Recently I had a first-hand account of the housing crisis affecting so many young people. A relative – a professional on good money – was telling me how she’s spending half her salary renting a small room in a house. She has to perform contortions to fit into the tiny shower she shares with the other tenants. But it did lead her to offer some helpful financial advice for the new year. With so much money to be made, she suggested that I let out my own spare room.
It’s a tempting prospect, although naturally I prefer to think of it as helping to solve the accommodation problem rather than an opportunity to fleece a hapless young person. But I have my doubts, and I suspect most crime writers would.
In books and films, the prospective lodger who appears on the doorstep in the pouring rain, clutching a suitcase and wearing a haunted look, is a familiar figure. As fans of the thriller genre will know, this rarely ends well. Whether it’s Single White Female or The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, appearances are always deceptive. Even the lodger who pegs out early can still bring trouble, as those who enjoyed Shallow Grave will remember. And writing these kinds of stories can make you even more paranoid about stranger danger than watching or reading them.
I’m still in two minds about a new career as a landlady. I’m aware that you’re allowed to specify “non-smoker preferred” in ads for rooms. But are you also allowed to insist that prospective tenants must undergo a full-body search for guns, drugs and anything that might be used to dismember a corpse? You know, just to be on the safe side.
The DIY deficit
If I do let a room to a serial killer, I’ll have to get my radiators fixed first. Bleeding them hasn’t helped and neither has watching those helpful videos on YouTube. So it looks like I’ll need to blow the first month’s rent getting somebody in to sort it out.
If experience is any guide, that will probably mean watching the repairs and thinking, “I could have done that myself” after I see the bill. I don’t think I’m alone. And it’s not just simple household problems that baffle many of us either. I don’t drive, but I know car owners who still leave changing the oil or cleaning the spark plugs until the service is due.
When I finally become minister of education, I’ll be instructing schools to spend an hour a week teaching pupils how to do basic home and car maintenance. Not only will it save them a lot of money over the years, it’ll also spare them the embarrassment of a man with a van telling them: “Er … actually, I think you just needed to replace the fuse.”
Sign of the times
It might just be me but I’ve noticed that astrology seems to have gone into steep decline lately. The new year used to see endless articles on what the stars were holding in store for us over the coming 12 months and it made some of the soothsayers famous. That seems not to be the case so much these days. It also seems a long time since any new acquaintance asked me what star sign I was born under, to see if we would be compatible. My view was that if you believed in this stuff, we probably wouldn’t.
No doubt the somewhat predictable nature of the astrologers’ forecasts didn’t help. Most of us probably guessed that the planets were favourably aligned for a holiday in August. But perhaps the cynicism has been overdone. It might be true that astrologers didn’t see the course of 2016 coming – but then neither did most other forecasters.
