• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Unhappy Houses & Odd Happenings

Fanari_Lloyd said:
Well, they lived in Abertillery, Escargo. But her husband had gone to a church meeting one night and was late, so my great-gran went to meet him and walked alongside the railway line as that was the way her husband used. (It was quicker, I suppose)
Click to expand...
Thank you! :D
 
Gloucestrian said:
Adverse possession. If you take and occupy a property for 12 years you can lodge a claim with the Land Registry to register the property in your ownership. The original owner is notified but if the property was unregistered with the Land Registry as many old houses used to be then they have no way to contact the original owner. I think they would have placed a notice in the paper of record (London Gazette).

Adverse Possession is no longer so straightforward since the criminalisation of squatting some years ago. Historically it was quite an important right because otherwise many old properties become unoccupied as no one is sure who owns them. The downside was some very questionable behaviour like that shown by your relative.
Click to expand...

Not sure because by the time she did it, my mother - who was the only one of the three who had inherited the house who would even still speak to her - was dead and the other two weren't speaking to her! So they maybe were none the wiser.

I know the person who owns it now was a local and he knew my great aunt, but am sure he had no idea that respectable old lady was actually squatting in someone else's house. It wasn't like she had nowhere to live. She had owned her own house - her dad was a farmer who had given her a piece of land and had a house built on it for her. So why she decided, on her sister's death, to move out of her own home and into her sister's, is anybody's guess. She just did.

It's a listed building (because of the ship's staircase) and it must be worth a fortune, at today's prices. But when I was a kid these villages were full of old ladies rattling around in semi-derelict cottages and there were even quite a few empty houses. Although the second home owners were beginning to creep in and gentrification was starting.
 
bugmum said:
@GhostInTheMachine, your story reminds me a little of The Woman in Black - an old lady living in a very unhappy house, haunted by her sister because of the death of a child.
Click to expand...
I sort of hope her sister did haunt her!

Strangely, it wasn't a "sad" feeling house at all. These days I think people would want to sell up and move away. It's a strange village because I know of half a dozen murder houses, all within about one minute walk of eachother... and not hugely historic murders, but ones from the 1960s onwards, still in living memory. The most recent was only a couple years ago.

A bit like Albert Square. But rural.
 
Mrs Migs said:
Please tell us more!
Click to expand...
LOL. I don't want to out it (esp as I think relatives of the most recent murder victim still live in the house - and it is pretty recent - court case only last year. Or rather, I guessed that family might still live there, from not seeing a For Sale sign outside it, since).

I knew of the 1960s' murder, because remember my parents talking about it whenever we drove past - it was a pub at that time but was changed back to a family home in the 1980s and I remember having a conversation with a local, when it came up for sale, who said that outsiders had bought it and the locals had made the decision between them kind of thing, not to mention the murder. (Stabbing IIRC). And others I've read/heard about including one from the 70s or early 80s, that I'd not heard about or don't remember from the time, but then a friend told us he nearly bought a certain house in x village but the estate agent warned him that there'd been a fairly recent murder there... he decided against buying it. It's a lovely house. Wouldn't have put me off, tbh.

My other "murder must be commoner than you think" anecdote is... in the Midlands, the first ever class of kids I taught only had 23 kids in it. 2 of them were the children of murderers. One a pub carpark stabbing and the other, the mother stabbed the dad in the neck - in front of the child. The kids were only 8 and these had been fairly recent events when I taught them...
 
IbisNibs said:
That's supposed to be about the worst thing that can happen to a child. :(

I hope both children grew up to have happier lives!
Click to expand...
This little girl whose mother killed her father, was far and away the most intelligent child I ever taught. Well, I can think of another kid about the same intelligence level - he had an horrendous start in life, too.

She had supportive and fabulous foster parents, who I got to know well and even went with Mr Ghost to see the little girl in her local church's nativity play - the community were warm and welcoming and I knew she was loved and well supported. Social services told me they were trying to rip her away from the lovely foster family, who adored her, because they were from the "wrong" Caribbean island. Think the little girl's parents were Jamaican and the foster family from Trinidad or somewhere else... This was my first inkling, as a teacher, that social workers were bastards. (Of course the social worker who told me this had to look at her paperwork to even remember the child's first name... utterly didn't give a toss and the kid was clearly just an inconvenient case number, to her). I was only there for a year and so never found out if the social services dept succeeded in their passionate quest to rip her away from lovely foster parents who made her very happy and settled as far as she could have been. I remember the foster parents telling me they were hoping to keep her. She was a fantastic kid and all the other kids had taken her under their wing when she moved to that school from another part of the city.

