan has emerged from Wreyland Housing and Management in Devon to offer this account of what really happened when he was a humble housing officer for the Notting Hill Housing Trust in the 1970s.
"One of our more colourful tenants was an ex-jockey with a love of anything to do with horses. I was visiting tenants to discuss their flexible attitude to rent payment, and one mentioned that the ex-jockey hadn't been seen for a few days.
"I went upstairs and knocked, but there was no answer. There seemed to be someone moving in the room, so I looked through the letterbox to see a rather scrawny, elderly-looking brown horse (nothing like 16 hands tall) munching hay from a dustbin in the middle of the carpet.
"On the way back to the office I stopped off to use the communal bathroom between the first and second floors only to find it was home to half a dozen chickens. I'd wondered why no one had mentioned the horse before and now I knew.
"Later that afternoon the ex-jockey called in to the office. He said he was looking after the horse for a local rag-and-bone man who was in hospital. By that evening the horse was back in its stable, without the aid of a helicopter, though, as the tenant had no trouble walking him down the stairs. I never did find out who owned the chickens – they were gone three days later."
So there it is – straight from the horse's mouth. Can anyone do better?
Winning a pony at cards
Not to be outdone with tales of equine eviction, Gaye Rose, project worker at Hammersmith & Fulham Federation of Tenants' and Residents' Associations, recalls a case from the Cherry Orchard Estate in south-east London in the 1980s.
A bailiff forced an entry to a flat on the estate to find the place deserted apart from a horse on the balcony.
A housing officer made investigations at the flat next door to be told by an elderly neighbour that the tenant was always winning strange things at cards.
But worry not, RSPCA officers – the horse was being cared for. The woman had seen it with its head over her balcony and, fearing it wasn't eating properly, she would put cornflakes into a washing-up bowl every morning and give them to the beast. We truly are a nation of animal-lovers.
Source
Housing Today
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