Perhaps I should have called this post "Dives I Have Known", because it's really a matter of cheap rented gaffs, how I found them, and how I got by living in them. One of my luckier finds was very much like this house (thank you Ned Hoskins of Artists' Open Houses) although it was not, sadly, full of artists.
On landing a new job, which is of course many miles away from your previous job, a Brit has 2 choices: stay where you are and commute, or up sticks and move. There is also the ghastly third choice of weekend commuting, but Lunchista has tried this and found that short of actually dying it's the quickest way ever to lose touch with your friends and, indeed, most of your life. I have also watched other people do it and end up divorced, or worse still stuck in a jam on the M25 at 4:30 on a Monday morning.
Of those three choices, by far the best for an unattached, and un-roadworthy, Lunchista was to move. In the days before Google Earth, and assuming the place is so new to you that you don't yet know anybody who lives there, the first step was to go to the new city, get an AtoZ and a local paper at the station, take a taxi to somewhere vaguely near the workplace (not forgetting to chat to the taxi driver for interesting local information), find a seat, get out a pen, then find a phone-box and start calling (and walking). If it was raining I just got wet. The important thing is to avoid agencies, because these people are paid extra to get you into somewhere expensive, and waste a lot of time talking about places which are totally unsuitable. "It's a beautiful village" "I'm sure it is, but it's 15 miles from where I want to live, and I don't drive...".
The list of priorities was as follows:
1. If I can't walk there, forget it
2. Cheapness
3. Brightness
4. Hot water
5. Non-immaculate decor
And that was it. The hot water needn't mean heating, it's surprising how quickly you get used to life without it. The non-immaculate decor might need some explanation. It so happened that while I was still a student, I noticed a definite correlation between a Landlord (or Landlady)'s laid-back attitude to appearences, and a happy crowd of tenants. Also, decor is only superficial and anything that was too rough even for Lunchista could easily be sorted ("Do you mind if I paint that wall? It looks a bit sad..."). I also developed a preference for older, terraced houses.
Let's just say that the places I found using this algorithm were not for the faint-hearted. There was the landlord whose brother was rumoured to be a gun-runner for the Contras in Nicaragua. The council found out that we had no fire escape so we all had to move out that week. My protestations that I lived in the basement flat, and anyway it was far too damp to ever catch fire, fell on deaf ears. There was the attic flat that was my utter favourite, until the ceiling fell in one night (while I was away. Why was I elsewhere? Because two nights previously I'd had this terrible nightmare about the ceiling falling in...)
Some people made a lot of noise: the couple who argued on the stairs at 2 am when I had to get up at 5 were the worst. But music-type noise could be dealt with: here is my method, and it really does work.
Walk into the room where the music is being played, ostensibly to borrow, return, ask, something unrelated to the music. Just take in the atmosphere. Notice where people are sitting and what they're doing. Ask anything (except, at least initially, if they're into Heavy Metal), just generally chat for a while, then make your excuses and slope off. Next time whoever it is is playing music, you have a ready-made mental image of what they're doing. It's nothing drastic, or scary, or unknown. The music's just music, the back of your brain no longer regards it as a threat and you can get on with your Physics, reading, or sleeping.
Things would sometimes go wrong, though, at my "end of the Market". There was one Landlord who went bankrupt, left the country and then the whole street came up for sale. Another had a nervous breakdown (nothing to do with me, honest...). One of my Chinese friends had an elderly landlord whom he used to look after a bit. One morning he brought this old chap his usual morning tea and found he'd passed away in the night.
But cheap rented gaffs had their consolations. Chief of these was the concept of the shared kitchen. Because with the shared kitchen came new friends, local information and new dishes to try: in those days everyone had at least one dish they could cook, so the more people you shared with, the more you learned. I consider myself lucky to have done all my kitchen-sharing before the hegemony of the dreaded Microwave.
Here was my contribution to the fray: classic student-style Spag-Bol (feeds four at one sitting, or one student each night of the working week). Gently fry 2 chopped onions and 2 finely-chopped cloves of garlic, then tip in 1 pound of mince and fry til it has changed colour (it doesn't have to be completely done yet). Meanwhile in a separate pan, put in 2 tins of the ever-useful Italian tomatoes, some sticks of celery (finely-chopped), a few mushrooms (ditto), herbs like thyme and a bayleaf if available, and a spoonful of Bovril or Marmite. Lift the meat and onions out of their liquid and add to the tomato mixture. Heat these up until just shy of boiling, then turn down and simmer for at least 1/2 an hour. For added panache, pour in any wine that nobody wants to drink (anything up to a large glassful, and check first that no-one has dropped anything in it). For the pasta I have found that about 75g as measured when dry, per person works.
Of course another consolation of cheap rented gaffs was their sheer cheapness, which enabled the saving of money towards a project of choice (going on a course, visiting China, waiting for a recession so you could buy a house, or even being able to follow your favourite footie-team...) The people of the 1980s always said "rent is Dead Money", but if it didn't amount to much, did that really matter? And anyway, can someone remind me what exactly the first four letters of the word "Mortgage" mean?
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