She wiped the floor with the other kids in standardised tests and I was always quietly cheering her on, in my head.

I have often thought of her since and if she stayed true to the person she was aged 8, she is probably a very successful woman in her 30s now. I hope she is.

The other little girl was very different. Clingy, a teacher-pleaser, followed me everywhere (yet not particularly vulnerable - quite a streetwise, strong little kid and nobody's victim). She wasn't very bright at all. She never gave me a moment's trouble, but there was something about her that I found really unsettling that I could never quite figure out - she was a sinister kid but I'm sure I would be too, had I had that start in life. Hope she too is happy and safe and made herself a great life, too.
 
Several years ago Mr Zebra and I were house-hunting and one particular house we visited looked very nice and normal from the outside (and from the estate agent pictures) but the moment we set foot in it, we'd barely been in there a minute when we both, simultaneously, decided we just didn't like the feel of it. At all.

Nothing to do with decor, or owner, or anything like that. Simply the 'vibe' of the house.

We made our excuses and left.


I wish I could remember where it was (somewhere in the midlands is all I can narrow it down to and Mr Zebra can't remember either!) but we've never had that feeling about any other house we've viewed over the years.
 
I was just watching this video about 'murder houses' - I do like Dr Grande's videos and he has a very dark dry sense of humour (it's all in the best possible taste I assure you). He takes quite an anthropological view really, that we are superstitious about houses where a murder took place as though it's almost something in the air of the house that might infect the next inhabitants (even to the extent where a new house built on the same site isn't quite right either). And people have a strange fascination for such places. But, as he says, it's not in a house's self-interest to be a 'murder house' as they tend to get mysteriously burnt to the ground. I think the video will appeal to your Fortean sensibilities.
 
Eponastill said:
I was just watching this video about 'murder houses' - I do like Dr Grande's videos and he has a very dark dry sense of humour (it's all in the best possible taste I assure you). He takes quite an anthropological view really, that we are superstitious about houses where a murder took place as though it's almost something in the air of the house that might infect the next inhabitants (even to the extent where a new house built on the same site isn't quite right either). And people have a strange fascination for such places. But, as he says, it's not in a house's self-interest to be a 'murder house' as they tend to get mysteriously burnt to the ground. I think the video will appeal to your Fortean sensibilities.
Click to expand...

A bit silly in parts, obvious in others.
 
I have an unhappy house experience to present to my Fortean companions. Please bear with the long story as I tried to include enough details to forestall obvious questions or objections.

Context:
I did not ever live in this unhappy house. I owned it as a rental income property in Indiana, US. In 2004, a very troubled tenant rented it, and after a year of my chasing rent checks which bounced, non-responses from the tenant, and witnessing her telling others that I was a racist (she was black, I am white), I evicted her legally.

Evidence of her extreme emotional troubles: she had a son, “C”, who lived with her. C was about 10 years old, and had asthma. His mother, in my presence, treated C with astonishing disrespect and anger. C would start wheezing and gasping when his mother would scream at him. (My husband and I discussed reporting her to Child Protective Services but did not.) The house was filled with their possessions to a hoarding extent: only narrow walkways existed between piles of their possessions, most of which were still in boxes and never unpacked. This was a fairly large 3 bedroom, 2 bath house with an attached garage. The day after her eviction, when I entered the house, the smell was atrocious in the Indiana summer with high heat and humidity. She (I assume it was she and not her son) had urinated on the living room carpet and the kitchen floor, and then turned off the air conditioning. She had embedded broken glass shards and fishing hooks in the carpet in the living room and the stairwell. There were so many fishing hooks over a large expanse that I assume it was deliberate and not accidental. Etc.

Story:
After my troubled tenant had left, my husband and I spent time and money cleaning everything up and replacing broken items. We then advertised the rental as available in the local newspaper. Usually, with the great location and the reasonable rent, it rented within 48 hours of advertising. Not this time: several months passed in which we showed it to many prospective tenants. None wanted it. I thought that the house had become contaminated with the bad vibes of the crazy tenant. My husband disagreed and thought it was just an unfortunate coincidence. However, we were getting desperate about the unrented house mortgage payments which we were still making.

