My recent travels have required me to do some serious trawling for accommodation, perhaps more so in London than anywhere else. For that genuine London Eye-opening experience, the best ride in town has to be the city’s accommodation roller coaster.
Like so many new arrivals in London, my partner and I mooched our way through our first few weeks in town. We stayed with some long lost, but happily rediscovered, relatives who had three small children and a room to spare. The children clung to my limbs like baubles on a reluctantly replanted Christmas tree and reaffirmed my resolve to delay child rearing for some further years. Quite some further years.
Our yearnings for more peaceful surrounds (mis)led us to us to a backpackers in central London. The cheapest we could find, naturally. Peace? We found none. Rats, filth and foul mouthed antipodeans? We found plenty.
An overworked television was the focus of everyone’s existence. That is, until someone kicked it in, probably in a drunken rage at the end of one night. Or day. Or maybe even morning. Oh how I longed for my baubled past as I was constantly engulfed in funky dubious smoke like a sad smouldering ex-xmas tree being burnt long after New Year’s Eve. If I should ever have children, dear God, let them leave home before they grow into spoilt, scungey, cigarette suckling shits.
By some miracle, we managed to score a ridiculously cheap night one of London’s five star hotels. Let’s call it the Celery, Apples, Walnuts, Grapes (in a Mayonnaise Sauce) Hotel. The Celery, Apples, Walnuts, Grapes (in a Mayonnaise Sauce) Hotel was truly something to marvel at. Above our bed there was a chandelier (where I would normally expect a ceiling fan). There were floral painted floors, floral painted walls, even floral painted flowers. And six pound cheese sandwiches. Who could ask for more?
Sadly, neither cheap celery, apples, walnuts nor grapes (and certainly not cheap mayonnaise) last forever. We hit the streets to find a place to call our own. Even if it would be someone else’s.
Now I thought I had met some scammers travelling the Indian sub-continent, but these were but poor amateurs compared with the players in London’s real estate market. A market that thrives in dinghy upstairs offices with no fixtures and few fittings.
Real estate agents promised us that we could see wonderful properties if, and only if, we paid registration fees of fifty to one hundred pounds. That buys a lot of cheese sandwiches. Outrageous though it was, we believed that it was just the way it was. But it was illegal. That’s what it was.
Some (slightly) less crooked agents set us straight and did not seek to charge us for the ‘honour’ of inspecting a property. Our images of cosmopolitan London apartments were shattered as we inspected countless nasty little hovels designed to support only the most basic of rent paying life forms. Only for six months at a time, mind you.
We were forced to madly rush through each of our inspections. I’ll never understand why it is that one may spend hours studying classifieds searching for those better homes and gardens, but when it comes to inspecting the real thing, one is granted mere minutes. For the spatially impaired, such as myself, the time constraints are impossible. I’m still trying to work out whether I would want to spend a year living in places that I moved out of years ago. Nowhere is this situation worse than in London, where life moves fast and flatless life forms even faster.
We shared our final flat inspection with another young couple. The agent had set this up to intensify the competition for the flat. It worked. We swallowed the bait (along with a good dose of lies about our liability for council tax or entitlement to furniture) and signed away our lives. Well not quite our lives, but a deposit which would have sustained our lives for a year or more back home in Oz.
We had finally finished our London trawling. We moved in and have now almost furnished our unfurnished furnished apartment. And I can tell you, it is a great load off our minds to finally be paying through our noses to have a roof over our heads. Even if it is someone else’s.