I
moved to London in late 1995, to start a new job as a hack for a reasonably well known publisher. However, an almighty fuck up by the owner of the flat I was renting meant that for the first two weeks I had nowhere to live, so I was obliged to crash on various people's sofas for a while. I initially started out down in Clapham, but the journey into work was simply insane, and the friend of a friend who I was staying with was a bit strait-laced for my liking. However, after a day or two an actual proper mate offered me crash space at his luxurious west Hampstead pad, and I jumped at the chance, because (a) he was a very good mate and (b) his flat was amazing.

However, I had been there about three days when Chris arrived. I'd met Chris before when I'd been over for the interview for the job that took me to London. Chris was a bit odd. He was somewhat distant, to the extent that you could talk to him for ten minutes or so without him noticing, even when you were the only other person in the room with him. And in the intervening weeks, he had become much, much odder, to the extent that he was clearly in the early stages of some sort of quite alarming mental illness.

Firstly, he'd developed the habit of smoking any and all dope in the vicinity. I had bought an ounce of rather nice skunk shortly after arriving, and was rather alarmed to realise on Chris's first night there that he's managed to work through almost a quarter of it. He still had the problem with conversation, except it had got a little more hard to tell, since he would actually mutter "yeah" and "no" occasionally and giggle. However, it soon turned out he was holding extensive discussions in his head with (oh yes) Jesus, Hitler, Buddha and Charles Manson.

Since I had already claimed the sofa, there was some debate about where Chris would go. Eventually he plumped for sleeping in the flat's very small hallway, thereby blocking access to every single room in the house while he was sleeping, including the bathroom. In the mornings, when both my friend and I were trying to get ready for work, Chris would disappear into the bathroom before either of us and remain there for long, long stretches of time. We eventually discovered that he was just sitting on the loo, with the seat cover down, having a damned good think. While doing so, he would also impart his unique goaty stench to the entire room...

Part of the reason my mate tolerated Chris was that he was fanatically clean, and would gladly tidy and wash the whole flat on a daily basis. This proved less fun for me, as he would often be seized by the need to clean at unlikely hours of the day and night, so I would occasionally be awoken by a noise only to find this weird smelly bloke standing over me in his underpants with a fistful of knives and giggling.

My mate eventually gave him the bum's rush when he got home from work to discover that the bin in his kitchen was full almost to overflowing with broken glass. Chris explained that he'd been working some rather dangerous magic which involved him smashing every single bottle in the kitchen into the bin in order to destroy the forces which were working against him. As I say, that didn't seem to pan out too well, since it got him chucked out of the flat.

I understand that he did subsequently seek treatment. I have no idea how it turned out.
(Wong Fei-Hung - now with added flickr.com (see profile), Fri 7 Jan 2011, 11:57, Reply)