I had a friend who was a practicing witch in the American Wiccan tradition. I had witnessed her do astonishing things (astonishing results, I should say) and asked her if she could help. I wish to be clear on this point: at no time had I discussed the details of my crazy tenant with her, and she did not know about the son, his asthma, the vengeful rage of his mother, etc. We had no friends in common who knew the story. All I told her was that we were having trouble renting the place out, and I didn’t know why. She agreed to visit the property with me and tell me what she thought.

I took her out to the property, unlocked the front door, and stood back. She spent a few minutes at the front door, just taking it all in. Then she went inside and spent a few minutes in each of the rooms. She paused for far longer in the bedroom which had been C’s, the son’s, room. Then she talked to me. What she told me was that the house overall had a very dark presence. The bedroom which had been the son’s was the place of a lot of pain, fear, and darkness. She told me that the person who had that bedroom had had difficulty breathing. This comment from her just knocked me off my feet, so to speak. She told me that the overall darkness of the entire house may have been the reason nobody wanted to live there.

I asked her to clear the darkness. She agreed, and here is what she did: she put herself into a trance state, and reached out to the universe. When she connected, she asked that it help her remove the darkness and make the house a place of happiness and blessing. She burnt a sage stick throughout the house. She buried a sea shell near the front door. She sprinkled salt across all the doorways into the house. During all this, she did not talk to me and I did not interrupt her with any questions. When she was finished, she then went through the house with me, and I had the impression that the dark presence was gone and that the house seemed filled with light and was peaceful. It then rented to the next couple who viewed it.

Possible explanations:
1. I am batshit crazy and have made up this story.

2. All the linked events (crazy tenant, unhappy asthmatic son, inability to rent, witch friend’s visit, then renting the place out) were a coincidence and had no cause-and-effect relationship.

3. All the linked events actually had a cause-and-effect relationship: the crazy tenant had influenced the house such that subsequent prospective tenants did not want it, and my friend removed this influence. Based on the evidence of what I observed, this gets my vote. I do not have a coherent theory or hypothesis of how my witch friend did this, but this does not detract from my first-hand witness observations.

I remain endlessly amazed at our weird reality
 
That's a great account @Endlessly Amazed I enjoyed reading it.

I was once in touch with some Wiccans here in Britain. Although psychic abilities didn't seem to be a necessary requirement to following the various paths I knew of at least one who had been attracted to it as a way of formalising/using her abilities.

I never actually met her, although we had a mutual friend in RL I chatted to her on line. Anyway that's to say that while some of the 'workings' she performed did seem to yield impressive results I really can't offer an opinion on any of them as I wasn't there and have to take others words for it!

So I file all that sort of thing in the 'question mark' folder being neither prepared to dismiss or believe it!

As to what happened about your house, with my skeptics hat on I might say that the change was mainly in yourself. Feeling that she really had cleared the house of negative energy you felt better. Maybe when you were showing prospective tenants round you were still feeling ultra cautious after the awful experience of the woman and her son and maybe giving off unconscious off putting signals. In spite of your hard work getting the place back to rights it still had a taint for you.

As to her picking up on the son's breathing problems she may have made discreet enquiries before going to the house.

Or it was all perfectly genuine. I certainly wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.

And after all it worked which was the object of the exercise so what does is matter just how it did? The results were miraculous for you. :)

Sollywos x
 
@Sollywos – excellent points! I had not considered that my own attitude may have been off-putting to potential tenants. However, my husband generally took on the showings, not me, for personal safety reasons. But I vaguely remember showing the house at least a couple of times on my own. Hhhmmm.

I think there was no way for my friend to make discreet inquiries about the son. She lived over 15 miles away, had never before been to the house, didn’t have the address, I drove her there, etc. I remain convinced that she actually performed some kind of actions which informed her of the asthmatic son and which then removed the darkness. Her knowing about the breathing difficulties and nailing the correct bedroom for the asthmatic son really rocked me.

It is another datapoint in my enduring quest for a unified field theory of ontology (and I am not joking).

Sollywos, thanks for the comments. If you think of anything else, please add them in. Having smart minds as are found here in Forteanaland examine an experience can only improve one’s understanding.
 
Endlessly Amazed said:
I have an unhappy house experience to present to my Fortean companions. Please bear with the long story as I tried to include enough details to forestall obvious questions or objections.

Context:
I did not ever live in this unhappy house. I owned it as a rental income property in Indiana, US. In 2004, a very troubled tenant rented it, and after a year of my chasing rent checks which bounced, non-responses from the tenant, and witnessing her telling others that I was a racist (she was black, I am white), I evicted her legally.

