Freaky little gaff

Beatlemania, petomania - it’s all the same to me.

As I afforded you a tantalising glimpse of who I am yesterday, perhaps today I should tell you a little bit about where I live?

Well, my place is a small rented one-bedroom ground floor garden flat in Haringay, North London.

It’s pretty basic affair, but cheap. Close to a tube line. The electricity falters wach time a train passes.

I share the building with Weird Bob, or Robert Mercer as he's known to local Police. He's an unemployed half-man, half-beast with toe-curlingly unfortunate teeth who lives in the flat upstairs. As far as I can tell, Weird Bob spends his days strung out on psychoactive chemicals creating industrial techno music under strobe lighting conditions.

Behind our shared front door, there’s a short entrance way. Letters regularly litter the floor under the letterbox all addressed to the quite mysterious Humphrey Goggle.

In the summer, the hideous red swirly patterned carpet in the reception hallway acts as a graveyard for dozens and dozens of dead wasps. Where they come from, I haven’t the faintest idea.

At the end of this little reception hallway, there’s a door that leads up to Weird Bob’s place (and who knows, maybe a home-made torture chamber containing 14 year-old kidnapped girl) and another that opens up to mine.

According to my girlfriend Zosia, my flat reeks of stale sweat and flatus. Whenever she comes round she moans in her crap English accent that I should open the windows to air the gaff once in a while.

I do but, stale sweat and farts? Surely that’s just the smell of a real man?

I concede that maybe Zosia has a point about the sweat thing. When I sleep I really do sweat like a bear, always have done, ever since I was a kid. Sometimes, even in the middle of the coldest of winter nights, I’ll wake up to go for a pee and discover I’m drenched.

The mattress on my bed even features a yellowy me-shaped sweat stain on it, like one of those chalk drawings on the floor at murder scenes. The pillows have taken on a distinctly yellowy hue too.

And yeah, I suppose I do have a certain tendency towards hurricane force flatulence. Zosia once suggested I strike a match each time I let rip. I can easily get through a whole boxful of an eve.

But the main thing that irks Zosia about my flat is the tidiness, or rather lack of it.

The crusty pants lying about on the floor, the unwashed plates stacked high in the sink, the bin crammed with empty beer cans, the recreational soft drug paraphernalia strewn about the place, the various musical instruments and amplifiers, the ash on the floor, the permanent skid marks in the toilet; all of this she cites as incontrovertible evidence of my slobbish behaviour.

I admit I’m not totally anal about hygiene. And maybe I don’t get round to cleaning the loo as often as I should and yeah, perhaps there is a certain degree of debris lying about and shit, but well, I try my best to keep on top of things.

I’m a full-blown heterosexual man, for fuck’s sake. I’m not supposed to be tidy.

The best thing about my flat, as Zosia readily concurs, is the garden; my own personal green oasis in the vast concrete jungle that is London town.

I know it’s overgrown with weeds and climbers and bushes and roses that grew taller than two men, all wildly dangerous branches and skin-tearing thorns. I’m aware the patio is dangerously uneven with broken or missing slabs between which grass and weeds and other brightly coloured wild flowers that I’ve never bothered to learn the names of grow unchecked. And okay, birds do flit hither and thither, dropping shit bombs on the warped and rotting cable drum that acts as my garden table and the solitary aluminium chair with the dodgy back.

So what?

So what if the occasional cheeky fox passes through? Rats and mice too. The odd Basking shark? I just take all this as proof that, despite not actually doing any gardening, or more likely because of not doing any gardening, I am the curator of one of the most eco-friendly gardens in the city.