When I originally ended this series in April last year, I was living fairly comfortably in a three-bedroom house share in North London with a couple of flatmates I'd already moved with twice. I'm resurrecting it today because I've just left, and we all know the sorts of things that can happen when I leave somewhere.
We signed on for a second year with the landlord who turned out not to be dead, though it was quite difficult to tell. The house wasn't ideal and there was literally nothing nearby, but we'd done enough moving and there really wasn't any reason for us to uproot ourselves. We complained a bit about it - the constant building work next door, the lack of anywhere to go for a drink, the fact that all the garden furniture was literally rotted through and the comedy pratfalls were going to get a bit less comedic eventually - but we were fine. We watched Bake Off together, hung a mask of Dwayne The Rock Johnson on the wall, and printed my flatmate's face onto fabric and made a bunch of cushions out of it. I was living with friends.
But things change. My boyfriend and I had, by this point, come to the conclusion that we were properly stuck with each other, and decided to move in together once my second year's lease was up. I told the others about ten months in advance, they were pleased for me, everything was still fine. And it continued being fine right up until one of my flatmates got kicked out of the country and sent back to Canada, thus disrupting my two and a half years of Good Flatmate karma.
We had to replace her, money being a thing the other two of us didn't really have, and we replaced her with an acquaintance of mine who had always seemed like a decent sort but took an apparent dislike to me almost as soon as they'd moved in. A strange sort of hostility set in after my first show - two days after the move-in date - and we spent the next four months in perpetual slight discomfort. Much as I knew I'd miss my other flatmate, I started spending less and less time at home.
July came upon us and my boyfriend and I started looking for a flat, having decided that his current place was a) way too small for two people and b) so infused with Essence of Him after five years that I was always going to feel like a guest in someone else's home. His previous flat-hunting karma meant that we found a place we loved on our second day of viewings, with loads of space and a light living room and a goddamn tropical garden, which somehow also managed to be 30 seconds away from a tube station and within budget. My previous flat-hunting karma meant that it wasn't available until several weeks after my lease was up, so I'd have to transport all my stuff to my boyfriend's place, live out of boxes for three weeks, and then move house again in the same month.
We took it. I've had way worse than this.
So as of today, I and all my stuff are packed up small and squished into a living room that wasn't designed to accommodate two people, everything one of those people owns and quite a chunk of the stuff the other person owns as well, waiting for our beautiful new flat. I'm still terrified it won't go through, because I am hyper aware of every tiny alarm bell ringing in my head, but they've taken all the deposit and rent money, which is either a good sign or a horrendously bad one. If all goes well, there will be a short coda coming in a month or so. If it doesn't... hoo, boy.
Showing posts with label adventures in housing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adventures in housing. Show all posts
Saturday, 6 August 2016
Thursday, 2 April 2015
adventures in housing, part eight
[Previously in this series: invasions, evictions, and something else that sounds snappy. Let's finish this thing.]
We started searching for our next home. I had dreams of moving back to the area where this story started, the area I'd lived in comfortably for two years, that had everything I needed and felt like home to me. At first my flatmates were willing to indulge me, and we looked at a few things around there. We got unreasonably attached to a flat we called Robert which they wouldn't let to us. We tried to make an offer on a place in a beautiful building with a lovely kitchen, but the lettings agent repeatedly refused to call us back after we expressed interest and let it to someone else instead. We saw a maisonette with an enormous roof terrace and beautiful living room, which came with a slightly terrifying landlord, a third bedroom barely big enough for a dog bed, and a single-person kitchen with no oven. We debated for days over taking a ratty little flat on an estate which stretched the upper limits of our budgets because I was so excited about proximity to a Zone 1 tube in the area I loved. After that, the other two gave up on my dream and started looking elsewhere.
The house we were leaving might have been owned by a crazy person, but it did have a clean and spacious kitchen and bathroom, and it was hard to go from that to the kinds of things that were on offer in any places that were even vaguely accessible. Sinks missing vital components, ovens that rattled ominously when anyone came within seven feet of them, toilets that appeared to contain the aftermath of someone setting fire to a crocodile. My flatmates, who didn't have quite the same dance-focused transport-dependent schedule, started looking further and further out to find nice places within our budget.
Them: What about this place?
Me: It's in Leytonstone.
Them: But it's so cheap!
Me: There's a reason.
The first Leytonstone place was easy enough to reject. It was a long way from the tube station (which was a long way from anything I considered to be civilisation), it was dark and cramped and unpleasant.
Estate agent: [pushes door open] This is the master bedroom.
Me: Huh.
Mostly-naked man on bed: Uh, hi.
Estate agent: Of course there's more light in here when the curtains are open.
Me: I - hmmm.
Mostly-naked man on bed: [nods to me and covers his lower half with duvet] Yep.
Me: OK, I think we're done here.
The second one was harder to turn down. It looked large and well-maintained and pretty in the photos, it was under budget, and it was three minutes' walk from the tube. We sat outside in the heat (hey, remember that? When it was all hot last summer?) waiting for the estate agent.
Me: Guys, I really don't want to live in Leytonstone.
Them: But it's really pretty and cheap!
Me: I go to a lot of late-night social stuff and getting back here would be an absolute nightmare. It would take hours.
Them: Well, we stay in a lot, so we want somewhere nice.
Me: I get that, but literally the one thing I said I wanted was somewhere accessible.
Them: But it's pretty and cheap.
Sitting outside that house, I felt dread build up in my stomach. I can't live here, no way. But if it's as pretty as it looks in the ad, they're going to want to take it, and I'm going to have to say no and then there'll be fights and they'll hate me. We waited, and I panicked, and we waited, and I panicked, and we waited, right up until the estate agent called my flatmate to say that one of their other properties had exploded and they wouldn't be coming after all (yes, there are two exploding properties within one year of housing drama. At least this one worked a tiny bit in my favour).
We stopped looking in Leytonstone, but time was running out yet again. We started looking for rooms on our own in case we needed a back-up.
We got another viewing. The house was on the side of London none of us had lived in. It was old fashioned and the landlord was slow-moving to the point that I thought he might have been doing it on purpose as a psychological experiment. But it was a house, and there were two full bathrooms between three of us, and fruit trees in the garden, and it was inconvenient but manageably inconvenient, and we would get a proper tenancy agreement, and we were the first people to see it and the slow-moving landlord liked us.
My flatmate was conflicted. She hated it. She couldn't even pinpoint why, except that it smelled funny. She really didn't want to live there, but we only had a week left until moving day. There was almost no chance we'd find somewhere else where we could all live together. She decided she couldn't take the risk, and we made the snail-landlord an offer. He accepted us.
We packed up for the move across London. Convinced that our ridiculous landlady or her proxy would comb the place looking for reasons to deduct from our deposit, we hired a cleaner then cleaned the whole place again twice after she'd gone. I broke a glass and panicked that she was going to charge £300 for it. We worried about the state of the pans, the bathroom grouting that wasn't done properly in the first place, any scuff or scratch mark we hadn't documented when we first got there. We were convinced we would be living in abject poverty for months while we tried to recover from the loss of our deposits.
The landlady's husband came to see us out. He seemed normal. He had completely normal conversations with both of my flatmates, but treated me like a slightly dangerous dog, trying not to speak to me or make eye contact or attract my attention with sudden movements. I wonder what she'd told him about me. Maybe as far as he was concerned, I was some kind of ghost that had acquired the ability to communicate with the living and get a bank account. We loaded up our van, said goodbye to the house and the street and the whole of South London and left forever. To my utter astonishment, my full deposit landed in my account several days later.
Me: She's given it all back!
Flatmate: I know. Don't ask any questions.
Me: But we broke a glass! And we replaced the mattress protectors with Primark ones.
Flatmate: Shut up! She might be listening in somehow.
Me: How?
Flatmate: Maybe she bugged us.
Me: She certainly bugged us.
Flatmate: Shut up.
We settled in to our new home (after cleaning the smell out), and eight months later we're still here. We've not heard anything from our landlord since last year, and are working under the theory that he's dead but because he moves so slowly nobody's noticed yet. It's OK here. I miss convenient bus routes and wooden floors and the ridiculous fuck-off living room in the mansion and kitchens with space in them, but it's OK. My room is my room. I've been able to settle in and spread out and accumulate crap. It might be a long journey home, but I know where I'm going. The landlord might be slow, but the novelty of having a landlord stay the hell out of the house still hasn't worn off. I'm comfortable, and comfort is something that's been missing for a long time.
So concludes my adventures in housing. It's been interesting, going back over it all and writing it down and remembering everything. I almost enjoyed it. But that's enough. It's done now, right? This is all the housing upheaval I've been budgeted for this lifetime, and I'm looking ahead to decades of really, really boring house moves and living situations. I'm sure that's it.
The End. (Please.)
We started searching for our next home. I had dreams of moving back to the area where this story started, the area I'd lived in comfortably for two years, that had everything I needed and felt like home to me. At first my flatmates were willing to indulge me, and we looked at a few things around there. We got unreasonably attached to a flat we called Robert which they wouldn't let to us. We tried to make an offer on a place in a beautiful building with a lovely kitchen, but the lettings agent repeatedly refused to call us back after we expressed interest and let it to someone else instead. We saw a maisonette with an enormous roof terrace and beautiful living room, which came with a slightly terrifying landlord, a third bedroom barely big enough for a dog bed, and a single-person kitchen with no oven. We debated for days over taking a ratty little flat on an estate which stretched the upper limits of our budgets because I was so excited about proximity to a Zone 1 tube in the area I loved. After that, the other two gave up on my dream and started looking elsewhere.
The house we were leaving might have been owned by a crazy person, but it did have a clean and spacious kitchen and bathroom, and it was hard to go from that to the kinds of things that were on offer in any places that were even vaguely accessible. Sinks missing vital components, ovens that rattled ominously when anyone came within seven feet of them, toilets that appeared to contain the aftermath of someone setting fire to a crocodile. My flatmates, who didn't have quite the same dance-focused transport-dependent schedule, started looking further and further out to find nice places within our budget.
Them: What about this place?
Me: It's in Leytonstone.
Them: But it's so cheap!
Me: There's a reason.
The first Leytonstone place was easy enough to reject. It was a long way from the tube station (which was a long way from anything I considered to be civilisation), it was dark and cramped and unpleasant.
Estate agent: [pushes door open] This is the master bedroom.
Me: Huh.
Mostly-naked man on bed: Uh, hi.
Estate agent: Of course there's more light in here when the curtains are open.
Me: I - hmmm.
Mostly-naked man on bed: [nods to me and covers his lower half with duvet] Yep.