Evidence of her extreme emotional troubles: she had a son, “C”, who lived with her. C was about 10 years old, and had asthma. His mother, in my presence, treated C with astonishing disrespect and anger. C would start wheezing and gasping when his mother would scream at him. (My husband and I discussed reporting her to Child Protective Services but did not.) The house was filled with their possessions to a hoarding extent: only narrow walkways existed between piles of their possessions, most of which were still in boxes and never unpacked. This was a fairly large 3 bedroom, 2 bath house with an attached garage. The day after her eviction, when I entered the house, the smell was atrocious in the Indiana summer with high heat and humidity. She (I assume it was she and not her son) had urinated on the living room carpet and the kitchen floor, and then turned off the air conditioning. She had embedded broken glass shards and fishing hooks in the carpet in the living room and the stairwell. There were so many fishing hooks over a large expanse that I assume it was deliberate and not accidental. Etc.

Story:
After my troubled tenant had left, my husband and I spent time and money cleaning everything up and replacing broken items. We then advertised the rental as available in the local newspaper. Usually, with the great location and the reasonable rent, it rented within 48 hours of advertising. Not this time: several months passed in which we showed it to many prospective tenants. None wanted it. I thought that the house had become contaminated with the bad vibes of the crazy tenant. My husband disagreed and thought it was just an unfortunate coincidence. However, we were getting desperate about the unrented house mortgage payments which we were still making.

I had a friend who was a practicing witch in the American Wiccan tradition. I had witnessed her do astonishing things (astonishing results, I should say) and asked her if she could help. I wish to be clear on this point: at no time had I discussed the details of my crazy tenant with her, and she did not know about the son, his asthma, the vengeful rage of his mother, etc. We had no friends in common who knew the story. All I told her was that we were having trouble renting the place out, and I didn’t know why. She agreed to visit the property with me and tell me what she thought.

I took her out to the property, unlocked the front door, and stood back. She spent a few minutes at the front door, just taking it all in. Then she went inside and spent a few minutes in each of the rooms. She paused for far longer in the bedroom which had been C’s, the son’s, room. Then she talked to me. What she told me was that the house overall had a very dark presence. The bedroom which had been the son’s was the place of a lot of pain, fear, and darkness. She told me that the person who had that bedroom had had difficulty breathing. This comment from her just knocked me off my feet, so to speak. She told me that the overall darkness of the entire house may have been the reason nobody wanted to live there.

I asked her to clear the darkness. She agreed, and here is what she did: she put herself into a trance state, and reached out to the universe. When she connected, she asked that it help her remove the darkness and make the house a place of happiness and blessing. She burnt a sage stick throughout the house. She buried a sea shell near the front door. She sprinkled salt across all the doorways into the house. During all this, she did not talk to me and I did not interrupt her with any questions. When she was finished, she then went through the house with me, and I had the impression that the dark presence was gone and that the house seemed filled with light and was peaceful. It then rented to the next couple who viewed it.

Possible explanations:
1. I am batshit crazy and have made up this story.

2. All the linked events (crazy tenant, unhappy asthmatic son, inability to rent, witch friend’s visit, then renting the place out) were a coincidence and had no cause-and-effect relationship.

3. All the linked events actually had a cause-and-effect relationship: the crazy tenant had influenced the house such that subsequent prospective tenants did not want it, and my friend removed this influence. Based on the evidence of what I observed, this gets my vote. I do not have a coherent theory or hypothesis of how my witch friend did this, but this does not detract from my first-hand witness observations.

I remain endlessly amazed at our weird reality
Click to expand...
I would suggest that your previous tenant badmouthed you as a landlord to everyone, so that people were cautious about renting from you. Eventually someone either decided to overlook your appalling reputation or came from out of town and hadn't heard it, and rented it.
 
catseye said:
I would suggest that your previous tenant badmouthed you as a landlord to everyone, so that people were cautious about renting from you. Eventually someone either decided to overlook your appalling reputation or came from out of town and hadn't heard it, and rented it.
Click to expand...
Could be, although the potential renters may also have made up their own minds about the reliability of the previous tenant as a character witness...
 
catseye said:
I would suggest that your previous tenant badmouthed you as a landlord to everyone, so that people were cautious about renting from you. Eventually someone either decided to overlook your appalling reputation or came from out of town and hadn't heard it, and rented it.
Click to expand...
@catseye - That may be, although I don’t think it feasible. The angry tenant was transferred out of the country by her employer at the time of the eviction (if only I had known…). The county where this was located had a population of about 120,000 in 2000. Most of the tenant pool were graduate students at a nearby university; the angry tenant had not attended college and was uncomfortable with those she thought would look down on her. Even if she was comfortable with the grad students, she could not have badmouthed us to grad students who were coming in from out of state for months after she left the country. These were a big part of the prospective tenants who declined the rental.

