slumjumpers

As you might be aware, if you’ve bothered to read this, we used to live next door to the most awful people we’ve ever had the misfortune to live next door to. 

To stop ourselves from losing our cool completely we coined phrases and names for our “neighbours”.  On the one side we had Spam and Fanny and crippled with laughter any time we uttered those names…very childish I know but you weren’t there so don’t even bother to comment.  Spam and Fanny were OK really, they didn’t like us, we didn’t like them but they showed this by ignoring us which was fine.  Fanny liked to sing, really badly, and really loudly but that was the extent of their annoying behaviour.

On the other side we had a family who were so bad there wasn’t a word in the OED that would be adequate enough to describe them…so like all childish people we invented our own.  I am proud to say that we invented the word slumjumper…my husband and I that is!

What the hell does that mean I hear you ask…I’ve never heard of such a thing; and you wouldn’t have.  A quick search of Google confirms that no other person (on the Internet at least) has uttered the word slumjumper. 

Slumjumper (n): someone who really is so scummy that they belong in the slums but they seem to have been able to claw their way out through the phenomenon that was cheap houses in the early 1990s.

These people may have taken advantage of Maggie Thatcher’s scheme whereby they could buy their council houses, thereafter selling them on so as to “move up the property ladder” (I hate that phrase).  Anyway, they should have stayed in the slums but have jumped out and so are known (to my husband and I at least) as slumjumpers.

The family we used to live next door to were indeed SLUMJUMPERS. 

She loved to wear bright red lipstick and velour tracksuits and had the sort of hairdo where the front section is bleached yellow…really classy bird!  She really did look like she was going out to work the street corners, and who knows she might have been…good luck to her…I don’t think she would have had much business.

He on the other hand didn’t seem to like clothing, preferring to go topless even in the most Arctic conditions, except for the hankie he would wear on his head when the sun threatened to shine…this we presume to stop his baldy head from burning.

Of course, the language of a slumjumper leaves a lot to be desired too.  With such a poor vocabulary he could only utter such words as Fuck and Shitebag and she could only manage to holler the kids names from the back door.

These things on their own do not a slumjumper make…there’s one other thing…the propensity to, as my brother in law so eloquently puts it, shit in your own back garden.  This being when you prefer to leave rubbish all around your property rather than either take it inside at the end of the day (if it’s an expensive or treasured item) or dispose of said rubbish in the bin.  We actually lost count of the number of electrical items that were put outside the back door of the next door house…and with only one working where did the money come from…maybe she was selling herself on street corners…who knows!

I realise there’s a lot of venom in this post but that’s really to demonstrate that slumjumper is not a word to be used lightly; not many are worthy of such a title…maybe that’s why it’s a never used before word…

As a footnote: the spellchecker suggests that perhaps I meant to write smegma instead of slumjumper…quite amusing don’t you think?