As you may have heard on the grapevine, or maybe I told you myself, I recently moved house. It was one of the strangest and most horrendous experiences of my life and left me emotionally shattered.
Let me begin this tale of suffering and woe by describing the character of my friend Adam. He’s the kind of guy who would have revelled in the 60’s hippy scene in San Francisco. He loves smoking dope, free love and avoiding pain at all costs. You can imagine that he’s not a very angry person. I’ve only seem him really angry on a couple of occasions under extreme provocation but he’s normally a very relaxed character.
Adam and I had been frantically looking for a place to live for six weeks. We had made the decision to move out of our old house in Kilburn before Christmas and had been casually looking since then. If any of you know the London rental market you’ll realise that casually looking is about as likely to get you a house as knocking on random doors and asking if you can live there for a while.
We began to be under some pressure to move out. People had moved into Kilburn on the proviso that we would be leaving shortly and vacating one of the large rooms. We had already begged a one month extension to look harder but only two weeks of that was left. Adding even more pressure was the fact that I hadn’t been able to find a job since coming back from Australia at the start of January. As we headed into the middle of February we were discovering that landlords weren’t very understanding about my temporary lack on employment. Even my explaining that I was just between contracts was falling on deaf ears. If we wanted a place to live we would have to lie on a grand scale.
On the second last weekend before we would have to leave Kilburn we rang about a place in East Dulwich in South London. The best we could do was arrange for an appointment to see the flat on Monday. As I wasn’t working at the time I was elected to go and look at the place. I decided to set the scam in motion by going down there in my suit with the story that I was working for Freeserve, the biggest Internet Service Provider in the country. On the way down to East Dulwich, due to my inexperience on the overland rail system, I ended up on a line taking me within 30 minutes walking distance of my destination. Normally this wouldn’t be a big cause for concern but I was on a tight schedule and wearing my new leather shoes that had left my heels horribly disfigured the week before. As I hobbled up the rain soaked streets I congratulated myself on buying an umbrella that morning. The weather had turned against me and was almost blowing me back down the street. I soon discovered that umbrellas bought in very cheap local shops don’t cope very well with gale conditions. I was being pelted with rain from every direction while my umbrella insisted on turning inside out. I was soon soaked to the skin in a suit that was smelling remarkably like a wet carpet, pain shooting through my feet with every step, cold fingers madly fumbling at the now soaked map, and starting to lose my temper. As I navigated the confusing streets between Herne Hill and East Dulwich I passed the local school which had been attractively decorated with a burnt out car. At least the kids round here were normal.
My attempts at map reading aren’t usually too bad. I’ve successfully navigated my way around many parts of London. This day was a different story. I put it down to having cold hands, a wet map, and being very, very angry. After various wrong map readings I’d ended up walking up and down the same stretch of street four times. I began cursing the driving rain, venting my fury at the nature that so cruelly hampered my efforts at finding a house. All the weeks of job and house hunting had ended up in this moment of frustration and pain. Despite wanting to go home several times I eventually found the real estate agents. Impressively I was only 45 minutes late. I imagine I didn’t quite look the successful young professional that I was hoping to portray but my excuse of being late for the appointment due to heavy work commitments went down well. On the way over to the flat, as I secreted my wet suit smell onto the leather upholstery of the estate agent’s Audi, I gave my work story when prompted. It all seemed to be going well with this comfortable and self-satisfied character. As we bitched about looking for places to live while working full time I could feel my fortunes changing. Sure enough, when we arrived at the two-bedroom flat it turned out to be a corker. It was probably the nicest flat that I had seen in London. The price was right, it was clean and as a bonus it was nicely decked out. In short it was an absolute godsend. The hard part was going to be getting it.
On the drive back to the station I asked the estate agent how one would go about obtaining said property to live in if one was interested. He seemed quite taken with my conservative young man impression and very helpfully ducked into the office to get a couple of applications. There were the usual costs. One months rent in advance, a months deposit and a hundred pound holding deposit while references were checked. What I was banking on was making enough of a good impression to get the wheels moving without giving them a hundred pounds. If they discovered that our story was false it would mean losing money for nothing. Money wasn’t in such abundance that we could afford to do that. Adam and I duly filled out our applications and faxed them off the next day. My follow-up call proved discouraging. I was told that while they could start to get ready to look at our application they couldn’t actually process it until they had one hundred pounds. “Well that’s that!” I thought. With the amount of false information on the application they could sink our bid at any time.
I was all set to have a last ditch attempt at looking for another place that weekend when Adam received an interesting phone call. One of the real estate agent’s had rung up to ask us to supply the necessary references with no mention of a hundred pounds. While still not being very hopeful of getting the place we set further lies in motion. Jemima very kindly agreed to ring up and pretend to be my human resources manager at Freeserve which I then followed up with a fake fax. Luckily they had spotted my good character and by London standards were virtually begging us to live there. By Friday it had all been sorted and on Saturday morning we went to pick up the keys. When we left the real estate agent’s with the keys in hand we were in good spirits. All we had to do now was the relatively simple task of moving all our stuff from Kilburn to East Dulwich. Had we known what was to follow we might just have left the country as a simpler alternative.