Me: OK, I think we're done here.
The second one was harder to turn down. It looked large and well-maintained and pretty in the photos, it was under budget, and it was three minutes' walk from the tube. We sat outside in the heat (hey, remember that? When it was all hot last summer?) waiting for the estate agent.
Me: Guys, I really don't want to live in Leytonstone.
Them: But it's really pretty and cheap!
Me: I go to a lot of late-night social stuff and getting back here would be an absolute nightmare. It would take hours.
Them: Well, we stay in a lot, so we want somewhere nice.
Me: I get that, but literally the one thing I said I wanted was somewhere accessible.
Them: But it's pretty and cheap.
Sitting outside that house, I felt dread build up in my stomach. I can't live here, no way. But if it's as pretty as it looks in the ad, they're going to want to take it, and I'm going to have to say no and then there'll be fights and they'll hate me. We waited, and I panicked, and we waited, and I panicked, and we waited, right up until the estate agent called my flatmate to say that one of their other properties had exploded and they wouldn't be coming after all (yes, there are two exploding properties within one year of housing drama. At least this one worked a tiny bit in my favour).
We stopped looking in Leytonstone, but time was running out yet again. We started looking for rooms on our own in case we needed a back-up.
We got another viewing. The house was on the side of London none of us had lived in. It was old fashioned and the landlord was slow-moving to the point that I thought he might have been doing it on purpose as a psychological experiment. But it was a house, and there were two full bathrooms between three of us, and fruit trees in the garden, and it was inconvenient but manageably inconvenient, and we would get a proper tenancy agreement, and we were the first people to see it and the slow-moving landlord liked us.
My flatmate was conflicted. She hated it. She couldn't even pinpoint why, except that it smelled funny. She really didn't want to live there, but we only had a week left until moving day. There was almost no chance we'd find somewhere else where we could all live together. She decided she couldn't take the risk, and we made the snail-landlord an offer. He accepted us.
We packed up for the move across London. Convinced that our ridiculous landlady or her proxy would comb the place looking for reasons to deduct from our deposit, we hired a cleaner then cleaned the whole place again twice after she'd gone. I broke a glass and panicked that she was going to charge £300 for it. We worried about the state of the pans, the bathroom grouting that wasn't done properly in the first place, any scuff or scratch mark we hadn't documented when we first got there. We were convinced we would be living in abject poverty for months while we tried to recover from the loss of our deposits.
The landlady's husband came to see us out. He seemed normal. He had completely normal conversations with both of my flatmates, but treated me like a slightly dangerous dog, trying not to speak to me or make eye contact or attract my attention with sudden movements. I wonder what she'd told him about me. Maybe as far as he was concerned, I was some kind of ghost that had acquired the ability to communicate with the living and get a bank account. We loaded up our van, said goodbye to the house and the street and the whole of South London and left forever. To my utter astonishment, my full deposit landed in my account several days later.
Me: She's given it all back!
Flatmate: I know. Don't ask any questions.
Me: But we broke a glass! And we replaced the mattress protectors with Primark ones.
Flatmate: Shut up! She might be listening in somehow.
Me: How?
Flatmate: Maybe she bugged us.
Me: She certainly bugged us.
Flatmate: Shut up.
We settled in to our new home (after cleaning the smell out), and eight months later we're still here. We've not heard anything from our landlord since last year, and are working under the theory that he's dead but because he moves so slowly nobody's noticed yet. It's OK here. I miss convenient bus routes and wooden floors and the ridiculous fuck-off living room in the mansion and kitchens with space in them, but it's OK. My room is my room. I've been able to settle in and spread out and accumulate crap. It might be a long journey home, but I know where I'm going. The landlord might be slow, but the novelty of having a landlord stay the hell out of the house still hasn't worn off. I'm comfortable, and comfort is something that's been missing for a long time.
So concludes my adventures in housing. It's been interesting, going back over it all and writing it down and remembering everything. I almost enjoyed it. But that's enough. It's done now, right? This is all the housing upheaval I've been budgeted for this lifetime, and I'm looking ahead to decades of really, really boring house moves and living situations. I'm sure that's it.
The End. (Please.)
Wednesday, 25 February 2015
adventures in housing, part seven
[Previously in this series: some happy times and some more FOR FUCK'S SAKE]
Our time at the mansion was coming to an end. We were packing up (one suitcase, one laptop bag, some bedding, and an enormous pile of stuff from the emporium of "I Don't Want This, Do You Want This? Because You Can Have It If You Want It"), working out our new commutes, wondering if we should have a housewarming once we got there. Then a couple of days before we were due to move, the landlady emailed to tell us she would bring our contracts round on moving-in day, and we should give her our first month's rent in cash.
I was done ignoring the alarm bell, so I phoned Shelter for advice.
Her: That sounds weird. If you decide to do that, make sure there's a proper audit trail in case of any problems. Is she a live-in landlady?
Me: The ad says live-out, but she says she might need to stay occasionally.
Her: And she has a room for that?
Me: Yes. We can't go in it.
Her: That sounds weird and I'm a bit worried for you.
I asked the landlady to confirm that we would have a proper tenancy agreement. Landlady confirmed that actually, we would have the exact same agreement as I had with Wine-Diluting Shut-In, meaning that we had no rights to a confirmed length of tenancy and no real rights to get our deposits back either. She offered to return our holding deposits if we wanted to back out, but by that point it was the day before we had to move out. She knew we weren't backing out of anything.
We signed the shitty agreement and moved in. And in a way, it was alright. It wasn't too far to the station and my commute was less crowded and horrible. The night bus stopped more or less outside the front door. There was a convenient supermarket and 24-hour garage. My room really was very nice, and the kitchen and bathroom were both new. Even though our living room was a dingy box because the actual living room had been converted into an inaccessible landlady bedroom, even though our neighbours weren't the shiniest of characters, even though the music from next door was really, seriously annoying, even though I once got propositioned by an employee in the 24-hour Tesco at 7am on my way back from a house party, it wasn't that bad.
But she was.
We'd asked her for notice if she was going to be in the house, so she would text one of us five minutes before she walked through the door. If that person wasn't home or available to let the others know, too bad. We started freaking out every time we heard the door open. Somewhere in my Facebook message inbox is six months' worth of "was that you just coming in? Please say it was you. I can't cope with an invasion tonight." She'd be sweet and polite and not quite all there right up until we asked for something or implied that something was wrong, whereupon she would switch right into super-formal mode and tell us we weren't cleaning adequately or some such.
Before we moved in, we agreed that we'd need a strategy for dealing with her as a house. One would be the nice, normal one, one would be a bit of a ditz who could do things like check she'd given us keys that actually worked, and one (i.e. me) would be the pedantic, legalistic bitch who used long words and demanded everything in writing. This worked reasonably well until she thought she'd found the weak spot.
On the Wednesday before Easter, my flatmate said: "The landlady is coming to stay tonight. I'm going to ask her if she's staying tomorrow as well."
On Easter Saturday, quite late in the evening, I was about to go out when my phone rang.
Flatmate: Jen, I think I'm being evicted.
Me: What?
Flatmate: She's sent me an email headed "Notice to Terminate".
Me: Why?
Flatmate: She says I'm invading her privacy by asking when she's going to be in the house.
Me: What?
Flatmate: What am I going to do? I've got nowhere to go.
Me: It's OK we will sort something out you won't be homeless WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS WOMAN
We got some advice, looked at our options, and decided the best thing to do would be to try and talk her out of evicting our flatmate. A few days later the eviction was rescinded, with the landlady expressing surprise that the other two of us had found out this was happening.
We spent the next three months on eggshells. We didn't know what might set her off. We complained bitterly about her, getting up every five minutes or so to make sure she hadn't snuck into the house when we weren't paying attention. We wondered what on earth would make someone so paranoid about privacy. We may or may not have come up with several increasingly wild theories as to what she might be up to, which may or may not have been aided by several hours of Google stalking through page after page of increasingly irrelevant stuff. We may or may not have given up when we arrived at "trusteeship of a slightly rubbish-looking golf club".
We'd agreed to stay for six months. It wasn't written down anywhere, but from the point of view of eventually getting our deposits back, none of us could afford to piss her off. We accepted her five-minutes-ahead notifications, gritted our teeth and dealt with her announcements that her small children and elderly father would be staying in the house too, listened with strained ears for any sign of someone approaching the door, and spoke in hushed voices even when we were sure she wasn't around. We marked our moving-out date in our calendars and prepared ourselves to tough it out.
She tried a few times to plant discord among us. I was generally out at my dance classes when she dropped by unexpectedly, and after a few months had gone by in which she'd not seen me at all she began to remark to my flatmates that wasn't it a bit weird that I was never there? Wasn't it strange? They'd been living together for over a year, after all, and I was a relative newbie of only a few months - they didn't really know me at all, did they? What did they think I could be up to? This did not have the desired effect, partly because my flatmates saw me all the time and partly because out of me and the landlady, only one of us was holding onto large amounts of their money and sending them random eviction notices for no reason.
Eventually, the time to hand in our notice drew near.
"It'll have to come from you, Jen. She's scared of you."
"EXCELLENT."
Mindful of our deposits, we composed the most hilarious bullshit notice email. We told her how much we'd loved living there, how devastated we were to be handing in notice, but that our commutes were just too long and difficult and for the sake of our collective mental health, we would need to move somewhere more accessible. We wished her all the best, told her we would be taking away many happy memories, and wished similar happy times for her next tenants. We signed it "many thanks and kind regards", which is a level of contempt I didn't know I could reach. The whole thing was probably the greatest work of sarcasm I've ever constructed.
To our surprise, she responded like a reasonable human being. I can't quite tell from her reply whether the bullshit went straight over her head or whether she got it immediately and responded in kind, but the important thing was that we wouldn't have to fight her. Actually, that was the second most important thing. The most important thing was that she would be out of the country on our leaving date, meaning that her husband would come to do the inventory and I would be able to walk away from the tenancy with the triumph or never having to see or speak to that woman once in the whole six months we'd been there. Sometimes it pays to be the pedantic bitch.
[Next time: moving out, Rad Rod and the thrilling conclusion... for now]
Our time at the mansion was coming to an end. We were packing up (one suitcase, one laptop bag, some bedding, and an enormous pile of stuff from the emporium of "I Don't Want This, Do You Want This? Because You Can Have It If You Want It"), working out our new commutes, wondering if we should have a housewarming once we got there. Then a couple of days before we were due to move, the landlady emailed to tell us she would bring our contracts round on moving-in day, and we should give her our first month's rent in cash.
