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.