London Trawling

My recent travels have required me to do some serious trawling for
accommodation, perhaps more so in London than anywhere else. For that
genuine London Eye-opening experience, the best ride in town has to be
the city's accommodation roller coaster.

Like so many new arrivals in London, my partner and I mooched our way
through our first few weeks in town. We stayed with some long lost, but
happily rediscovered, relatives who had three small children and a room
to spare. The children clung to my limbs like baubles on a reluctantly
replanted Christmas tree and reaffirmed my resolve to delay child
rearing for some further years. Quite some further years.

Our yearnings for more peaceful surrounds (mis)led us to us to a
backpackers in central London. The cheapest we could find, naturally.
Peace? We found none. Rats, filth and foul mouthed antipodeans? We
found plenty.

An overworked television was the focus of everyone's existence. That
is, until someone kicked it in, probably in a drunken rage at the end
of one night. Or day. Or maybe even morning. Oh how I longed for my
baubled past as I was constantly engulfed in funky dubious smoke like a
sad smouldering ex-xmas tree being burnt long after New Year's Eve. If
I should ever have children, dear God, let them leave home before they
grow into spoilt, scungey, cigarette suckling shits.

By some miracle, we managed to score a ridiculously cheap night one of
London's five star hotels. Let's call it the Celery, Apples, Walnuts,
Grapes (in a Mayonnaise Sauce) Hotel. The Celery, Apples, Walnuts,
Grapes (in a Mayonnaise Sauce) Hotel was truly something to marvel at.
Above our bed there was a chandelier (where I would normally expect a
ceiling fan). There were floral painted floors, floral painted walls,
even floral painted flowers. And six pound cheese sandwiches. Who could
ask for more?

Sadly, neither cheap celery, apples, walnuts nor grapes (and certainly
not cheap mayonnaise) last forever. We hit the streets to find a place
to call our own. Even if it would be someone else's.

Now I thought I had met some scammers travelling the Indian
sub-continent, but these were but poor amateurs compared with the
players in London's real estate market. A market that thrives in dinghy
upstairs offices with no fixtures and few fittings.

Real estate agents promised us that we could see wonderful properties
if, and only if, we paid registration fees of fifty to one hundred
pounds. That buys a lot of cheese sandwiches. Outrageous though it was,
we believed that it was just the way it was. But it was illegal. That's
what it was.

Some (slightly) less crooked agents set us straight and did not seek to
charge us for the 'honour' of inspecting a property. Our images of
cosmopolitan London apartments were shattered as we inspected countless
nasty little hovels designed to support only the most basic of rent
paying life forms. Only for six months at a time, mind you.

We were forced to madly rush through each of our inspections. I'll
never understand why it is that one may spend hours studying
classifieds searching for those better homes and gardens, but when it
comes to inspecting the real thing, one is granted mere minutes. For
the spatially impaired, such as myself, the time constraints are
impossible. I'm still trying to work out whether I would want to spend
a year living in places that I moved out of years ago. Nowhere is this
situation worse than in London, where life moves fast and flatless life
forms even faster.

We shared our final flat inspection with another young couple. The
agent had set this up to intensify the competition for the flat. It
worked. We swallowed the bait (along with a good dose of lies about our
liability for council tax or entitlement to furniture) and signed away
our lives. Well not quite our lives, but a deposit which would have
sustained our lives for a year or more back home in Oz.

We had finally finished our London trawling. We moved in and have now
almost furnished our unfurnished furnished apartment. And I can tell
you, it is a great load off our minds to finally be paying through our
noses to have a roof over our heads. Even if it is someone
else's.

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