Let's Lynch The Landlord

 

And now I'm all alone. In bedsit land. My only home 

Living in a Rhyl bedsit in the mid-80s wasn’t so much housing as an endurance test. You didn’t rent a home; you rented a collection of problems and smells that happened to share four damp walls.

The toilet didn’t work, which felt less like a maintenance issue and more like a philosophical stance. The landlord insisted it was “temperamental,” as if it merely needed encouragement and positive thinking. The carpet had fleas — not the odd freeloading hitchhiker, but a thriving, organised society. If you stood still long enough, they treated you like public transport.

And then there was the scabies. A delightful skin condition that arrived uninvited and refused to leave, like a distant relative who suddenly needed “a place to stay for a few weeks” and was still there at Christmas. You’d lie in bed scratching and wonder whether the mattress had ever been new, or whether it had simply existed since the dawn of time, quietly absorbing the despair and mites of previous tenants.

Electricity came courtesy of a single plug socket for the entire flat. One socket. That was it. You had to plan your evening like a military operation: kettle or heater? Television or lamp? Luxury or survival? Owning an extension lead made you the technological elite.

The landlord would occasionally appear for inspections — not to fix anything, obviously, but to check the building was still technically vertical. Meanwhile, disco thundered from the flat below like a permanent soundtrack to mild suffering. The bassline vibrated through the floorboards, rattling the damp plaster and giving the fleas something to dance to. I would counter this with storming punk rock and they below had the nerve to complain!

Requests for hot water or heating were met with the timeless landlord refrain: “All you ever do is complain.” Which felt unfair, considering the alternative was silently dissolving into the wallpaper. Sometimes you’d return home to find the place mysteriously “checked” while you were out — nothing stolen, just a vague sense that your privacy had been borrowed without permission.

The yard outside hosted rats with the confidence of long-term tenants. They didn’t scurry; they strolled. Cockroaches joined the party too, because every ecosystem needs diversity. Turning on the oven released a smell that suggested it had previously been used for experimental chemistry. And when it rained, the ceiling joined in, contributing its own indoor water feature.

Yet, somehow, we lived like this. We laughed about it in pubs, swapped horror stories, and kept going because rent was cheap and options were thinner than the wallpaper. It wasn’t comfort — it was survival with a sense of humour. Cynical humour, perhaps, but humour all the same.

Because if you didn’t laugh, you’d probably just sit there in the dark.

Virtual Agreement

By day—by which he meant whenever he opened his laptop—Elliot was a good person.

Not just good in the vague, harmless sense. He was visibly, demonstrably, relentlessly good. The kind of good that arrived punctually in comment sections and left a tidy trail of heart emojis behind. The kind of good that knew exactly when to post, what to say, and which opinion would receive the most approving nods from strangers with anime avatars.

Elliot had built the persona carefully, like a bonsai tree trimmed into a perfect shape. It had taken years of pruning.

In real life, his flat was quiet in the way places become when no one visits. The curtains stayed half closed. The sink filled gradually with mugs that once held coffee and now held intention. His phone rarely rang, but it buzzed constantly—notifications from people he had never met congratulating him for being such a thoughtful human being.

The applause was silent but addictive.

Online, Elliot was kind. Fiercely kind. Performatively kind. He shared petitions before breakfast and posted compassionate threads before lunch. He corrected people gently but firmly. He condemned things with careful, eloquent disappointment. He supported causes he had learned about three minutes earlier with the conviction of a lifelong activist.

He never said the wrong thing. More importantly, he never said the honest thing.

Honesty was risky. Honesty could be screenshotted.

So Elliot watched the crowd instead. He waited for the temperature of the room to settle before speaking. A pause, a scroll, a quick scan of the most-liked replies. Then he would step forward, nodding vigorously, echoing the consensus in slightly different wording—just enough originality to seem sincere, just enough agreement to stay safe.

He was a human retweet.

The mob didn’t frighten him because they were cruel. They frightened him because they were efficient. One misstep, one badly phrased joke, one opinion that aged poorly, and the crowd would turn with the speed of weather. He had watched it happen to others. People evaporated overnight, leaving behind apology notes and locked accounts.

Elliot survived by never standing still long enough to be noticed.

His posts read like warm hugs. His private thoughts read like cold rain.

He muted people he publicly praised. He rolled his eyes at threads he enthusiastically shared. He despised the endless moral grandstanding even as he perfected it. Each day felt like attending a party where everyone insisted they were having a wonderful time while quietly checking the exits.

Sometimes he typed a reply that was honest. Something blunt. Something real. Something that might have started an argument instead of ending one. He would stare at the words, heart racing, imagining the fallout.

Then he would delete it and replace it with kindness.

Kindness was safer. Kindness was applauded. Kindness got likes.

Likes felt like oxygen.

