Archive for May 2009

Dear Landlords

In Rants on 22 May 2009 tagged flathunting, landlord with 1 comment

Dear landlords,

I know that Homes Under the Hammer promised you the world. Just buy the house, they said. It’s easy, they said. Buy on Monday and by Thursday you’ll be rolling in endless piles of cash! What could be better? Nothing, you thought, as you applied for the mortgage and waited for the money to roll in.

But what they didn’t tell you was that the trouble starts when the tenants move in; the endless unreasonable requests. Can they have a cooker with all of the knobs on? Can they have a hoover that sucks up dust? Can they have a wardrobe that can hold a few hangers without collapsing? It’s really quite unreasonable – If you bought all of that it would cost 3% of your annual profit!*

But I’m here to ask if you would, for a minute, think of the tenants. You don’t need to think of them nicely – I mean, they’re mostly money machines to you, but they are people-shaped money machines. They call the flat home, and they look after it for you – they have almost as much to lose if the place goes to rack and ruin as you do, homelessness not being an awesome option. So I was just wondering if you could take a minute out of your accounting to think about whether or not you would live in your own buy-to-let property. Really?

You see, fire alarms are not, and will never be, “features”. Double glazing is a feature, that I admit, but only if it’s actual double glazing and you haven’t just fitted permanent panels of Plexiglass over the windows so that if that firealarm has to do any work it’ll take us four hours and a set of screwdrivers just to be able to jump out of the window (and you’ll notice a wee flaw with that plan, too, a flaw that sounds a lot like “burning to death”).

And you should probably know that freezers ceased to be luxury items in the seventies, and if you were just to pop down to Tesco you can pick up a microwave that wasn’t carved out of stone for less than £40. Seriously, look around your flat: the 80s didn’t die, they just moved to Bruntsfield.

And this isn’t all your fault, I know. You pay for a letting agency to sort out things like furniture that has deassembled itself and carpets that look like Jackson Pollock’s inspiration. And they’re miserable, those letting agents; it’s not like you want to make friends with them. But I do have to spend fifteen minutes trapped in a small flat with them, and sometimes get in a car with them. And it would be nice if, for those fifteen minutes, we could all put on our happy masks and pretend that this isn’t the worst. Job. Ever. Because in what other job do you just turn up fifteen minutes late, let some people into a flat, wait until they’re in the living room and then phone a friend for a chat?

Still, thanks for having some money to pay for a flat that I can rent from you for an extortionate amount – no, really, I’m genuinely grateful, because homelessness doesn’t look very fun (although don’t think I haven’t noticed that if I would homeless I would be allowed a dog). I appreciate that. It’s just that I’m not a huge fan of spending hundreds of pounds a month to live in ramshackle pig sheds.

Love,
Sarah

*Sidenote: our current landlord genuinely does calculate this stuff and quote it at the letting agency when we do selfish things like point out we have a couch that the letting agent “wouldn’t give to his cat”. And then he says no. I will sorely miss him.

#1 – Watch a film in 3D

In 1000 new things on 7 May 2009 with 3 comments

Before last week, my only experience of moving 3D came approximately 15 years ago, courtesy of the 3D glasses with red and green lenses taped to the cover of Live and Kicking magazine, which my whole family to viciously fought over to watch the 3D episode of Live and Kicking one Saturday morning. This was a morning I remember only as being somewhat disappointing, although not as disappointing as the Scratch’n'Sniff episode of Going Live, where everything appeared to smell of cardboard. So as we sat down to watch Coraline 3D my expectations were pretty low, not least because the glasses were so big and uncomfortable on my abnormally small head that I felt like Brains from Thunderbirds making a cameo appearance in Happy Days.

