Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Fold-Out Bed in Your Kitchen, for £1K a Month

What is it? It is impossible for me to adequately describe what is happening here, because I spent the Bank Holiday Weekend at Leeds Festival and, even now, even three days without a beer later, I'm a shell of a man, a husk; a vital part of my psyche was ripped out at that festival, as if trepanned out with hooks, and it lies there, still, in a litter-strewn field in Yorkshire, there among the grease-smeared paper plates and the opaque-grey little empty baggies and the cider cans, thousands upon thousands of stomped-on cider cans, in among clots of brown sun-scorched grass and dry scabs of earth, there on the ground in front of the Main Stage, where I witnessed Post Malone and twenty one pilots cover "Don't Look Back in Anger" so hard I died – 'This cannot be real,' I reasoned. 'Something this bad cannot happen. This is like looking at a war. This is proof that I have died and the electric snaps of my synapses are punishing me, one last time, as I jolt to death in the back of an ambulance' – there on the floor is part of my mind, still, like an animal skinned and burned, never to be recovered or restored. So yes, fair to say this is quite a difficult one this week—
Where is it? I mean, just to give you an idea of how far out of my tree I was there, on Saturday night we walked through the red camping area to try to find the tent we'd stashed three crates of sun-warm Foster's in – a detour that took something close to four entire hours (making the same trip sober the next day, it took under ten minutes) – and there among the smoke and the threatening masked teens and the pulsing dance music, drums throbbing through us like a tribal beat, like an army approaching, we witnessed a glowing white triangle, floating there, above where the lights could reach, above the trees and above the smoke and above the pyro, and between us, my friend and I (equally drunk), we had the following exchange: "What’s that?" "Don’t know." "Is it… God?" "It must be God." Went back there the next day. It was the top of a helter skelter.
What is there to do locally? Why do I persist in making this bad decision, these bad decisions? I have gobbled an entire handful of liver supplements today, and drank pint after pint of water, and write this to you from the inside of a cleansing face mask, and still the sweat shivvers out of my scalp and my back, my knees and my elbows, and my body is sore and my voice is lost forever, and the sheer idea of a beer – just the thought of it! – makes me shudder over anew, like I might throw up my own organs into a sink. And yet: if you offer me tickets to Leeds Festival again next year, will I take them? I will take them. I will scrape my brain out and turn it inside-out like a dusty purse, and I will thank the sesh all over for hurting me, amen;
Alright, how much are they asking? Best get this bit over and done with: it's a fold-down bed in Shepherd's Bush-cum-Hammersmith. It costs £945 a month to rent. Can someone come to my house and please kill me.

Here's this week's one, look. At the surface level: it looks quite nice (we have talked about nice places on this column before, and the trap within them – shit-nice places, i.e. places that are nice but still shit are still shit, even if they are nice. The easiest way to tell if somewhere is shit-nice is: does it look quite clean, and nice? Are the electrical sockets ordered in the most deranged and nutty way you've ever encountered? Then this place is shit-nice, do not rent it), does it not?

But then you realise that, actually, that's a fold-down bed, and that as soon as you want to sleep in this room, all the immediate floor space is consumed, instantly, like a sponge soaking up all the water in a precisely sponge-sized container, so that you vwoop that bed down, and boom: your kitchen is no longer a kitchen, your reception room is no longer a reception room, everything is gobbled up by bedroom, the room can only ever be one thing at once.

This costs £945 a month and it is in Hammersmith. As an adult, do you not think you are worth something north of that?

This is the thing that I do not ever understand, the lingering question that hovers over every shit-nice place (especially one like this – so glossy, so shiny, the warranty stickers still on all the white goods, the weird downlights in the kitchenette, as if it was designed by a 19-year-old Max Power subscriber who has taken the design cues from the Fiat Panda he lowered and loops around roundabouts every Friday night): why's someone done this? Why has someone taken the time, and spent the money, and done this? Why has someone seen this room, and done this to it?

Seen this room and thought: 'If we spend about five grand on an oven, a washing machine, a freezer, some baffling lights, a child-sized toilet in a tiny cupboard of an en-suite bathroom, grey paint, tiles, fixtures, a freestanding wardrobe and a fold-down bed arrangement… we could rent this to some cunt, couldn't we? We could recoup that money in less than a calendar year.

Answered my own question there, didn't I. That’s depressing.

I see a lot of trends in London Renting Shitholes, because I have to log on to Gumtree or whatever and find one every week, so we have seen the 2019 boom of mezzanine beds, and we have seen the late-2018 era of rolling up some towels on the end of a freshly made bed to make it look more enticing, and we have seen that evergreen era of putting a big canvas print of Audrey Hepburn up in front of a dinner table that is slightly too small for one person to comfortably sit at, but this flat demonstrates something new and quite troubling: instead of the usual white or off-white walls, these are grey, the mirrors are framed, the bathroom is tiled with slate. And what this means is: the Mrs Hinch Effect has slammed two-footed into the London rental market. Expect more and more immaculate grey prisons in the coming months. Possibly with special bedrooms for dogs in them.

@joelgolby