On the home front (Part 2) (From Times Series)

On the home front (Part 2)

9:30am Tuesday 9th December 2008

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Continued from previous blog...

For the next few weeks, my flatmates and I received a series of contracts, all containing unknown names replete with redundant vowel sounds. To fill the time I engaged in one of the most mesmerisingly fruitless email exchanges ever known to man with a woman called Montana (a largely empty American state, coincidentally, in which tumbleweed is a treasured tourist attraction), whose messages read like deconstructionist Gertrude Stein poems.

Three months, and 35 non-punctuated emails, later we received the correct details, with the explanation that our paperwork had gone missing because the fax had run out of ink, or broken down, or spontaneously combusted after being pelted with disembodied Property Bureau employees, or something.

And then we started receiving letters explaining that we were in arrears for £679.05, or £840.38, or £1,495.81, or any random assortment of digits that their Amstrad 1512s cared to vomit onto the page.

Phone calls went unanswered, letters disappeared, emails received automated replies, and - desperate to salvage some grain of productivity from the affair - we started using the numbers on the letters to play the Lottery every Saturday (from which I won a tenner).

Then all fell silent. And months later, the wad of arrears letters fashioned into a giant papier mache effigy of PB managing director Michael Gill, we discovered the company had gone into liquidation.

In short, all our cash had been churned up in one giant blender of administrative mis-management.

Because of this, when our second landlord "Ali G" – who converted the famous comedy club behind the pub into a snooker hall where Rolf Harris would most definitely never be seen dead and who did all his dirty work through shadowy "Caesar" in the backroom broom closet – went bankrupt and sold out to "Bali A", we were left without a contract, alone, vulnerable and exposed to the illimitable evil that is an unscrupulous landlord.

Without a legal leg to stand on, it didn't take Bali A long to smoke us out. First he started coming and going whenever he saw fit. Then, once James had gone, he moved in his cousin at 3am, who filled his nights with shouting matches and an assortment of female companions.

His destructive zeal still unsated, he then piled all our sitting room furniture into the storage space by the kitchen and moved in two pot-smoking Colombians.

Adam was the second to fall, replaced by an oafish Polish guy who proceeded to break his key in the front door in his first week – leaving us without a lock for three nights in one of the most Asbo-hungry districts in the capital.

Then the toilet blocked, the kitchen buckled under the weight of dirty plates and roach colonies... and my defiance finally gave way to defeat, sending me back to my parents' pad with an empty heart and emptier wallet.

But now I am determined to rise from the ashes once again. Our North Finchley friends may not be the same people who caused me such misery, but they have symbolically taken their place in my affections. And, replacing incompetence with downright dishonesty, their actions have hurt people far more severely than those of the Property Bureau and co ever hurt me.

So like I said before: "Bring 'em on."

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