Adam’s parents had offered to come down and help us move in a hired van. We got back to Kilburn before they arrived and started to pack some stuff up. When they got there at about midday it was like a whirlwind of efficiency. The van was soon loaded with the first half of our stuff and Adam left with his parents to unpack. What followed I can only relate to you in the garbled version I got when Adam returned at four. Apparently his parents found the flat unsuitable for him to live in. His mother took a brief look at it before fleeing to the van in horror and bursting into tears. Adam managed to unpack all our stuff and they proceeded to drive back. All the way home his parents told him he was a failure, that he’d never amount to anything, the flat wasn’t fit to live in and that he should give up his musical career, leave London and start a teaching job. As I mentioned before Adam is usually a calm and friendly person and is used to his mother being a bit critical, but this time with a dual verbal lashing from both his parent’s he finally snapped. There was a massive argument which resulted in Adam telling his parent’s to piss off back home. When he arrived back at the house he was the angriest I’ve ever seen him. He was literally foaming at the mouth and acting like a deranged wildebeest bellowing in pain.
I fully supported him in his decision to tell his parents to go away, but now we had a slight problem. Half our stuff was at the new place and half lying rather messily around our current rooms. Other people were moving in the next day, so we absolutely had to be out by that night. It being around 4:30 pm on a Saturday hiring another truck was out of the question. The only person we knew with a car was Adam’s girlfriend Jemima. In hindsight I probably should have called her given Adam’s mood. She was in Wales at a harp competition and when he asked to borrow the car she said “That’s a bit cheeky.” Adam’s response was to bellow very loudly “WELL FUCK OFF THEN!” and hang up. Before you start getting the wrong impression of Adam I should point out once again that this was very unusual behaviour prompted by the fact that his parents had just ripped his guts out and virtually disowned him. Now that Adam had managed to get offside with his parents and his girlfriend only his brother remained.
Jonny is Adam’s younger brother. He studies Astro Physics in Canterbury and is a really top geezer. He likes clubbing and staring at Jupiter, but most of all he loves his maroon bug. Strictly speaking it’s not his car as he and Adam co-own it, but it’s Jonny’s if the amount of time you work on it and love it count for anything. Jonny was in the last stages of his degree and doing his best impression of a hermit as he stayed in his room staring at formulas. We couldn’t ask him to jeopardise his studying schedule so we now had no option but to take the bus to Canterbury and pick the car up. As we waited outside the Kilburn house for the mini cab we started to analyse the situation. We would get up to Canterbury by about 10:30 pm, make it back to Kilburn just past midnight and move the rest of our stuff in a couple of hours. We were emotionally shell-shocked and not experiencing the smoothest move in history but we could still do it. We were standing around in the cold for about 15 minutes before we gave up on the cab and legged it down to the tube. Three quarters of an hour later we were at the Victoria bus station being told that the 8:30 pm bus to Canterbury had just left. Compared to the rest of the day waiting an hour for the next bus didn’t seem like the worst fate.
Thankfully we made it to our destination without further incident. Jonny picked us up and we went back to his place for a quick cup of tea. We eventually got on the road back to London at midnight. “No worries”, we laughed to ourselves. After all that’s gone wrong what does staying up all night matter. It was in this frame of mind that we greeted the first snow flakes of the night. Being an Australian I’ve only seen snow falling a couple of times so I quite enjoyed seeing the cute little flakes tumble down. It’s only with hindsight that I realise blizzards usually start small and get big. In about ten minutes visibility had been cut to ten metres and the windscreen wipers were chugging under the weight of snow. It was almost too much to take. After all the events of the day we’d ended up with the possibility of being stuck on the north circular in snow for the rest of the night. As Adam furiously tried to remember the way back to Kilburn, claiming he couldn’t see the signs because of the snow, I thanked my lucky stars that the last misfortune to befall us had been a blizzard and not the car breaking down.
You’ll be surprised to learn that the car didn’t break down. It was the next logical step and I’d being mentally preparing myself for the eventuality for some time. Instead something happened that was totally out of the blue. We hit a traffic jam. It was about 1:30 am on Saturday morning and we were on a three lane motorway that was inching forward. Adam and I had quit moaning. We had turned to switching between stunned silence and incredulous, hysterical laughter as a means of temporarily maintaining our sanity. Eventually we crawled past a sign that informed us that road works were being carried out between 12:30 am and 6:30 am of just that night. I think they did it especially for us. It was certainly starting to feel like nothing would ever go our way. At our darkest moment we received a phone call from Jemima. She was on her way back from the competition and offered to come with her mother to help us move house. We were way beyond being proud and gleefully accepted her offer. All we had to do now was find our way back home.
We finally made it back to Kilburn at 3 am. There was a fresh blanket of snow on the ground which we silently crunched over as we carried our stuff between the house and the bug. Jemima arrived soon after and we filled her car up as well. We set off with Jemima close behind us to navigate the streets of London.