I was done ignoring the alarm bell, so I phoned Shelter for advice.
Her: That sounds weird. If you decide to do that, make sure there's a proper audit trail in case of any problems. Is she a live-in landlady?
Me: The ad says live-out, but she says she might need to stay occasionally.
Her: And she has a room for that?
Me: Yes. We can't go in it.
Her: That sounds weird and I'm a bit worried for you.
I asked the landlady to confirm that we would have a proper tenancy agreement. Landlady confirmed that actually, we would have the exact same agreement as I had with Wine-Diluting Shut-In, meaning that we had no rights to a confirmed length of tenancy and no real rights to get our deposits back either. She offered to return our holding deposits if we wanted to back out, but by that point it was the day before we had to move out. She knew we weren't backing out of anything.
We signed the shitty agreement and moved in. And in a way, it was alright. It wasn't too far to the station and my commute was less crowded and horrible. The night bus stopped more or less outside the front door. There was a convenient supermarket and 24-hour garage. My room really was very nice, and the kitchen and bathroom were both new. Even though our living room was a dingy box because the actual living room had been converted into an inaccessible landlady bedroom, even though our neighbours weren't the shiniest of characters, even though the music from next door was really, seriously annoying, even though I once got propositioned by an employee in the 24-hour Tesco at 7am on my way back from a house party, it wasn't that bad.
But she was.
We'd asked her for notice if she was going to be in the house, so she would text one of us five minutes before she walked through the door. If that person wasn't home or available to let the others know, too bad. We started freaking out every time we heard the door open. Somewhere in my Facebook message inbox is six months' worth of "was that you just coming in? Please say it was you. I can't cope with an invasion tonight." She'd be sweet and polite and not quite all there right up until we asked for something or implied that something was wrong, whereupon she would switch right into super-formal mode and tell us we weren't cleaning adequately or some such.
Before we moved in, we agreed that we'd need a strategy for dealing with her as a house. One would be the nice, normal one, one would be a bit of a ditz who could do things like check she'd given us keys that actually worked, and one (i.e. me) would be the pedantic, legalistic bitch who used long words and demanded everything in writing. This worked reasonably well until she thought she'd found the weak spot.
On the Wednesday before Easter, my flatmate said: "The landlady is coming to stay tonight. I'm going to ask her if she's staying tomorrow as well."
On Easter Saturday, quite late in the evening, I was about to go out when my phone rang.
Flatmate: Jen, I think I'm being evicted.
Me: What?
Flatmate: She's sent me an email headed "Notice to Terminate".
Me: Why?
Flatmate: She says I'm invading her privacy by asking when she's going to be in the house.
Me: What?
Flatmate: What am I going to do? I've got nowhere to go.
Me: It's OK we will sort something out you won't be homeless WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS WOMAN
We got some advice, looked at our options, and decided the best thing to do would be to try and talk her out of evicting our flatmate. A few days later the eviction was rescinded, with the landlady expressing surprise that the other two of us had found out this was happening.
We spent the next three months on eggshells. We didn't know what might set her off. We complained bitterly about her, getting up every five minutes or so to make sure she hadn't snuck into the house when we weren't paying attention. We wondered what on earth would make someone so paranoid about privacy. We may or may not have come up with several increasingly wild theories as to what she might be up to, which may or may not have been aided by several hours of Google stalking through page after page of increasingly irrelevant stuff. We may or may not have given up when we arrived at "trusteeship of a slightly rubbish-looking golf club".
We'd agreed to stay for six months. It wasn't written down anywhere, but from the point of view of eventually getting our deposits back, none of us could afford to piss her off. We accepted her five-minutes-ahead notifications, gritted our teeth and dealt with her announcements that her small children and elderly father would be staying in the house too, listened with strained ears for any sign of someone approaching the door, and spoke in hushed voices even when we were sure she wasn't around. We marked our moving-out date in our calendars and prepared ourselves to tough it out.
She tried a few times to plant discord among us. I was generally out at my dance classes when she dropped by unexpectedly, and after a few months had gone by in which she'd not seen me at all she began to remark to my flatmates that wasn't it a bit weird that I was never there? Wasn't it strange? They'd been living together for over a year, after all, and I was a relative newbie of only a few months - they didn't really know me at all, did they? What did they think I could be up to? This did not have the desired effect, partly because my flatmates saw me all the time and partly because out of me and the landlady, only one of us was holding onto large amounts of their money and sending them random eviction notices for no reason.
Eventually, the time to hand in our notice drew near.
"It'll have to come from you, Jen. She's scared of you."
"EXCELLENT."
Mindful of our deposits, we composed the most hilarious bullshit notice email. We told her how much we'd loved living there, how devastated we were to be handing in notice, but that our commutes were just too long and difficult and for the sake of our collective mental health, we would need to move somewhere more accessible. We wished her all the best, told her we would be taking away many happy memories, and wished similar happy times for her next tenants. We signed it "many thanks and kind regards", which is a level of contempt I didn't know I could reach. The whole thing was probably the greatest work of sarcasm I've ever constructed.
To our surprise, she responded like a reasonable human being. I can't quite tell from her reply whether the bullshit went straight over her head or whether she got it immediately and responded in kind, but the important thing was that we wouldn't have to fight her. Actually, that was the second most important thing. The most important thing was that she would be out of the country on our leaving date, meaning that her husband would come to do the inventory and I would be able to walk away from the tenancy with the triumph or never having to see or speak to that woman once in the whole six months we'd been there. Sometimes it pays to be the pedantic bitch.
[Next time: moving out, Rad Rod and the thrilling conclusion... for now]
Wednesday, 14 January 2015
adventures in housing, part six
[Previously in this series: Southend and an honest-to-God house]
Before I carry on, I feel I ought to state that the past five parts of this saga only covered six months of my life. Six months. No wonder I was cranky.
I moved into the mansion in early December. I put my own sheets on the bed, the couple of books I'd been carrying around on the shelf, my clothes on actual hangers in an actual wardrobe. I did the happiest food shop I've ever done in my life, whizzing down the aisles of the supermarket with a huge grin on my face, picking up anything that even slightly took my fancy, loving the Christmas music more than I had done in years. I had a shelf in the fridge, my own space in the cupboards. It was one of the happiest days I can remember.
The journey into work wasn't the easiest, but beyond that the place was a dream. We cooked things. We did clothes swaps. My friend and I went to dances together thrilled to have someone to come back with on the night bus. I bonded with one of my new flatmates over the Christmas decorations. We all went for drinks and did pub quizzes together. We had a tiny Judeo-pagan Christmas party. When I went home for the holidays, my friend sent me a message telling me she was really glad I'd moved in. The universe was finally being nice to me.
Of course it didn't last. How could it?
I'd been told before moving in that the landlady was trying to sell the house. I'd also been told that it had been on the market for quite some time and it wasn't anything to worry too much about. So I didn't really think about it at all. Maybe it would get sold in six months, a year, but I didn't need to worry about that now.
A month after I moved in, the landlady contacted us to tell us she was going to "pop by for a chat." My flatmate saw her later that same day, sent round a message headed "IMPORTANT" and gathered us all in the kitchen to tell us the place had been sold.
It's probably OK, she said. The landlady is nice and wants to make sure we'll be OK. She's chosen a buyer who's willing to take on the existing tenants, so we probably won't have to go anywhere. She'll send us notice to terminate our current contracts, and the new landlord will draw up fresh ones for us. I nodded and shushed the alarm bell in my head because it was fine, it had to be fine, there's no way I'd have to leave this place already because that would just be ridiculous.
We got an email from the woman who'd bought the flat. She told us that yay, she would take us on as tenants at the same rent we were currently paying. Only now it wouldn't include bills, thus pushing the overall cost well out of everyone's budget. We explained this to her, got a snotty email including the phrase "substantially below market value", and gave up.
Me, to everyone I knew: I have to move.
Everyone: What?!
Me: Flat's been sold.
Everyone: For FUCK'S sake!
Me: Yeah.
We decided to try looking for somewhere together, third flatmate having revised her instant hatred of me, as well as separately. We all independently went to view a place down the road, which had several spare rooms as well as a handy built-in Sexual Assault Tunnel with no lights in it, a kitchen that stank, one room we couldn't get into because there was a broken bed and a stack of wallpaper strippings in the way, and a room which contained nothing except a huge pile of cigarette butts.
"So... people smoke in here, then."
"Oh, no," said the twelve-year-old public schoolboy playing at being a landlord. "There's no smoking in this house."
The twelve-year-old public schoolboy upset my friend somewhat. "Who the fuck rents out a cesspit like that? Complete contempt for his tenants, that's what that is. Oh, you don't live here? With the scum? Live in Richmond, do you? See, this is what was wrong with Margaret Thatcher."
Shortly afterwards my friend found somewhere with one free room and decided to take it, leaving the other three of us to look together. We found a house in an area we weren't sure about with a landlady we weren't sure about, but it was clean and had a big kitchen and cost exactly what we were each paying currently. Also I was paying the most and would have the big pretty room with the sofa in it. We had a week until our notice ran out, and none of us wanted to be living in uncertainty anymore. We told the landlady we'd take it.
[in part seven: new house and more evidence of my truly terrible landlord karma]
Before I carry on, I feel I ought to state that the past five parts of this saga only covered six months of my life. Six months. No wonder I was cranky.
I moved into the mansion in early December. I put my own sheets on the bed, the couple of books I'd been carrying around on the shelf, my clothes on actual hangers in an actual wardrobe. I did the happiest food shop I've ever done in my life, whizzing down the aisles of the supermarket with a huge grin on my face, picking up anything that even slightly took my fancy, loving the Christmas music more than I had done in years. I had a shelf in the fridge, my own space in the cupboards. It was one of the happiest days I can remember.
The journey into work wasn't the easiest, but beyond that the place was a dream. We cooked things. We did clothes swaps. My friend and I went to dances together thrilled to have someone to come back with on the night bus. I bonded with one of my new flatmates over the Christmas decorations. We all went for drinks and did pub quizzes together. We had a tiny Judeo-pagan Christmas party. When I went home for the holidays, my friend sent me a message telling me she was really glad I'd moved in. The universe was finally being nice to me.
Of course it didn't last. How could it?
I'd been told before moving in that the landlady was trying to sell the house. I'd also been told that it had been on the market for quite some time and it wasn't anything to worry too much about. So I didn't really think about it at all. Maybe it would get sold in six months, a year, but I didn't need to worry about that now.
A month after I moved in, the landlady contacted us to tell us she was going to "pop by for a chat." My flatmate saw her later that same day, sent round a message headed "IMPORTANT" and gathered us all in the kitchen to tell us the place had been sold.
