The gossip column that did it Norway

JED means jeg elsker deg

LASHG, KLOE, ALMO – there’s nothing housing folk like better than a good set of initials. Here’s my current favourite: SUMO, which stands for “shut up and move on”.

No, it’s not the Home Office’s new antisocial behaviour catchphrase but apparently what one should do in the face of change, or so members of the Housing Association Internal Auditors Forum were told at the organisation’s annual conference in Manchester this month.

In order to reinforce the message, delegates were asked to make a love pledge to each other in Norwegian.

Social Animal is not convinced that flowery Scandinavian prose will help you face down redundancy, but I guess it could help you drown your sorrows in Oslo.

Lame academy

Hacas Chapman Hendy’s Derek Joseph is a regular fixture in the housing press but, at Trowers & Hamlin’s reception at the Royal Academy last week, he confided that television is where his heart truly lies.

Indeed, fans of early 1990s holiday programmes may have seen Joseph’s first starring role – touring theme parks with his family to mark the opening of Eurodisney.

Unfortunately, disaster struck when Joseph twisted his ankle and had to soldier on with subsequent shots redesigned to hide the injured limb. What a pro – Judith Chalmers would be proud.

Camera loves you, baby

Also spotted at the Trowers bash: New Islington & Hackney chief executive Brendan Sarsfield with his daughter Tessie.

You’ll have seen Sarsfield, of course, looking pensive on the cover of Housing Today’s 16 April issue after he pounded the mean streets of east London to ask tenants how he could improve services.

But Tessie revealed exclusively that, chez Sarsfield, our black-and-white pics met a cool reception on the grounds that he looked like “a Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels gangster”.

So, is this the end of Sarsfield’s career in front of the camera? “Well, I suppose I could model balaclavas,” he suggested to Social Animal with, I’m sure you’ll agree, undue modesty.

Social housing democrats

“Democracy is the worst form of government except all those others that have been tried,” according to Winston Churchill. Tenants of New Charter Housing would probably agree.

A total of eight tenant representative places are up for grabs on the RSL’s two subsidiary boards and, so far, nine candidates have put their names forward.

Four will be elected unopposed; the other five await their peers’ verdict. All in all, though, as only one person out of the nine stands to fail, it looks like excitement will fail to reach fever pitch on 26 July when the result is declared.

Artistic circles

What do Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor and Circle 33 have in common?

They’re all veterans of media controversy (remember the tabloid fuss about Circle 33’s care home for elderly Bangladeshi people?). And, of course, they’re all appearing in this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

The show has a whole room devoted to architecture, including a model of Peter Barber Architects’ social housing scheme for Circle 33. Future tenants will surely be praying that this project is less likely to cause offence than some of the artists’ works – and less likely to catch fire.

Source

Housing Today