Rental Opportunity of the Week: An Attic in London's Worst Nightlife Destination

What is it? It's weird that this pandemic and the lockdown that results from it and the ticking death counter and the families in distress is this huge, over-arching constant that hums behind every moment of our lives right now, but it still doesn't feel Big, exactly; it still doesn't feel Immediate. It's just there, hanging in the air like a fug, a pressure storm rolling distantly down the mountain while all you feel is the soft cold fizz of mist on your face—
Where is it? I suppose there is mediocrity in catastrophe, and, having never truly experienced one before, that has come as a surprise to me. Out there, outside the windows and doors of my flat, people are getting sick and dying, and yet still my most immediate concerns are, like, 'It's quite hot in this room, should I get the fan going (loud) or should I open a window (pollen, dust),' and, 'What can I cook tonight that isn’t one of the same five meals I've cooked every night for ten weeks,' and, 'Does this mask I bought on Etsy look cool, or does it look shonky and homemade, like a primary school nativity costume?' I have a pair of shorts coming in the post today and I'm on edge about whether I can get downstairs for that delivery before the rogue mail-thief in our building gets there first. That sort of thing. It's odd how everything at once feels deeply relevant and entirely inconsequential. Covid is a cliff we cannot climb.
What is there to do locally? I mean, in among all that, in among all the World Events and History We Are Living Through, does it really matter if this one flat in Shoreditch is fit to live in or not? What decisions the fitters and landlords and property developers and people who have lived there before have made in creating the space as it is? Does any of this matter? Will the things that matter every day in Normal Life (a transient space we will never, truly, return to) matter anymore in the post-covid landscape? Or will we have to re-order what "matter" looks, feels and tastes like? What will it look like when we are all allowed back outside?
Alright, how much are they asking? I mean I just I woULD GIVE EVERYTHING I HAVE TO GO TO THE PUB WITH MY MATES RIGHT NOW. FOUR PINTS, SOME SPICY NUTS, A FLOOD IN THE GENTS, A MATE OF SOMEONE YOU ARE SITTING WITH HAS RECOGNISED HIM AND COME OVER AND SAID HELLO AND IT IS CLEAR FROM THE BODY LANGUAGE OF YOUR FRIEND – NOT GOT UP, TWISTED TO FACE, NOT INVITED THE PERSON TO SIT WITH US, ETC – THAT HE DOES NOT REALLY LIKE THE GUY ENOUGH TO ACTUALLY BLEND HIS AND OUR GROUPS INTO ONE MECHA-GROUP, BUT THE GUY WHO HAS COME OVER HAS NOT REALISED THIS, HIS ERODED ROLE IN THE WIDER FRIENDSHIP, AND SO HE IS TALKING, ENDLESSLY – "GOD WHAT HAPPENED AT AGP AFTER I LEFT? IS DANIELLE STILL GOING ON ABOUT THOSE MEETING ROOMS?" – AND YOU, THE REST OF THE GROUP, ARE JUST WATCHING THIS CRAP CONVERSATION HAPPEN, BETWEEN TWO MEN, ONE STANDING, ONE SITTING, NONE OF YOU STARTING YOUR OWN CONVERSATIONS BECAUSE THE MOMENT TO DO THAT PASSED LONG AGO (WHEN THE GUY FIRST CAME OVER AND TAPPED YOUR FRIEND ON THE SHOULDER AND SAID "THOUGHT I'D SEE YOU HERE" YOU ALL STOPPED ABRUPTLY TO GIVE HIM THE REQUISITE 15 TO 20 SECONDS IT SHOULD TAKE HIM TO HAVE THIS SOCIAL INTERACTION, BUT NOW WE ARE FOUR MINUTES IN AND COUNTING AND HE SIMPLY HAS. NOT. STOPPED.) AND SO YOU ARE ALL THERE, IN SILENCE, WATCHING THIS ABSOLUTE FUCKING CAR CRASH OF A CONVERSATION UNFOLD. IT'S AGONY. IT'S LIKE HAVING ALL YOUR BONES REMOVED BY A SURGEON. I WOULD PAY UP TO AND INCLUDING ONE BILLION POUNDS TO EXPERIENCE IT AGAIN. £802 pcm.

