The next thing on Adrian’s agenda during this time, was to contact the other tenant, Jason regarding the noise-nuisance, but his ‘phone was switched off, so he ‘phoned Jason’s sister, Melanie, instead. She was one of the many female relatives who seem to be sorting out a whole generation of men. A meeting was arranged between Adrian, Jason and the sister.
We weren't especially concerned about him making the house difficult for the current housemates; that is, Jason wasn't driving out two good tenants (Gerald and Gethin), with his loud music – since we were evicting them anyway for non-payment of rent. In fact, bad behaviour by Jason might hasten them on their way. We did worry, though, that if we managed to get decent tenants to replace these two jokers, they might be driven out by Jason's lack of consideration, so the issue had to be tackled. At least Jason was an amiable type and his rent was always paid (by the State). The outcome of the meeting was that Jason was put on a final warning.
The month before we'd got rid of Gethin and Gerald, Adrian had texted Adam – our only ‘good’ tenant – because we hadn’t received the rent, and he had texted back to apologise and say that he had lost his job three weeks earlier, but had put in a claim for LHA.
‘He’s a great guy’, Adrian said, ‘devoted to his kid.’
‘Well, we’ve had that before’, I replied. We’d had fathers who seemed devoted to their child; that is they still wanted to be fathers after splitting up from the mothers, but it didn’t always mean they paid the rent. In my book, that made them rubbish people, as we were paying the mortgage and bills and they didn’t give a damn about us. The good thing was that Adam did seem okay and was trying to find another job. But it meant that, all of a sudden, we had three out of four tenants not paying the rent! The mortgage had gone down at the time to under £200 a month (from a high of £600), but the council tax, water and electricity came to over £300 because of their decadent use of it. With one person paying £217, we were running the house at a loss, therefore, when we should have been making a profit for a change.