Moths, rot and total collapse!

PROPERTY 3

After the experiences of bongs, bongos and spontaneous fountains, I was naturally rather cautious when it came to looking for my next place. The trek from West Ealing to Waterloo was taking far too big a bite out of my day. Not only that, but the Piccadilly Line was always clogged with travellers going to and from Heathrow with enormous suitcases that took up all the space in the carriages. The last straw was when some green-about-the-gills guy who had probably eaten something dodgy on the plane threw up all over my boyfriend’s new suede shoes.

I ditched both Ealing and the boyfriend, but kept the job and moved to Belsize Park, still quite a grotty and bedsit-riddled area then, where I paid £64,000 for an enormous one-bed flat with a garden. I loved the area, but, yet again, the flat was blighted. The first weekend after I had moved in, the carpet came to life. It moved, it wriggled, it flew. It was infested with carpet moths, in every stage of their ghastly little lives, from white grubs poking their snouts up through the dark brown wool tufts like maggots on the hide of a rotting buffalo, to horrid little cocoons and hideous flying beasties.

I plugged in the vacuum, turned it on: nothing. My vacuum cleaner had died. I walked a mile to an electrical goods store and lugged a huge box containing a new one all the way back, staggering under the weight and resting it on garden walls every few minutes to ease my aching arms. I got it home, ripped open the box, uncoiled the flex of my shiny new Hoover, plugged it in and… nothing. That’s when I realised the electric socket was faulty and not my machines. I was now stuck with two vacuums and a house full of moths.

Not to mention a herd of elephants. When I came to view the flat, the owners had been able to assure me that the household was blissfully quiet and they never heard a thing. I found out later that it was because the flat upstairs had been empty for a year. A few days before I moved in, three clog-dancers also moved in and took over the upstairs flat. Two men and a girl, all in their late twenties, they were very nice, very lively and extremely noisy, clumping around as if they had bricks attached to each foot. I couldn’t go to sleep at night until I had heard the last brick being kicked off and landing with a thunk on the floor. It was misery. Then, to cap it all, the next door neighbours decided to remodel their flat and relocated their kitchen next to my bedroom. They were fond of midnight snacks and I heard every cupboard door bang, the taps being turned on and off, their jolly chatter, the radio blaring... I just couldn't live there, so I splashed a bit of paint around and put it back on the market.

And then, as I was about to start the viewings, I hit another snag. The bathroom was right at the back, in a grotty extension built out into the garden. It was accessed down a long corridor, to the left of which were a couple of cupboards I had never investigated. It was just as well that I did, because, on opening the first door I was greeted by a terrifying orange fungus, bubbling out of the wall like something in a horror movie. It was the dreaded dry rot. How my surveyor had missed it, I shall never know. I called Mr Bodge the Builder, who I'd met in a pub, and he came round, hacked off six feet of plaster, treated it with a noxious chemical and I crossed my fingers that the beast was dead. 

The flat took a year of sleepless nights to sell. About three months after I'd got rid of it, I took a walk past my old flat and saw that the front wall was propped up by stout beams and girders. The house had developed subsidence. I had got out just in time.