Listen, this isn't the worst flat I've ever dragged through the cat flap and presented, lifeless and tattered, at your kingly little feet, but more and more that feels like a false boast: this isn’t the worst flat that I – the guy who, every week, looks through London property listings to find the worst flat, among many – has ever seen, but that doesn't mean it's good exactly, it just means it’s not quite so essentially and fundamentally terrible as the others.

If I took you to the pub (see above.) and said to my mates, "Look at this one. This isn’t the worst prick I’ve brought to the pub, is it?" you wouldn’t feel good about yourself, exactly, would you? You’d sit there, with your four pints and your spicy nuts, but you wouldn’t be in the chat: you’d be there, floating just outside of yourself, wondering what it is about you that’s so wrong. You live a good life, don’t you? You’re not mean, you didn’t come here to hurt. You do Veganuary and set up a direct debit to a charity. The planet, having you crawl around on top of it, is in a position of net profit, right, for having you there? Your presence on Earth is a good thing. And yet: not the worst prick I’ve brought to the pub, is it? This will echo in your dreams for an eternity. You will never, ever shake this slight.

Anyway: here's a Shoreditch flat where you sleep in your kitchen and the walls lean steeply, threateningly in. You are fairly near Goodhood, but that’s about it. On weekends, the whole texture of the surrounding area changes, as the hip weeknight clientele who work in the offices nearby cycle back out to their more east London enclaves, and instead a flood of Essex commuters come in via Liverpool Street for a Big Night Out, and the air is glowing and cold and threatening and a load of people who have been turned down for The Apprentice three cycles in a row flap £20 notes at the bartenders, and even though it is corny it works, and here you are, elbow-to-elbow with a load of bandeau dresses, resolutely not getting served, despite standing with your hand on the bar for 40 straight minutes now.

Later, when you give up and go home, the lad in the kebab house will get distracted halfway through making your order by three blokes in tight glossy shirts muscling up the crackly, sexy tension before a fistfight, shouting, "Lads, lads, lads: you can’t do that in here, yeah? You can’t do that in here," and so they go outside and black each other's eyes, then the police turn up and the kebab man is just holding your shawarma in his open palm, the meat cooling to an ambient temperature there on top of it, mouth agape, all of you in the queue here turned to watch as a bloke in handcuffs and his face rammed against a riot van goes "WATCH MY WATCH YOU CUNT", and when you turn back he’s forgotten your order entirely and started another cage of frozen chips and you have to say, "Mate, mate, large lamb wrap," and he’s like "eight quid, mate" and you have to say "I already paid I—" and he’s like "I don’t remember that" and you watch as he hands a lamb wrap, your lamb wrap, to some girl who came in here 20 full minutes after you, and it’s like, Time Out never writes about this side of Shoreditch, does it—

Not even got close to describing this place, sorry. The walls lean so drastically in that the mattress is not actually on the bed, look. The angle of the walls have it so the only way the bed can be against the wall and the mattress can be on it is if the mattress sticks out two inches over the lip of the bed frame. The other alternative is to put the bed in the middle of the room, but then you are giving up a lot of extremely precious floorspace just to have your mattress sit neatly on your bedframe, so you don't do that, do you? You pay £802 a month – and I just know from the insistence of those two pounds over the £800 monthly rent that the landlord in charge of all this is an absolute tight-fisted jobsworthy megacunt – you pay £802 a month to not have your bed fit on its frame.

I have never seen a space heater mounted at such a psychotic angle: it inspires in me the same deep, dipping fear I get when I watch archive footage of Michael Jackson dangling Blanket over a balcony. The kitchen is fine enough, but the small amount of tiling on the angled wall really amplifies the woozy, wrong-feeling effect of the entire angular space. The blinds, like every set of blinds in every rental property on the planet, is a tangled fucked up mess that will never get replaced. The bathroom is OK but the shower is mounted on a stand – which, much like a small fire blanket being mounted next to the front door, I have long taken as an unwritten "red flag" of a property being bad – and, if I'm being a diva, the tiles inside it are very ugly indeed.

Do you want to pay £800 (plus £2) a month to live here? You're in someone’s attic and you sleep in your kitchen and the walls peer down on you like monsters in a nightmare. It's near Goodhood, though. So you see: not the worst we've ever seen, sure. But not exactly good, either.

@joelgolby