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[personal profile] smokingboot
Yesterday was wet and hopeful rather than beautiful. Still, the magic was there, raindrops and furry buds so interlaced across the trees you couldn't tell them apart. Happy Equinox to you!

At physio the therapist applied something I've never come across before. Apparently it's used a lot on women in labour (https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/transcutaneous-electrical-nerve-stimulation-tens/). Only occasionally painful, the feeling was still unpleasant, like a series of pinches or multiple needles prickling just beneath the skin. At the same time, the therapist applied a heat pad right on the afflicted area. The two sensations combined are peculiar, but once he took the heat pad and the TENS gewgaw away and began massaging with some other gel covered machine, the ankle started to feel loose and light and flexible. Right now it's completely painless. There have been about two throbbing moments this morning. He's given me the very worst kind of exercises to do, ie, ones that mustn't be skipped. Pah! The health gods are on to me!

While he did all this, he told me about his difficult week. In fact he told me about his past two months, in which his landlord raised his rent twice, by £100 each time, and finally told him over the past couple of days that he had to move out. The landlord's going to turn the flat into some kind of three person bedsit. The therapist can stay if he can afford the total rent, but of course he can't. I strongly suspect the rent bumps were illegal. The therapist tells me it's like this all over Glasgow, that he knows students who are living on the streets because the University offers them a place but no accomodation support and there's just nowhere to live.In such situations, where an incoming student can't find lodging of any kind, the University suggests they defer their place.

I listened, astonished. In Scotland, private landlords are facing rent caps, so the ones who can't afford the hit will take their property off the rental market, while others will divide up the rental space in order to charge more. Then people will pay the same price or more for a smaller space, because of all those landlords who had to resort to the first option, leaving even less housing available. And of course, the therapist really doesn't want to get on the wrong side of his landlord, despite that individual's sharkish behaviour, in case he needs a reference for a new place.

It left me wondering about that richly paved road to hell, good intentions and their consequences.

It's great that Winter's over. So many people need light and Spring.

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