You might find it a bit rum to open your front door to a stranger and hand over your door keys and alarm code as they head for an upper bedroom. Around a third of erstwhile landlords would now agree with you and have ceased renting, while the call for such affordable room at the inn continues to grow.
Now we and our crumbling pile are getting increasingly ancient
Half a century ago, we answered a tap at the door to a beautiful woman, standing in the snow in kitten heels. She was a Maori, a chieftaness no less, having slaughtered her first sheep on the family North Island farm at the age of eight. She lingered, getting married two years later in our back garden, and even produced what became a second-generation lodger.
Emboldened, we put a further ad in a South London rag in response to which a professor answered the call, an academic from Los Alamos nuclear centre, teaching our boys martial arts, though without the nuclear option.
In some ways I feel disappointed not to experience the frisson of evil that a lodger can bring. The closest we came was the destruction of our washing machine by two Sicilian waiters from the volcanic island of Stromboli, whose passata-stained uniforms proved too fierce a match for Miele. The other catastrophe was brought on by some well-born Italian girls whose consumption of cotton buds and wet wipes brought about a geyser-like eruption of the lavatory in the wee hours. We awoke to the implosion of the bathroom ceiling.
We once took in a couple of German exchange students from the Berlin Gymnasium. I had to answer increasingly desperate telephone calls for Frau Schmitt, telling her that, no, her teenage daughter had not returned from the Trocadero and was indeed unreachable.
The closest we got to an Isis sleeper agent was the morose young man who lay in his darkened room, photographing the dust under his bed and sending it to the language school with threats of reprisals.
Then there was the young Russian boy, a physics prizewinner, who trekked over the Urals from Ekaterinberg (site of the Romanov murders) bringing with him a giant sack of his own porridge. While going upstairs to take a shower, he set the porridge on a lively broil on our stove, to which we were alerted only by plumes of smoke wafting through the upper floors.
From Brazil, a doctor and her young daughter, living in a gated community in Brasilia under security, were captivated by the ease of the short stroll to our tempting gelateria. The child had never been able to leave her flat without security detail. There was also a huge Brazilian called Mr Nice, loaded with degrees, who ended up marshalling pizzas at a flagship outlet in Chelsea. Our eldest son had to serially pull the lavatory chain for yet another young Brazilian to whom such Edwardian sanitary ware was a closed area.
France produced a lanky funambulist whose day job was measuring the inside legs of policemen for their uniforms. When asked what English culture he might like covered by our nubile university daughter, this lascivious Gaston elected, ‘ze parts of ze boday’.
A highly-educated Kazakh appeared in a three-piece suit, bringing with him as offering a felt model of a typical Kazakh rural home, a curious tepee-like structure with an open fireplace. Ah, the presents from foreign lands! I could go on. Among these, a virgin copy of a DVD from an Ankaran medical student, going by the name of Dogdu, charting the life and times of Ataturk.
An agonisingly shy South Korean girl, dubbed Too Soon given the strictures of her given name, came from the Women’s University of Seoul, her mother sending us hand-made pink satin cushion covers in gratitude. Too Soon, an accomplished architect, set fire to her foot having put the kettle on the floor. She never steeled herself to speak, despite voluminous notebooks of English vocabulary, and moved to the hub of South Korea in New Malden, to a house, as she said, ‘with three looms’.
Enthusiasm waned somewhat with the arrival of an Uzbekh lawyer, who showed me a photo of his young son. ‘His name means war’, he explained. Struck down with a misdiagnosed agony in his fundament, the poor fellow was scrambled in torment to a North London hospital which specialised in ‘disorders of the rectum’. Months later, I was still receiving the hospital invoices, despite his perfectly honourable efforts to give the mutton-brained NHS accounts department his credit card as he was rushed into theatre.
Now we and our crumbling pile are getting increasingly ancient, and the bathrooms more Jurassic. A Health and Safety inspector has told us we must extirpate our drawing room fire, a blameless source of comfort, to comply with the new Landlord’s Safety Certificate. It’s been a riot, but it might just be time to change the locks.
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