The worst landlord ever

When I was in my second year at uni, my friend and I decided to move off campus into our own place. We looked at a few places but settled on a flat on a council estate, mainly because it was over the road from university.

When we looked at it, however, it was a little rough around the edges, to say the least. There were chips in the paintwork in most of the bedrooms. There was a huge hole with piping exposed in the bathroom wall. There were odds and ends of crockery in the cupboards. Nothing had been cleaned. There were no curtains or even a curtain pole in my room.

The estate agent confidently assured us that everything would be sorted by the time we moved in. There would be professional cleaners and builders etc who would get the place ready before we arrived.

We found two flatmates to fill the other rooms and, a week later, my friend picked up the keys and headed there with all her belongings, ready for the exciting new adventure. I was working until early afternoon so it would be a few hours before I got there.

I got a phonecall shortly after she had walked through the door, which I thought would be full of excitement and anticipation. Instead it went something like this:

“It looks exactly the same as when we viewed it the other week. There’s still a big hole in the wall and it’s a mess.”

She called the landlord and said there was still a hole in the bathroom wall and that it wasn’t safe. His response?

“What’s the problem? Are you going to climb into the hole?!” followed by a little chuckle at his own wittiness.

When I got there after work, we donned house clothes and yellow gloves and got to cleaning. We packed up all the bits in the kitchen which had been left and put our own stuff in the cupboards.

When the landlord eventually came round to sort out the hole in the bathroom wall, he brought a man with him who, I got the distinct impression, it seemed he’d picked up randomly on the street while driving to the flat.

At one point, the man was cleaning the oven which, we had insisted, needed a proper industrial clean out as it was so dirty. The man, who spoke no English, just kind of muddled through and my friend had decided to keep an eye on him. This was how she saved our cutlery from destruction as he reached for a knife to start scraping the dirt off the inside of the oven.

“No!” she said, speaking slowly and clearly, as though talking to a child. “We use these to eat with. You need a sponge or a scourer.”

He also tried using the oven cleaner he’d found, on the inside of the bath, which he’d been asked to clean. Again, Sophie stepped in, speaking slowly and clearly and handing him some bathroom detergent spray.

That was just a hint of things to come. He owned the flat upstairs too and the girls living there had some hilariously bad set up where he would pitch up every month and collect the rent in cash, all £1400 of it. We gave him cheques for a while before insisting he give us his bank details so we could pay him properly, by bank transfer. That honestly took about six months from first asking him before he gave us them.

When there was a water leak upstairs because someone left the tap on and water was flooding out through our light switches and down the walls, he said there was no need to get anyone out to look at the damage or fix anything because it would be fine.

He’d show up at odd moments and start talking nonsense. Like the time he turned up at my birthday party and started rambling on about this idea he had to store memories on a computer chip so as not to forget them.

He was from Sri Lanka and would just disappear off there without any forewarning, leaving no-one in charge of his business dealings. So, for no discernible reason, we wouldn’t be able to contact him for a month. He didn’t see what the problem was.

He once threatened to turn up, pack my bags and put them outside. When I pointed out that he needed to go through a court and have a properly authorised eviction notice to do anything at all, he flipped out, said he didn’t care about my ‘rights’, and said we owed him money. It’s all hilarious now, but honestly, it was quite ridiculous.

The more I think about it, the sillier it seems. After we moved out, he insisted two people’s rent hadn’t been paid and so kept the whole deposit (four people’s rent). When I called to ask for the other two people’s rent back, he said he’d ‘told the police on me’. I said the police don’t get involved with rental disputes as it’s not violent crime. He stopped picking the phone up when I called.

And that was my experience with the worst landlord I have ever had. It was like living in a comedy.

My staple diet

We’re going back to my university days again for this one. My flatmates and I were having a bit of a party. I think it was someone’s birthday. It was one of those nights were huge sections of it don’t make sense.

For example, at one point, we were all in the kitchen, listening to music while standing on the chairs and waving teatowels around furiously. Yes. Teatowels. Given that our kitchen window was easily within sight of the campus bar, it’s quite likely that the people in the bar were wondering, in amazement, why the girls in B block were being so crazy.

At one point, one of my flatmates drunkenly said to the other (who was sober), “You’re so drunk!” … She was not drunk.

There had been balloons at this party so after a vigorous session of teatowel waving, it was time to pop the balloons with a knife. Obviously. A shaky video taken on a phone still exists somewhere of me tearing around the kitchen, knocking stuff over, climbing on chairs and tables, chasing these balloons around. Everyone had cleared out of the kitchen, as I was armed and dangerous. One of them hates balloons being popped because it releases the “old stale breath” inside. On the video, there is a little voice in the background going “All the breath! All the breath.”

The finale of the video is me chasing down the last balloon and throwing it gently in the air, with my knife poised underneath it and at the moment the balloon touches the knife and bursts, I let out a short but loud, “WAH!” then smile smugly, although I have defeated a baddie and saved mankind.

So you get the picture, it’s all a bit excitable and silly. Into this mix, we put some hunger. We are hungry and we need to eat NOW, at 1am. What to have? Obviously cheese toasties. There was a toastie machine so we got everything set up, closed the lid and waited impatiently for the green light to click on.

When it eventually did, we were ravenous. So Sophie unclips the clip thing, opens the machine and toasted onto the top of one of the toasties…. was a staple! I still to this day have no idea how that could have happened. As silly drunks, we laughed uncontrollably for maybe twenty minutes. That kind of laughter were you can’t even see straight and your tummy muscles ache and you get breathless. And then Sophie, in her infinite wit, said, “It’s our staple diet!”

Well, we were off again. Up until that point in my life, I think that might have been the funniest thing I had ever heard. Actually, maybe it still is…. Staple diet…. Hilarious.