The rooms all had at least two beds in them, including at least one with bunk beds, and the students there were all foreign students from India or Pakistan; I was to be the exception. Now, the thing to realise, and it’s hard to remember as you get older, but when you’re young you don’t consider things like impoverished accommodation with loads of foreign students, all sharing one bathroom and all being forced to be up at the same time as being a nightmare, you just look at it as being perfectly normal – your acceptance level is much higher.
And so it was, that despite some misgivings, I was happy to move in (especially as by that time I was desperate to free myself from the increasingly irksome burden that was David).
The day finally arrived and I moved in, but there seemed to be a little confusion amongst my fellow inmates (I use the term advisedly) and this led to Mr Man being summoned. When he saw me he looked slightly shocked and taken aback. He then proceeded to explain, in a slightly embarrassed manner, that as I hadn’t been back in touch in the two weeks since agreeing to take the bed (I can’t say room, as they were all shared) he assumed that I’d changed my mind and he had therefore let the bed to someone else, and they were already there.
In retrospect I guess it’s fair to say that I probably had a lucky escape, as the place was so weird, but in the short term it gave me a major problem – I was suddenly and unexpectedly homeless!
Luckily, though, Mr Man clearly felt rather responsible and said that I could live in the dining room of the house, sleeping on the (velour) sofa – at full rent! With no idea of what else to do, I accepted and moved into the dining room. The dining room contained a very large table with sufficient chairs for all the tenants, and the aforementioned sofa. Luxury! I was provided with a few blankets, a couple of sheets and a pillow and this was my new accommodation. I began longing for the old fashioned carpets and comforts of home.
The only real item of note that happened in the short time I was there, was that we held some kind of party and various people who nobody knew turned up. One of the unknown students to arrive was a bloke who was studying French, and he had with him a French exchange student who didn’t speak much English. I had reasonable spoken French having done a French Exchange at the end of year 10, with Frederique in Strasbourg, and I chatted away with the exchange student as best I could in my pigeon tongue, and I was quite proud of the fact that I managed to converse quite well.
It was only after they left that one of the other lodgers at the house, Rikki, a trainee chef from India, told me that it was obvious to everyone but me that the second guy wasn’t an exchange student at all, and they had just been pretending he was French for a laugh. All they needed was to find someone gullible enough to believe them ......
Rikki became my friend after that, but I have to say that he was rather a ‘toxic’ friend, as David had been, but in a very different way and he was always using me to get something or other that he needed or wanted. By the end of the year I had largely managed to shake him off, but it was another friendship that I wished I’d never had. In modern parlance, I guess you'd refer to his friendship as being 'toxic'.
Flasher!
As regards the house itself, I managed to last out for a few more days sleeping on the sofa, but the situation wasn’t great and things all came to a head one morning as breakfast was being prepared. I was of course sleeping in the dining room, where we all had breakfast, and for the system to work, I had to be up and about before everyone came down for breakfast at 8.00am. Or, to be more precise, I had to be up and about before 7.45am when Mr Man’s daughter came into the dining room to lay the table.
One morning, I was bit the worse for wear and when the alarm went off, instead of jumping off sofa as usual, I lay there, slowly coming round. After a few minutes I was awake enough to get up and get dressed. Just as I was in the middle of doing so, at the most inappropriate moment possible, in walked the daughter to lay the table. The level of embarrassment between the two of us was palpable, especially as, both being young, we didn’t really know how best to deal with the situation.
What I ended up doing was collapsing back on the sofa whilst trying to cover my privates with sheets and blankets, whilst she, instead of retreating, covered her embarrassment by continuing to lay the table! The time it took her to finish her labours and exit the dining room became the longest two minutes of my young life.
The good news was that this incident made it abundantly clear that it was completely impractical for me to stay there any longer, and that I urgently needed to look for yet another place to stay. And so the search for my third place to stay in as many months began. As before, places were at a premium, and I think I rather went from the frying pan into the fire. This time I moved into the lino house.
My Accommodation Part.3: The Lino House
I found a room in a shared house where there were three tenants (including myself) and the landlord, who lived in. The landlord was Mediterranean (I’m not sure from where) and the other two tenants were both Greek. We each had our own room and shared a kitchen, dining room and bathroom, all much as standard. However, the house was completely, and I mean completely, covered in cheap lino – the hallways, dining room, kitchen, bathroom – even our bedrooms! This, along with the universal use of woodchip wallpaper on every single wall, gave the house a really cheap and chilly atmosphere. I guess if you were an estate agent you would call the place Spartan, as opposed to what most people would call it, which would be institutional.
The piece de resistance though, were the gas fires. Each bedroom was fitted with its own gas fire – and gas meter. We all had old style gas fires in the fireplaces, and near to them, at the side of the old chimney breasts, were individual gas meters that took 50 pence pieces, and those meters ate 50 pence pieces like they were going out of style.
I became friendly with one of the Greek tenants who was clearly politically aware, and he was keen to tell me all about recent Greek History and the suppression of free speech and the ‘Z’ movement.
One day he came to me and said: ‘Chris, I think that the landlord is charging us too much for gas, so it’s costing us much more than it should to heat our rooms. I’ve asked around and apparently there’s a maximum that landlords are allowed to charge their tenants for gas, and I’m pretty sure we’re way over that limit.’ He then showed me a little indicator on our meters that showed how much we were being charged for gas. It clearly showed that the meters were set to maximum, meaning that we were paying the maximum possible for our gas. He then asked if I could contact the gas board about this, as his English wasn’t too good.
I was stunned. I remember thinking ‘Hang on, I’m the English guy here. It should be me showing him that we were paying too much for gas, not the other way round.’ A lesson learnt in never underestimating others, or overestimating yourself. I wrote to the only supplier of gas at the time, British Gas, and asked for clarification.
Note that there was no such thing as the internet through which I could contact the gas board, and the only other alternative apart from writing a letter, was to ring them. Now you also need to realise that back in those days your only access to a phone was via a public call box, and not only that, but any phone calls made in the morning (before 1.00am) were charged at a much higher rate than those made in the afternoon, so if you did need to use the phone, then you had to try and wait until after 1.00pm, which was a total pain. At the time I thought that it would be too expensive and too complicated to try and ring the gas board, so contacting them by letter was the only viable option, and so that is what