This morning I awoke to the sound of the postman dropping the mail through the letterbox onto the floor. For some reason it sounded as if he was forcing through the entire back catalogue of GQ so I dragged myself out of bed to find 3 miserable looking letters lying there, with a combined weight of about 100grams…go figure!
Amongst those three was one from my landlord, or rather the property management company. The company I rent from is one of those that has about 20 ‘holding’ companies which I assume is to avoid paying as much tax as possible, after all I rent from a good Jewish company!
Now, it has to be said since moving into my current abode in 2003 I’ve heard very little from them, I get the annual letters telling me I am due a gas safety check and an electrical safety check but that’s about it. I spoke to them earlier this year when the washing machine broke down but other than that nothing, which is kinda how I like it. So when I get a letter from them I can only assume it’s bad news, I wasn’t disappointed!
They were writing to advise me that they had just noticed that my lease expired on 1 September 2005 (very observant of them!) and as they assumed I wished to continue they were prepared to renew it for a year… Nothing bad so far huh? Then they named their price.. OUCH! The rent has gone up £980pa or in layman’s terms I’ll be out an extra £81.67per month… I’m hoping that’s really 3 years increases rolled into one as I can’t afford that sort of rise each year!
To be fair, I did consider myself fairly lucky not to have had an increase each year but obviously I wasn’t really going to call them up and ask, “Hey, do you feel like charging me more rent this year?” I’m just wondering if now is a good time to ask them to replace the shitty windows and perhaps re-plaster the front room wall that was damaged by water from the flat above?
I thought I’d drag out an old, slightly obscure (to some) track for you to listen to. It’s by Jefferson Airplane and is called, She Has Funny Cars. You might think it’s a strange title for a song but bear in mind it comes from an album called Surrealistic Pillow and suddenly it doesn’t seem so strange after all. Enjoy it and let me know what you think
Comments are closed.