This isn’t a film review. No-one should be forced to sit through one of my film reviews, which comprise mostly of ordered list items so pedantic that Al has evolved a part of his brain that switches off completely as soon as he hears, “ONE!” But the 3D was amazing: always subtle enough to enhance the scene without distracting you completely and always realistic enough to make you forget that this isn’t the way stop-motion films always feel, but adding enough to the screening that I can’t imagine watching the film in 2D is anywhere nearly as enjoyable. Frankly, I’m never watching a film in 2D again and will be starting a petition online to have Dot and the Kangaroo converted to 3D as soon as is practically possible.

Disturbingly, Coraline appears to be being marketed as a children’s film – or at least I assume so, based on us being pretty much the only people in the screening who knew the full alphabet and remembered the 1990s. I say disturbingly, because this is one creepy film. Perhaps the concept of some “other mother” trying to replace your eyeballs with buttons is overlooked by people who haven’t mastered the art of trying their shoelaces, or perhaps the uneasiness is produced not by the story but by the feelings adults can project onto it, but at least three times during the film I looked around me and was really surprised that no-one was being marched out by a horrified parent. Don’t have nightmares.

Lastly, if you go to see Coraline 3D – and you should unless you’re of a very nervous disposition – don’t be one of those people who get up as soon as the credits start (not least because why do that? So you can get home fifteen seconds earlier than everyone else?) – stick around for the credits, which have some of the nicest 3D in the film; I actually ducked as a flying dog made straight for my face, and if you’ve never had a dead dog fly at you then you’re just missing out.

1000 new things

In 1000 new things, Projects on 6 May 2009 tagged 100 new things, lists, photo, Projects with 2 comments

You’d be surprised about what’s new to me. I spent my teens hidden away, sleeping, and my time at university was spent almost exclusively switching between uni work, paid work and a state of cognitive suspension that meant all I could do was press the F5 key over and over and over and over…

So when I was looking for something to fill a bit of time now that the degree is done – pause here for the small party that happens in my brain every time I realise that – it made sense to concentrate on the new. To both identify the things I want to do that I’ve never done, and to grab those things that I’d never even considered but that would be fun, interesting or will one day make an interesting story to tell when I’m tucked into my rocking chair.

And because no project is complete(d) without a goal, and as I am the Queen of Ordered Lists and unattainable targets, I figured I’d start small – so 1000 new things it is! There is no time limit, but I accept that it’s in my best interests to do some of them now rather than waiting until I’m 80, not least because I need the impetus to add variety and structure to my life over the next few post-uni months

Some basic rules. I like rules.

1. For the purposes of the list, the definition of new is new to me. I’m not out to make history here. You’ll probably have done at least some of these things already (perhaps all, in which case I ask you: do you ever sleep?) but if I haven’t then it totally counts as new.
2. I can’t include anything that I can’t mentally define as “a thing”. The sort of activity that you might mention to a good friend on the phone or when you bump into them in the street. For example, five minutes ago I sent an email that I’ve never sent before while eating a cereal I’ve never had before! That’s two new things at once! But neither of these count, not least because they don’t meet the friend-mentioning criteria – not even I’d start a conversation with “yesterday I sent an email about image resizing for printing”. I hope.
3. I won’t include things that are new but that make me crumple a little inside. On Monday my purse was stolen, something that had never happened to me before, but because I don’t want to add it to the list and I don’t want to reference it repeatedly, it won’t be included in the list. Is this blurring the truth somewhat? Most likely. But I choose not to make it a bigger part of my life than it already is.
4. If I’m not sure if something is list-worthy or not, I’ll ask someone I can trust to be adjudicator. Their decision is final, unless by asking I realise I vehemently disagree with them, and then my decision is final.
5. Part of the project is to blog as much as I can, but I very likely won’t blog everything, and there may be some things I just can’t blog about (state secrets, criminal escapades, work stuff, etc.). In which case I’ll post horribly modified entries that make the story sound way more interesting that it actually is, like it’s a Facebook status update.

I’ve already started with some items I’ll blog about later (four or five so far – one needs to go into adjudication), but I’m very open to any ideas for things to do, no matter how small or big. I’ll try anything, so have a think – what do you do that I’ve probably never done?