The strangest part was how much he resented the people who provided it. Their avatars smiled back at him from his phone like a chorus of polite strangers applauding a speech he didn’t believe in. He knew they didn’t truly know him. Worse, he knew he didn’t want them to.

He feared ridicule more than loneliness, so he chose loneliness with Wi-Fi.

Every so often he posted about mental health. Vulnerability performed well. A carefully worded confession about burnout, a tasteful mention of therapy, a gentle reminder to “be kind to yourselves.” The responses poured in immediately. Support. Love. Solidarity. Dozens of people telling him he mattered.

He read every message and felt nothing.

Because the person they cared about didn’t exist.

One evening, after a particularly successful thread, Elliot closed the laptop and sat in the silence of his flat. The room hummed faintly with electricity and distant traffic. He realised he had spent the entire day agreeing with people he secretly disagreed with.

He tried to remember the last time he’d said something that felt dangerous and true. The memory didn’t come.

His phone buzzed again. Another notification. Another stranger thanking him for being such a good person.

He stared at the screen for a long time before turning it face down on the table.

The silence that followed felt heavier than any argument.

Grown up punk

He still had the leather jacket.

It hung at the back of the wardrobe like a fossil from a louder era, the sleeves creased into permanent rebellion. Sometimes he’d catch sight of it while reaching for a neatly ironed shirt and feel a faint, embarrassing tug in his chest, like hearing a song you once loved playing faintly in a supermarket.

Dave had been seventeen when the jacket first mattered. Spiked hair, safety pins, opinions sharp enough to cut glass. He’d shouted about the system in cramped venues that smelled of beer and sweat. He’d sworn he’d never sell out, never settle down, never become one of them. The future was a thing to fight, not plan for.

Back then, the world felt simple: there were the powerful, and there were the rest of us, and he knew exactly which side he was on.

He raved through the 90s with the stamina of someone who believed sleep was a conspiracy. He drifted through bad jobs with heroic indifference, treating employment as a temporary inconvenience rather than a necessity. Weekends blurred into weekdays, hangovers into late alarms. Responsibility hovered nearby, politely waiting to be acknowledged.

He ignored it with admirable dedication.

The bedsit in Rhyl had peeling wallpaper and a mattress that remembered every poor decision ever made on it. There had been a girl whose surname he never learned, a pregnancy scare, a string of unpaid bills that arrived like threatening postcards from the future. Life didn’t implode dramatically; it just sagged in the middle.

One morning he woke up and realised rebellion had stopped being fun and started being exhausting.

The change wasn’t dramatic. No lightning bolt, no epiphany. Just a slow drip of practical thoughts. Rent. Stability. Pensions. Words he once treated like punchlines began to sound suspiciously like solutions.

He cut his hair first. A small thing. Sensible, even. Interviews went better when people could see your eyebrows.

The job arrived soon after. Then a better one. Then a promotion. Each step felt temporary, a strategic compromise. He told himself he was infiltrating the system, learning its weaknesses from the inside.

The system, meanwhile, quietly handed him a company lanyard and a dental plan.

Years passed in tidy increments. He bought shirts that needed ironing and shoes that required polish. He stopped going to gigs because they were too loud and started complaining when restaurants played music too loudly. Somewhere along the way he discovered he liked coffee that tasted of adjectives.

He told himself this was maturity.

The leather jacket stayed in the wardrobe, watching.

The biggest change wasn’t the job or the mortgage or the reliable sleep schedule. It was the music. One afternoon he realised the records he once worshipped had been replaced by something softer, safer. Stadium anthems. Polished choruses. Songs that didn’t demand anything from him except passive approval.

He told himself it was just taste evolving.

One weekend, while clearing space in the spare room, he found the old vinyl stacked in a dusty crate. Angry album covers. Bands with names that sounded like threats. He picked one up, smiled nostalgically, then opened his laptop and searched for its resale value.

The listing went live within minutes.

It felt efficient. Sensible. Adult.

Election day arrived on a rainy Thursday. He stood in the polling booth holding the stubby pencil, staring at the ballot paper like it was a mirror. He hesitated for a fraction of a second, then made a neat, decisive cross beside the candidate who promised stability, lower taxes, and strong markets.

The pencil didn’t tremble.

Walking home, he passed a group of teenagers outside a takeaway. Leather jackets. Loud laughter. One of them shouted something about the government and the end of the world. They sounded furious and certain and invincible.

He felt an unexpected flicker of irritation. Kids, he thought. They’ll understand when they’re older.

That evening he hung his suit jacket beside the old leather one. The two garments touched at the shoulders, strangers sharing a hanger. He stood there for a moment, staring at them, unsure why the sight made him uneasy.

Then his phone buzzed with a work email, and the feeling passed.

The leather jacket stayed where it was, waiting patiently for Rebellion festival in August where he could play pretend.