“Golden Sky” Vol.13
In Court with The Beatles
14th March 2023
“In Court with The Beatles”
Part IV — Insanity versus Absurdity
“I never give you my number
I only give you my situation
And in the middle of investigation
I break down”
Today is 9 years, 10 months and a handful of days since the “debt” began.
Today is 8 years, 10 months and a handful of days since the “debt” became known, acknowledged and publicly disputed.
Today is 6 years, 6 months and a handful of days since I was told by the then “owner” of the “debt”, and in the upstairs of the very court building that I am in today, that I “wasn’t on the list today” and that “we’ll contact you separately from the Court”.
Today is 6 years and 1 month since the “debt” was registered as a County Court Judgement (CCJ) against me. Without any notification whatsoever and in my absence, the CCJ was lodged against me, and I am being penalised today, among other things, for not lodging a defence against an impending CCJ of which I had zero knowledge of, 6 years and 1 month ago, in a long ago February of 2017.
Today is the next chapter in 8 months of an anxiety driven hell that has severely dented the on-going recovery of my mental health. During this time I have received the first of many threatening letters (5th August 2022) and the first time I was made aware that the aforementioned CCJ was lodged against me in February 2017. To save you the mathematics again, it had been 5 years and 6 months since the CCJ was entered against me without my knowledge when this first threatening letter arrived, and 6 years and 6 months since I’d last had any knowledge of the “debt”.
Despite this, I
Filed Court papers.
Communicated fully with the Court(s).
Communicated with the “Court Enforcement Services” (CES) though they still thought it suitable to send a bailiff and stranger to my door.
Attended the Court appointed Hearing of 4th January 2023, though both the Judge and the Claimant did not.
What larks!
Attended once more on 18th January 2023 for a farcical, angry and bewildering appearance that ended in a befuddling adjournment.
Filed Court Papers once more, twice in fact but the pertinent issue is I have a time stamped filing of 12.38pm ahead of the 4pm deadline of 27th January. My “Witness Statement” demonstrates all this and far more in a lengthy submission for which I had to, as a layman, refer to a legal case for the grounds upon which to apply for this 6 year and 1 month old Judgement and enforcement action to be “set aside”.
Despite this, the whole sordid history and as we all awaited today’s Hearing date, the Claimant’s solicitors have continued to send letters and emails threatening sky high additional costs whilst also offering me a discount if I settle, without the trifling legalities of the upcoming Hearing, a now hugely inflated sum of money, and a sum of money for a “Claimant” that whether it’s nearly 10 years (or strictly nearer 9) or whether it’s been over 6 years since I was last talking to a previous “Claimant” and “Owner” of this “debt” or during these last 8 hellish months or even the 8 days leading up to yet another mental health scrambling appearance in Court, to a “Claimant” I have never, ever, ever spoken to, bought anything from, sold anything to, exchanged energy with or luckily beaten at a late night, high stakes game of poker.
Nada. Zilch. Nil. Cero. Null. Nic. Nolla.
Or more plainly, fuck all.
Strangers who I’ve never met, and after a six year hiatus when I was last meeting with another stranger in this very Court building on the very same matter, can just splinter apart someone’s life and fear fellow strangers knocking on their door?
Ain’t disaster capitalism great?
Listen.
Do you want to know a secret?
Act I
I was far too preoccupied and panic stricken to enjoy Ironbridge today. This was of course no fault of the grandest lady of them all as despite the drizzle or “mizzle” as us English folk occasionally call it, she was a beautiful picture as always. I return here for any excuse whatsoever let alone the mini tradition now in place that I pass through beforehand and have a pre-match legal chat with myself and of course, the bridge herself. It’s a metaphor for my dear old Mum of course, but it’s also a personal conversation between friends on one story that will only ever be between us and yes, I talk to a bridge. More accurately I pass on my regards and lament on my woes before lighting another cigarette as I await those sweet chimes from the church atop the hill.
I played tourist and tourist guide, the latter never fails to please me. The chimes of St Luke’s tolled gently as the river far below flowed briskly following the recent inch or so of snow and the Biblical rains that followed. I noted they’d moved the benches around the World War statue. I smiled that no-one had asked me. I saw Sam and her cheery family and gang of girls in the chip shop. For once Sam didn’t see me. Probably wise. I wasn’t up to being flirted with by a very happily married angel from the Black Country.
Not today.
The noise inside my head just wouldn’t stop.
The secret, astute readers of my previous articles on this infuriating topic will attest to, is a rhetorical question I posed in the third and previous article. I do so enjoy a rhetorical question! Have you noticed? The rhetorical question I posited in my previous edition was whether or not I was taking this hullabaloo seriously enough. The breath of a decade’s old albatross wrapped in the shiny smiling veneer of disaster capitalism is far too pungent for words but I pen them here to release some of that noise rattling around within the tiny confines of my splintered mind. A faintly ridiculous sum of two big ones has become, with the magic of legal costs, fees and fairy dust, over three big ones and today, 9 years, 10 months and a handful of days since the beginning of this maddening farrago, another big one can be added to the other big ones from a legal team (a legal team!) who seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time on this matter.
The secret is I am taking this seriously, way over the hills and faraway too seriously, and I told all of this among twenty or thirty different tangents in twenty or thirty seconds to a Welshman who isn’t in fact Welsh, before falling to pieces in front of him.
It turns out that the owner of the “Old Fashioned Sweet Shop” (a genial, friendly gentleman by the name of Jeremy) isn’t as Welsh as our decade’s old friendship would have me believe. Rather than being born the other side of the border he was in fact born the other side of the nearby River Severn and so was as English as I. After serving a lady from Edinburgh and three elderly ladies from Australia whom I so desperately wanted to talk cricket with, the Welshman who isn’t Welsh persuaded a jittery fellow Englishman to go and collect his car.
