Cold

Apart from poor diet, isolation, the smell of damp and the undercurrent of violence the main and unescapable feature of many bedsits is cold, the kind of cold you can only experience when rooms have no heating other than your own fan heater, one place was so cold that to get a shower we used to turn on the oven in the kitchen on and leave the hot water running in the shower until it was warm enough to strip off, single glazed windows with wooden frames often ice over on the inside in winter and even when you go to bed, you usually have to sleep in clothes, the feeling of cold if you need to get out of bed during the night is indescribable, Imagine being on a train station platform waiting for a connection, no cafes or buffer bars are open, it's a tiny station with no waiting room and it's open to the elements, you're cold, wet, hungry, your teeth start chattering and you just think of warmth, welcome to bedsit land cold.

Friday on my mind.

Just a thought or several, why do the underclass always kick off on a friday? Why do most arguments in bedsits seem to occur on a friday? Why do uneducated, unemployable chavs feel the need to end the week on an agressive note? These 'people' have remarkably short attention spans and even shorter tempers? Why do some landlords insist that decent working people who have fallen upon hard times should share with these examples of human rubbish? Even now, I have a quiet night on on a friday, I might pop out to a quiet pub or do a bit of shopping but I recall too many bedsit brawls to even consider being around too many people or too much alcohol, drink and volatile people is a bad combination so is drunken volatile people in the same house as sober rational people (who quite often have to be up for work on a saturday morning). Landlords take heed.

The greediest man ever?

There is well known 'Rachman' type landlord who quite frankly is a disgrace, he just crams as many people as possible into unsanitary fleapits, once he phoned my landlord (there were several) and suggested evicting us all and replacing us with illegal farm/landworkers, I later found out that these people were living 3 or 4 to a room and often 'hotbedding' (one person slept while another worked a different shift), just out of interest this phone call took place while this disgraceful specimen of humanity was on a skiing holiday to the Swiss Alps, the shamelessness of living off other peoples misery should disgust any decent person, he certainly doesn't belong to that catergory.

A few words on Immigration.

Immigration as such is no bad thing, uncontrolled immigration however most certainly is and Labour have not to put too fine a point on it totally screwed up the immigration/asylum fiasco, we were one of the few EU countries (can't we just get out of the EU and run our own country?) not to restrict entry from new member states in 2004 and as a result were overwhelmed with new arrivals, I have lived with many immigrants and found them usually decent enough people (if you exclude the awful Irish student, I generally find the Irish cheerful enough but this one was an exception to the rule), I have had/am having relationships with foreign women but that is a different matter altogether, the next foreigner I lived with was Jordanian, a very nice guy, like many students he 'overstayed' his visa but I got on well with him and often used to sit chatting with him for hours, it was a novelty meeting a teetotaller too, I lived with a Turkish guy who I only ever heard coming in at strange hours and I think I only ever actually saw him once, a couple of Zimbabwean women who were certainly not backwards at being forward and at different times Chinese people, the Chinese language (yes I know there are many variants) sounds incredibly sweet when it's being spoken by a pretty young woman but very harsh when two men are arguing! I love Chinese food and often eat out in a local buffet type place or get a takeaway, let me warn you the stuff my flatmates cooked at home smelled NOTHING like the stuff I'm used to, it positively reeked and frequently made me physically sick, needless to say I never asked to taste it, I remember also a Polish couple I once shared with, nice people but the thing I first noticed was that: a lot of Polish women are incredibly beautiful, they seem to have remarkable bone structures, age well and have glowing complexions, this one was the plainest woman I have ever seen, not ugly just plain, for some bizzare reason she reminded me of the 'Aunt Sally' character played by Una Stubbs in 'Wurzel Gummidge' (showing my age now!). It's incredible what bedsit life does to you.

Sights, sounds and smells.

I can't believe I failed to mention one of the women I shared with, although I have to confess I very rarely saw her, the impression I had of her was that she was either painfully shy or suffering from what are now termed 'mental health issues', the few times anyone saw her, she would scurry away into her room, if we dared to even mutter 'hello' to her, she would glare at us in such a way that didn't encourage further conversation, I gathered she had sons who would sometimes visit and end up shouting at her that she was a 'disgrace', but the smell comig from her room was something else, I have it on good authority that the first smell that Korean war veterans noticed about the country they were sent to was human excrement which the Koreans used (or maybe still do) as fertiliser, as a kid I used to wander around the woods and local farming areas and I can tell you that cow dung probably runs it a close second, I've smelled my fair share of farts (some I even managed to produce) but the stench from this unfortunate womans room became so bad we asked the landlord to investigate, while she went to sign on he went into her room to trace the source of this odour, her reluctance to venture far from her room was obviously quite an issue, apart from a bag full of empty food tins and old sanitary towels was a bucket which for some undiscovered length of time she had been using as a toilet.

Perfect day.

Not one of my favourite songs (I find Lou Reed depressing, probably ideal bedsit music) but by bedsit standards a good day is getting up on a day off work (assuming you do work, that is), having a relatively clean kitchen with a fridge you can safely leave food in, making your own breakfast without having to step over at least one druggie/wino/dosser, being able to sit in the living room and watch a bit of TV, going out for the day with no worries and coming home to a still intact front door, no smashed windows, no low life squabbles, no urine soaked furniture after someone fell asleep after one too many, no drug parties, no squatters that have decided to 'crash out' for a few days and best of all no sarcastic notes left under your door from Rachman landlords and to top it all a decent nights sleep, I enjoy and appreciate the simple things in life, at one place I used to walk through the door clutching a can of super strength lager just to 'fit in', nowadays I enjoy a large bottle of fruit juice and above all peace and quiet!

Long term inmates.

The 'space cadet' I mentioned earlier is at the time of writing in his mid 50's and has lived in bedsits for around 30 years which probably explains a lot, but one oldy boy has been living in the same freezing cold room for around 25 years, a quarter of a century of just existing, even the unusable twin tub has gone which means he has to either wash his clothes by hand or walk to a launderete, in some ways I feel sorry for him, his whole apperance has a look of desperation, he has developed a serious drink problem and every time I see him around he seems more and more depressed, he once told me he wouldn't care if he died, that's an awful thing to say about yourself but to be brutally honest, I doubt if anyone would care or even notice, how do people end up like that?