Once upon a time in the Weston

I’ve been trying to move out of my houseshare into a place of my own and pickings are slim. Literally in fact – most of the flats in my price range are basically glorified corridors.

Renting in Bristol is like being Harry Potter if he had to pay £600 a month for his cupboard. The only remotely affordable place was a flat above the Wetherspoons in Bedminster. I was tempted but I had to turn it down out of concern for my own health. Anyone who is familiar with my lifestyle will know that it’s not safe for me to be that close to that much breakfast. I could probably get them to bring it up to me. I’d spend half my life scrubbing bacon stains out of my bedsheets.

I’d looked at another upstairs flat and the landlord had deemed it necessary to tell me that the stairs were for access to the flat only, not for “messing about”. I’m not sure what wild stair-based activities he was picturing but his weary tone suggested he was speaking from experience. Perhaps a previous tennant had tried to slide down them when they were late for work and was now suing him for giving them carpet burns.

This reminded me of an experience I’d had a few years before when I was looking for a room in Spain. I was viewing a flat and I accidentally opened a door I wasn’t supposed to, behind which were piles and piles of fruit. The landlord slammed it shut and told me in no uncertain terms that this was “the fruit room” and that I must never set foot in there again. A more shameless writer might say that this was the second time a landlord had told me to keep off the apples and pears, but I wouldn’t dream of it. 

I told the landlord that I’d give him an answer by the end of the day and we boarded a train for Weston-super-Mare. (My girlfriend and I, not the landlord and I. He struck me as more of a Clevedon man.) It was a lovely day and Weston was packed. The land train was doing a roaring trade (surely all trains are land trains), and the beach was heaving with excited children and forlorn donkeys. I say forlorn but it’s hard to tell what mood a donkey is actually in. They just have naturally sad faces. There is no discernible difference between a donkey at a birthday party and a donkey at a funeral, except the funeral donkey will be less at risk from blindfolded kids with safety pins.

After being pale and awkward on the beach for a while, we went into  the arcade where we amassed a grand total of 103 prize tickets. We figured we probably had enough to buy the whole arcade, or at the very least a fully loaded bubble sword, but as we approached the prize counter we realised we were sorely mistaken. The cuddly toys started at 1000 tickets. The ones you would actually want to cuddle started at 1500 (nobody wants to go to bed with a toad in a sombrero). It looked like our only choice would be five Maoams, and trying to share an odd number of sweets would surely put a strain on our relationship. Have you ever tried tearing a Maoam in half? It might as well be a phone book.

As I was about to make a choice my girlfriend pointed to the back shelf and said, “Is that a Slinky?” Sure enough, tucked away between a Moomins lunchbox and a heap of assorted Ben 10 paraphernalia was a very old, very dusty slinky, going for a mere 100 tickets. Either the arcade staff had missed it when they were ramping up the prices, or Slinkys are somehow immune to inflation like bitcoin. Someone should get a boxload over to Greece before its too late.  Even if they didn’t stabilise the economy, you could have great fun with them on the steps of the Parthenon.

I handed the arcade lady our 103 tickets and told her to “keep the change”, which made me feel witty and smooth for about three seconds, and then like the worst man in the world for about three hours. I was so excited about the Slinky that I couldn’t wait to get home to test it out. I pushed it off the curb by Yate’s Wine Lodge but there wasn’t enough of a drop and it just fell listlessly into the road, as I’m sure many people have done outside that particular establishment. The people of Weston gave me pitying looks as I picked it up and walked away with my (rainbow coloured) tail between my legs.

As soon as we got home I rushed upstairs and gave the slinky another push. This time it was everything I’d hoped for. It sailed elegantly down one stair after another, landing like a gymnast on the wireless router. I immediately picked it up and rushed upstairs for a second go. As I was about to launch it again my phone rang. It was the landlord asking me if I’d made a decision about the flat.

“Sorry”, I said, “I need a place where I can mess around on the stairs.”

Photo by Mike Charles / Shutterstock.com