My husband and I have debated this weird occurrence occasionally since it happened – so for over 15 years now. We can’t come up with any conventional explanation for the sequence of events, except the fallback position of a string of unlikely coincidences.

Looking back on it - we talked about it again today - we both regret not doing something for her poor son; but that type of intervention is sticky in the US, and our attorney at the time told us to stay out of it. We had no direct evidence of physical abuse. Also, I know from my personal experience as a child of a very troubled parent, an outsider expressing an opinion (as the mildest form of intervention) about the harshness of the parent sometimes leads to disastrous consequences for the child.
 
She was probably badmouthing you the entire time she was your tenant though, not just when she left. That kind of thing can stick - so I am very glad you found a new (and hopefully more reliable) tenant!
 
catseye said:
She was probably badmouthing you the entire time she was your tenant though, not just when she left. That kind of thing can stick - so I am very glad you found a new (and hopefully more reliable) tenant!
Click to expand...
Yes, I think you are right. You and others here in this discussion have brought up aspects and possibilities which my husband and I had not thought of.
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
A few years ago at work I was publishing a police appeal for a man wanted for a very long string of car thefts.

I taught him to drive.
Click to expand...
Like the most intelligent lad I ever taught - mentioned upthread. Dad was nowhere to be seen (like 90% plus of the dads in some classes I had). Mum was a prostitute. She taught him to shoplift. Person who had him before me found him a difficult kid to handle, but for some reason he never gave me a moment's trouble (In fact I used to save some of my lunch, a banana or a treat for him every day). He was gobby but in a way that made me laugh. You're not meant to have favourites but of course, you do. Just have to hide it. And he was firmly one of my favourites.

He was startlingly intelligent. And despite growing up in the inner city and with no pets he loved animals. I used to tell him with his brains he could be anything one day - even a vet. Odd thing was, person who had him the year after me asked me how the feck I'd ever coped with D-. Apparently he was my predecessor and the following colleague's worst nightmare. But I had no trouble controlling him - I discovered he was phobic about the sound of my long nails on the blackboard when they accidentally scraped it. So I'd just stand there if he got challenging - not that he hugely did - and said "D, I'm going to scrape my fingernails right down this blackboard if you don't behave yourself." He'd behave himself.

The person who taught him before me I think it was, said to me when I said how intelligent he was that he'd be a master criminal one day. I thought "Poor sod, he doesn't stand a chance in life with people judging him like that". He was just a great kid. You forget many of the kids you teach or can just remember their first names, if that but he was one of the few I'll never forget.

He had a very unusual surname, quite distinctive.

Several years ago, out of curiosity, I looked up a couple of kids I'd taught just to see if I could see what they are doing now. (You get curious - some of them I had really cared about and often wondered how their lives turned out - especially as one or two I heard about since had very unexpected outcomes and I wondered if he had).

And there he was in the local newspaper. Got sent down for several years for taking part in the robbery of a hotel reception, I think it was. He was in a gang of several men and the other two got longer sentences - he had tried to reassure the person at reception and handed something back to them, I think, that was their's (I forget the details) but the judge remarked D got a shorter sentence, essentially because he was so polite.

Part of me was heartbroken because my colleagues' jokes had been proved right. Another part of me quite proud that D had been the "bestest" criminal...

He wasn't a bad kid, despite what my colleagues thought. But every teacher heard about him before they got him and prejudged him. It was their own failure to find a way to harness that incredible brain - why he got caught doing such dumb crime I have no clue.
 
Ghost In The Machine said:
Like the most intelligent lad I ever taught - mentioned upthread. Dad was nowhere to be seen (like 90% plus of the dads in some classes I had). Mum was a prostitute. She taught him to shoplift. Person who had him before me found him a difficult kid to handle, but for some reason he never gave me a moment's trouble (In fact I used to save some of my lunch, a banana or a treat for him every day). He was gobby but in a way that made me laugh. You're not meant to have favourites but of course, you do. Just have to hide it. And he was firmly one of my favourites.

