Tuesday 21 April 2009

Flatmate (un)Wanted Ads

Over the years, my experience of flat-share ads has shown them to need extensive interpretation. Either deliberately deceptive, or in code, they disguise the neurotic, slap-inducing tendencies of your prospective co-tenants, so pay attention.

Beware the word ‘executive’ in all its guises. Only a complete arse would describe their home (or themselves) this way, and consider it a positive. ‘Executive’ means they have done the Alpha course, and will try and winch you in. They own the flat, and regard you, their lowly sub-tenant, as a loser for not racing up the property ladder from the age of fifteen. While their room is ensuite, they will continue to vindictively use your bathroom. They return home late, bitter, tense, coke- up and spiteful. They will go home to Wigan for long breaks, claiming to have been in Chicago. On ‘executive’ business.

‘Gay friendly’ can be a minefield. It might simply mean that gay people live there, and are preferred. A frightening alternative is that residents will assume the same frantic, and altogether terrifying mental state of the characters in ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme,’ compulsively re-enacting key scenes, screeching with mirth. For a friend of mine, it meant a lovelorn lesbian housemate who looked like Wee Jimmie Krankie.

‘Friendly, lively house’? The devil in disguise; it’s all back to mine, gone mad: baked beans everywhere, lager cans in the sink, no cleaning at all, ever, and friends on the sofa, in the hall, and in your bed if you get home a minute after midnight. After weeks spent ankle deep in take away cartons, and the same track will boom and thump courtesy of the bedroom DJ in the next room, until your eyes swivel in time to the music, and the pores on your forearms bleed spontaneously.

‘Communal House’ Hmm… with the rest of house populated by skunk loving anarcho vegan hippy eco warriors who don’t believe in mousetraps, and threaten regular weekly and accusatory house meetings/denunciation sessions, you will emit a whining sound. Then you’ll go mad, but find redemptive sanctuary in a pond.

‘Creative’. That means cacophonous, gurning, experimental musicians rehearsing in your kitchen. Arty types, such as fashion students will cast a critical eye over the design values of your knickers on the line, and decode the aesthetics of your shoes. In a flashback from my student days, I still view sculptors as violent thugs, because they were, leaving a trail of giblets, blood, ears etc after nutting and gouging each other on the dance floor. I don’t know why; they just did.

‘Quiet.’ Another loaded phrase. ‘Quiet’ means a passive-aggressive, forlorn shadow who will hiss “shush!!!” you if you watch anything other than the Antique’s Roadshow, and judge you as a harlot for having overnight guests. You will live your life under a solemn ticking clock (a prize possession) every beat of which marks the passing seconds of your life.
Until you run screaming from the house.
And the whole, hideous cycle starts again.

11 comments:

Neil80 said...

I wonder if anyone has a positive experience of a house/flat share, one that hasn't degenerated into communicating only via post-it notes?

When I lived in a house share I had a thermostat war caused by my housemate across the landing having a big room with a broken radiator, when I on the other hand had a small room with a comparitively huge radiator... anyway I'd creep downstairs and turn it down, my housemate would turn it up, I'd turn it back down... and so on.

Funny thing was neither of us mentioned this until the end of the house share contract!

QG said...

One that sticks in my mind was an advert for a lodger in a shared flat that stated: "You don't have to be a vegetarion but it would help."

I didn't apply but often wondered what would have happened if I came in with a kebab or started grilling myself a nice steak and so on.

RenterGirl said...

The best ones are on gumtree, where I've seen people asking for actual gimps ie house-slaves, and another for a flatmate/writers amenusis, who asked if the flatmate could basically writer her book for her. Its finished: "...the house is close to a 24 garden centre." Yippee!

NB; Blogspot is driving crazy: I am thorughout the day intermittently 'locked out' of comments and even posting. Any ideas? (...defect to wordpress...?)

Sorry if I'm not repsonding.

la glitz said...

