Rental Opportunity of the Week: The Sheer Hell of Living with More Than One Person

What is it? The sinister energy of a wipe-clean brothel rent-a-room mixed with the basement lighting of a hidden dungeon. Whatever happens in this room, it involves mucus. That is what I am saying here.
Where is it? In a liminal space that could feasibly be Paddington, Marylebone and Edgware Road, or all three at once.
What is there to do locally? Well, to be fair, you are slap-bang in central London, so you can go to the Sherlock Holmes Museum, walk through Marble Arch, attend the Sylvia Young Theatre School, go Madame Tussaud's, go Regent's Park and, most crucially, visit Speaker's Corner and call anyone talking there a "nutty twat".
Alright, how much are they asking? £1,175 pcm, which I think we can all agree is "too much".

Breaking one of the harder and faster rules of the column this week and going directly in on someone's actual house, and I apologise up front for this. The thinking behind it is: when I find an abandoned studio flat rotting away in Chingford with a mattress flopped up against the wall to give the appearance of floorspace and yellowing light humid throughout it, I know that this listing is long for the world, because of its deep unappeal, and that the flat attached to it will lay empty for some weeks or sometimes months, cutting away at the requested rent week by week by week, until someone finally caves in and takes the place – please, just anything: I'll take the studio in Chingford; please just take it off Rightmove, please – and I don't mind saying, like, "Ah, this place with just a microwave in it and an impossible half a wardrobe? In Chingford? This place is shit," because nobody is living there, currently, and nobody who ever lives there will be living there out of active choice, i.e. nobody on Earth who lives at the short end of the rental market believes it to be anything other than shit, and only those at the sharper spectrum – your landlords, property managers and developers, your estate agents – think that it is, like, a place you can live in. So I don't mind saying that.

But this week we’re looking at one double room in a household of seven, so I'm about to say the house that six people currently live in is bad, and if you are one of those six people, I am sorry in advance, to you, not for my own actions but the actions of generations of governmental failure and hang-them-by-the-necks crooked landlordism that has led to this point now, in history, today, that has you renting one of six rooms in a house-share and somehow still footing more than a grand a month for it. Could that paragraph have been more elegant? Shorter, perhaps, with fewer commas? Experts suspect that it could not.

So here's the room on offer today, and yes you are right to think that it is not the worst room we have ever had. I do, personally, have beef with bed frames mounted on tiled or laminated floors – there is something deeply uncomfortable about it, something chilling and cold, plus the squeaking, sliding noises and motions it makes if you fuck on it are real nut-tuckers – and en-suite rooms that don't at first glance appear to have a visible door (I don't care how intimately you know or love someone, you don’t need to see them shower and you don't need to see them shit; at best you can watch them piss, but I’m not having anything more than that), and jade-green coverlets, and wardrobes that very actively block your exit from the room into the garden, and ceiling-mounted spotlights, and a toilet brush that stares at you as soon as you enter the room, like a threatening and unmoving animal, just looking, waiting, and toilets mounted at a slight angle to fit the tiny amount of space allotted to them. But those are all my own personal bugbears and they do not ultimately detract from the room. The room is fine, and cold-seeming, and joyless, and I do feel like people have paid for handjobs in it in a way that nobody enjoyed the handjob, giver or receiver, but ultimately it is fine.

But what I'm a little uncomfortable with is the sheer economics of this room. This room – joyless, remember, chillingly cold and un-homely – costs £1,175 a month. And that's not for your own place: it's shared with six other people, and we all know the enjoyment of a home-living situation goes roughly like this:

0 housemates: a special form of heaven where sometimes you forget to leave the house for seven whole days and start taking too-serious care of all your plants.
1 housemate: it is good, it is OK.
2 housemates: haha OK guys, who left this pan out though!!!!!!! I was going to make moussaka but the only pan has cheese crusted to it. Soaking doesn’t work, we had that whole email thread about it.
3 housemates: I don't understand how one person can have so much football kit at once, one person can be high three times a week and one person is just locked in the room all the time, as best I can tell trading Bitcoin and occasionally eating "just plain rice", but I hate all of you.
4 housemates: it is impossible to have four housemates in London and not have at least one of them be Australian. Stop saying "lamington", I don't know what it means.
5 housemates: good how the simple act of six people leaving the house in the morning and six people coming home at night is like two separate acts of war, isn't it.
6 housemates: impossible to know six names. It is impossible to know that many names.
7 housemates: you have been woken up twice tonight by two separate people coming home drunk, and once more by two separate people having sex, and you haven't had hot water for a hundred days.
8 housemates: refuse to push the analogy further than: eight housemates is basically "just prison".

So you see how £1,175 for an un-special room in Paddington (presuming similar rates across the other rooms, a landlord somewhere is making £8,000 a month off this) somehow now looks more expensive and terrible, for you, because six other people are in the house, at least, clunking around, scuffing the walls, using all the kitchen equipment at once, inelegantly frying an egg so badly that the special nice spatula your mum got you for Christmas got melted all at the end, kicking their shoes off and leaving them with their socks in them for days, all using the TV in the only shared room literally whenever you want to use it, leaving you on edge, inviting their sinister friends over, who all sit on the arm of the sofa so much the arm of the sofa has gone both shiny and crispy, somehow, and smells like all your dad's old coats when he was still smoking, heaving a big bag of garbage into the back garden even though the bins are in the front, What Was Your Thinking Behind That Mate, having a BBQ even though it's September, absolutely flooding the bath mat seconds before you walk in there in socks.

£1,175, a month, for that? It's going to be a polite no thank you from me there, cheers!

@joelgolby