London Rental Opportunity of the Week: This Is Not An Acceptable Bathroom Mirror, Sorry

What is it? About £200 worth of flat stretched out across a £850 listing, that’s what;
Where is it? Leyton, the sort of place that only exists in London as an end-of-the-line bus journey where you wake up – bleary, blinking, dribble down your cheek, the hot-sweat smell of 2AM McDonald's vivid on the air around you – a good £40 Uber away from your house, The Escalating Cost Of Being A Dipshit;
What is there to do locally? I honestly don’t know. One of the "Guide To London!" things I always pull up when I have to answer this question legitimately suggests "walking to Westfield", but what you're supposed to do there – get locked onto the world's slowest-moving escalator behind a hundred-thousand prams? Inexplicably spend £8 on a Boost Juice? Have a panic attack in the big Primark? Shoplift? – isn’t exactly clear
Alright, how much are they asking? £850, which in the context of the UK is "very bad"; in the context of London is "an inch above reason"; and in the context of Leyton is "beyond insanity".

How often do you think about your bathroom mirror? It’s not really a thing you actively think about, is the thing: bathroom mirrors are for steaming up during showers, staring blandly into while you brush your teeth, a tool to gaze at your pores with and the place for juddering realisation six hours into the sesh, when you go to wash your hands and end up face-to-face with yourself, purple beneath the eyes and sweating like a marathon runner. They are, for most people, tools, and ones that often double up – with a simple click – as a cabinet door, to reveal your unguents, your plasters, your salves, your UTI medication. You have never thought about a bathroom mirror before. I am asking you to think about this bathroom mirror:

The thing with this bathroom mirror (or: a pocket mirror dangled from a joist on a hot water pipe, if you want to be cynical) is that it is just one red flag in a bathroom simply decorated with them.

You have: the exposed pipe and water meter combo; the mismatching tiles sandwiched together with inelegant grouting; the less-than-one-square-metre floorplan. But most importantly you still have the coat hooks from when this bathroom was, as it was designed to be, a coat cupboard for coats, and for some reason that – not the child-sized sink plugged into the wall with a single exposed PVC pipe – is what disturbs me most about the room.

Because this flat is simply overflowing with chaotic energy. An admission I am not proud to make: I have had to rotate 50 percent of the photos of this flat uploaded to Gumtree because the estate agent-cum-property seller who did so in the first place uploaded them wrong, which added an even more anarchic air to proceedings.

But I mean, look at this: a kitchen made up of a washing machine duct-taped to the wall so it doesn’t forward crawl mid-cycle and block off the bathroom door; a freestanding fridge with a laundry rack folded behind it; a very sinister amount of visible damage to the door and door-jamb!; the fact that the only cooking tool you have is a microwave, and you have to lean over a washing machine to use it; a combination of a mirrored cupboard (sorry to keep making you think about mirrored cupboarding, but: when have you ever seen a mirrored cupboard outside of a bathroom?) and large-pattern tiling that makes me think this studio apartment was actually just someone’s actual bathroom once, until they yo-dawg-we-heard-you-like-bathrooms-so-we-put-a-bathroom-in-your-bathroom’d it and turned it into something that could – nominally, if not legally – be blocked off from the rest of the house and described as a studio flat.

Anyway, here’s your bed – which inexplicably has a base that still has the plastic delivery wrapping on it, but a mattress that has very clearly been heavily used, so much so it sags in the middle and has a white area where the pattern has been eroded away; so what, frankly, the fuck – which is crammed into the room’s only alcove, between a door jamb and an electric heater.

As you can see from the cheeky white goods corner peeking into shot, the bed is just an arm’s length away from your fridge, which is good when you want to wake up in the middle of the night and immediately chug an ice cold cola, but bad when you, say, want to fall asleep in a room that isn’t simply thrumming with middle-of-the-night fridge sound.

Here are four pieces of furniture that absolutely do not match together at all – big "out-in-the-first-week X Factor waifs-and-strays boyband" energy, very United Vibe – all of which are lined up against the wall as if they’re being looked at from behind a two-way mirror by the victim of a violent crime. The chair and stool are very good if someone wants to come over and quietly watch you sleep, I suppose, though both have to be moved if you want to get anything out of the wardrobe at all. The TV stand is fine if you have a TV that absolutely does not exceed the width of it, otherwise you’re going to have to do some Tetris to make sure the fridge doesn’t butt up against it and push the whole thing onto the floor. Boxed-out power cables stripe the main wall; a head-height fuse box looms ominously above your bed. Anarchy.

All of this is fine, I suppose, if you’re in a pinch – the whole point of this column is not to denigrate the not-quite-nice-but-useful-at-least flats and houses people can stay in across London in times of desperation, which this place feasibly could be, to someone, once – but I cannot quite imagine the pinch you’re in when you very desperately need a one-bed, in Leyton, and can afford £850 (a month!) for it, and end up here.

We have a lot of fun on here calling landlords less-than-human, lower-than-dirt, sort of hybrid animal-monster chimeras with hearts of coal, souls doomed to hell and a clunking bank balance figure where a brain should be; but, very truly, what kind of person looks at this flat – a converted bathroom with a bed just-a-fucking-bout crammed into it, the same mirror tiles that were seemingly once above a bath, exposed pipe and exposed tile and the whole thing licked together with uneven polyfilla, history’s tiniest mirror as the cherry on the turd sundae – and think: 'Yeah, good. Eight hundred and fifty pounds a month, this, I reckon'?????

The answer, sadly, is: someone who belongs in a gulag.

@joelgolby has a book out