The Landlady
The Landlady repairs the Hastings flat
The Hastings flat is already looking a million times better than when our bad tenant vacated. Katy and I managed to persuade her long-suffering husband Stuie to come down and hang new kitchen cupboard doors a fortnight ago, a task during which he grumbled and complained the entire time.
I know this because I was there in the position of ‘glamorous assistant’, which basically meant that I had the task of feeding him meat pies and Cornish pasties all day long, which unfortunately only stopped him moaning during the process of actually eating them.
Previously, the area in Hastings where our flat is situated had been devoid of any establishment selling meat pies, so it is fortuitous that a number of new, fairly up-market establishments have sprung up in recent months. I do not know if this means that Hastings is on the up, as it’s had a few false starts in this respect. I fear that it’ll take more than a posh bakery and a twee handbag shop to regenerate the area.
“Our tenant appeared to have a fear of electricity and had taken all the electrical sockets from the walls”
Last week, I went back to the flat and spent an entire day attempting to finish off clearing up the damage that our tenant had caused.
Apart from scrawling many Biblical references on the walls – none of which seem to coincide with anything written in either testament – our tenant also appeared to have a fear of electricity and had taken all the electrical sockets from the walls, just leaving naked wires hanging out. How he managed to survive for so long without either frying himself or inhaling carbon monoxide from the disconnected boiler-flue, I have no idea. He must have the constitution of an ox.
I reconnected all the sockets, then tried out the vacuum cleaner in all of them to make sure they worked. I then had the even more irritating task of removing all the silver paper the tenant had glued to the doors and windows – no doubt for the purpose of creating an even greater risk of death by electric shock. This required a trip to one of the more down-market pound-shop type establishments of which there are many, in order to buy lighter fluid to remove the glue.
In the first shop I tried, the serving assistant seated behind the counter was as wide as she was tall and clearly had no interest in serving me. Without so much as turning her head to regard the shelf behind her, she claimed “It’ll be in tomorrow,” a line that was clearly her stock in trade. At the next shop, in my raggedy work-clothes, I was regarded with suspicion by the assistant who clearly thought I was going to sit on a bench and get high, which I have to say, was a more inviting prospect than spending the afternoon scraping glue off a window…