It's probably OK, she said. The landlady is nice and wants to make sure we'll be OK. She's chosen a buyer who's willing to take on the existing tenants, so we probably won't have to go anywhere. She'll send us notice to terminate our current contracts, and the new landlord will draw up fresh ones for us. I nodded and shushed the alarm bell in my head because it was fine, it had to be fine, there's no way I'd have to leave this place already because that would just be ridiculous.
We got an email from the woman who'd bought the flat. She told us that yay, she would take us on as tenants at the same rent we were currently paying. Only now it wouldn't include bills, thus pushing the overall cost well out of everyone's budget. We explained this to her, got a snotty email including the phrase "substantially below market value", and gave up.
Me, to everyone I knew: I have to move.
Everyone: What?!
Me: Flat's been sold.
Everyone: For FUCK'S sake!
Me: Yeah.
We decided to try looking for somewhere together, third flatmate having revised her instant hatred of me, as well as separately. We all independently went to view a place down the road, which had several spare rooms as well as a handy built-in Sexual Assault Tunnel with no lights in it, a kitchen that stank, one room we couldn't get into because there was a broken bed and a stack of wallpaper strippings in the way, and a room which contained nothing except a huge pile of cigarette butts.
"So... people smoke in here, then."
"Oh, no," said the twelve-year-old public schoolboy playing at being a landlord. "There's no smoking in this house."
The twelve-year-old public schoolboy upset my friend somewhat. "Who the fuck rents out a cesspit like that? Complete contempt for his tenants, that's what that is. Oh, you don't live here? With the scum? Live in Richmond, do you? See, this is what was wrong with Margaret Thatcher."
Shortly afterwards my friend found somewhere with one free room and decided to take it, leaving the other three of us to look together. We found a house in an area we weren't sure about with a landlady we weren't sure about, but it was clean and had a big kitchen and cost exactly what we were each paying currently. Also I was paying the most and would have the big pretty room with the sofa in it. We had a week until our notice ran out, and none of us wanted to be living in uncertainty anymore. We told the landlady we'd take it.
[in part seven: new house and more evidence of my truly terrible landlord karma]
Thursday, 8 January 2015
adventures in housing, part five
[Previously in this series: exploding guest houses and a large dose of FOR FUCK'S SAKE]
I ended up spending a month in Southend.
On the one hand, it's a long way away. The walk-bus-train-tube-tube-walk to work every morning was an adjustment I hadn't been quite prepared for, and I am singularly bad at mornings. Most of the time I would wake up about seven minutes before I needed to leave the house and would remain not really woken up for the rest of the day. I have songs on my iPod that take me straight back to sitting on a bus stop in Southend in the November drizzle, hoping that I was awake enough to spot the bus arriving and remember to get off it in the right place (I wasn't always). I did not end that month full of the joys of the suburbs and planning my own future as someone who would happily trade living in London for being able to buy an actual house.
On the other hand, I had a bed for an entire month. I had a room. I had somewhere to leave my things. I could eat actual dinner instead of takeaway or sandwiches in my office. I stopped ping-ponging between hair-trigger irritability, slightly manic hyperactive chirpiness and sullen depression and started acting like a human again. The aches in my back and shoulders faded, and I got some peace inside my own head. I didn't noticeably piss off either of my friends and I left their hospitality with relationships intact.
Living with a married couple was strange. It was like walking back into the same situation I'd just left, only now it wasn't mine. Of course, it wasn't exactly the same situation, since my friends are a functional couple who didn't spend entire evenings sitting on opposite sides of the room attempting to ignore each other, but occasionally I would watch them and remember when this was my life, when I couldn't really separate "my life" from "our life", and I knew his habits and preferences so well that they almost belonged to me. It was a confused nostalgia, a reminder that things weren't always the way they were at the end, and a kind of dreadful, frightened triumph at the thought that I could still be in this place, still living this familiarity that looked so comfortable from the outside but itched like crazy when I was wearing it. I envied the security while wanting to scratch it off my skin at the same time.
My friends are possibly exactly unlike me and my ex, which is why I'm now going to take a moment to say hi, Tom, everything is fine. You are the very best of all the friends and didn't accidentally cause me bad feelings by going about your life in your own house.
I continued to message people advertising rooms. I continued to go to viewings of what turned out to be tiny cesspits hidden away in alleys lined with drug dealers, with front doors that didn't lock and seven people crammed into two bedrooms, that the estate agents and landlords felt perfectly comfortable offering for rent at £160 per week.
"Very reasonable, we think."
"...um."
"The window will be replaced at some point with one that doesn't have a hole in it."
"That's nice."
"And don't worry about Susanne, she's just like that."
"...um."
"You won't find a lot in an area this accessible for this cheap a price."
"That does seem to be true, yes."
"So, are you interested?"
"Let me get back to you."
One morning I got a message from a friend. At the time she was a friend in the way that many people I've met through the dance scene are friends: connected on Facebook, would go and say hi and possibly give them a hug if I saw them, but not close enough to go out for dinner or email stupid videos to each other. She said there was a spare room coming up in her house in a few weeks and would I be interested?
I restrained myself from trying to leap directly through my laptop screen at her and said yes, yes I would be.
After rearranging several times to find some mutual free time in our clashing dance schedules, my friend met me at the closest station and took me to see the flat, which turned out to be a mansion flat with the most ridiculous huge fuck-off living room full of enormous sofas and giant mirrors and Sky TV. And it was cheaper than the drug den box room with Susanne who was just like that, don't worry. I thought perhaps I'd fallen into a mirage. I met the other two flatmates, one of whom was sweet and friendly and the other of whom seemed to dislike me on sight, but I was barely paying attention. Yes, I am going to live here. I am going to live here. I am going to live here.
I sent a "please let me live in your house" message the next day, and both the girls and the landlady accepted me. Shortly thereafter I left Southend, bought myself some bedding and took it and my suitcase to my new home.
[in part six: the mansion and FOR FUCK'S SAKE yet again]
I ended up spending a month in Southend.
On the one hand, it's a long way away. The walk-bus-train-tube-tube-walk to work every morning was an adjustment I hadn't been quite prepared for, and I am singularly bad at mornings. Most of the time I would wake up about seven minutes before I needed to leave the house and would remain not really woken up for the rest of the day. I have songs on my iPod that take me straight back to sitting on a bus stop in Southend in the November drizzle, hoping that I was awake enough to spot the bus arriving and remember to get off it in the right place (I wasn't always). I did not end that month full of the joys of the suburbs and planning my own future as someone who would happily trade living in London for being able to buy an actual house.
On the other hand, I had a bed for an entire month. I had a room. I had somewhere to leave my things. I could eat actual dinner instead of takeaway or sandwiches in my office. I stopped ping-ponging between hair-trigger irritability, slightly manic hyperactive chirpiness and sullen depression and started acting like a human again. The aches in my back and shoulders faded, and I got some peace inside my own head. I didn't noticeably piss off either of my friends and I left their hospitality with relationships intact.
Living with a married couple was strange. It was like walking back into the same situation I'd just left, only now it wasn't mine. Of course, it wasn't exactly the same situation, since my friends are a functional couple who didn't spend entire evenings sitting on opposite sides of the room attempting to ignore each other, but occasionally I would watch them and remember when this was my life, when I couldn't really separate "my life" from "our life", and I knew his habits and preferences so well that they almost belonged to me. It was a confused nostalgia, a reminder that things weren't always the way they were at the end, and a kind of dreadful, frightened triumph at the thought that I could still be in this place, still living this familiarity that looked so comfortable from the outside but itched like crazy when I was wearing it. I envied the security while wanting to scratch it off my skin at the same time.
My friends are possibly exactly unlike me and my ex, which is why I'm now going to take a moment to say hi, Tom, everything is fine. You are the very best of all the friends and didn't accidentally cause me bad feelings by going about your life in your own house.
I continued to message people advertising rooms. I continued to go to viewings of what turned out to be tiny cesspits hidden away in alleys lined with drug dealers, with front doors that didn't lock and seven people crammed into two bedrooms, that the estate agents and landlords felt perfectly comfortable offering for rent at £160 per week.
"Very reasonable, we think."
"...um."
"The window will be replaced at some point with one that doesn't have a hole in it."
"That's nice."
"And don't worry about Susanne, she's just like that."
"...um."
"You won't find a lot in an area this accessible for this cheap a price."
"That does seem to be true, yes."
"So, are you interested?"
"Let me get back to you."
One morning I got a message from a friend. At the time she was a friend in the way that many people I've met through the dance scene are friends: connected on Facebook, would go and say hi and possibly give them a hug if I saw them, but not close enough to go out for dinner or email stupid videos to each other. She said there was a spare room coming up in her house in a few weeks and would I be interested?
I restrained myself from trying to leap directly through my laptop screen at her and said yes, yes I would be.
After rearranging several times to find some mutual free time in our clashing dance schedules, my friend met me at the closest station and took me to see the flat, which turned out to be a mansion flat with the most ridiculous huge fuck-off living room full of enormous sofas and giant mirrors and Sky TV. And it was cheaper than the drug den box room with Susanne who was just like that, don't worry. I thought perhaps I'd fallen into a mirage. I met the other two flatmates, one of whom was sweet and friendly and the other of whom seemed to dislike me on sight, but I was barely paying attention. Yes, I am going to live here. I am going to live here. I am going to live here.
I sent a "please let me live in your house" message the next day, and both the girls and the landlady accepted me. Shortly thereafter I left Southend, bought myself some bedding and took it and my suitcase to my new home.
[in part six: the mansion and FOR FUCK'S SAKE yet again]
Monday, 24 November 2014
adventures in housing, part four
[previously in this series: spurious reasons for keeping a deposit, sleeping on floors and a possible Murder House]
At this point, I'd been homeless for nearly a month and I'd exhausted all my offers of longer-term crash space in London. I would spend one night in a cheap hotel, the next on a friend's sofa, the next on my dance teachers' floor, the next on the floor of someone I barely knew at all. At the weekend I decamped to my little brother's place (oh, the 23-year-old with his mortgage and his spare room and his parking space and his two bathrooms in a two-bedroom flat). I was carrying my massive suitcase into work and back on the tube during rush hour every day. I was gradually taking over more and more cabinets at work to lock away things I wasn't going to need that night and lighten my load slightly. Most mornings I would wake up with no idea where I'd be sleeping that night. Nobody was responding to my messages online. The potential flatmates I'd found disappeared. All my muscles hurt, sleep had long since stopped being restful, and any time someone made a well-meaning joke about my situation I almost burst into tears. I needed a break. Just a few nights where I didn't have to do this.
