London Rental Opportunity of the Week: Go Head-to-Toe in Dublin!

What is it? Dunno because to truly classify something like this you need words like "tenements" or like "a ghetto" or one of those overcrowded sublets you always see the police clearing out when Big Tezza May has decided to send the vans round, but then it's also a new build and it costs €1,300 a month to live there, so?????? In answer to the question "what is it?", I guess I am gonna go with……… "a very elaborate prank"?

Where is it? Dublin, in Ireland. See normally – when this is a London borough – I can do some informed "bits'"about the area based on what it is genuinely like ("Ah, Tooting," I would say. "Where all the people who really want to buy a house go when they can't afford to buy a house!". That's not a good one, hold on: "Muswell Hill!" I'll say. "A Little Waitrose that got a bit out of contro—" actually, fucking hell. I've lost it. I used to be good at this. Guess this is it. One day your skillset will just… disappear. It'll just fizzle out beneath you. Look at footballers. When their knees go, their pace dries up, what do they do? What do they do when they can no longer do the one thing they have ever been trained to do? I mean I suppose they get really into casino gambling and having affairs. But other than that. What do they do?) but then any joke I do now make about Dublin will err onto the horrible grey traintracks of being A Genuine Racial Attack, so anything I do say here, now – "Dublin!" I'll say, playing it safe. "Nice place! Guinness!", that will be horribly misconstrued, somehow, will trigger a 4,000-comment Facebook thread on VICE's page calling me, like, Irish words for "dickhead" that I don't even understand, "Ya big English prat!" they are calling me, "you Queen-fucking fancy shite!" – so honestly I'm just going to go here with "Dublin – a city in Ireland".

What is there to do locally? I DON'T EVEN DARE ANSWER THAT QUESTION JESUS CHRIST

Alright, how much are they asking? €1,300 (about £1200) a month

READ:

They are constantly building new homes, is the thing. Look to the sky and see it littered with cranes. Take your normal walk thru town and see those painted wooden fences with taut canvas prints of the shape of things yet to be printed all above them. "CALL NOW", the prints say. "SECURE YOUR DREAM HOME". A mass of hands and dust and concrete, and girding and iron and glass. Trucks come and go. Building dirt, hot grey-white, gets crushed into the pavements outside. They are building, yes, but not for us. They are building for people who have £800,000 available to them. They are building for… I dunno. They are building houses… for… Russian… billionaires?

I truly do not understand who they are building the homes for, in this country.

What baffles me though I suppose is they are building these homes, for people, but it seems like the people building them have never seen a person, or a home, or ever lived in a home, or ever set foot in one, or ever seen a person, and never once done the mental calculation to see how 2 x adult humans might fit into and interconnect with 1 x new build property. For example, a treat this week from Dublin:

So I mean lets go thru the design flaws in this image alone:

• To open the curtains you have to move an entire bed, to get behind the bed, to get to the curtains.
• But because of the other bed Tetrissed in there and firming everything up you actually probably have to move two, beds, to open the curtains.
• Motherfucker the beds are in the kitchen.
• My guy, my guy: one of the beds is directly at a 90 degree angle to the other bed.
• So you either have to sleep with your feet in someone else's face or you sleep with your face in someone else's feet.
• And can I just state for the record that one of these beds is a double, thus designed to accommodate two human people.
• i.e. so say you are slamming, okay? Say you are slamming some dude. Or getting slammed. You're fucking, doesn't matter how.
• Then right when you're about to blow one oh, what's this? Oh it's THE TWO NUDE FEET OF YOUR FLATMATE, RIGHT IN YOUR SEX FACE.
• THIS ROOM WAS DESIGNED IN THE YEAR 2017
• THIS IS NOT THE FIRST ROOM EVER DESIGNED FOR HUMAN HABITATION IN HISTORY, LIKE YOU MIGHT EXPECT
• LIKE SAY THE YEAR WAS, I DON'T KNOW. ONE THOUSAND B.C.
• OKAY? AND LIKE YOU ARE DESIGNING THE FIRST EVER ROOM. YOU HAVE MOVED OUT OF THE CAVES AND DISCOVERED CLAY AND BUILT A SMALL HUT AND YOU ARE DESIGNING THE ROOM WITHIN IT
• THEN — POSSIBLY — I WOULD ALLOW THE NAÏVE DESIGN DECISION TO BUTTRESS ONE BED AGAINST ANOTHER IN AN L-SHAPED FORMATION
• I WOULD ALLOW THIS BECAUSE YOU ARE THE FIRST EVER HUMAN TO EVER ATTEMPT A ROOM. YOU ARE A PRIMITIVE QUASI-BEAST. YOU BARELY KNOW WHAT FIRE IS. BUT EVEN THEN I AM TAKING YOU TO ONE SIDE AND CONVEYING WITH GRUNTS AND A PRIMARY FORM OF PRE-LANGUAGE THAT I THINK YOU NEED TO HAVE A FUCKING WORD WITH YOURSELF, YOU FUCKING IDIOT
• BUT
• BUT THIS IS THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND SEVENTEEN. WE HAVE HAD ROOMS FOR A REALLY LONG TIME NOW.
• HOW DID THIS GET DESIGNED
• HOW DOES THE PERSON WHO DESIGNED THIS FUNCTION IN ANY WAY AT ALL

So I mean we all have some questions. Like: of the nine studio apartments available, all at €1,300 per calendar month (i.e. a lot!), who is going to pay six hundred and fifty big ones per month to sleep side-by-side with another adult human in a single bed which, again, appears by the granite work surfaces to be situated in some sort of kitchen-hybrid bedroom?

Or: who, in the morning, is like, knocking gently on someone else's bedroom – hey, man, hey my guy: mind if you put that wank on pause for a hot sec while I make some coffee in the flat's only kitchen, i.e. your bedroom?

Or: like, who designed this kitchen? Had they ever seen a kitchen before? 'Ah, yes, hmm, a kitchen: famously, kitchen's are just a massive extractor fan situated over the top of a toaster, a sink, a microwave-hob combination device which I did not even know existed, two cupboards and – despite this being a new-build, newly renovated flat – the shitty-ass piece of shit shit wallpaper is already peeling from the walls. The job, she is done.'

Or: why does this flat listing include four (FOUR) near-identical photos of the stairs, stairs which seem to have been custom-designed to feature a carpet you just want to throw yourself down? I want to die on that carpet? I want to go down it head-first into the eternal abyss?

FOUR!

Or: "We also have all the amenities, such as: a fucking washing machine just left out, there, in the middle of what's left of your kitchen-cum-bedroom."

"No, I don't know how to turn the digital timestamp off, literally a problem last encountered by any other human beyond a property agent in the year 2001. Everyone else figured it out. Not me, though."

I've said it before, I'll say it again, you think I don't mean it but I do: string every landlord up by their ankles and hang them to death before the eyes of the lord, amen amen amen

@joelgolby (h/t @teacupwolf)

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