I can almost smell the rot in that first photo
David posted. The rotten air in the fridge that no amount of bleach can shift. All the spilled food and drinks over a period of fifteen years stinking the carpet out. The bed who knows how many people slept in. The fitted kitchen from around 1957. A fridge louder than the telly. Someone else's wet snots wiped into the armchairs and sofas. A table and chairs from a Wendy house.
On the positive side you can make your morning coffee while still in the bed. You can peel and chop your fresh foods in the comfort of a second hand duvet and sheets from a hospital in 1973. There's a glorious view of what appears to be a brick wall. Pretty unique, that. The clock above the bed ticking the moments of your life away while you lie there listening to the neighbours take a dump as though they were in the room with you. Wondering what the fuck is was your Mam said that you now wish you'd listened to. The misery of getting home after a long day and pissing rain - walk into that gaff with a bag of spuds for dinner and all you want to do is slash your wrists and write your last goodbyes in blood on the wallpaper.
Doors that don't fit and a draft coming in under the front door that could lift the yellow and brown sheets off the bed.
Windows you can't open - because they're glued shut and screwed into place. The bedside cabinet and the weird stuff the previous tenant left behind: hair-clips, an empty condom packet, a used comb, post-its with five-digit telephone numbers written on, an envelope with a threatening letter from the electric company. A brass penny from the 1930's. A needle and a length of blue thread. A used toothpick. One sock. A small plastic bag full of rusty thumb-tacks. Two mass cards for two toothless culchie-looking men. A faded photo of Padre Pio and the blood on his hands as he looks up to heaven.
It's amazing what the Irish get away with.
The Nordic people I know are always amazed at Irish standards. As if it's not bad enough that we don't all live in thatched cottages and keep chickens out the back garden, we instead expect them to be happy with the likes of the above image of your standard Dublin flat. And it is a flat, it most fucking certainly is NOT an apartment. Which of course baits the question about said flat: where in the unbelievable Jayzus is the bathroom? I bet you a pound to a penny it's down the hall and you have to share it with the eleven Chinese fast food delivery boys who do shift work and the beds are rotated accordingly - Chan gets up goes to work. Ching then lays down in the warm bit. Each tenant has a key for the john so they can lock themselves in during the more delicate moments of the morning. After all, imagine how your girlfriend's going to react when she sees the bed for the first time? Or when she goes down the hall to take a shower, and when she reaches out for the hair conditioner, Chan hands it to her while sitting on the toilet pot.
A third world country is right.
It's horrible inside and it's even more horrible outside.
The smell of damp, the rot around the window frames. The noise the sink makes when the taps are running. The noise of the Syrian couple upstairs who never stop fighting and battering each other. The call to prayer and all that wailing they do. The seventeen girls from Argentina and Brazil sharing the flat down the back and their salsa and Latin music blaring all day. Your man in the tiny flat upstairs who's trying to write a book on a typewriter from 1950. Clack, clack, clack, clackety-clack, clack. Whiss - Ping!
The piled up mail in the hallway for people who neither live there nor even exist any more. The electricity meter box on the hallway wall and the lock the landlord put on it so you don't drill a 1mm hole in the casing and use a pin to stop the wheel from revolving. The old 50p meter still in the wardrobe seventy years later. The landlord using his own key to your flat when you're out and making himself a cup of tea. You get home and he's sitting there on your mangled old sofa, which - if you tell him to get off it and get out - he responds with: '
no - this is MY sofa, and it's MY flat' - I was just checking the taps anyway..'
So he stays until he's finished slurping down his tea, then rinses the cup with a splash of cold tap water and puts it back onto the '
From Butlin's Mosney' mug holder the last tenant left behind. His rancid breath and lip-marks on your mug that you have to wash twice after he finally fucks off.
It truly does beggar belief what these hungry cunts get away with.
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