He was startlingly intelligent. And despite growing up in the inner city and with no pets he loved animals. I used to tell him with his brains he could be anything one day - even a vet. Odd thing was, person who had him the year after me asked me how the feck I'd ever coped with D-. Apparently he was my predecessor and the following colleague's worst nightmare. But I had no trouble controlling him - I discovered he was phobic about the sound of my long nails on the blackboard when they accidentally scraped it. So I'd just stand there if he got challenging - not that he hugely did - and said "D, I'm going to scrape my fingernails right down this blackboard if you don't behave yourself." He'd behave himself.

The person who taught him before me I think it was, said to me when I said how intelligent he was that he'd be a master criminal one day. I thought "Poor sod, he doesn't stand a chance in life with people judging him like that". He was just a great kid. You forget many of the kids you teach or can just remember their first names, if that but he was one of the few I'll never forget.

He had a very unusual surname, quite distinctive.

Several years ago, out of curiosity, I looked up a couple of kids I'd taught just to see if I could see what they are doing now. (You get curious - some of them I had really cared about and often wondered how their lives turned out - especially as one or two I heard about since had very unexpected outcomes and I wondered if he had).

And there he was in the local newspaper. Got sent down for several years for taking part in the robbery of a hotel reception, I think it was. He was in a gang of several men and the other two got longer sentences - he had tried to reassure the person at reception and handed something back to them, I think, that was their's (I forget the details) but the judge remarked D got a shorter sentence, essentially because he was so polite.

Part of me was heartbroken because my colleagues' jokes had been proved right. Another part of me quite proud that D had been the "bestest" criminal...

He wasn't a bad kid, despite what my colleagues thought. But every teacher heard about him before they got him and prejudged him. It was their own failure to find a way to harness that incredible brain - why he got caught doing such dumb crime I have no clue.
Click to expand...
Perhaps in prison, he has the chance to improve himself by getting a degree. Some people have done that and left the crime behind.
 
I sometimes idly fantasise about committing a minor offence so I can go to prison and get the university education I never had a chance to have. When they announced this thing about breaking travel rules being a 10 year prison sentence it was my first thought!

I have been saving up to do an OU course for 17 years now, the bastards keep raising the fees.
 
@Gloucestrian – I live in the US, so this may not apply to wherever you are. Here, there are many, many universities and colleges, which are accredited (meaning they are legit for actually providing an education and are not merely a profit-making organization), and some of which are very inexpensive. Also, here in the US, we have community colleges (CC) which provide 2 years of the standard 4 years needed for a Bachelor’s degree. These CCs are incredibly cheap and good value. They are, however, looked down upon by many 18-22 year olds as not high-status. I went to one for 2 years (actually 3 :) ) and it was a great education. I then transferred to a state university to finish my degree. Oddly, the university did not provide nearly the educational quality I received at the local community college.

I know several persons here who attended different small, private colleges who had extraordinary educations. These were at different reading colleges who based all curricula, at least in the beginning, on the Great Books readings, and logic and reasoning. They were very inexpensive. They did not have sports teams, big stadiums, or alumni rallies with lots of booze.

Some people have the goal of getting an education to help them with critical thinking and topical information. Others want a degree from a prestige school, and actually learning much is a very secondary goal. Others want to go to college to avoid life for a while. I was one of these for a long while.

I don’t know what OU is. However, I suspect that there are more choices out there than one would think. I hope you find what is best for you.
 
That was a very thoughtful reply, @Endlessly Amazed, thank you. I am in the UK, and the OU is the Open University, an alternative way of taking higher education courses in the UK. Truthfully the course fees are not really the problem, though they have been going up a lot, but I have suffered a number of economic set backs and I am the principal earner in my household. I have been intending to take a sabbatical for a long time but every time it looks like it might be possible, something happens to stop it. Last year I was made redundant, for instance.

It rankles a bit that prisoners get free education when through no fault of my own it wasn't possible for me to take higher education when I was younger, and now it is looking increasingly unlikely that I will ever be able to. I am the most absurdly law abiding person (I even abide by the bylaws in my local park, such as not walking on the grass!) so I am not seriously in any danger of becoming a felon, and I don't really begrudge any prisoners who have had a free education as it really is a good way of reducing the chances of them reoffending.

Apologies for the somewhat off topic posts, at some point I might post about the unhappy house I grew up in (the people were happy, mostly, but the house was quite odd).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top