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Househunting
Thursday, 1 September 2011 @ 01:52
The idea of moving into a new place should be an exciting one. Unfortunately, having spent hours of today trawling through flat shares and studios, I'm rather of the opposite opinion. I started looking for a place in London a few weeks ago. I'm moving in with my girlfriend (you may now, like the friends I have so far told this to, take a sharp breath of grinning knowingness, as if to say, 'this is the end of fun') and I've been really looking forward to finding the right place for us to come home to.

Now, I know the rental mark is absurdly inflated in London. But seriously, what the fuck. Who are these single people looking at properties we can't afford between the two of us? How does anyone pay the extortionate prices required in central London, let alone save enough money after the landlord has fisted your bank account in his monthly violation, to build a deposit for their first purchase? It really is a but of a nightmare. Let me give you just one of countless examples of the absurdity of the market.

A studio flat in the heart of Bloomsbury. £205 a week. Furnished.

So far so good I think, great location (the little script underneath the property gives me the distance to the nearest 11 major areas, just in case I knew London well enough to know where Russel Square was, but no clue where Angel, Camden, King's Cross, Holborn, und so weiter are. But wait, what's this? Kitchen separate but sole use. Right, so it's a kitchen which others have access to, but which really is mine. Well, I might have to be a bit of a kitchen Nazi to begin with, but that's hardly a deal breaker. One WC. I look at the picture. A set of what initially appears to be some bizarre plumbing arrangements materialises into a disabled handrail. While it sits uncomfortably on its sludgy terracotta gloss wall, at least saftey comes first in this flat. So, despite a few hiccups, things are going well. Time to hit the big stuff. It's (virtual) viewing time.

 
Well, it's certainly unusual. The spartan furniture hardly seems to legitimize the use of the word 'furnished', but at least the landlord appears to have made all the incongruous items in a single, frenzied session with a log and a chisel - everything is pine. But it's quite hard to get an idea of the scale of the thing. The two tables both seem scaled correctly, but are relatively rather different. And the TV, just visible in the background offers only the most limited clue. It's hard to say from the recessing corridor shape of the room just how deep it is - the TV could be either a handheld or a 52 inch, it's all about perspective. Well, luckily, the landlord pre-empted this very problem, and decided to offer us more snapshots inside:


Well now there's a chair in there too. All that's done really is to make the large table seem small, and the small table seem really small. (And the TV shrink to fingernail size). That clever landlord though, he knows the difficulty that prospective tenants face, and he kindly deigns to reveal the true aspect of the room:

Oh there's that chair again...and that table. Which means that...which means that it's just a fucking corridor. A SMALL corridor at that. How do you fit a bed in? How do you do almost anything? It's like Alice in Wonderland except that Alice stops by Ikea first. More than anything, it's insane that anyone would pay for this. I really hope I sort out my place soon, but until I do, I am at least glad that somewhere, no matter how wretched my conditions, no matter how overvalued my room, some poor chump is living in a white box for the best part of a thousand pounds a month.

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quote of the week.

"The circle of human knowledge, illuminated by the pale, cold light of reason, is so infinitesimally small, the dark regions of human ignorance which lie beyond that luminous ring so immeasurably vast, that imagination is feign to step up to the borderline and send the warm, richly colored beams of her fairy lantern streaming out into the darkness ; and so, peering into the gloom, she is apt to mistake the shadowy reflections of her own figure for real beings moving in the abyss.

Sir James George FrazerThe Golden Bough
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The title of this blog comes from a poem by Coleridge, A Wish: Wriiten in Jesus Wood, Feb. 10th, 1792, Plus most blogs are moans anyway. Including this one. lol manuscripts
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I'm a 23 year-old student in London Cambridge London, studying English Literature Law. It's hard to really think of anything truly personal I can put here that might give you some idea of who I am, so I will just tell you that my favourite Shakespeare play is Richard II, my favourite chocolate bar is Snickers, and I have a bit of a thing for instant coffee, especially if someone else makes it for me.


I'm interested in Renaissance Literature, Higher Education policy, and libraries.
I'm completely in love with a Scottish girl.