'STUDENT DIARY: DAY 396' by jack johnson

The Landlord

Our landlord popped round earlier demanding the money I apparently owe him. He’s not going to be getting a penny with that sort of attitude.

Personally I don’t have any time for the man. Don’t get me wrong, he’s not a murderer or anything but there’s just something about him. Something disturbing. The way the bloke lets himself into our house, completely unannounced, and just appears in your room with a nauseating grin plastered across his potato face. It’s creepy. He’s got the look of a Mitchell Brother, just the lesser-known gay one who runs a Latino-themed cocktail bar in Ibiza. I bet Peggy rarely talks about him.

He confronted me about my unpaid maintenance bill. I knew this day would come, eventually. I’m sorry but the so-called ‘improvements’ made to my room (I say ‘my room’, obviously I mean ‘his room’ as he fucking owns it) during the summer aren’t worth a hundred quid. A medium-sized tin of magnolia and some crudely crafted skirting boards, fashioned exclusively with only best MDF leftovers and a few spare plastic-coated wooden floor tiles don’t cost a hundred quid. If he thinks I’m paying for it, he can eat shit. I told him that too - well, sort of.

I might just change the locks. That’ll wipe the smile off his face, temporarily at least.

Obviously I paid the said bill. I think when he started asking if I had a lawyer I knew I was out of my depth. After all, a hundred quid is better than ten years in strange ways, right? I’m sure even Mandela would have coughed up. Still, I wasn’t happy about it.

Before we moved in to Regent House the landlord asked us all to consider having all our rooms improved for only a ‘’tiny cost’’. He said that it would be doing him a favour as it’s improving his property plus it would make our year in his house that bit more comfortable. It sounded like an attractive prospects to me so I agreed to it straight away because otherwise it’d have been living in a 1970s nightmare. And no one wants that - apart from maybe my Auntie Julie. So when I returned to Uni for my second year in September I was excited to see what he’d done to my room. I wasn’t expecting rustic mock-Tudor beams and elegant Lawrence Llwelyn-Bowen style lace curtains or anything, but I certainly wasn’t anticipating what I was about to see.

Slightly tired after my early morning train journey I burst into my room only to find piles saw dust everywhere, an uneven floor and the brightest white walls I’ve ever had the misfortune of seeing. It almost gave me an instant headache. To say I was slightly disappointed with my landlords decorating skills is an understatement. If that wasn’t enough, to my amazement, curled up in the foetal position in my bed was a random longhaired bloke. Unamused, I woke the confused man and in no uncertain terms asked him to leave. To this day I still don’t know who that man was.

So my new room (which still looked shit) was christened by a tramp. £100 well spent.