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.
