Looking Out To Sea

When we moved into our flat on Leith Walk there was an arrangement with a man from Penicuik to get the stair cleaned. At each visit he’d post a bill through someone’s door, so each person only had to pay every eighth time. He’s stopped coming — in fact, he’s stopped business altogether — and he didn’t tell us. And because there was always a long gap between bills anyway it took a while to sink in that the stair was definitely getting dirtier.

At the weekend we sent round a note asking people to come in on Monday evening for a meeting to decide what we wanted to do. Helen had done some research and found prices for the council and for a local company to clean, and we were also willing to entertain a bucket-and-mop rota if that was the consensus.

Out of the 7 other flats we had one apology and two shows, which leaves four flats technically unaccounted for. Someone is apparently on holiday for 3 weeks, so that seems a reasonable excuse. Another were only just moving in that day so maybe they’re just snowed under. Overall I’m still annoyed by the lack of communication. As I guessed would happen, we settled on our preferred option. Of course now we have to get people to go along with this — to agree to paying regularly. If we can’t do that where are we? Whatever happens we lose if there are people who can’t be bothered — if the stair gets slowly more filthy that’s rubbish for everyone, but some care less than others; if some of us pay then we’re taking a bigger hit and others are free-loading; and if no-one wants to pay then people who care about the stairwell end up cleaning it themselves, when they can, while others look on. It may be worth noting that the people who bothered their arses this time round are the ones who own their flats.

(A similar issue can be found when you look at the garden. Who uses it? Who cares about it? Who weeds and tends it? Who has a lawnmower or can pay someone to trim the grass? This is made much harder because the dividing fence between our half of the garden and the half belonging to the adjacent tenement has been removed. It’s a bigger, nicer garden, but there are double the number of people to rope into any discussion.)

To help foster the impression that it’s not just me or Helen forcing the issue one of our neighbours is going to write up a wee note saying what we decided and who decided it. Once everyone knows what our decision was we have to work on getting the other tenants of the stair involved. Knocking on doors and such. It’s not the kind of thing I’m very good at or relish in particular but it has to be done and right now there is no real community here. I want to see if we can sort some of that out. Just starting with a core of two or three households that hold a common opinion, and working from there.

And that also leads onto the garden and the issue of the next tenement over. We need to make some friends there too — to even see some faces would be an incredible help. Last summer there were regular barbecues from the other tenement so maybe we’ll be able to build on that too.

I’m sure this is a recurrent problem. The renting tenants in the stair just seem to come and go, and we’ve recently lost two owners who had been for a long time, so we lost a lot of common understanding and knowledge in a short period of time. This happens all over the city, all over the country. But how, right now, do we deal with it?