It occurred to me that I could check into a guest house for a few days. It would be cheaper than a hotel, I could still have a room to myself, and I could get a bit of rest. I found somewhere a little way out and booked myself in for the best part of a week.
I left my brother's place on Sunday afternoon, got the train back to London, went dancing (because priorities) and trekked out to the further reaches of East London to get to the guest house, which was labelled as such by an almost imperceptible sign next to the door. There was no doorbell. I knocked, and a few minutes later a woman answered.
"Hi," I said. "I'm booked in for four nights."
"Oh." She laughed. "I don't work here. I'm staying here. You need to phone this guy's mobile and he comes round and gives you the keys."
"Um. OK then."
"Yeah, I know. I don't understand it either."
I made the call, and a man showed up with the keys. He showed me where the bathroom was, gave me the WiFi password, and told me I was free to make use of the kitchen. He showed me my room, which was huge and warm and nicely decorated. The internet worked. I dropped everything in a heap on the floor, collapsed into bed and slept for ten hours straight.
The next morning, I was woken up by one of the other residents knocking on my door. "Hi," she said, "I'm really sorry about this, but these guys from the electric company have shown up and I can't hang around to deal with them, I'm really late as it is. Would you mind?"
"Sure," I said and came out of my room.
On the doorstep were two men, one of them holding a search warrant. I ordered the small alarm going off in the back of my mind to shut up, everything was fine, there was no way that everything wasn't fine.
"We have a warrant to come in and have a look at your meter," said the man with the warrant. "We cut the electric to this property due to non-payment of bills, and we have reason to believe that it's now being accessed illegally. This your place?"
"No, I'm just renting a room for a few nights."
He gave me the most sceptical look I've ever seen in my entire life. "Renting a room."
"It's a guest house."
"It's not licensed to be a guest house."
Oh, for fuck's sake. "I didn't check. I just booked a room on the internet."
"Hmmm."
I let the other man, the engineer, into the house to look at the meter, while I stood on the doorstep trying to convince the first guy I wasn't running a shady guest house that was at least three types of illegal and lying brazenly about it to his face. After offers to show multiple forms of ID, booking confirmations, the original online listing, and the contact information of the people who actually were running a shady operation, he decided to trust me. He took the phone numbers I offered and was about to make a call when the engineer came up out of the basement where the meter was. He looked ever so slightly shaken.
"Nothing we can do," he said to the first guy. "I am not touching that."
"What is it?"
"They've rigged it to get free electric like we thought, but the way they've done it... there's exposed wires everywhere, it looks like it might blow up any minute. I'm not touching it, it's not safe." He cast a glance at me.
"She doesn't live here," said the guy with the warrant.
"Get out," said the engineer. "I'm not kidding. That thing's a death trap."
As the engineer pulled out a phone to call his boss, the guy with the warrant took me to one side. "You need somewhere else to go. That guy's a qualified engineer, he's been doing the job ten years. If he won't touch it, it's dangerous. Legitimately this place might explode. You can't stay here, it's not safe."
Oh, for FUCK'S sake. "I don't have anywhere else to go."
"Find somewhere," he snapped.
They left, and I called the owners, wondering what on earth I could have done to invite this level of exhausting over-the-top stupidity into my life. "Hi, I'm renting a room from you at the moment. Um. The electric company showed up and said you're not a licensed guest house and you're accessing your electric illegally and that the house might explode."
"Oh," she said.
"So, obviously, I can't stay here."
"Why not?"
"Because the people who know about electricity said the house was going to explode?"
"Oh, that." She laughed. "No, it's fine."
"No, it's not fine. They said the house was going to explode!"
"No, it's fine."
"Look, I can't stay here. I've been told it's not safe."
"You can leave if you want to, but the place is fine, so you won't get a refund."
"You can't rent an exploding guest house!"
"It's not going to explode. No refunds."
I phoned the electric company.
"Hi. One of your engineers just came by the place I'm staying and said it was about to explode. Can I get that in writing so I can get a refund?"
"Uh... what?"
"Can you provide a written statement saying that this place is about to explode?"
"...I'm going to be honest, I've never been asked this question before. Can I get someone to call you back?"
I phoned my manager.
"Hi. So an engineer just showed up at the place I'm staying and said it might be about to explode and now I need to find somewhere else to live and am possibly having a mild panic attack."
I wish I could have seen his expression. I bet he would have beaten the guy with the warrant for Most Sceptical Look Ever on a Human Face. "So you're not coming in then."
"I would be of very little use, unless you need someone to sit under a desk and cry for five hours."
He sighed. "Fine."
I phoned my mother.
"Hi, Mum. This guest house is illegal and the engineer said it was going to explode and the people won't give me my money back and I don't know what to do."
"WHAT."
"What do I do?"
"YOU GET OUT OF THERE RIGHT NOW WE WILL GET YOU A HOTEL BUT YOU NEED TO LEAVE RIGHT THIS SECOND YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO GET BLOWN UP."
"...okay."
My parents paid for two nights at a hotel, and my aching muscles gave me a talking-to. The chances of finding anywhere to stay in London within the next few days are slim to none, they told me, and you clearly, clearly cannot do this anymore. Stop it. My friends had been offering me their spare room for ages, but I'd kept turning it down because it was in Southend (and honestly, who lives in Southend? I know you're reading this, you're both ridiculous). I didn't want to have to commute into London every day, and I didn't want to be so far away from my social life, but I couldn't prioritise that anymore. The longer commute had to be better than lugging all of my things up and down escalators twice a day. A bed had to be better than a floor. Comfort and security had to be better than blindly hoping for somewhere to stay in zone 2. Staying with people I knew and liked and who probably weren't going to hate me after two weeks had to be worth leaving a few dances earlier than I'd have liked.
I took them up on their offer, and two days later my suitcase and I left London.
[in part five: the joys of commuting and a possible actual place to live]
At this point, I'd been homeless for nearly a month and I'd exhausted all my offers of longer-term crash space in London. I would spend one night in a cheap hotel, the next on a friend's sofa, the next on my dance teachers' floor, the next on the floor of someone I barely knew at all. At the weekend I decamped to my little brother's place (oh, the 23-year-old with his mortgage and his spare room and his parking space and his two bathrooms in a two-bedroom flat). I was carrying my massive suitcase into work and back on the tube during rush hour every day. I was gradually taking over more and more cabinets at work to lock away things I wasn't going to need that night and lighten my load slightly. Most mornings I would wake up with no idea where I'd be sleeping that night. Nobody was responding to my messages online. The potential flatmates I'd found disappeared. All my muscles hurt, sleep had long since stopped being restful, and any time someone made a well-meaning joke about my situation I almost burst into tears. I needed a break. Just a few nights where I didn't have to do this.
It occurred to me that I could check into a guest house for a few days. It would be cheaper than a hotel, I could still have a room to myself, and I could get a bit of rest. I found somewhere a little way out and booked myself in for the best part of a week.
I left my brother's place on Sunday afternoon, got the train back to London, went dancing (because priorities) and trekked out to the further reaches of East London to get to the guest house, which was labelled as such by an almost imperceptible sign next to the door. There was no doorbell. I knocked, and a few minutes later a woman answered.
"Hi," I said. "I'm booked in for four nights."
"Oh." She laughed. "I don't work here. I'm staying here. You need to phone this guy's mobile and he comes round and gives you the keys."
"Um. OK then."
"Yeah, I know. I don't understand it either."
I made the call, and a man showed up with the keys. He showed me where the bathroom was, gave me the WiFi password, and told me I was free to make use of the kitchen. He showed me my room, which was huge and warm and nicely decorated. The internet worked. I dropped everything in a heap on the floor, collapsed into bed and slept for ten hours straight.
The next morning, I was woken up by one of the other residents knocking on my door. "Hi," she said, "I'm really sorry about this, but these guys from the electric company have shown up and I can't hang around to deal with them, I'm really late as it is. Would you mind?"
"Sure," I said and came out of my room.
On the doorstep were two men, one of them holding a search warrant. I ordered the small alarm going off in the back of my mind to shut up, everything was fine, there was no way that everything wasn't fine.
"We have a warrant to come in and have a look at your meter," said the man with the warrant. "We cut the electric to this property due to non-payment of bills, and we have reason to believe that it's now being accessed illegally. This your place?"
"No, I'm just renting a room for a few nights."
He gave me the most sceptical look I've ever seen in my entire life. "Renting a room."
"It's a guest house."
"It's not licensed to be a guest house."
Oh, for fuck's sake. "I didn't check. I just booked a room on the internet."
"Hmmm."
I let the other man, the engineer, into the house to look at the meter, while I stood on the doorstep trying to convince the first guy I wasn't running a shady guest house that was at least three types of illegal and lying brazenly about it to his face. After offers to show multiple forms of ID, booking confirmations, the original online listing, and the contact information of the people who actually were running a shady operation, he decided to trust me. He took the phone numbers I offered and was about to make a call when the engineer came up out of the basement where the meter was. He looked ever so slightly shaken.
"Nothing we can do," he said to the first guy. "I am not touching that."
"What is it?"
"They've rigged it to get free electric like we thought, but the way they've done it... there's exposed wires everywhere, it looks like it might blow up any minute. I'm not touching it, it's not safe." He cast a glance at me.
"She doesn't live here," said the guy with the warrant.
"Get out," said the engineer. "I'm not kidding. That thing's a death trap."
As the engineer pulled out a phone to call his boss, the guy with the warrant took me to one side. "You need somewhere else to go. That guy's a qualified engineer, he's been doing the job ten years. If he won't touch it, it's dangerous. Legitimately this place might explode. You can't stay here, it's not safe."
Oh, for FUCK'S sake. "I don't have anywhere else to go."
"Find somewhere," he snapped.
They left, and I called the owners, wondering what on earth I could have done to invite this level of exhausting over-the-top stupidity into my life. "Hi, I'm renting a room from you at the moment. Um. The electric company showed up and said you're not a licensed guest house and you're accessing your electric illegally and that the house might explode."
"Oh," she said.
"So, obviously, I can't stay here."
"Why not?"
"Because the people who know about electricity said the house was going to explode?"
"Oh, that." She laughed. "No, it's fine."
"No, it's not fine. They said the house was going to explode!"
"No, it's fine."
"Look, I can't stay here. I've been told it's not safe."
"You can leave if you want to, but the place is fine, so you won't get a refund."
"You can't rent an exploding guest house!"
"It's not going to explode. No refunds."
I phoned the electric company.
