on...Kosovo...and...Liz Truss?

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hi!

Hello! The other week the Guardian published a piece on this writer's worst experiences with housemates, and it was presumably meant to feel quite nightmarish but I thought it all seemed a bit tame. I spent ten years of my life living in various houseshares and that decade got…colourful at times, so I thought I'd shamelessly copy the format of that feature and also share my top 5 worst/funniest/a combination of the above experiences. I should note, before starting, that all of those took place in flats I'd found on Gumtree or similar. No real friendships were harmed in the making of this programme.

(I would also like to note, on top of this, that it was in retrospect insane to just scour the internet to find strangers to live with. It is now wild to me that I did that as a teenager and in my twenties. Good lord.)

1. The Portuguese man who wouldn't clean

Look, his explanation was straightforward: he was Portuguese and in his Portuguese household the women did all the cleaning. That was part of his culture. He lived in this flat with two women so naturally we had to do the cleaning. This made sense to him. A Portuguese man doesn't "tidy". Obviously.

2. The washing machine that kept breaking

So this is, in and of itself, not the worst thing in the world. A washing machine that keeps breaking is irritating, but not anecdote-worty. No, you see, the specific problem with this was that our landlord, a genial and stout little man called Hussein, insisted on coming to fix it himself whenever it broke, which was every other week. Hussein would come to the flat, where four young women lived, and he would tend to the washing machine. He would sweat a lot while doing so, and he insisted on us frequently wiping his brow while he worked. That was a crucial thing we had to do. He just got such a sweaty forehead otherwise, you know.

3. Oh god, the Italian woman

She worked in a bar and she would come home at 3am and "relax" by putting some techno on so loud that the windows of my bedroom would start shaking. She would scream and shout if you mentioned that this was quite a mad thing to do, because she felt she had the right to relax after work, like everyone else. That was fine. I could deal with that.

Because being a bartender doesn't pay that well, the Italian woman also had a sideline in making then selling ketamine. She would pour the liquid ket in the pan and, overtime, it would turn into a powder, and she would collect that powder and put it in little bags and sell it to people. Again, that wasn't ideal but it wasn't the end of the world. Ketamine users are quite chilled, really. They'd come into the flat but they'd be pretty relaxed about the whole thing. Ketamine is maybe one of the most relaxing drugs you can. Also: she used her own pan.

The worst thing about the Italian woman was that she, at some point, decided that bartending and drug dealing wasn't enough: she wanted to be a tattoo artist as well. I found this out one morning, as I woke up and went to get myself some coffee, and walked into a very heavy Italian man lying on the kitchen table, topless, receiving a tramp stamp. That was too far. I couldn't tell you why it was the last straw, but it was. I just wanted my morning coffee.

4. The thief

Obviously, thinking about it after the fact, I shouldn't have trusted the man who showed me around the flat. He was smoking a very large joint while he was doing it. That's just not the way you should introduce yourself to the world, especially if you told the internet you were the property's "manager", or words to that effect. Still, the room was large and it was in Shoreditch, and the rent was quite absurdly low, so I took it.

I moved in and once a month he would come and collect all our money, in cash, then he would leave. After the third month he didn't show up, and someone else showed up instead, and he introduced himself as the landlord and asked us why we'd not paid rent for the past three months. Ah. Hmm.

As it turns out, joint-smoking man had run off with three months' worth of rent, having failed to pass it on to the landlord. Said landlord did trust us when we swore to him that we'd dutifully been paying our rent, so he let us off the hook. We found out some time later that our money was put to good use, by which I mean that our guy went to Morocco, bought a lot of weed, tried to smuggle it into Greece, and ended up in jail there. Ah well.

5. The German landlord

He really was just exquisitely German. We never saw him, because he lived in Portugal, but he had this friend or partner who was Brazilian and he would deal with us. I had one room, a couple had another one, and a fourth, unremarkable housemate had the third one. It was quite a nice little flat. One day, our German landlord emailed us to say that he'd changed his mind, no longer enjoyed Portugal, and would be moving back into the flat, turning the living room into his bedroom.

We all decided to move out pretty quickly after that, and he let us know, via the medium of his Brazilian helper, that he felt quite offended by our decision. Granted, it's not as bad a story as the others, but it still tickles me often. Oh you do not want to live with kindly Hans? You are offended that you have not been offered, say, a reduced rent, simply because you would live with kindly Hans and no longer have a living room? Ach, that is harsh on Hans. He is not pleased.

Bonus:

So this shouldn't really count, because it has nothing to do with housemates or landlords, but thinking about those years reminded me of this story, and it's too glorious not to share. So: the year is, I want to say, 2010. I have this friend V. who has quite famously ploughed most of east London. V. and I have never slept together, though we have, on occasion, shared a drunken snog. That's what you do at that age.

V. gets a girlfriend and she, probably rightly, is convinced that he has been cheating on her the entire time. I don't believe anyone ever got any proof that he was, but it's fair to say it wouldn't have surprised anyone. Anyway. My housemates and I throw this houseparty one evening, to which V. is invited. At some point, his non-invited girlfriend arrives, flanked by a large, intimidating group of female friends.

They burst into the flat, she rips our intercom off the wall, and they all leave again, intercom in hand. I assume, at this stage, that she believes I am the one V. has been cheating on her with. Again: I am not. We hadn't even snogged since he'd got that girlfriend. I am entirely innocent. Still: that intercom is gone.

For the rest of our tenancy, the girls and I take turns standing against the wall, where the intercom once was whenever Hussein comes to check in on us, or fix the washing machine again. Somehow, we get our deposit back. The end.

A column

Look, it was just a table. It shouldn't have annoyed me as much as it did. My neighbour had left it out in the corridor on our floor, round the side of the building, in front of the door of a flat which has been unoccupied for years. There was a little note saying that whoever wanted it could take it, and I'd been thinking about it, as my current dinner table is slightly too small.

In the end, I wasn't able to make a choice either way, as a stern note appeared on the table overnight, explaining that it was a health and safety issue, and no objects should be left in communal areas, in case there's a fire and we all need to evacuate quickly. Again: the table was not in the way. It was not near the stairs. It was not near the lifts. It was hidden away on the side, where no-one currently lives. Still, it had to go.

Man, it annoyed me. Again, I wasn't even sure if I wanted it or not, and I didn't feel that strongly about the table itself, but something about the stupid, mindless rigidity of those rules stuck in my craw. Why did the housing association have to get involved? Can't we just live our lives?

In retrospect, I wonder if the timing was at fault. TfL had recently banned the tube station book exchange shelves which, as long-term readers will know, were one of my favourite things about living in London and, more broadly, being alive. That really, really made me furious. No-one's on the side of fire, but surely having a small shelf with a handful of paperbacks at ground level doesn't actually harm anyone.

Sadiq Khan has allegedly decided to get involved, and it's possible we'll get our books back eventually, but I'm not holding my breath. It was a stupid, killjoy thing to happen, which is making me think that it'll hold, given the stupid, killjoy times we live in.

In case you were wondering: yes, I do know what I sound like right now. No, I don't like it either. I sound like my French grandmother does on the phone once in a while, when she temporarily moves away from her usual bourgeois centre-right sensibilities, and starts sounding like a gilet jaune. Oh we can't do anything anymore, she tells me, we're not allowed to do anything and we're told how to act and what to say and how to behave and what not to do and I hate it, she complains, I hate it all, no wonder people are furious.