Happy Friday, this is the first week since 22 July that I’ve worked a five day week and you wouldn’t have thought that it would be hard but I’m tired, ok, so it’s also the week when I’ve been covering for another person on top of my work but really, it shouldn’t have been so difficult, I blame 40!

Anyway the weekend is here, it’s a Bank Holiday in England and Wales (sorry Scotland!), so a three day weekend lies before me and I’m going to spend one of them in Broadstairs.

Here’s this week’s reading..

1) How home ownership became a nightmare. I know that I bang on about housing a lot, that’s because I think it’s important, nearly 60% of my salary after tax goes on rent, I have no security of tenure but I do have a good landlord and a job so I’m one of the lucky ones. However, I have no hope of every owning my own home, no access to public housing and I don’t earn enough nor am I able to save enough for a deposit to get me into a shared ownership scheme. Housing in this country is very broken and it’s going to take vision to fix it and none of the major political parties has a vision that isn’t more of the same.

Housing is the only basic human need for which rapid price rises are met with celebration rather than protest. The house trap stretches from the estate agents mediating house-selling, to the provision of mortgages to buyers, the supply of mortgage finance to the banks and building societies, the construction of house-price indices, the skewing of finance away from owner-occupiers towards landlords, the supply and construction. Homes were always castles, not just in England, but also across Europe and the US. But during the madness they evolved into cash machines, surrogate pensions, principal pensions, and even livelihoods. And in many places, this is still the case

2) Stumbled across this the other day and I completely get it, it’s not that I don’t know that I’m lucky and I am aware that other people are in a far worse place. However, that doesn’t mean that I’m secure and that feeling is tiring.

Holding things together is tiring. Knowing that you’ll be absolutely fine- as long as nothing goes wrong- is tiring. Not having much time or money? Is exhausting, because living on a tight budget takes work. Living on a tighter budget than you need to- both with time and money- because you know that you need that little extra wiggle-room when things inevitably go wrong? Even more so. And when more than one or two small things go wrong and you see your weeks or months of wiggle-room knocked back in hours or days? That’s exhausting.

3) Interesting. A convert from Christianity to Islam explains why he converted. I don’t agree with him, I don’t think that Christianity is passive and I don’t think that turning the other cheek is passive either. Refusing to be violent is a different thing from being passive. However, I can see why an RC school and an urban upbringing can cause conflict, I never got good answers from RE teachers as a teenager either…

I converted to Islam after learning about the religion’s monotheistic foundation; there being only one God – Allah who does not share his divinity with anything. This made sense and was easy to comprehend. My conversion was further strengthened by learning that Islam recognised and revered the prophets mentioned in Judaism and Christianity. My new faith was, as its holy book the Qur’an declares, a natural and final progression of these earlier religions. Additionally, with my newfound faith, there existed religious guidelines that provided spiritual and behavioural codes of conduct. Role models such as Malcolm X only helped to reinforce the perception that Islam enabled the empowerment of one’s masculinity coupled with righteous and virtuous conduct as a strength, not a weakness.

4) The royal baby pictures show privilege trying, and failing, to look normal

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge may pose as totally average people, they may even think they are totally average people, but if they don’t care about image, why the Hollywood teeth? In this picture everything is manicured, including the vast empty lawn. It’s not an image of ordinariness but of the new elite of David Cameron’s Britain who dress, relax and smile with an unostentatious confidence that’s actually born of huge financial security