The Cancer Strikes

“Just watching 4 in a bed. Shame the Hotel Continental went tits up.” A gentleman, B.P. wrote 8/01/2018.

It’s over a year ago now that the state crusher operated by the animals juggernauted over us. The Hotel Continental, 28-29 Marine Parade, CO12 3RG, 01255 551298 is now a sorry site, derelict, pining, fretting, a soul in purgatory. What will become of it we do not know. We believe someone has bought it.

Why and how the death happened, a kind of murder, we’re still not sure about. It was a slow tormented end. All our energy, all our ideas, our minds, every impulse night and day went into keeping it alive. We fought, we toiled, we employed specialists but finally overwhelmed could not prevent the demise of this companion. Not forgotten. Mourned. Still loved. Condolences offered much appreciated.

The answer to why depends a bit on where you stand, which political proposition, which particular rightness you choose. And that will depend on what you think best serves you personally. But the how, the mechanical wind-down is easier to see, to tabulate, and whilst I’ll recount from memory I will revert to our archive for detail and to clarify.

However, both how and why are applied ideas. I realise the how and the why are married, feed on each other and as in ideas fact and opinion grind. Fact and opinion make new facts and the new facts form fresh ideas fact and opinion. And so on and so on. A difficult, challenging knot. The hope is achievement which in our case culminated in tumble-down.

Where’s the beginning of the trail to understanding? It’s maddening. I want to get down the stubborn, pig-headed stupidity, the blinding injustice which under the cover of respectability induces catatonia in powerless victims. And yet part of me doesn’t want to know, wants to blank out, delete, skip over, forget. It’s happening, you can’t believe it’s happening at the time and somehow afterwards, after it’s happened you can’t believe it’s happened. I want to express the frustration, the anger I should have experienced at the time. It’s a big job, an important job. A re-think is needed to bring about a clean-up of this sordid sham that serves easy pickings to crooks buying up assets at knock-down prices.

It sounds like a rant, a rambling rant and I will rant because its’ wrong, so wrong. A dirty and terrible business. It’s theft and there must be a better way. But those disgusting, righteous benefactors prepared with their arguments to justify their actions, don’t want one.

It’s a big topic the journey through to insolvency; to the house arrest; the stifling, smothering bankruptcy proposition; the practically unbelievable open prison with rules preventing any initiative which turns out the light at the end of the tunnel.

It delivers chaos to the mind; defies common sense; denies logic to problem solving. I can easily get worked up about it. And adapting lines from the Dylan Thomas villanelle,

“Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

I will take his advice. I will rage. And I will spill the beans as they come to mind. Starting and stopping abruptly as ideas flit and loop the loop. Going wherever they take me as once started memories come faster and faster. Faster than I can write like the sea tumbling over itself to get on the shore away from the wind’s most ferocious roar.

The IVA racket and it is a racket, how did we get into it? Well it was through a nonsense called a ‘Business Coach’. The saying “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach” crops up as the wisdom of hindsight asks, “Why isn’t a business coach too busy succeeding in business to take up a totally bogus stand teaching the theory instead of practising what they purport to preach?”

Anyway, we were offered a free one to one session with one of these gurus. We went along open- minded clutching at straws I suppose. We were, are not, and never have been unwilling to learn.

This specimen advised we consult an accountant. We had an accountant of course. A Scotsman who’d looked after us for 20 years at least. But the specimen in his nice office oozing quiet efficiency and shining technology on an estate in Colchester of nice offices oozing quiet efficiency and shining technology said we’d better see this new one who was very good and so made us an appointment. No harm in it we thought. The accountant found was in a modest office next to a petrol station in the country. The accountants were two women who didn’t strike me as inspiring and pretty much all of what they said we’d heard before. But somehow, we had a second meeting in our flat, the Garden Rooms at no.30 Marine Parade, at which they rubbished our Scotsman accountant claiming he hadn’t done the work he’d billed us £15,000 for. At this meeting, we were introduced to the IVA (Individual Voluntary Arrangement) route out of our predicament. This is where things get messy, because we had a financial expert working with us insisting he wasn’t an advisor giving advice, may have been at the meeting with the two women. I think he was and it seems, looking back, they all knew the insolvency practitioners at whose office we attended soon afterwards to be told, which they later denied, that the bank was insisting we enter an IVA programme.

We didn’t like it, didn’t believe in it but were told we had no alternative because the bank insisted.

What they didn’t tell us was their fee for setting up the IVA’s was ……£20k? £20,000 which we paid to them and which we could have and should have paid to our creditors to reduce our debts.

You see, a racket. A cosy racket. Easy pickings which benefit insolvency practitioners milking the unsuspecting whose resources could be better used, but who, being gullible, can’t argue because they haven’t the knowledge.

What a network. A battalion of shysters.!

A tangential anecdote; We are honest souls and that’s a problem. Because before we agreed to this poxy establishment orthodoxy, IVA malarkey, we somehow were contacted by a man in a suit, and had a meeting off the record al-fresco at a coffee shop in city centre London, who offered to arrange the buyout of the bank’s mortgage, refinance our borrowing at a reduced amount and reduced interest. It will cost us £5000 he said. Stupidly we didn’t do it. Mistake, mistake, mistake. Big, big mistake. I’ve been kicking myself ever since.

As I said too honest, and it doesn’t pay to be too honest. Often the unconventional offers better results. Learn to read the runes, the I Ching, the tea cup, the tarot, anything, anything and grab your intuition with both hands.

We were put into two IVA’s and a PVA (Partnership Voluntary Arrangement) and initially we were asked for £5k a month, an impossible sum, and anyone who looked at our accounts would have known that. And these insolvency supervisors were accountants. Our financial man, our non-advisor, said ‘don’t commit to too much. Offer £3000’ which we did. But in the long run we couldn’t afford £3k. Under the rules we were allowed a 6-month payment holiday which we took but our income stream would not obey the cold clockwork demands imposed. And eventually it was the Ipswich insolvency practitioners who initiated the bankruptcy proceedings. The final legalised robbery. A vicious mugging, a no-good solution. Bad, bad, bad and stupid. Because selling off the spoils is unlikely to raise enough money to pay off our debts. There’s something wrong with this respectability. Fundamentally wrong.

Our case was run by two weeds. All through their involvement I believed one of them to be helping us, guiding us if you like, defending our interests, and the other was working for the creditors. I was shocked to learn towards the end they were both hostiles working for the other side. Many times, our financial advisor said he didn’t like the way our case was being handled by them, the Ipswich outfit.

Here, and for no reason, I’m reminded that early on our financial non-advisor brought along a person to have a tour of the hotel. This turned out to be a viewing by a potential buyer. The deal put to us later was, we declare ourselves bankrupt and Doug the viewer, he was called Doug, will negotiate a good price for the properties, the hotel and flats, with the bank, develop it and sell it. And after a year we would automatically be discharged bankrupts, and receive a percentage of the profits and possibly a pension fund would be established for our long-term benefit.

Imagine that.

Footnote. The Hotel Continental, (Site of) has now, June 2021, been redeveloped and become mundane apartments of a type that can be found in any street anywhere.

Blossom House

There she stands

at the end of a freedom journey,

cool and silent

as a tombstone

erected in memory

of those who loved in her

toiled with her,

hoped with her,

suffered the slings and arrows

of the valley of the shadow with her

till optimisms face aged