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London Rental Opportunity of the Week

London Rental Opportunity of the Week: Holloway’s Most Pitiable En Suite

Dunno how big you are on privacy but...
Photos via RightMove

What is it? I call this one "studio-style en suite", which was a very clever joke the first time I wrote it – I'm sure about that – but every time since I have revisited it in the edit it's taken me a second or two to get it, so I don't fully expect you to without me explaining it, so right: you know how studio apartments are just flats without any dividing walls? Well this is an en-suite without any, like, privacy. Do u get it now

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Studio-style en suite

It's a good joke isn't it;
Where is it? Holloway – essentially a prison that got a bit out of control and became a district;
What is there to do locally? Every time I have been in Holloway the options have seemed to be "inhale so much thick grey mucus-like smog that you die", "cast around desperately for a pub, any pub, before being drawn inexorably into the Wetherspoons that used to be a cinema" and "look at the hospital and, seeing as you are in Holloway and things clearly haven't worked out that well for you, sort of yearningly wish you were in there, being treated";
Alright, how much are they asking? £1,365pcm, but if you split the flat then only £682.50. That said, our social media guy is currently advertising a way nicer room in a way nicer looking place for like £150 less than that, so you've really got to look at it in context, haven't you

A few years ago mankind ran out of revolutionary stuff to truly invent and so instead started combining two already invented items to make a third sort of invented item. So, for example, you have the spork. The iPhone, that harbinger of the third digital age, is a combination of a phone, an MP3 player, an alarm clock and a calculator. Vans are just big cars. You see what I'm getting at here. It's a sort of solipsism of things: everything that can be known to exist already exists, and everything beyond that is just layering a few things and calling them an invented name. Don't shit in my hand and call it a Shand®, is what I'm saying. If you're going to shit in my hand, be honest enough to say you shat in my hand and you are all out of ideas.

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Anyway, with that in mind, we're off to Holloway:

Yes, correct: some innovator has managed to combine the concepts of "bedroom" and "bathroom" for something I am tentatively calling a "bedathroom". I mean, look at this photo for a sec, then mentally climb inside it with me and let's imagine living this life.

Alright, you are my wife or husband now, and we live together in this room. I get up a bit earlier than you so you normally wake to the slow, trickling sound of me sudsing my pale, naked body in the shower and rigidly watching you while I do it. When I open the door to the shower – the tiny, tiny shower, a lot of the time it's not the alarm sound that actually wakes you but rather the sound of me clomping my elbows against the inside of the door – when I step out of the shower a plume of steam gets everywhere, and over everything. Black mould spores already dot the ceiling wallpaper, and we've only been living here, my love, for a week. I am going to go to the tiny sink now and bend over it, with my naked wet arse fully in your face, while I do my whole toothbrushing routine. There are like four tiles above the sink but I still manage to splash water all up and around the wall. I have an electric toothbrush that for some reason since I took it on a plane recently has been really, really loud, and I've got that going full pelt on my molars. It is not 7AM yet. You are not due to be up for another half an hour. The flannel I do my face with is dripping off the sink and into the thin grey carpet. We married in a lavish ceremony on a white sand beach in Cancun just a fortnight ago. Already your love for me has faded, never to return.

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So you can see there are certain drawbacks to having the world's smallest shower cubicle just a few centimetres from your bed. I am going to troubleshoot the rest of the flat for you: both rooms are nominally en suite. I know this because I did the thing I loathe most, which is "spoke to an estate agent on the phone". My main question was does this flat, you know, have a separate bathroom? And the answer is sort of but no: both bedrooms have the same strange tiny shower-sink arrangement, then there is a tiny splinter room that just has a toilet in it. So there is no actual, like, bathroom. Which strikes me as either i. a fundamental design flaw, ii. a landlord turning a one-bed flat into a two-bed by ripping out the bathroom proper and converting it into a sort of bedroom with half a bathroom in it. Greed, the mother of invention.

Sidebar: in properties that are targeted towards students (this one, walking distance to London Met, is very student-oriented), landlords are often more lax when it comes to sub-letting, i.e. this advert very overtly says it's OK if you want to split the rent three ways and have someone rent your front room and sleep in there as if it is a bedroom (we have seen this with kitchens before). Riddle me this, though: where is that third person supposed to wash and shower? Is one of you supposed to cede your entire bedroom to them every time they need to wash their body, which for most people is a good once a day? They meant to gently knock and push when they need your sink to brush their teeth in? Or are they doing that in the kitchen sink, in case you are too busy masturbating yourself to sleep? It is possible I am overthinking this, yes, but I'm afraid looking at this from a purely logistical point of view, living in this flat would be very close to Actual Hell.

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@joelgolby (h/t @NatalyaLobanova)

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