Wanted

I picked up my phone and organised a couple more viewings, left some voicemails for potential flatmates and went to check the daily offering on the gumtree. At 11pm I’d finally had enough and got into bed. I’d been ignoring Taylor’s calls all day but I knew I'd have to speak to him eventually. Staring out of the skylight at the stars I wondered what Joe was doing.

I was awoken abruptly by my phone vibrating on the table next to me, I reached out for it knocking a glass of water over. ‘Yes’ I said sleepily. ‘You left me a message earlier’ a foreign accent said. ‘Oh, was it about a flatshare?’ I said confused, it was 5am. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘I saw your advert in Loot, about a room in your house,’ I told him. ‘What?’ he repeated.

Why was London so full of fucking weirdos, I thought, furious I had been woken by this idiot. I hung up and tried to go back to sleep, my phone immediately started buzzing again. I switched it off and tried to calm down, knowing I wouldn’t be able to sleep now.

Couch surf time

So the flat hunting weekend hadn’t gone exactly to plan. Well actually it had been the biggest waste of 48 hours I had ever experienced. I was now homeless and starting to get desperate so I had called a friend in Middlesex to beg for a bed until I found somewhere permanent. Fortunately the spare room at her parent’s place was vacant for two weeks. ‘Come home and commute from here’ my mum had suggested. But that would cost the same as rent and completely defy the point of my planned year in London doing whatever the hell I wanted, with whom and where I wanted.

I sat on the bed with a copy of Loot and a pen and started circling flatshares in my budget and in the areas I wanted to live. This could take forever and it was beginning to feel like having a second job, working all day then spending my breaks searching for flats, going straight to visit them after work and returning home at around 9pm. I just wanted to get somewhere, it wasn’t that much to ask. The commute from Teddington was adding an extra couple of hours on my day too.