RenterGirl, I'm a huge fan of yours and, as a newbuild tenant in Manchester, have found every word you write on the subject not only true to life, but also very useful as advice for avoiding Dovecote Hell. I'm a bit upset to find this paragraph on your blog though:

‘Gay friendly’ can be a minefield. It might simply mean that gay people live there, and are preferred. A frightening alternative is that residents will assume the same frantic, and altogether terrifying mental state of the characters in ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme,’ compulsively re-enacting key scenes, screeching with mirth. For a friend of mine, it meant a lovelorn lesbian housemate who looked like Wee Jimmie Krankie.Gay men are often shrill queens? Lesbians are bitter and ugly? So avoid living with the gays at all costs, just in case? Imagine the sheer horror of having to live with an ugly dyke? I'm sure you don't mean to perpetuate such nasty homophobic clichés on your blog, but these comments, although they're lighthearted, left a really nasty taste in my mouth. I'd hate to stop reading your blog for fear that I'd encounter homophobic comments, because your politics are so brilliantly spot-on in other ways. Could you avoid using gay clichés as sources of cheap humour in future, please?

signed: a lesbian fan.

la glitz said...

In fact, it's quite extraordinarily counter-productive and close to incitement to hatred to portray gay people as enemies of right-thinking renters. In fact, the issues you rightly blog about here - landlords who evict you on a whim, insecure flats, dodgy neighbours - are ones experienced by gay people much more intensely. Lesbians, in particular, are statistically liable to be the victims of homophobic attacks in their own homes, particularly when these are in insecure, dodgy areas. Moreover, a friend of mine is currently battling a homophobic landlord in the courts who refused to let his property to her and her civil partner once he had figured out that they were lesbians.

'Gay friendly' is not a message to straight renters to say 'Stay away: ugly queeny fags here!'; it's a message saying, 'Please do not expose me to precisely this sort of homophobic abuse in my own home, and please have my back in the unfortunately frequent event of verbal or physical assaults both inside and outside the apartment block.' In fact, it would be doing the rental world at large a huge service if you could post highlighting the very real dangers that we gay and lesbian tenants run every day by the simple fact of renting in shared space in a homophobic society, rather than giving your readers a licence to snark at those pathetic queers who have the temerity to demand a safe, respectful living environment.

RenterGirl said...

I have been in communication with laglitz, and while I disagree her in some ways, I'd like to add the following:
The person enmeshed in Gimme Gimme Gimme hell was actually a gay man. The situation with the wee jimmy krankie lookalike was the deliberately edited part of a very difficult situation. Nobody is, or was, sniping at 'pathetic queers,' but (all house-shares, gay and straight) can come with problems.
I am still having a nightmare with comments, which grants me access to my own comments spot randomly, when it feels like it.

the reaper said...

'I'm sure you don't mean to perpetuate such nasty homophobic clichés on your blog, but these comments, although they're lighthearted, left a really nasty taste in my mouth. I'd hate to stop reading your blog for fear that I'd encounter homophobic comments, because your politics are so brilliantly spot-on in other ways. Could you avoid using gay clichés as sources of cheap humour in future, please?'

the Stasi would be proud.their spirit liveth on.

toughen up,your mates in parliament are taking us on a one way trip to bankruptcy,thanks in no small part,to the huge non job infrastructure created to service the thought and speech control that you so clearly advocate.

your time will be better spent studying for an alternative career after the bond market collapse.

yours in liberty
T Reaper

toru okada said...

I'm a big fan of this blog, have been reading for quite a while, so everything is taken in good humour, obviously... I laughed when I read the bit about vegetarians, but in my experience, if everyone else in the house is a veggie, when someone new moves in, its just easier for it to be someone who at least respects shared cutlery/crockery/kitchen equipment and doesn't leave it covered in fat/grease etc. The only problem we had when choosing who to let the 6th room in our big house to was picking between the lovely vegetarians who saw it, but then again I do live in Chorlton...

There's no shortage of rooms to let, if living with vegetarians would be that much of a problem, there's always somewhere else to look.

RenterGirl said...

I know Toru. I don't eat meat, and have looked around houses with other tenants are roasting hunks of beast, wondering if I'd be happy. The accumulated bacon grease in the grill pan thing is on the list of things other housemates should be shunned for allowing. Soemtimes it's about trying to pre-empt flash-points.

Cerisa said...

the 'quiet' one made me laugh as I have experienced exactly that.

RenterGirl said...

Me too...
Thanks for reading!