Living in a shitty share house with strangers is something that nearly everyone has to do at some point, unless you’re Chelsea born and bred and your Grandad owns McVities or something (if you’ve been reading my posts, you may have cottoned onto my vengeance for Made in Chelsea- I have a slight problem with incestuous rich brats whose glossed lips don’t touch when they speak). Some people have great experiences and make friends for life, some people end up with a skin disease and moth eaten belongings. Yes, me.
Weirdflatmate.com is an outlet for long suffering students and travellers who are living in a less than desirable situation with a collective of freaks, geeks and sexual predators- yep, me again. The site is a portal whereby roomies can sympathise with each other and compare who lives in the shittest place with the shittest people. Lots of people post about their flatmate’s annoying and peculiar habits, like late rent, vandalism, smoking, stealing food, ‘borrowing’ toothbrushes, having noisy sex in the living room, walking around naked and other anti-social behaviour- you’d be surprised by how many people go to the toilet in a place that isn’t in fact a toilet.
After making our mark of chemmy spews and bush wees around Europe, my two Aussie friends and I (and our bank accounts) decided to call it a day and head on down to Brighton town. With no money and even less sense, we settled to be bundled into one room in a filthy share house, owned (or so we thought) by a tight-ass hoarder from Glasgow. With nine other foreigners already living upstairs on mattresses for inflated prices, our land lady didn’t think she was making enough money so she charged us £875 per month- we haggled down from £1000. Our new home was a small room just big enough to fit two beds, a fridge and a broken TV, not to mention shelves full of hoarded used toothbrushes, hairy soaps, melted candles and magazines from 1999. The only perk we discovered was that I could open the fridge with my foot for a midnightsnack- some rotting fruit from Lidl most likely.
We really should have foreseen what was going to become of our situation on our first day, when an exasperated Turkish girl appeared at the house, panicking because there was someone in her room. Turns out she’d gone back to Turkey for a week to visit her dying Mum and the mental land lady had gotten rid of her belongings and rented the room out to another unsuspecting foreigner. It quickly became the norm to pass someone in the kitchen that you’d never seen before; the tenant turn over was so quick. Along with us, there were two long term lodgers including a gay Spanish bartender who smoked weed in the shower and an inexplicably hairy agoraphobic creature from Cornwall who lived on sausages (and little boys, we later found out when he was up on charges of paedophilia).
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