Mortgage I've been filling in my first ever mortgage application and it's harder than The Times crossword. Strangely though, the question that's giving me the most hassle is not how much I earn (in my dreams), or whether I'm riddled with county court judgements against me; it's that "previous address" part. The lenders want to know where I've been living for the past three years and they've left me just five lines to tell them. Unfortunately I've been through eight different flats since 1995.
Covering a second sheet of A4 with the details of ex-landlords, I can't help but think back about four years in London that have seen me go through most of the postcodes from E to SW12, alternately swearing that I'll never move south / north of the river again.
I started my London life in Bethnal Green, sharing a squat in a converted chapel with thirteen assorted Kiwis and Australians. I slept in the airing cupboard there, wedging the door open at nights with my trainers so that I wouldn't suffocate in my sleep. My parents were horrified that I wanted to leave rural Gloucestershire to live in a place where the only bird I ever saw was a dead pigeon, but on Sunday mornings, with the Columbia Flower Market in full swing, I fell in love with London. It's a city of contrasts and surprises.
From the east to the north. My next flat - legit this time - was in Tufnell Park. It was while hunting for that place - answering ads in Loot and subjecting myself to flatshare interviews that made getting into the diplomatic service look easy - that I discovered you don't even have to leave the tube station to find out what it would be like to live in a certain London borough. At Kentish Town, the lift was full of people who looked as though they were on their way to a sociology lecture, so it shouldn't have come as such a surprise that the flat I shared there was part of a vegetarian Marxist commune. At Clapham Junction, where any colour you like as long as it's grey is de rigeur, I shared a house with a banker who could blend into the draylon sofa like a chameleon in his pin-striped suit. Near King's Cross, where everybody looks as though they're in a terrible hurry to get away, I hung up my hat for just over a week.
But the time has come to put down some roots. I want to paint walls without begrudging a landlord the time it takes to polyfilla the hole left by a rawl plug. I want to strip, sand and customise. I want a place of my very own. But it's going to cost a bit more than a month's rent in advance... So, I'm stapling my address sheet to the mortgage application and hoping that they won't find anything too suspicious in the fact that for the last three years I've moved house pretty much every time the telephone bill arrived.
Montage
by Mark Love
©Chris Manby, 1999