What is living in London like? Hell. Here’s proof, beyond all doubt, that renting in London is a nightmare.
Where is it? Brighton, home to that one aunt of yours who went a bit off-piste and didn't talk to your mum for five years, then to break the silence sent a handwritten postcard (?????) from Brighton saying you should come down and see her and Chris – deliberately enigmatic about the gender of her new live-in lover, your dad pacing round the kitchen yelling, "I WAS ALWAYS TELLING YOU, I ALWAYS KNEW!" – and then you all drive down to spend a four-day weekend there, but their house smells of boiled food and neither of them wear shoes anymore, and for some reason your aunt thinks the ideal family activity would be to go to the beachfront and watch her try to sell anklets off a blanket all morning, and your mum really kicks off and is like, "We came down here for a break, Natalie; will you give it a rest with your anklets for one fucking day," and your aunt goes fine, says, "Okay, there is a family activity day at the Nature Centre down the way, we can go there if you’re not going to support my dreams," and when you get there it’s a family day, yeah, but not the ones you know and love; there is a lot of aggressive wearing of sequin-embroidered shorts, someone is carrying a flag made of old rags, a bring-your-own-muslin cheese-draining course, and there is live music but all the bands are made up of five old dads in round-framed reflective shades, backwards berets and single-thong leather necklaces, mildly bouncing backwards and forwards and bopping large bongo drums into twin-mic setups – "We Are Earth Eternal And We Came Here To Funk You!" – and off in the distance you can see your mum and your aunt squabbling over something. You can see the similarities between them, here, your eyes peered back from the close facade of them both, the way they both stand, with one arm crossed in front of them as if they are cold, the other one pointed arch into the other's face, hints of your grandma in both of them, and as your mum storms towards you both with that furious wobbling walk of hers, your dad – two mild pints of mead deep and actually having quite a nice time, someone let him play a lute – your dad says, "Uh oh," and as your mum gets near she says, "Come on, we're going," with that final tone that suggests we're not just going home, now, to the boiled food house, but we're actually going Home–home, a four-hour drive through creeping motorway traffic as the darkness falls around you, and you know, deep in your little heart, that your Game Boy doesn't quite have the battery power to make the ride, and you also know, deep within you, that now is absolutely fucking not the time to mention anything to your mum about it, because she is not in the mood. Did you even have a single ice cream? Did you even get a single stick of rock?
What is there to do locally? Go to that Mexican place; go to that curry place; go to that ice cream place; go to that Jack the Ripper place; go to the pebble beach, which really isn't as pleasant as you think; lose £20 in change down the arcade; walk down a big forward-tipping hill towards some students; get a photo outside that guitar shop called "GAK", then ready yourself for an overwhelming influx of Londoners, horrible Londoners – not the good Londoners, because they are all hungover, but the up-early-on-a-Saturday Londoners, PR manager Londoners, Barry's Bootcamp Londoners – who all surge in on heaving trains clasping the remnants of gins-in-tins and flood the place with filth and too-loud laughing all at the merest hint of a ray of sunshine, and it's just that every weekend from March to September—
Alright, how much are they asking? I don't know if I made it clear about the toilet next to the bed, but: £1,000 per month. £1,000! Per month! The toilet is next to the bed!
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