London Rental Opportunity of the Week: An Impossibly Stressful Bedsit in Camden!

What is it? Part of me wants to say "a studio flat in Camden", but another, much larger part of me wants to say "one of those special cells inside a prison designed to incite the maximum amount of anxiety possible out of the captive";
Where is it? Right by Mornington Crescent station, which is very useful when you want to catch the Tube, or be kept up late four nights of the week by the crowds flopping out of Koko yelling primally for a kebab;
What is there to do locally? Spotter's tour of all the places in the mid-aughts where Pete Doherty did a piss? I don’t fucking know. Go buy some incense with some goths? Honestly. I don’t know;
Alright, how much are they asking? £210 p.w., which I make out about £882 p.c.m. which is how literally everyone on Earth beyond estate agents thinks about rent anyway

I want you to look at this photo and then try to connect with me (me.) on a human level. Here’s my issue: this static photograph of an unremarkable room is one of the most stressful images of my whole life, and I cannot figure out why. Is this happening with you? Look at it:

Keep looking at it. Push through. It hurts, doesn’t it? You know how you lift your ears sometimes when your muscles clench and tense, and there is a rushing sound of the blood in your ear-drums, and that is like the sound of stress? This image is the visual equivalent of that. You know how sometimes you’re getting ready to leave the house and you don’t really want to leave the house and all along your back – not the spine, nor the skin, but some supra layer between the two – goes tense and hard and chillingly cold? That’s this image. The hairs on your arms are lifting. Look at it again:

Why is my heart beating faster in my chest when I look at this? We have to consider the cold facts: this is a studio flat for rent in Mornington Crescent, leaning on Camden. It costs £210 per week to live here. It is a single room with appallingly-designed subdividers. (This is an issue for me: if you are going to try to cram every aspect of a larger, liveable flat into one tiny room, and isolate each area for use – washing, cooking, sleeping, relaxing – with small low walls that half-divide the room and guide it into shape, why are they all so badly designed? I suppose there is something about the ugly place that the very idea of renting one room as a flat actually contorts the idea of it as it comes out, mushing and crumpling and bending it, so you think this sort of sub-divider layout is acceptable. But also: why can London’s shithole landlords not even design one room of a building?).

You have a sofa, look, that backs up into – and blocks access entirely to – your kitchen. You have an entire gigantic wardrobe. By the window? A table with so much crap underneath it you have to sit sideways along it just to eat anything there. The main point of storage in your flat? The back of the front door, which seems to open immediately onto a small low table, i.e. the door of this flat does not swing open freely because there is too much useless crap behind it. Your bed? Your bed is single, and during the day it seems to work as a very bad sofa with pillows either side. Your luggage? Ram it on top of the wardrobe, you fool. THE TV STAND IS EXCEPTIONALLY RED.

Are you stressed like I am yet?

What about the freestanding slice of mirror that’s just there, leaning next to the shower? How about all those patterns at once? Hey, listen, just answer me this: what’s that hanging up between the handles on those kitchen cabinet doors? Because to me it looks like that time your weird weed flatmate in halls chopped his ponytail off and kept it, at once thick and wizened, in a weird ornamental ashtray by his bed. Am I stressing out too much now? Or is that human fucking hair?

Here, have some more:

We see a lot of cursed places in this column (which everyone loves! The column! Fan favourite that everyone loves!), but for me this is truly one of the most cursed. We see gloomy rooms and ask what happened there. We see smudged carpets and ask whose blood was spilled. But here, I feel like: this place, more than anywhere we have ever seen, needs a sage cleanse or an exorcism. There has been a lot of talk of energy this week, and this house has it in spades. But it is bad energy. I feel like if you put a dog in this room it would run around in tight circles and then lie down and try to sadly die. If you put a cat in there it would just start hissing. This room is a fire alarm, it’s a crocodile, it’s an "… is typing" notification from a girl who’s about to dump you. This room is that dull sad beep the ATM makes when you have insufficient funds before it spits your card back at you. This room is no 4G and you don’t know how to get a night bus home from south London. This room is a child on a quad bike inexplicably doing wheelies in a cul-de-sac. What I am saying is that this room is an unknowable, unquantifiable expression of stress. This room, more than anywhere else in London, needs to be knocked down and built anew.

@joelgolby