BATTERY

You are sold the idea of owning a home. It's an anxiety sell: if you don't own your home, you're a loser, you're falling behind, you're not on the ladder being climbed by your more successful peers. So you get a job and your mum and dad give you the money you need for a huge deposit. The house is insubstantial. It was built, cheaply, more than one hundred years ago to house manual labourers who had no material possessions beyond a tin bath and two sets of clothes, one for work and one for Sunday best. Or you buy an overstyled, brand new tickytacky box made of crap. You work your loans and credit cards to fill the small space with things and to knock the walls about, not really managing to create a convincing copy of a look laid out in a magazine. A look to which you have been taught to aspire this month.

Then comes the redundancy, the illness, the divorce, the drugs, the booze, the this and that. So you lose "your" house. The bank sells it to another person who has been led to believe that she needs to "own" a "home". Repeat. Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. So those pennies saved by your mums and dads are steadily transferred to where they really belong - onto the balance sheets of banks bailed out with your money. No mortgage paid off ever again. The bank gets all your money and ruins your life. You are there to make them money. Housing developments are capital farms. You're a battery hen. Or, if you want to reference The Matrix and go all Scottish, "You're a battery, hen."