Some days I want to strangle every single bureaucrat with their own red tape.
For a while now I’ve been trying to find a way to get out of my contract with Foxtons, who I’ve in the process found out have the worst reputation of any large real estate agency in London. So sayeth the internet, anyway.
When I got this flat all the way back in October last year it was after an exhausting and writing-time-consuming search that had been going on entirely too long. I was being called out of class, was up until 2am looking through classifieds of places that had been taken by the time I enquired, and wasting whole days on fruitless viewings. When this place in Ealing finally arrived it was my third choice of the day, the other two having been sold literally hours before I called. It was more expensive than I would have liked, but I was tired of the race and when my dad told me to just take it, damn the consequences, I did.
Within 48 hours I’d moved in. I arrived at the Ealing Foxtons branch with all my bags late at night, after a long day at the LFS. A contract was placed in front of me, and I was encouraged to scan through it briefly, the negotiator watching and waiting with baited breath, and then sign. Which I did. Then, after Foxtons refused to help with the bags, I carted them up the hill to the flat on Corfton Road for a good twenty minutes, and crashed. For the next few days I was fishing clothes tags out of the cupboards and finding lipstick under the radiator. There was a leak in the kitchen and for weeks afterwards I coped with only half the lights operable. I still haven’t been able to identify all the stains on the bathroom tiles.
All this backstory may read as an excuse. But it’s really not. The Foxtons people told me quite simply (and falsely, as it turns out) that the landlord would not accept a six month break clause. If I demanded one, they said, he’d opt for someone more amenable to place in the flat. Now this has come to bite me on the behind because officially my contract goes to halfway through October. And why do I want to leave scenic Ealing before then? Well, besides the fact that it takes an age to get anywhere (if you oversleep for ten minutes you’re late by an hour, basically) and that spending day upon day alone in the suburban silence is making me go stir-crazy, I want to do the proper young professional thing and go flatting in stereo.
Paul and I have been planning to both work and flat together for a while now, and recently the shared living idea has been taken up by two more of our class. The advantage of a group of four or so is that you’ll get much better places for prices per person that would get you something dank and small on your own. With house prices dropping all over London due to the fabled credit crunch and students moving out after the end of term, the next few months will be the best time to do it.
If, that is, I can move before mid-October. But with harpies like Foxtons involved, the only way to do that may be to have the two places at once, at least for a while. Unless I set up a meth lab here on Corfton Road and recoup some of the extraneous losses that way. Nobody would expect. Not in Ealing, where nothing happens.
To end on a bright note, I recently saw Lift To The Scaffold, a late-fifties tragic dissertation on the ever-widening circles of misfortune, where an office worker shoots his employer in order to run off with the man’s wife, only to find a small mistake affecting not only his but many other lives. A perfectly polished puzzle, everything fits together in a way that is inevitable and yet surprising.
