A Tale of Yore

I mentioned a few posts ago the issue I have with my landlord/housemate’s toileting habits. Smearing faecal matter all over the toilet seat and bog roll just isn’t the type of thing somebody in their late 20s should be doing this side of a mental asylum’s front door. Nevertheless, I got back from my weekend in Dorset to discover that the bloke had yet again managed to pebble dash the entire toilet bowl and underside of the seat with slurry. I really don’t know how to approach this awkward issue with him – I mean, what do I say? “Excuse me mate, would you mind not leaving your shit all over the place?” See my point? Hopefully I’ll have moved out before long...but that’s another post (coming soon, maybe). 

I also mentioned in the recent past how I’m really looking forward to having my own crib, and that isn’t something that’s likely to change whilst I’m living under the same roof as poo boy. It’s not until you live in a shared flat or house that you can really appreciate just how fucking annoying other people can be, and just how inconsiderate too. Case in point – not only does Hong Kong Pooey (as he shall henceforth be referred to) do the scat thing, he also has several other endearing properties. Like, for example, doing the washing up at any time after 10:30pm every night of the week. Not the biggest sin in Christendom, you may think – until you understand that the kitchen backs onto my bedroom and so every slammed cupboard door and every clanging pan, pot, cup and plate comes echoing through the paper-thin plasterboard like a freight train passing the window. Why at such a late hour? Every night? Why not at, say, 7.30? or 8? Why is it after 10.30 that the cacophony starts up? I’ve been on the edge of storming into the kitchen and smashing every plate and cup in the fucking flat on more than one occasion. Gah! Seriously, it’s not until you’ve experienced it 5 nights on the trot that your sanity starts to seep out through your ears. 

Another treat is the guy’s penchant for slamming doors. Early AM? BOOM! Late PM? BOOM! The guy walks around in a self-consuming daze and just slams doors like Thor slams heads. I’m surprised there are any left on their hinges in the damned place with the amount of slamming that goes on. And then there’s me trying to be quiet (whilst trying to avoid touching the shit-encrusted toilet seat) if I need a piss in the middle of the night like some kind of bitch. Upon re-reading what I’ve just written, I think I’ll start laying the slam-down myself next time I need to drain the main vein at 3am. See how Hong Kong Pooey likes them shit-stained apples. 

So as you can probably tell, not only am I not overly enamoured with this pathetic excuse for a town (I refuse to call it a city), my current accommodation setup is pretty undesirable too. This isn’t the first time I’ve lived in such intolerable circumstances. When I graduated back in 2003, I moved back to my mother’s house in a bid to save some money. I found it unbearable and when a friend of a friend mentioned he was looking for some housemates to rent rooms in his newly-acquired rental property, I jumped at the chance. After about a week, I and another friend (let’s call him...erm...Frank (?!) moved in and I was all set for it to turn into a real-life episode of Friends. 

After about a month, however, I realised that living in a house with two blokes who don’t really get on was less like an episode of Friends and more like an episode of Bottom. Plus, I also discovered that the ‘landlord’ (he wasn’t, although he claimed to be because his name was on the tenancy agreement) was a complete weirdo who constantly complained about ‘cross contaminating’ the dish cloths and refused to have any dairy products near his shelf in the fridge. Also, he had the ability to drink two pints of Guinness and then projectile vomit all over the carpet. After a further couple of months, Frank had decided he’d had enough and left to live with his girlfriend. That really bummed me out because I was left living alone with ‘landlord,’ who we shall now refer to as Mr Strange. We continued as a party of two for a couple of weeks and I rarely saw the bloke unless he was in the kitchen complaining about the dish cloths or cooking up his non-dairy rice-pudding with prawns slop. And then McRae happened. McRae was a random bloke that Mr Strange had recruited from his office as a third housemate, partly (I’d wager) as a way of obtaining an ally in the house (did I mention things had gone a bit sour between us?!), and partly as a way of once again splitting the rent three ways. When I first met McRae, It was on a Sunday night after I’d got back from visiting my dad in outer Lancashire. He was sat in the living room loudly bleating some clichéd political view whilst clutching a can of lager. Mr Strange sat there nodding and laughing falsely – it was like David Brent fawning after Finchy in an episode of the Office. So in I went, introduced myself, made small talk, had a few beers with the pair of them...and left thinking that maybe the guy was alright and that I shouldn’t be so quick to make assumptions based merely on association. These impressions quickly faded after it transpired that McRae was the smelliest, scruffiest man alive. 

He slept on top of a bare mattress in a sleeping bag and lived exclusively on takeaways. But he invariably didn’t finish said fast food and just left the wrappers and food remains all over his bedroom floor or on the kitchen worktop. He never washed his clothes (at least as far as I could tell) and as with the takeaway cartons and kebab foil, just left stinking socks and underpants lying all over the place. I recall one incident when I was walking up the stairs; a gust of wind must have blown in through his open bedroom window, collected the stench from within and then forced its way through the gap under the door. It hit me full in the face as I walked up the stairs and it nearly knocked me back down them again: sweat, shit, feet, rot and decay, all combined in one demonic sucker punch to the nasal cavity.

It later transpired that he’d also run up a fucking huge phone bill talking to some toothless ‘girlfriend’ on her mobile (this was 2003 remember). The phone line was in my name so the bill came out of my account...and McRae valiantly offered to repay me £5 a month until the debt was honoured. I told him to get fucked and angrily demanded the sum of the bill...which he then suddenly happened to have. I moved out not long after, and not long after that I joined the navy. Upon which I endured a further 6 years of smelling other people’s unwashed bodies and putting up with their abhorrent ‘ways.’ After that came the ‘house of the bathroom-floor period blood,’ as described in another recent post...and now we’re bang up to date.  So it’s either been shit on the toilet seat, period blood on the bathroom floor or stinking, unwashed socks and takeaway cartons blocking the hallways. Yes, my experiences in shared accommodation have been ‘interesting’ to say the least.

This will be the last.