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"Part of my kitchen floor are thick with dust, grease, part of a broken mug, a few mummified oven-chips, a desiccated used teabag and a couple of pieces of cutlery", says Sandettie Light Vessel Automatic. To most people, that's filth. To some of us, that's dinner. Tell us about squalid homes or obsessive cleaners.
( , Thu 25 Mar 2010, 13:00)
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during my second year at university in Southampton, however, I lived in a house which even other students found unbearably disgusting. It had:
* Crumbling walls which broke at the touch, leading to piles of plaster on the floor, never cleaned.
* An infestation of slugs which left trails around the carpets every night. If you lives in the downstairs bedrooms you had to watch your feet when getting out of bed to avoid stepping on one
* A shower which began with mild mildew but which, by the end of the year, had clusters of actual mushrooms growing out of the walls
* An upstairs toilet with a hole in the bowl. Every time it was flushed it would drip through the floor and into the bedroom below.
* A kitchen floor which, following the breaking of the washing machine and flooding of the floor, had been covered in thick layers of rotting newspapers, which were never removed.
* A kitchen bin overflowing to the point where it took up a good section of the room and turned out to have a sizeable colony of maggots behind it.
* Around a hundred pizza boxes in stacks around the living room floor. Three of the people in the house worked for Domino's and brought back free pizza every night.
* Stacks of newspapers everywhere, like you see in the documentaries about old people dying in houses full of junk. This one was pretty much my fault. Sorry.
* Piles of unwashed plates everywhere. Each housemate had brought a full set and nobody was going to wash any while there were clean ones around.
* Stains and fragments of broken glass all around the walls from the night when one housemate (who later turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic) and his friend (who is now a semi-famous rockstar) decided to smash bottles of wine against the walls
* And I could continue, but you get the drift.
At the end of the year we laughably attempted to get back our deposits. The landlord replied with a letter in which he described the house as being "beyond all human expectation".
It's just lucky for him that he didn't rent to my friends down the road - they lived for a couple of years on soapbar hash, porridge oats with water, GHB and pints of white russian, and used one old towel to wipe their hands, clean their bodies and dry their dishes. One of them managed to get TB and nearly died. It wasn't really funny, but a lesson was learnt.
( , Fri 26 Mar 2010, 15:43, 4 replies)
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( , Fri 26 Mar 2010, 16:02, closed)
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I know what you mean. Last time I was down there visiting some mates who went to Uni there too. It was in the papers that a women round the corner had killed her husband with a pick axe. I think that's what is meant by intersting people and of course the area is a big hang out for hookers and students. Weird mixture...
( , Fri 26 Mar 2010, 16:48, closed)
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