TOUGH JOB TO LAUGH THROUGH THE TEARS
ANTI-SOCIAL: The Secret Diary Of An Anti-Social Behaviour Officer
EVER since Adam Kay had a huge hit with This Is Going To Hurt, a memoir of his years as a junior doctor, the race has been on for publishers to find more people who can write entertainingly about their horrendously difficult jobs.
Anti-Social is a memoir by Nick Pettigrew who was until recently an anti-social behaviour officer. Like Adam Kay, he has also worked as a comedy writer and performer in his spare time, and he follows the Kay formula of leavening his hair-raising anecdotes with dollops of jet-black humour.
An ASB officer, Pettigrew tells us, is not a policeman, a social worker, a solicitor or a mental health worker, but at the same time the job is “a tiny bit of all the above”. He manages council-owned social housing estates, with some 3,000 people under his watch.
The residents present him with quite a variety of problems.They range from complaints about neighbours hoovering in the evening to worries about funny smells from neighbouring properties – it’s not all that uncommon for council flats to be utilised as cannabis farms.
A lot of Pettigrew’s time is taken up with investigating issues that don’t exist – people complaining about terrible smells that nobody else can smell, or phantom neighbours banging away at imaginary drum kits.They do this either because they’re “loopy” – one of the virtues of Pettigrew’s book is its no-nonsense, politically incorrect vocabulary – or they’re trying it on so they can be moved to a nicer home.
It’s quite common, too, for residents to invent allegations about neighbours they don’t like in the hope they’ll be thrown out. As Pettigrew notes, a hairdryer borrowed and not returned often escalates into a feud of biblical proportions. By contrast, some of his cases are extremely serious. There is the harrowing tale of a woman with learning difficulties who takes in a homeless woman for a couple of nights and ends up virtually a slave to the woman and her boyfriend.
Pettigrew does his job and keeps the peace and yet he cannot help feeling guilty at the sledgehammer approach he’s sometimes obliged to take.
These feelings, combined with a cripplingly huge workload, lead Pettigrew to start self-medicating with booze, in addition to depression medication. By the end, he has to hand in his notice to save his sanity.
This is a very funny and very sad book, often simultaneously.
That said, Pettigrew feels the need to spray the pages with gags, and sometimes he overdoes it: his stories are funny or fascinating enough to work without jokey embellishments.
Still, when he moves into dark territory, his acerbic wit seems not just welcome but essential if we are to bear carrying on reading.