"Hi. One of your engineers just came by the place I'm staying and said it was about to explode. Can I get that in writing so I can get a refund?"
"Uh... what?"
"Can you provide a written statement saying that this place is about to explode?"
"...I'm going to be honest, I've never been asked this question before. Can I get someone to call you back?"
I phoned my manager.
"Hi. So an engineer just showed up at the place I'm staying and said it might be about to explode and now I need to find somewhere else to live and am possibly having a mild panic attack."
I wish I could have seen his expression. I bet he would have beaten the guy with the warrant for Most Sceptical Look Ever on a Human Face. "So you're not coming in then."
"I would be of very little use, unless you need someone to sit under a desk and cry for five hours."
He sighed. "Fine."
I phoned my mother.
"Hi, Mum. This guest house is illegal and the engineer said it was going to explode and the people won't give me my money back and I don't know what to do."
"WHAT."
"What do I do?"
"YOU GET OUT OF THERE RIGHT NOW WE WILL GET YOU A HOTEL BUT YOU NEED TO LEAVE RIGHT THIS SECOND YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO GET BLOWN UP."
"...okay."
My parents paid for two nights at a hotel, and my aching muscles gave me a talking-to. The chances of finding anywhere to stay in London within the next few days are slim to none, they told me, and you clearly, clearly cannot do this anymore. Stop it. My friends had been offering me their spare room for ages, but I'd kept turning it down because it was in Southend (and honestly, who lives in Southend? I know you're reading this, you're both ridiculous). I didn't want to have to commute into London every day, and I didn't want to be so far away from my social life, but I couldn't prioritise that anymore. The longer commute had to be better than lugging all of my things up and down escalators twice a day. A bed had to be better than a floor. Comfort and security had to be better than blindly hoping for somewhere to stay in zone 2. Staying with people I knew and liked and who probably weren't going to hate me after two weeks had to be worth leaving a few dances earlier than I'd have liked.
I took them up on their offer, and two days later my suitcase and I left London.
[in part five: the joys of commuting and a possible actual place to live]
Monday, 20 October 2014
adventures in housing, part three
[Previously in the saga: unhinged landlord explains things, more Monologuing Through Doors, and finally moving out]
So then I was homeless.
After that one moment of doubt in the hotel on the first night, I never for a moment questioned whether I was right to move out of the House of Diluted Wine (there is a house in Pimlico, they caaaalll Diluted Wine, and it's been the ruin of many a young life, but God, it won't be mine...) (stupid rewritten song lyrics for every occasion, thank you very much). I didn't have a home, but I'd take that over a home with That Guy in it.
For the first few weeks, things weren't so bad. I stayed in some dancer friends' spare room for a week, then on another dancer friend's floor for two. It wasn't even close to ideal, but I knew where I'd be sleeping every night. I mostly coasted through on a sense of sheer amazement that I had people who'd take me in. Six months ago I'd had almost no support system in London at all, and now I was being offered spare beds and sofas and floors, sent likely-looking roommate ads that people had seen, and contacted by friends of friends who had been told that I would be an excellent person to fill their spare room. I'm not sure I'd have exchanged all that for secure housing.
There was still unfinished business with my newly ex-landlord. I'd sent him a message asking him to get in touch if there were any issues with the return of my deposit, and he had told me (in possibly the world's longest ever text message) that yes, there were issues with the return of my deposit, the issue being that he thought he should get to keep it. He gave me three reasons:
One, that I had given my month's notice at a time he found extremely inconvenient;
Two, that I hadn't bought enough loo roll and cleaning supplies;
Three, that I hadn't been cleaning to his satisfaction whilst I'd been living there.
These hardships, he thought, entitled him to keep nearly a thousand pounds of my money. I rather disagreed. I told him that none of those things were things you get compensation for, especially when you haven't at any point said, "hey, housemate, you're not buying enough loo roll", and that if these were his only issues then I expected all of my money back. We had a tedious and stressful back-and-forth where we fought, then he would say something nasty, then I would stop responding, then he would apologise. Eventually he suggested we "work something out that's fair to both of us", and I asked him to break down exactly what material losses he felt he had suffered and how much of my deposit he was proposing to keep for each of said losses, thinking that maybe it would be easier to negotiate with him if I could just get him to write the words "compensation for inconvenient timing of notice: £500" and read it back to himself a couple of times.
He didn't. A few days later, via email that radiated martyrdom, he told me that he'd returned my deposit in full, because it just seemed like the easiest thing to do. I gave him a forwarding address (my parents') for any mail, and never heard from him again.
It felt like one of my greatest triumphs. I'd got my money back, without having to involve any professionals, and I didn't have to deal with That Guy anymore. But I still had nowhere to live. I was running out of options that would give me a place to sleep for more than two nights and dancer goodwill was drying up rapidly.
I redoubled my efforts to find somewhere and went to a speed flatmating event. Everyone with a room going wanted over £1000 a month for it, but I found a couple of potential flatmates to team up with. We viewed one place, which was in Clapham but also somehow in the middle of a wood, had a pitch-dark stairwell, contained only severely water-damaged furnishings, but was, we were assured, completely safe because "anybody looking to start trouble usually goes to one of the other flats."
I checked into a hotel.
[in part four: exhaustion and the exploding guest house]
So then I was homeless.
After that one moment of doubt in the hotel on the first night, I never for a moment questioned whether I was right to move out of the House of Diluted Wine (there is a house in Pimlico, they caaaalll Diluted Wine, and it's been the ruin of many a young life, but God, it won't be mine...) (stupid rewritten song lyrics for every occasion, thank you very much). I didn't have a home, but I'd take that over a home with That Guy in it.
For the first few weeks, things weren't so bad. I stayed in some dancer friends' spare room for a week, then on another dancer friend's floor for two. It wasn't even close to ideal, but I knew where I'd be sleeping every night. I mostly coasted through on a sense of sheer amazement that I had people who'd take me in. Six months ago I'd had almost no support system in London at all, and now I was being offered spare beds and sofas and floors, sent likely-looking roommate ads that people had seen, and contacted by friends of friends who had been told that I would be an excellent person to fill their spare room. I'm not sure I'd have exchanged all that for secure housing.
There was still unfinished business with my newly ex-landlord. I'd sent him a message asking him to get in touch if there were any issues with the return of my deposit, and he had told me (in possibly the world's longest ever text message) that yes, there were issues with the return of my deposit, the issue being that he thought he should get to keep it. He gave me three reasons:
One, that I had given my month's notice at a time he found extremely inconvenient;
Two, that I hadn't bought enough loo roll and cleaning supplies;
Three, that I hadn't been cleaning to his satisfaction whilst I'd been living there.
These hardships, he thought, entitled him to keep nearly a thousand pounds of my money. I rather disagreed. I told him that none of those things were things you get compensation for, especially when you haven't at any point said, "hey, housemate, you're not buying enough loo roll", and that if these were his only issues then I expected all of my money back. We had a tedious and stressful back-and-forth where we fought, then he would say something nasty, then I would stop responding, then he would apologise. Eventually he suggested we "work something out that's fair to both of us", and I asked him to break down exactly what material losses he felt he had suffered and how much of my deposit he was proposing to keep for each of said losses, thinking that maybe it would be easier to negotiate with him if I could just get him to write the words "compensation for inconvenient timing of notice: £500" and read it back to himself a couple of times.
He didn't. A few days later, via email that radiated martyrdom, he told me that he'd returned my deposit in full, because it just seemed like the easiest thing to do. I gave him a forwarding address (my parents') for any mail, and never heard from him again.
It felt like one of my greatest triumphs. I'd got my money back, without having to involve any professionals, and I didn't have to deal with That Guy anymore. But I still had nowhere to live. I was running out of options that would give me a place to sleep for more than two nights and dancer goodwill was drying up rapidly.
I redoubled my efforts to find somewhere and went to a speed flatmating event. Everyone with a room going wanted over £1000 a month for it, but I found a couple of potential flatmates to team up with. We viewed one place, which was in Clapham but also somehow in the middle of a wood, had a pitch-dark stairwell, contained only severely water-damaged furnishings, but was, we were assured, completely safe because "anybody looking to start trouble usually goes to one of the other flats."
I checked into a hotel.
[in part four: exhaustion and the exploding guest house]
Wednesday, 15 October 2014
adventures in housing, part two
[Previously in this story: a break-up, a new landlord, diluted wine, and the first instance of Monologuing Through Doors]
I knew within the first week of moving to this place that it wasn't a long-term option, but I thought I could probably stick it out for six months. My post-break-up social life had taken off in a way I'd never expected, so I wasn't in very much and he didn't try to communicate with me that often, so I just wouldn't go in the communal areas and we could ignore each other until Christmas. I could handle that, I told myself.
Six weeks later, I told everyone else that I was handing in my notice at the end of the month. I had nowhere else lined up, but I didn't care. I couldn't hang on til Christmas, I couldn't hang on til I had another option secured. I had to get out and get out now, before I woke up to find him in my room, draining my blood into a recycling bin because he was worried about the mess I might make on his carpets if I ever happened to cut myself. I couldn't stand it anymore. I couldn't stand living with someone who panicked so hard whenever anything was out of place. I couldn't stand being spoken to like a fourteen-year-old girl who knew nothing about the world. I couldn't stand having him repeatedly condescend to me about my own areas of expertise. I couldn't stand having any more basic concepts or household items being explained to me in ridiculous detail.
"Now, I'll show you something that's really useful. These are excellent." [produces a roll of paper towels] "And all you do is tear off a sheet, like this - see? - and then you use it to wipe up any stain on the counter top..."
"Yes, I bought those."
Once he heard me singing and thought it was the radio. He argued with me for five straight minutes that I couldn't possibly have been singing, and finally walked away confused as to how he'd been unable to make me understand that I hadn't been making that noise. Every interaction I had with him was stressful, and I came to dread the mere sound of his voice or his footsteps, even his breathing.
When my fainting problem started to get worse, I was off sick and stuck in the flat more often than I'd like. My tolerance for the man reduced to essentially zero, and I tried harder than ever to keep out of his way. Once when I was off sick, he asked me what the matter was. I explained it - I faint, it's a long term problem, it's my blood pressure, it's a pain but there's not much that can be done about it.
He said, "Maybe it's epilepsy."
"No, it's not epilepsy. They know what it is."
"But if it was epilepsy," he said, "that would be great, because then you could be cured. Maybe you should test for epilepsy."
I struggled past the sheer volume of wrong in those two sentences and told him that no, it wasn't epilepsy, I'd seen specialists, the problem had been diagnosed, and I'd appreciate him not trying to diagnose me.
