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London Rental Opportunity of the Week

London Rental Opportunity of the Week: Would This Bedsit in Hove Make You Kill?

Is red chill? Red feels: very unchill.
(All images via Gumtree)

What is it? I need to talk to you about my process, because a lot of writers have ‘a process’, and I don’t. So like some writers are like: “Ah, you gotta start the day with a belt of whiskey and a swim in the iron-cold sea!” No. Or they are like: “Man, wake up at 10AM and do a load of acid and then go to lunch and do more acid and then drink a margarita, w/ a bit of acid dabbed in, then I dunno about 8PM just spool out a fucking hundred thousand words of garbage and then, acid” No. “One perfectly poached egg and then an elegant wank amongst some trees and barren woodland” No. Some writers wake up really early and think about the human condition for a long while before doing some literary fiction about it. Some people smoke loads of cigarettes and dictate some bullshit to a harried intern. The point is: I roll in late with a pot of Pret porridge then stare at the blue-white internet, relentlessly, mainly checking Twitter then closing the tab then opening Twitter, again, until an idea attacks me, which very often it doesn’t, (January! Is! A! Dry! Month!), and I just end up finding a shit flat and writing about that. So in answer to the question "what is it?" it is: the third fucking London Rental Opportunity I’ve written in a row. That’s what it is. And for those wondering I was 18 minutes late today—
Where is it? Hove, the bit of Brighton I like to call "not Brighton"
What is there to do locally? I mean every time I’ve been to Brighton – if you want to come at me about the demarcation of Brighton and Hove as if they are separate places and that you are going to stay rigidly in Hove when Brighton is right there, next to Hove, and has loads of ice cream shops in it – every time I’ve been to Brighton it’s either been i. that one sunny day of the year where literally everyone in London hoards en masse down to Brighton to the beach to ruin it by being really London about everything and leaving disposable BBQs and Kopparberg bottles everywhere ii. I’ve spent ages and ages trying to get a photo of that shop called "GAK Pianos" but some bloke in a woven hoodie w/ damp dreadlocks keeps juggling in front of me and trying to tell me how wearing shoes is evil. So the answer is ‘I don’t know’.
Alright, how much are they asking? Can you believe we made it 417 words in before we got to this question? I mean even for me, that’s a piss take. You know I’m supposed to be wrapping these up around the 750 mark? I look at a word count the same way Australian lads see "wear warm weather gear" signs on the base of Snowdon and who end up having to get airlifted to hospital, shivering to death in a vest. The point is it costs £595 a month.

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My mum painted the front room red once, and I have to say it made me feel very on edge, forever. It just: there’s something about red rooms that makes you feel like they have been specially designed to murder a horse in them, or something. A creeping sense that maybe you are in a hotel and that all the guests here are dead. Everyone you meet in an all-red room could viably be The Devil, just dressed up in human skin. I’m just saying it’s not a relaxing colour, exactly. I feel like painting prison cells a violent red would lead to more shankings. It confuses the animal brain, all that vividness the colour of blood. It makes us panic and freak out. It makes us turn in circles and shit ourselves in fear. I’m just saying: if I were decorating the front room, mum, the room I watch Rugrats in and sometimes eat dinner, I would go for, like: blue. A nice soothing magnolia. Something green. Not, "the colour of hell itself".

Anyway: we’re in Hove this week.

I suppose I should attempt to describe what’s going on here, and once again we are weaving into the lane of oncoming traffic I like to call "a studio flat on technicality alone". Here we have a single room with a sort of leather-effect bed in it. You have a cooker, a fridge, and a spindly set of miniature shelves (I suppose you could stack… all your mugs in there? One by one?) all buried deep inside a sliding-door wardrobe. The rest of the wardrobe slides open to reveal a washing machine, the ghost of a place where once a wall-mounted TV did live, and… no, actual, viable wardrobe space.

Then we need to journey into the bathroom, which I’m afraid is one of those "just put a hole in the middle and every liquid can go down there" all-in-one affairs. I’ve never personally pissed in a toilet where the entire ceramic mass of it bisects the door it’s leaning against, nor have I really pissed in a room with a still-dripping shower in it, or again have I really done pissy in a room where the tiles are leaned and grooved into a sort of central mass to wick the water away and down into the plughole, and also also I’ve never done pissy where you literally have to wear shoes or sliders to do said pissy because the floor is going to be very fundamentally wet from the fact that it’s also a shower. I mean what I guess I am saying is: this room was never designed to be a shower, let alone a bathroom. This room was never designed to have a sink in it. This room – if I were to guess – was probably designed as a cupboard to have a boiler in it, and maybe some bare shelves for blankets and linen. Yr pissing in an airing cupboard for nearly six hundred quid a month mate.

Still, if you ever get bored of every single one of your available amenities being within reach of your bed, you can always relax by sitting back and looking at a violently, violently, violently red wall, and distantly wondering about what murders you might do, if you’d ever do one. You’d never do one, would you? Come on. You’re a moral person. You’d never kill, never commit a crime. But you think about them, don’t you. Your knee on someone’s windpipe. The heavy metal gun in your hand. You think of crushing a skull against a wall, don’t you? You think of kicking someone off a bridge. You’d never do it, though. Look at the red. You’d never do it, really. It’s just something to idly think about. Look at the red. You can imagine, though, the sound you make while you ping someone’s teeth out with a tool though, can’t you? I mean you’d never do it. But look at the red. Look at it again. Maybe – maybe you’d do it. Maybe this studio flat would drive you mad enough to do it.

@joelgolby