We had a court appointment to attend to.
I never intended this and I said things to that genial Englishman with a Welsh name that I shouldn’t have. With 45 minutes to go before yet another meeting with a Judge the jury was already out, and I’m stuck within that purgatory wasteland of wanting to be my own executioner but unable to do so. If things went south, or in fact anywhere near the “S” on life’s compass, I feared what I’d say in the Courtroom and whether I cared for the ramifications or not. There’s an injustice here I’d proclaim, a horrid story before the spectre of yet more disaster capitalists descending like wraiths and vexatious vermin, pushing their snouts into someone else’s life, after SIX YEARS, for an anonymous client with whom I have never, ever, ever spoken with or transacted any commercial or personal business with whatsoever. How dare they bulldoze their way into a life and circumstance of which they know nothing I’d pontificate, before reasoning that I had in fact met the very legal definitions of “Denton v TH White 2014” and that despite this “debt” descending from nowhere I had gone, yet again, above and beyond the call of duty for a mere supposed customer come part-time employee of an energy company and the supposedly independent “Ombudsman” and that this was a mess I’d argue, with supplementary evidence, that I tried in vain to resolve time and time again over a three year period, six long years ago.
I was going to say all this and much more but first Jeremy and I had to wait at the Usher’s desk as she fielded one long telephone conversation that in fact contained very little in the way of actual conversation, more a poor Usher frantically pressing buttons and asking “Are you still there?” to a presumably bemused person on the other end of this particular telephone call of doom. We stood. We stared. We stood some more. The Usher panicked. She pressed some more buttons.
Was the person still there?
The minutes ticked slowly by as I counted the seconds on the wall mounted clock. Disaster capitalism was booming this very afternoon, the waiting area surrounding the harassed Usher a hive of disastrous repossessions as more than a whiff of desperation hung in the air.
I entered an adjoining consultation room for a tête-à-tête with the opposition’s legal counsel.
Act II
As in my third and last pre-Hearing chit-chat with a legal team who seem to have spent a mighty long fee incurring time delving into this matter, their representative tapped furiously away at her laptop as I recounted and relisted the grievances already laid bare within my “Witness Statement”. I confirmed that I’d abided by, even in spite of this injustice landing from nowhere after six years, every tenet of the legal case of “Denton versus TH White 2014” and should things indeed head south shortly when we join the Judge in his Chambers, I will be appealing and I will continue to appeal until I exhaust every possible legal avenue open to me.
If you haven’t had the unpleasant experience of appearing at even a simple County Court room, picture the late night poker game I alluded to earlier. You may have a reasonably strong hand as I hoped I had within my witness statement, but it was medium strong, say a King and Jack suited. I had zero idea what cards the opposition held but of more concern were the cards held by the King of the Court who, to mix some more ugly sporting metaphors, threw me a curve ball, a delivery I almost missed before scrambling it back into legal play. You see, at the last Hearing, or maybe the Hearing before that, the Judge shouted down my request to make a verbal statement and here he was, immediately asking for one. I stumbled around with the 9 years, 10 months chronology through to the court date of 15th September 2016 and the hiatus since. As he continued to look down I took this as an opportunity to continue, stating that my witness statement describes the past decade in factual if ugly detail and that to the best of a layman I’d accurately described my adherence to the tenets of the legal case at hand to set aside such an unjustifiable judgement. He released a scornful look as I set out to describe the very real mental anguish this has had since August 2022 let alone the seven or eight years previous. Every fibre of my being wanted to swear as he passed the action across the aisle to the enormous fee incurring legal representatives of the “Claimant”.
They argued I’d actually breached two sub categories of the legal case under discussion, an argument the Judge didn’t dismiss but nor did he appear to fully agree with either. He remarked upon the distance between obtaining a judgement and the only evidenced letter of seeking action upon that judgement nearly five years later. He criticised the “gaps” in the contrasting chronologies between us. The Claimant’s legal team responded that I hadn’t provided an evidenced reason as to the commencement of the “debt”. I responded that I had a 5,000 word statement prepared to read to the Judge at the very first Hearing, a Hearing neither the Judge nor they decided to appear at, and an example of this evidence could be found within my witness statement.
My poker hand of a King Jack suited held up, and the Judge “set aside” the judgement.
I now have 18 days, until my Dad’s birthday, (oh the irony!) to now file a defence to a judgement entered against me on 17th February 2017, six long years and one long month ago.
I bought my English Welshman friend a beer when we returned to the toy town of Ironbridge we both love. It was my first alcoholic drink since May of last year. We talked tactics and whispered conspiratorial legal arguments from the leather sofas by the fireside. Jeremy bumped into a friend as we departed the pub. The genial Welshman who isn’t Welsh is well liked in these parts and rightly so.
I just waited, happy to watch the River Severn roll on by.
Act III
Minutes later and I was with my two favourite people in all the world as we went back 65 million years in the darkness of our local cinema in the company of a man, his newly adopted daughter and a whole host of dinosaurs. Without wishing to spoil the film (entitled simply “65”) our heroes escape a burning earth just as the Jurassic critters do likewise and I have no idea how Adam returns to seed the Garden of Eden.
Perhaps it’ll be explained in the sequel.
We all opined that there “wasn’t enough dinosaurs” before I had to mention that Sam Raimi was a producer/director and that led to three horror fans talking all things horror as the rain drifted slowly through the Neon lit wasteland of our very own Blade Runner.
I have a photograph of my son and I in the cinema, a picture only three people in the entire world will ever see. My son looks the very picture of excited happiness. After the worst of days and the best of days, I look alive.
“In Court with The Beatles” also moonlights as chapter 15 within the 3rd and final Act of my March 2024 self-published book “Golden Sky”.
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.