SUTLS

Today, I woke up at half past eight, though this did not happen without incident. I am a light sleeper and the slightest change to the conditions around me, be it noise, light or temperature, normally has me wide awake and raring to go. Today, my dastardly new phone started running out of battery at about six in the morning and kept beeping violently at me every five minutes. I ignored it and went back to sleep each time without even considering what was happening. I had never heard this sound before and it could have meant something much more sinister for all I knew, but I didn't care. Then, at 8:30, my alarm went off. For the first time in living memory, I was about to turn it off and go back to sleep, before I had visions of my grandad parachuting through gunfire at Arnham Bridge. He never sleeps in ever and he survived the war. I could see him frowning at me from his allotment, where he'd have been for at least two hours now. I felt shameful and lazy and got straight out of bed.

A few years back, my dad bought a house in Nottingham. I lived there when I was a student and all my brothers have lived there since. He is about to sell it and the valuers are coming round tomorrow so it was up to Joe, Lloyd and I to make it presentable. When I lived there, it wasn't a student house, it was a real house. When Joe lived there, it started deteriorating. One of his housemates used to get so desperate for neat vodka that he'd walk over a mile barefoot to the nearest off license or he'd ring up the Booze Brothers to order 40 alcopops and a bottle of Smirnoff, just to meet the minimum order. He was nocturnal too. This erratic behaviour spoke volumes about his house keeping skills. Once, he and Joe spilled a whole bag of suger on the living room floor whilst making fairy cakes (later dubbed "egg-sick cakes"). Two months later, the mountain of sugar was still there with not one grain out of place.

Then came Rowan. He is a throw-back anyway, but his house mates were worse. One was an actual cave man who learnt to live without grooming or cleaning himself in any way whatsoever. This is a polite blog and I know my mother reads it, so I will go into no further detail. But whatever you're thinking, it's a lot worse than that. This group of tenants probably hit an all time low when they realised they'd unwittingly been cultivating a colony of maggots in the hallway. I think this was probably something to do with the chicken carcass. There was also an Irish man living there.

Last in the legacy is Lloyd, whose housemate's cook blunt mince meat in the George Foreman grill and are capable of secreting undiluted filth in frightening quantities. Again, that is as much as I want to say, in case there are ladies reading. To the best of my knowledge, no tenant has washed a dish or hoovered since I lived there.

So today was to be fun. At first, I spent an hour cleaning the top of the oven. It took a cocktail of bleach, cillit bang and Mr Muscle to even make any kind of difference. I'd hate to think of what was actually in that brown crust. My task was interrupted briefly by Joe who ran downstairs clutching an old soggy wig at arms length. He dashed outside screaming and could do nothing but whimper for the following ten minutes. It turned out that he'd just been unclogging the bathroom plug.

We went to the pub next door for lunch. The only people ever here at this time are from the old folks home across the road and the smoking ban has hit them hard. They all talk about the olden days in the key of throat cancer. In between their moaning, they sit staring at their drinks in silence. Never before have I seen a better advertisement for death. A new bar maid was in there and one fossil (who has been drinking there since 1952, I once overheard her say), went to make an order. Despite the fact it was all under control, the old woman pointed out which area of the bar to get all the correct glasses and bottles needed for their drinks. She ended by saying "And it'll be exactly the same, every single day." She was staring into space and addressing nobody as she said this. It was almost a relief to finish my butter sandwich and get back to work

I had become obsessed with the oven. I decided I would not leave that house until it looked clean. So I applied ant killer to it. Anything that made my eyes water that much and made it so difficult to breath had to be cleansing. I tried many other things over the course of the day too and by five o''clock, it looked almost good enough for a tramp to eat off.

In between stints in the kitchen, I also had to hoover the house. This was doubly hard as I had to hoover the ceilings too, to remove cobwebs and other less conventional dirt. After all the BB gun pellets I'd vacuumed, the Henry rattled as he followed me around. He was the only thing in the house still smiling.

It was to be Lloyd though, who drew the short straw. One of the toilets has an ungodly stain on it. It's pitch black and as big as the toilet can physically allow it to be. It has been there months and according to one of Lloyd's housemates, it is what happens when you eat a jar of peanut butter in one go. It's half life had yet to be determined, even after using every cleaning product that is commercially available. A while back, Lloyd once said he'd lick it for a hundred pounds, providing a split second tongue stabbing counted as a lick.

It must have taken an act of God, but Lloyd was succesful. He came downstairs shaking and sat in the front room with his face looking lifeless and white. He refused to talk about what he'd just had to do and I don't think he ever will. I have no idea how he managed to get rid of it.

At the end of the day, the place was spotless, except for one room. There is still one tenant who occasionally lurks there. To put it politely, he seems to have developed mental problems. He is rarely seen, is never really contactable and is currently behaving like serial killers do before they snap. His room looks like a scene from the film Seven.

We congratulated ourselves on a hard day's work, apart from Lloyd, who was still not speaking, then left the house praying that it would stay in the same condition for at least the next 12 hours.