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.

3D">#1 — Watch a film in 3D

In 1000 new things on 3D">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?