The smells, the smells...
It was our own fault. We had a spare bedroom and not much money. He had a job, worked shifts (which indicated that we wouldn’t see much of him) and needed somewhere to live. We were warned, it has to be said, by another friend of ours who, after sharing with him for six months or so, had resorted to leaving copies of the Evening Standard and Loot out with all relevant flatshares circled in red marker (he didn’t even notice, apparently). But we'd known him for a while and were convinced that he couldn’t be that bad. How wrong we were.

Just after he moved in I arrived home to find him sat on the toilet with the door wide open. In the broadest of Welsh accents (perhaps that should have been another tell-tale sign) he explained that he had a ‘lazy bowel’ and had to take his medication once a week to clear it. In other words, he took an enema and we had to sit there and listen to him farting and shitting for a couple of hours each week, during which time he insisted on holding conversations with us through the open door, more or less opposite the lounge.

Naturally, during this time we couldn’t use the bathroom – and neither did we want to for the next few hours, either. It only took us a couple weeks or so to realise that his lazy bowel was more likely to be due to amount of shit food that he ate – never touched either a vegetable or anything that might have been considered fibre in the most faintest of definitions.

One weekend he was massively hungover and was violently sick in the toilet. He came straight back into the lounge, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, picked up a 2-litre bottle of Coke and, after taking a huge gulping swig, offered it to the pair of us, saying ‘Want a drink?’ This would be funny if we didn’t know that there was no humour involved – he thought he was being polite.

But worst of all was the smell. We never knew exactly what caused it – he didn’t have BO and was quite fastidious about showering etc. But every time his bedroom door was open, the smell was enough to make anyone heave. It was a weird mixture of everything considered offensive – shit, vomit, old socks, pungent farts, rotting vegetation – you name it and it could be partially identified in there. It got to the point where it could even be detected when the door was shut - we had a small central landing and since all the doors were close to each other and his room was next to the lounge, it soon became completely unbearable. So when he disappeared back to Wales for his days off, one of us (usually me) would take a deep breath, throw his door open and run into his room, opening all the windows wide. Not that it made much difference.

The difficulty in dealing with this was that he was actually a very nice guy. He was very kind-hearted but just seemed to have absolutely no idea of what he was doing – although I doubted that after we’d told him directly and he still claimed not to understand. He was, to be brutally honest, one of the ugliest men I’ve ever seen (genuine Neanderthal features, inaccurately and unfairly nicknamed Quasimodo when we'd worked together) and had a horrendous upbringing.

We tried very hard to be understanding - but I bet that, even for the most tolerant of people, the persistent smell of shite is not one of the many personal traits that it’s possible to cope with when home-sharing.

He didn’t even leave, in the end. He was forced to move because we split up (and to this day she still partially blames his presence, although I’m not convinced) and even then he wanted to come and share a place with me. It didn’t happen.

Alt: Smelly cunt ruins domestic harmony. Not quite the way it sounds.
(zebideedoodah likes florence but prefers venice, Wed 18 Mar 2015, 2:12, Reply)