My Flat Viewing

Part 8
Disability Discrimination
Part 2
People who don’t want to be beggars can’t be choosers

Baffled by how Phil could not see there were serious problems that having no money at all would cause a person, I pointed out that I wouldn’t be able to buy food.

I was about to expand on this, to point out that not being able to buy food meant I would starve, when his eyes lit up, he smiled this smug little smirk, then cut me off to inform me that he knew I was selling my house, as though he had caught me in a lie, and tell me that he wanted to know why I couldn’t use the money I was getting from the sale of my house to buy food.

The use of the word money here is a direct quote.

Even if I had been receiving money from the sale of my house, that sale had not completely yet, and I had no control, or idea, of when it would, at this time, as both me and my ex-boyfriend had already signed all the sellers’ parts of the paperwork, and just had to wait to be notified once the sale was finalised. This eventually happened in the January of 2019, as nothing happened with the sale for several weeks over the Christmas period.

However, due to the circumstances around why we were selling the house, we were selling the property at over a six-thousand-pound loss, as we were asking for just enough to break even so we weren’t left with either money on our mortgage, or joint equity deal, which we still owed money on to the property developers, who we had directly purchased the property from, and who still owned under 20% of our property.

Phil didn’t seem to understand any of this, yet he kept asking why there was no equality in the house, while using the word equality incorrectly several times, like he though I had just taught him the word, but he didn’t actually understand what it meant, but was insisting on using it anyway, so I thought he had always know what the word equity meant.

No offence to anybody who doesn’t know what the word equity means, when referring to a property’s value, or when selling a property. The equity is the overall value of the property minus anything owed in fees, sales costs, mortgages, etc. Put simply, its what you might be able to take away from a sale. People don’t always sell a property for the full value, and they don’t get the full amount a property actually sells for. Phil seemed to think that property had to sell for what the estimated value was, and that you got literally the value of the property back in full, like mortgages and sales fees, etc didn’t exist. And he was using the word interchangeably for money.

The point I am making is that I only know this after the process of buying and selling a shared equity property, and five years of working in banking.

Yet, Phil could not let himself feel as though I wasn’t inferior to him, and his own self worth was so fragile that not knowing a word, I assume lots of people wouldn’t know, made him feel inferior to me.

A person like that, should not be doing his job.

Phils behaviour, in regards to how he aggressively questioned me about the house I was losing, was distressing. I had put every penny into that house, and if we had sold it under better circumstance, which was something I had been willing to do, both of us would have walked away with a couple of thousand pounds. If that had happened, I wouldn’t have even been renting from a housing association, because I would have had the money for a deposit on a private let, and I had always rent private lets in the past.

Eventually, I suggest that could bring a copy of the paperwork from the court case, where all the details of how we would sell the house had been officially worked out, into the LMH office, if I could get it, and he instantly stopped interrogating me, which makes me believe he shouldn’t have been interrogating me on the matter in the first place.

Here, I believe there is a slight gap in my memory of this conversation, as the next thing I recall is him taking to me in the sort of voice you’d speak to a dog in. He was saying, and I quote, “I will bring you food parcels. Would you like that? Would you like it if I brought you food parcels?”

If you think this is strange, that he personally would bring me food parcels, I felt that way too, and when writing about it later, he didn’t mention offering to personally bring the parcels. Instead, he wrote something which seemed much less creepy and much more realistic, which is that he would refer me to either a food bank, or a department within Torus who dealt with food banks, but at the viewing he did say he personally would bring me the parcels, because I remember feeling very uncomfortable with the idea of Phil coming to my flat when I was alone, even more so than I normally would.

However, there was something far more concerning in his later emails and notes about this conversation, which is that he claims I asked him if the food would contain wheat because, I am wheat intolerant.

None of that is true.

What I said, was that I could not accept food parcels, as I have a genuinely life threating reaction to many of the ingredients that are used to make most processed foods, and that a lot of the time, the ingredients that I am most at risk of reacting to, aren’t listed in the ingredients, as they come under the collective term of “herbs and spices,” and that this is definitely the case with tinned and canned foods.

During this, I listed all of things I can’t eat, whether those things are common in processed foods or not.

Here is the list-

• Dairy, which includes, milk, butter, and cheese.
• All plants from the lily plant family, which include, onion, garlic, shallots, chives, leak, and asparagus
• Aloe
• Weeds, including, dandelions and nettles.

Then I explained to him the reaction I have to these foods which is that I stop passing solid waste completely, because my solid waste literally becomes solid, or as the doctors put it, it turns into a hard clay like substance which cannot pass through my intestines, and that in 2014 I came extremely close to my bowel rupturing, due to this, which would have either killed me, or resulted in me wearing a colostomy bag for the rest of my life, and that the doctors though it was likely an extreme allergic reaction, as this is how allergic reactions can sometimes present with all of these specific food groups.

(However, I have since learned that one of the lesser known symptoms of BPD, is severe and life threatening digestive issues, though a medical article I read online.)

At no point did I use the words wheat or intolerant.

But even I f I had, it’s my opinion that nobody should be forcing anybody who is wheat intolerant to eat wheat, and if they did, they certainly shouldn’t be calling it a favour or an act of charity, because what it is, is abuse, as you are literally poisoning that person.

I did however use the words “I will die, if I am forced to eat it.”