"Oh no," he said, "I'll still keep thinking of things, and coming to you with ideas." He gave me a satisfied smile. "I'm a journalist, you see."
DUDE. YOU FREELANCE FOR CANMAKERS MONTHLY.
"Yeah. Please don't," I said, and scuttled back to my room.
I sat around running through a list of excuses for moving out, trying to find the one that might cause the least amount of drama. I've lost my job. I'm emigrating. I'm dying. I've been accepted onto a reality show. I've converted to a niche religion which requires me to live in a commune. The one thing I really didn't want to have to do was tell him I was leaving because of him and have him explain to me why it was wrong of me to not be compatible with his personality.
In the end, I told him I was leaving because I couldn't afford to live there, and because I was ill. He suggested that both problems could be solved if I just stopped dancing, which is very much the wrong thing to suggest to me. He fought me on my decision to leave for a little while, and eventually I lied, appealed to his perception of me as an irresponsible child, and told him I was moving back home. From then on he stopped trying to convince me to stay, and communicated with me pretty much solely by Monologuing Through Doors from that point on, or by sending me text messages that said nothing except "PLEASE REPLY TO THIS TEXT MESSAGE." He would kick me out of the house whenever he was conducting a viewing no matter how sick I was and complain (Through Doors) about what terrible timing all of this was.
Finding somewhere else to live would be easy enough, I was sure. After all, there were hundreds of places last time. I just needed to find one that was slightly cheaper and preferably not owner-occupier and I'd be set. I fairly quickly discovered the actual truth about the London rental market: at any given time, there are approximately four habitable places for rent, and eighty-six thousand people applying for each one. Almost everything was extortionate, or infectious, or not in London at all. None of the semi-decent places I wrote to replied to me. None of my friends knew of anybody looking for a flatmate. My notice ran out and I still had nowhere to go and no leads at all.
I booked into a hotel for the night after moving day. My father came to help me move out, and to take most of my belongings back home. When he got out of the car I could see he was judging me; he thought I was being melodramatic and that I probably could have stuck this out a bit longer, at least until I'd found somewhere else to live. After all, the guy had seemed perfectly nice before. An hour or so later, Through Doors, he got to experience the landlord I'd been living with.
"Jen. I'm very concerned because I don't know when you'll be moving out."
"We'll be gone by 6.30 at the latest."
"Because I have other things to do and it's very difficult not to know when you'll be going."
"It'll be 6.30 at the latest."
"This whole thing has been very difficult for me, you know, with you giving notice and leaving when I'm having a very stressful time with my work and when I don't know when you're leaving - "
"Yeah. 6.30."
"Because I'm not able to plan the rest of my day, not knowing when you're - "
"I have said THREE. TIMES. We're leaving at 6.30."
"...oh. OK."
My dad, who asssesses everything and everybody on a scale of "not bad, actually" to "not quite the thing, really" looked at the door, then at me, then back at the door. "Yeah, he is a bit of a funny bugger, isn't he?"
As we drove away from the flat for the last time, he said, "Jesus Christ. No wonder his wife left him."
He dropped me off at my hotel with a suitcase and a laptop bag and left with everything else that I owned. I had a bed for the night, but no idea at all where I'd be going tomorrow. Maybe all the sensible people were right, and I should have stuck it out a bit longer. Maybe I should have waited until I knew I had somewhere else to go.
That night as I slept, my brain registered a clattering from the hotel kitchen and I sat bolt upright and shaking in the bed, terrified that I'd just dreamed the part where I moved out and I was actually still living in the flat. I looked down at the hotel bedsheets, at my suitcase on the floor, at my keycard on the table next to me, and fell into the most comfortable sleep I'd had in months.
No, they weren't right.
[in part three: dancers' floors and the fight for the deposit]
I knew within the first week of moving to this place that it wasn't a long-term option, but I thought I could probably stick it out for six months. My post-break-up social life had taken off in a way I'd never expected, so I wasn't in very much and he didn't try to communicate with me that often, so I just wouldn't go in the communal areas and we could ignore each other until Christmas. I could handle that, I told myself.
Six weeks later, I told everyone else that I was handing in my notice at the end of the month. I had nowhere else lined up, but I didn't care. I couldn't hang on til Christmas, I couldn't hang on til I had another option secured. I had to get out and get out now, before I woke up to find him in my room, draining my blood into a recycling bin because he was worried about the mess I might make on his carpets if I ever happened to cut myself. I couldn't stand it anymore. I couldn't stand living with someone who panicked so hard whenever anything was out of place. I couldn't stand being spoken to like a fourteen-year-old girl who knew nothing about the world. I couldn't stand having him repeatedly condescend to me about my own areas of expertise. I couldn't stand having any more basic concepts or household items being explained to me in ridiculous detail.
"Now, I'll show you something that's really useful. These are excellent." [produces a roll of paper towels] "And all you do is tear off a sheet, like this - see? - and then you use it to wipe up any stain on the counter top..."
"Yes, I bought those."
Once he heard me singing and thought it was the radio. He argued with me for five straight minutes that I couldn't possibly have been singing, and finally walked away confused as to how he'd been unable to make me understand that I hadn't been making that noise. Every interaction I had with him was stressful, and I came to dread the mere sound of his voice or his footsteps, even his breathing.
When my fainting problem started to get worse, I was off sick and stuck in the flat more often than I'd like. My tolerance for the man reduced to essentially zero, and I tried harder than ever to keep out of his way. Once when I was off sick, he asked me what the matter was. I explained it - I faint, it's a long term problem, it's my blood pressure, it's a pain but there's not much that can be done about it.
He said, "Maybe it's epilepsy."
"No, it's not epilepsy. They know what it is."
"But if it was epilepsy," he said, "that would be great, because then you could be cured. Maybe you should test for epilepsy."
I struggled past the sheer volume of wrong in those two sentences and told him that no, it wasn't epilepsy, I'd seen specialists, the problem had been diagnosed, and I'd appreciate him not trying to diagnose me.
"Oh no," he said, "I'll still keep thinking of things, and coming to you with ideas." He gave me a satisfied smile. "I'm a journalist, you see."
DUDE. YOU FREELANCE FOR CANMAKERS MONTHLY.
"Yeah. Please don't," I said, and scuttled back to my room.
I sat around running through a list of excuses for moving out, trying to find the one that might cause the least amount of drama. I've lost my job. I'm emigrating. I'm dying. I've been accepted onto a reality show. I've converted to a niche religion which requires me to live in a commune. The one thing I really didn't want to have to do was tell him I was leaving because of him and have him explain to me why it was wrong of me to not be compatible with his personality.
In the end, I told him I was leaving because I couldn't afford to live there, and because I was ill. He suggested that both problems could be solved if I just stopped dancing, which is very much the wrong thing to suggest to me. He fought me on my decision to leave for a little while, and eventually I lied, appealed to his perception of me as an irresponsible child, and told him I was moving back home. From then on he stopped trying to convince me to stay, and communicated with me pretty much solely by Monologuing Through Doors from that point on, or by sending me text messages that said nothing except "PLEASE REPLY TO THIS TEXT MESSAGE." He would kick me out of the house whenever he was conducting a viewing no matter how sick I was and complain (Through Doors) about what terrible timing all of this was.
Finding somewhere else to live would be easy enough, I was sure. After all, there were hundreds of places last time. I just needed to find one that was slightly cheaper and preferably not owner-occupier and I'd be set. I fairly quickly discovered the actual truth about the London rental market: at any given time, there are approximately four habitable places for rent, and eighty-six thousand people applying for each one. Almost everything was extortionate, or infectious, or not in London at all. None of the semi-decent places I wrote to replied to me. None of my friends knew of anybody looking for a flatmate. My notice ran out and I still had nowhere to go and no leads at all.
I booked into a hotel for the night after moving day. My father came to help me move out, and to take most of my belongings back home. When he got out of the car I could see he was judging me; he thought I was being melodramatic and that I probably could have stuck this out a bit longer, at least until I'd found somewhere else to live. After all, the guy had seemed perfectly nice before. An hour or so later, Through Doors, he got to experience the landlord I'd been living with.
"Jen. I'm very concerned because I don't know when you'll be moving out."
"We'll be gone by 6.30 at the latest."
"Because I have other things to do and it's very difficult not to know when you'll be going."
"It'll be 6.30 at the latest."
"This whole thing has been very difficult for me, you know, with you giving notice and leaving when I'm having a very stressful time with my work and when I don't know when you're leaving - "
"Yeah. 6.30."
"Because I'm not able to plan the rest of my day, not knowing when you're - "
"I have said THREE. TIMES. We're leaving at 6.30."
"...oh. OK."
My dad, who asssesses everything and everybody on a scale of "not bad, actually" to "not quite the thing, really" looked at the door, then at me, then back at the door. "Yeah, he is a bit of a funny bugger, isn't he?"
As we drove away from the flat for the last time, he said, "Jesus Christ. No wonder his wife left him."
He dropped me off at my hotel with a suitcase and a laptop bag and left with everything else that I owned. I had a bed for the night, but no idea at all where I'd be going tomorrow. Maybe all the sensible people were right, and I should have stuck it out a bit longer. Maybe I should have waited until I knew I had somewhere else to go.
That night as I slept, my brain registered a clattering from the hotel kitchen and I sat bolt upright and shaking in the bed, terrified that I'd just dreamed the part where I moved out and I was actually still living in the flat. I looked down at the hotel bedsheets, at my suitcase on the floor, at my keycard on the table next to me, and fell into the most comfortable sleep I'd had in months.
No, they weren't right.
[in part three: dancers' floors and the fight for the deposit]
Wednesday, 8 October 2014
adventures in housing, part one
[People have been suggesting for some time that I write about this, because it is completely ridiculous, so I'm having a go. This will be a saga in several parts. Everything in this story is true; names have been omitted for the sake of plausible deniability]
For my first two years in London, I lived with my partner. We had a slightly scruffy flat that I loved fiercely. I loved the chipped tiles on the front step. I loved the awkwardly positioned bathroom. I loved the garden we could never get anything to grow in. I loved the living room that could comfortably sleep my whole family, I loved the loo roll holder that fell off the wall literally any time anybody touched it, I loved the needlessly complicated back door, I loved the kitchen that just felt like mine. I loved the six-minute walk to the tube, I loved the Saturday farmer's market, I loved the cooked breakfasts at the café across the road. I loved our landlords, who rarely bothered us but would sort out any problems as soon as we asked (I miss them. Oh God, I miss them).
But living together got harder. We fought, and I hid, and he would ask me what the problem was and I would tell him and he would try to fix it by explaining to me why that thing wasn't actually a problem, and then we would fight and I would hide some more. When we split up he seemed surprised; like he hadn't seen it coming.
