HOME – BUT NOT ALONE

Dave and Steve Briggs share a bedroom in their parents' house. You might think that’s quite normal for brothers, but Dave and Steve aren't teenagers. They're both in their mid-thirties and their parents are now retired. They are part of a growing number of children who are being forced to live with their parents well into adulthood, simply because they can't afford to rent or buy a place, of their own. Steve has lived in the two-bedroom terraced house in the London suburb of Walthamstow nearly all his life, apart from two years when he was studying nursing in Derby. While he was there, he suffered a nervous breakdown and came home before completing his course.

'It was a difficult, time,’ he said. ‘It was the first time I’d really been away from my family and I was finding the course quite stressful. In the end, I just couldn’t cope and my life just went to pieces. I’ve suffered from depression ever since, which has meant I've been in and out of work a lot, but I've always been able to come home and know I'll be looked after, that I won't end up on the streets because I couldn’t afford to pay the rent’.

All that changed when Dave got divorced and had to leave his large four-bedroom house to his wife and two kids. He had originally left home at seventeen, when he joined the army, and now works as a mechanical engineer for Ford Motors. ‘When Lisa and I divorced, I thought I would just rent somewhere close by so I could just drop in and see the kids easily, but when I started looking, I just couldn’t believe how expensive everything was. I'd never actually had to rent a flat before, being in the army, and most landlords wanted something like a hundred and fifty pounds a week just for a tiny studio flat I thought about buying, but over the ten years Lisa and I had lived in our place, prices had just rocketed. I mean, for the money we paid for our house ten years ago, we could probably only get a one or two-bedroom flat in a large block now. It's ridiculous! There were cheaper places, but they were in really rough parts of town, where I wouldn't want my kids walking around. And the trouble is, it's not stopping prices have almost doubled just in the two years I've been staying with my parents. You know, the other day I saw a parking space being sold for £73,000! The world’s gone mad!’

So how does he find living at home again? 'It was quite weird for a long time, but you get used to it. It has its advantages. I still get my meals cooked and my clothes washed, but of course, it's difficult to have any privacy Steve snores, really badly. And he's; always smoking. It's really disgusting! I sometimes stay over at my girlfriend's flat, and I’m trying to persuade her to let me move in, but she's not keen at the moment. So what else can I do?'

As many people know, the answer is ‘Not much’. Unless, of course, you're prepared to move to a poor industrial town in the north or a tiny little village right out in the countryside, where you can buy a house for a tenth of the price it would be in London, I did suggest this to Steve.

Hugh Dellar, Andrew Walkley. Innovations. SB. Thomson, 2010.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14