Wait a Minute Mr Postman…

Three years ago, the 40 mile commute from Essex to London seemed all too much. I had just landed my first exploiternship, and decided that with my £25-a-week pay packet I would sack off the daily four-hour round journey and live the dream; I would move to London. Only it wasn’t enough money, there wasn’t much by the way of dreams about it, and I ended up couch-surfing for five months. Which was great – for a while. But when laundry night meant lugging all my earthly possessions for 20 minutes to the nearest Laundromat to spend two hours trying to avoid eye contact with the man twitching in the corner, life started to get me down.

Three years later, and I’ve managed to upgrade considerably, and sometimes people even stay on my couch. Yet after living in a succession of houses, and moving four times, I’m starting to feel like a glorified couch-hopper. Sure, I now pay an extortionate amount of rent for the luxury of having my own key, but I don’t own this place, this place that looks like IKEA just vomited on it, this place that I’ll move out of as soon as the lease is up. And as if to remind me of the fact that I’m nothing more than a personified pound sign to my landlord, and that like many that have gone before me I am entirely replaceable, I receive at least 14 letters a day addressed to people that aren’t me.

Granted these people have, like me, lived in this house, been outwitted by the Mensa-certified washing machine, and created whole new swearwords when the shower blasted them with a jet of cold water befitting a prisoner of war camp. But these people are nonetheless not me. Every day these letters serve as a beautifully mocking reminder of the transient, restless lifestyle that I, along with many Londoners, are living. Although unlike me (hopefully), some of these people are in for a BIG surprise when the taxman finally catches up with them.

Now it’d be different if, say, I lived in Gary Barlow’s old house; then at least I could kick back with a cuppa and get stuck into some deliciously spiteful hate mail, rifle through old women’s underwear and learn how to be a tosser with his latest eBay purchase, How to be Simon Cowell. But I don’t. I live in the former residence of tax evaders, people who don’t love their grandparents enough to supply a forwarding address and a guy called Jim, who is eligible for a discount on take-out pizza. However, the upside is that, as a result of my recently adopted pseudo name of Angela White, and her subscription to Firs Monthly, I now know that Douglas firs can live up to a thousand years in the right conditions. Good to know.

Image by kate* courtesy of Flickr