Flat hunting

My feet bled. Not badly, but enough so that I contemplated throwing financial caution to the wind and buying a new pair of shoes simply so I wouldn’t have to carry on walking in the pair of cheesegraters that my mules had suddenly turned into.

Not that the shoes were behaving entirely unreasonably. Jack and I estimated that on Thursday we must have walked at least five miles. And I’m not talking walking-holiday-up-hills kind of walking. I mean proper alliterative pavement-pounding. We went up and down streets, across whole sections of the A-Z, winding our way past the spine, over the top of one side and across onto a new page altogether. We were flat-hunting, and my poor blistered toes were the sorry sacrifice.

I knew that flat-hunting wouldn’t be easy. But I was toally unprepared for the painfulness of blisters, and also for how incredibly picky I swiftly became.

I started our flat-hunt with a song in my heart and with few demands in my head. I said things like, ‘Well, it won’t matter where we are, as long as we’re together’. I browsed through Loot online and findaproperty.co.uk and gasped aloud in a very girlish way at the plethora of one-bedroom flats, all of which sounded just perfect. In every way imaginable.

By the end of one day I was peering suspiciously around corners and making dark notes in my spiral bound ‘Notebook of Power’. ‘Does it have central heating?’ I asked the agent with curled lip. ‘Hmmmmmmm.’ And into my notebook the damning judgement was written in blue biro: funny smell – damp? No chest of drawers. Or even, by the end of our stay, Electric hob (would prefer gas). No power shower. Not very light. Hall strange shape.

Mind you, I had no idea how picky I could be until we made our second visit. It was all I could do not to run away from the place laughing, ‘You want HOW much for this flat? Good grief. Look, I’ll tell you what: if you pay me that much per week to live there, then maybe I’ll think about it. Maybe.’ Flat 22 in Grim Court, was like a really run down Hall of Residence, it had that same kind of lack of care, communal feel… only without the upsides of Freshers’ Week, cheaper rent, and a whole crew of people desperate to be friends.

Even the agent looked embarrassed about it.”It’s er- got double-glazing,” he said, raising his voice above the howl and roar of the traffic outside, “so when you close the windows it’s really quite quiet.” Almost as he said the word ‘quiet’ a bassline the like of which I’ve never heard before started reverberating through the floorboards and making our windpipes vibrate. DOOM DOOM DOOM! Lovely. DOOM!

I took just one look at the kitchen before deciding that I’d think twice about eating anything that had been stored in it. By this time the agent’s embarrassment meant he was mixing up his words, “It’s not very fanciful!” he said in a slightly squeaky voice, opening up the door, and I bit my lip and tried to think of tax returns. When we got to the bathroom, and Jack and I stared up wordlessly at the cracks in the ceiling, the damp patch and the paper hanging off in strips, the agent laughed a high-pitched, mechanical laugh, “Yes, it’s – er- not very advertising!” In an effort to break the silence, I asked whether the ceiling would be sorted by the time new tenants moved in . The agent peered into the reception room where an inscrutable Antipodean was watching television,
“Er… is anything happening about that problem in the bathroom, with the leak?”
“Nope!” he said, with something like relish. “Nothing. Graham came round a couple of weeks ago, but since then, zilch.”
Jack and I headed for the exit at a run.

The other thing I wasn’t prepared for was… well… was feeling so very unprepared. As Jack and I met an owner, or walked into another agents, I kept expecting someone to snort with laughter, “Out! Get out! You two aren’t grown-ups! I don’t care if he’s wearing a shirt and you’ve got your smart skirt on- get out and stop wasting my time. You two can’t rent a flat together, who do you think you are?!”

And who would have thought that an articulate, together sort of a person would find herself so terrified of making phonecalls? Or that her boyfriend (I experimented over the last few days with ‘partner’… swiftly rejecting ‘beau’ or ‘paramour’ and flirting briefly with ‘fiance’ before deciding that for all its American-teen-iness, ‘boyfriend’ would just have to do) would be equally if not more scared? We spent ages in pubs, spreading out all our bits of paper and handing our mobile phones to each other,
“You call them.”
“No, you.”
“I did last time!”
“Oh pleeeease!”

And so, I hear you all ask, were you successful? We-ell… in a manner of speaking. When we walked in to view the very first flat I had a feeling of nervous positivity. Positive because I liked it, and nervous because I wasn’t sure whether I should. Surely you can’t rent the first flat you see. And you definitely can’t set about renting it until you’ve seen some more. So I filed it in my head under ‘perhaps’ and we went off to see, among other flats, No. 22 Grim Court. And all the while I was wondering, do I really prefer the one we saw first?

Finally, six flats later, we were in a position to conclude that, yes, we really did prefer the first one. The only drawback being the amount of money they want for it. So Rumtumtugger (the) and Boyfriend (Jack the) are entering into negotiations first thing tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed, because if I can live in Firstflat with Jack as of a few weeks’ time, I shall be a very happy rumtumtugger indeed.

RTT
xxx