We had a big flat in zone 2 with a cellar and a garden, and I was the well-paid one (which is saying something). There was only one bedroom. Neither of us could keep it. We gave notice to our regretful but understanding landlords, and lived in a state of incredibly confused normalcy for a month, where it took two weeks for us to realise we shouldn't be sharing a bed anymore, because we'd been lying next to each other and not touching for six months already. I set up an ad and started looking for a room.
I was spoilt by that first flat hunt. Everywhere I viewed was at least decent. Everyone I met seemed nice. There must have been an unusual shortage of people looking for rooms that month, because I got dozens of messages every week from people wanting me to come and live with them (spoilers: you will not be reading that again). I found somewhere without too much hassle: not the prettiest but incredibly well-located, with two guys: the landlord, who seemed perfectly nice and easy-going, and another man who was in London maybe three nights a month at most. It seemed fine.
I had my first clue that things weren't fine on my first night there. He suggested we have dinner together, and offered me a glass of wine. When I accepted, he poured half an inch of wine into two tumblers and walked over to the sink.
"Do you want yours diluted?"
"Beg pardon?"
"Do you want your wine diluted?"
"Diluted? ...no thanks."
"Oh. I'm having mine diluted. It's how the Romans drank it."
"No thanks."
So he handed me the glass with half an inch of liquid in it and sipped, slightly defensively, at his strange alcoholic squash drink. I knew that a man who a) dilutes his wine and b) is quite comfortable giving someone half an inch of drink to show his disapproval of her excessive ways was not likely to be a soulmate of mine. (He then told me that he'd "observed that some of our greatest literature... is about change" and I think I deserve some kind of award for not telling him that yes, essentially, that is what a plot is.)
He told me he worked in PR. My next clue that this was not my forever home came during my first week in the flat, when he went out to a launch of some unspecified thing and returned with tales of free alcohol and a really interesting bar. "I've been telling everyone all night, 'My flatmate's a novelist'," he told me, with the air of a fully satisfied man. "I think that bar would be a great place for your book launch. I know exactly how I'm going to organise it."
I am a novelist, in the sense that there are half a dozen or so first draft novels sitting on my hard drive. I am not a novelist in the sense of having published anything, or having anything about to be published, or having an agent, or having sent anything off to anybody ever. I am certainly not a novelist in the sense of appointing a PR guy to do my launch party. It was a small incident, and not really enough to point to any conclusions - either that he liked to bullshit, and might have been doing so during the viewing, or he really thought this was reasonable, and maybe his grip on reality wasn't quite what it could be - and so I let it go. By the time I noticed that he hadn't left the house for anything besides food shopping in the month since that launch, and was possibly both bullshitting and delusional, other signs had begun to pop up all over the place.
It had become clear pretty quickly that he didn't want anyone, least of all me, in his house. He was used to the other guy paying him silly money for a barely-used room, and every time he saw me in the kitchen in the morning it was an unpleasant surprise. He wanted to talk about the things he'd heard on the radio or seen on the internet, but he couldn't bring himself to have a conversation about them. He regarded me as though I was a friend's teenage daughter that he'd taken in as a favour, and couldn't comprehend that I'd have anything to contribute to anything.
Once I came home late, had a pizza, and left the box on the table. The next morning I came into the kitchen to find him staring at it with an expression of sheer despair on his face.
"You left this on the table," he said.
"I came in late. I was going to - "
"You see," he said desperately, "it's best - it really is best - if you fold it up immediately and put it in the recycling. It's best to do it immediately. You see, if you fold it up like this - " as he demonstrated exactly how best to fold up a cardboard box " - and put it away in the recycling immediately, that really is best, if that's OK. Is that OK? Because it really is best - "
"I have to get to work."
We repeated this any time I left evidence of my existence out. If I left a cup in the living room, if there was a fingernail-sized blob of tomato sauce next to the stove, if I had a shower and prioritised drying myself above giving the bathroom an immediate and thorough clean. Because I'd just come out of the shower, was lacking in clothes and therefore keeping my bedroom door shut, he developed one of his weirder habits, Monologuing Through Doors.
"Ah, hah, Jen, you are going to clean the bath, aren't you?"
"Yes, when I'm dry."
"Because it's a mess, you know, it's a mess. I can see - there's shampoo - I can see a blob of shampoo in the bath. And I know - I know it's you, because you're the only one in the house with any hair..."
"I'll clean the bath when I've dried my hair."
"Because I can see it, you know, the shampoo, and I don't mind cleaning the bath, I don't mind it, but I think really if you could clean the bath when you've used it, if we could all clean the bath when we've used it, I think we - we should all clean the bath... there's shampoo."
"When. I'm. Dry."
"Shampoo... in the bath."
"I'm turning my hairdryer on now."
"...shampoo..."
[in part two: "if you had epilepsy, they could cure it", and how to leave your scary shut-in landlord]
For my first two years in London, I lived with my partner. We had a slightly scruffy flat that I loved fiercely. I loved the chipped tiles on the front step. I loved the awkwardly positioned bathroom. I loved the garden we could never get anything to grow in. I loved the living room that could comfortably sleep my whole family, I loved the loo roll holder that fell off the wall literally any time anybody touched it, I loved the needlessly complicated back door, I loved the kitchen that just felt like mine. I loved the six-minute walk to the tube, I loved the Saturday farmer's market, I loved the cooked breakfasts at the café across the road. I loved our landlords, who rarely bothered us but would sort out any problems as soon as we asked (I miss them. Oh God, I miss them).
But living together got harder. We fought, and I hid, and he would ask me what the problem was and I would tell him and he would try to fix it by explaining to me why that thing wasn't actually a problem, and then we would fight and I would hide some more. When we split up he seemed surprised; like he hadn't seen it coming.
We had a big flat in zone 2 with a cellar and a garden, and I was the well-paid one (which is saying something). There was only one bedroom. Neither of us could keep it. We gave notice to our regretful but understanding landlords, and lived in a state of incredibly confused normalcy for a month, where it took two weeks for us to realise we shouldn't be sharing a bed anymore, because we'd been lying next to each other and not touching for six months already. I set up an ad and started looking for a room.
I was spoilt by that first flat hunt. Everywhere I viewed was at least decent. Everyone I met seemed nice. There must have been an unusual shortage of people looking for rooms that month, because I got dozens of messages every week from people wanting me to come and live with them (spoilers: you will not be reading that again). I found somewhere without too much hassle: not the prettiest but incredibly well-located, with two guys: the landlord, who seemed perfectly nice and easy-going, and another man who was in London maybe three nights a month at most. It seemed fine.
I had my first clue that things weren't fine on my first night there. He suggested we have dinner together, and offered me a glass of wine. When I accepted, he poured half an inch of wine into two tumblers and walked over to the sink.
"Do you want yours diluted?"
"Beg pardon?"
"Do you want your wine diluted?"
"Diluted? ...no thanks."
"Oh. I'm having mine diluted. It's how the Romans drank it."
"No thanks."
So he handed me the glass with half an inch of liquid in it and sipped, slightly defensively, at his strange alcoholic squash drink. I knew that a man who a) dilutes his wine and b) is quite comfortable giving someone half an inch of drink to show his disapproval of her excessive ways was not likely to be a soulmate of mine. (He then told me that he'd "observed that some of our greatest literature... is about change" and I think I deserve some kind of award for not telling him that yes, essentially, that is what a plot is.)
He told me he worked in PR. My next clue that this was not my forever home came during my first week in the flat, when he went out to a launch of some unspecified thing and returned with tales of free alcohol and a really interesting bar. "I've been telling everyone all night, 'My flatmate's a novelist'," he told me, with the air of a fully satisfied man. "I think that bar would be a great place for your book launch. I know exactly how I'm going to organise it."
I am a novelist, in the sense that there are half a dozen or so first draft novels sitting on my hard drive. I am not a novelist in the sense of having published anything, or having anything about to be published, or having an agent, or having sent anything off to anybody ever. I am certainly not a novelist in the sense of appointing a PR guy to do my launch party. It was a small incident, and not really enough to point to any conclusions - either that he liked to bullshit, and might have been doing so during the viewing, or he really thought this was reasonable, and maybe his grip on reality wasn't quite what it could be - and so I let it go. By the time I noticed that he hadn't left the house for anything besides food shopping in the month since that launch, and was possibly both bullshitting and delusional, other signs had begun to pop up all over the place.
It had become clear pretty quickly that he didn't want anyone, least of all me, in his house. He was used to the other guy paying him silly money for a barely-used room, and every time he saw me in the kitchen in the morning it was an unpleasant surprise. He wanted to talk about the things he'd heard on the radio or seen on the internet, but he couldn't bring himself to have a conversation about them. He regarded me as though I was a friend's teenage daughter that he'd taken in as a favour, and couldn't comprehend that I'd have anything to contribute to anything.
Once I came home late, had a pizza, and left the box on the table. The next morning I came into the kitchen to find him staring at it with an expression of sheer despair on his face.
"You left this on the table," he said.
"I came in late. I was going to - "
"You see," he said desperately, "it's best - it really is best - if you fold it up immediately and put it in the recycling. It's best to do it immediately. You see, if you fold it up like this - " as he demonstrated exactly how best to fold up a cardboard box " - and put it away in the recycling immediately, that really is best, if that's OK. Is that OK? Because it really is best - "
"I have to get to work."
We repeated this any time I left evidence of my existence out. If I left a cup in the living room, if there was a fingernail-sized blob of tomato sauce next to the stove, if I had a shower and prioritised drying myself above giving the bathroom an immediate and thorough clean. Because I'd just come out of the shower, was lacking in clothes and therefore keeping my bedroom door shut, he developed one of his weirder habits, Monologuing Through Doors.
"Ah, hah, Jen, you are going to clean the bath, aren't you?"
"Yes, when I'm dry."
"Because it's a mess, you know, it's a mess. I can see - there's shampoo - I can see a blob of shampoo in the bath. And I know - I know it's you, because you're the only one in the house with any hair..."
"I'll clean the bath when I've dried my hair."
"Because I can see it, you know, the shampoo, and I don't mind cleaning the bath, I don't mind it, but I think really if you could clean the bath when you've used it, if we could all clean the bath when we've used it, I think we - we should all clean the bath... there's shampoo."
"When. I'm. Dry."
"Shampoo... in the bath."
"I'm turning my hairdryer on now."
"...shampoo..."
[in part two: "if you had epilepsy, they could cure it", and how to leave your scary shut-in landlord]
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