Now as much as I like Adam he does have one major fault; he’s a terrible navigator. However much he tells you otherwise he has a talent for getting lost. Every time I’ve driven with him further than the local shops he starts to get this slightly confused, slightly scared look in his eyes and before you know it we’re driving round and round in circles. I hoped that it would be different this time as he had already traversed this route earlier in the day but the emotions of the move must have caught up with him. He took on the aspect of a hunted rabbit in the oncoming traffic’s headlights and started glancing about him in an over-tired frenzy. We were soon horribly lost in South London. Adam had managed to find the right area but we couldn’t pinpoint the street. We were frantically looking for a London map in the car when we got an abusive phone call from Jemima. She was understandably unhappy about driving around in circles at 3:30 am on a Saturday morning. Adam found an old map behind the driver’s seat and we hastily did a 180° turn to get back on the right path. We had finally arrived at our destination 20 hours after starting the move.
We managed to unload the cars and dump all our shit around the house. Jemima and her mother were impressed by the flat and we were suitably grovelling and thankful for their assistance. 5 am saw Adam and I finally sit down in our new house and christen it with a Star Trek film. We only got 30 minutes into it before we had to stagger up to our beds and fall into a hard-earned sleep.
You would expect that to be all from a moving story. The heroes finally get all their stuff over there and start to enjoy their new pad but not us. Not by a long shot. The nightmare week had only just begun. We woke up on Sunday morning and started to clean the place up and organise our stuff. Adam got some more demoralising calls from his parents but they had already said the worst they could. We wandered up the road to get some breakfast and returned to the flat feeling better, if not quite normal. Adam still had a few things to pick up from his house so he went over in the bug Sunday evening to get them. In the meantime Jemima had come over and we were talking about how nice the new place was when we got a call from Adam. Once again he’d lost his mind and descended into raving loony land. His car had broken down on the way back from Kilburn. In the middle of traffic the accelerator cable came out and left him drifting to an agonising halt. To make it even worse the driver’s side door was stuck and the passenger side was blocked by a wall of Adam’s belongings. In the end he had to crawl out of the driver’s side window.
When Jemima and I arrived at the scene he wasn’t acting very rationally. He abused Jemima for not bringing a tow rope and very nearly yelled at me when I told him to stop yelling at her. We couldn’t leave him stranded there though, so we got a tow rope and took him back to the flat. When we got there we helped him unload the car, and Adam and Jemima went to get some food. Soon after I got a call from Adam asking me to stop Jemima leaving. I looked out the window and saw a sobbing Jemima get into her car and drive off. To summarise the situation Adam had been abused by his parents, pissed his brother off by being in the car when it broke down, virtually broken up with Jemima for the fifth time and he owed me a large amount of money.
That’s right, the mother of all evil had reared it’s head. On the Friday before the move I’d lost my wallet. It was the first time in my life I’d done this and it occurred at the worst possible moment. I was relying on getting money out of my Australian account to finance the deposit and first month’s rent. With the keycard gone I had no way to get the money we needed. In order to get the keys on Saturday Adam had written a cheque but we now had to cancel this cheque and promise to get the whole £1823 to the real estate agent’s in cash on Wednesday. I was relying on a combination of an emergency mastercard, paying money by cheque from the Australian account to my Eng’ish one and my first week’s pay cheque. Adam had been counting on some money from his parents, which now looked unlikely.
The hell that our lives had turned into continued on Monday. The computers at Adams bank went down for the day which meant that he couldn’t cancel the cheque but would still get fined £25 for not cancelling it in time. I found out that it would take too long to get money from my Australian account by cheque. We were now relying on a combination of my pay and emergency mastercard, which Adam had picked up from Kilburn that night. The next day our run of bad luck extended into the kind of period that sees most people hide under the covers for a while. I found that the emergency mastercard draws from the same account that you usually have. I’d transferred all this to my normal account, which I couldn’t access, and I couldn’t transfer it back because my normal mastercard had been cancelled. I also discovered that because I’d been payed by cheque for my first weeks work and that it wouldn’t clear till the end of the week. It was then that I started to shit myself. We were about £600 short and looking at being chucked out by a very irate estate agent. The only solution we could come up with was asking various people for short-term loans. While I sat at my desk at work, head in hands and rocking very slightly, Adam called our old upstairs neighbour Tony “Mr T” Peck. He was our last and only hope, and to our tremendous relief he had £600 stuffed under his mattress, which we very gratefully borrowed from him.
Tuesday night saw £1800 neatly counted out on my bedroom floor. They were just going to have to wait for the extra £23. Adam took this is in on Wednesday and since then things have slowly started to improve. The incidence of bad luck has slackened and we feel sure that the balance of the world should see to it that some pretty fucking good things happen this summer. The flat is looking awesome, it’s a great area, everyone’s talking again, and once Adam pays me back everyone will be happy.
Dave out.
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