Landlord Blues: Renting out the house from hell

Simon was a six foot something northerner, who would not stop talking. Initially, he paid the rent from his wages as a labourer, but after a while, the payments became erratic. He would sometimes come down to our house to pay. One time I was making lasagne;

‘Ooh, that smells delicious,’ he said.

I nearly offered him some until I remembered he owed us over two hundred pounds; so I stopped myself. I’d let him have some next time, if he’d paid his rent.

‘How many houses have you got?’ he asked Adrian, adding, ‘I’ve got a rich uncle who’s like you and lets houses out. He’s absolutely stacked.’

‘Actually, all our houses have high mortgages on them’, Adrian answered, refusing to be drawn on how many we had; it being none of his business.

‘God, that man stinks to high heaven,’ Adrian said, after he’d left. ‘I can still smell it now. He’s left the stench in the whole house.’

After I’d had my first child, I’d mysteriously lost much of my sense of smell. The stink of Simon was so pungent, however, that even I could detect it.

Another day, he ‘phoned to say the light on the stairs in the house wasn’t working.

‘Does the bulb need changing?’ I asked.

‘Yes, it’s probably that’, he said.

‘Well, can’t you do it?’ I enquired.

‘No’, he replied.

‘Is it too high for you to reach?’ I asked.

‘No’, he answered.

‘So’, I summarised, ‘you’re asking us to come on a 20-mile round trip to change a light bulb?’

‘Yes.’

So Adrian went and left a whole box of low-energy bulbs there, which should have lasted for the next ten years (they didn’t, because we had the same request to come and change bulbs a year or two later; because we were paying the bills, they left the lights on day and night). That was one of the only houses where they ever asked us to do something so small; four grown men were living there by then, and not one of them would pay for a bulb and reach up and change it.

Simon was naturally argumentative, moreover, and I reached the limits of my patience one day.

‘Don’t ‘phone me under any circumstances,’ I told him. ‘If you have something to tell me, put it in writing.’

He paid no attention; he would ring and say: ‘It’s Simon. I know you said not to call you, but I just wanted to ask you…’ and then he would start up a conflict-ridden conversation, I would tell him I wasn't going to listen and I would hang up.

At one point, the house was once more looking tatty, because none of the tenants would lift a finger to clean it. Adrian arrived there one day to move in a new tenant, Jason. Jason had arrived early and Simon greeted Adrian with: ‘Ah, here’s the landlord,’ in a derogatory tone. He then started declaiming that he wanted a rent refund because he was slightly in credit, for the first time ever, after a Housing Benefit payment.

Adrian said, ‘Can you wait a bit, Simon, because I’m busy?’ but he wouldn’t go away, instead standing in the doorway of the room that was being let as Adrian was trying to fill in the Tenancy Agreement. In the end, Adrian snapped.

‘Simon. Look. Get lost and go and get a life. I’m busy.’ He then apologised to Jason for being rude, but Jason was unfazed (we maybe should have taken that as a warning about the kind of person he was).