Bereiten - To Prepare

Although I’ve had a good few months to prepare for my impeding homelessness, I still haven’t got anything sorted - and my lease is up in less than two weeks. Piss artistry is one of my strengths, but this is extreme even for me. It’s tough looking for a place by yourself. A flat on your own is out of the question, unless you want to spend most of your wages (if you work in a cinema) on rent and bills. So some kind of house or flat-share is the only sensible option, but finding a place as a single guy isn’t that easy. Girls want other girls to live with so they can do each other’s hair and not get raped, while guys want girls to live with because there’s a slim chance of accidentally-on-purpose seeing them naked. That’s what I read on the internet anyway. But seriously, looking at online room ads, most of the decent-looking places state ‘females preferred’ or (not seriously at all) ‘blokes: piss off’. The rest are either situated in the most ghetto of areas or look like they belong to guests of the Jeremy Kyle show. It’s amazing that for an advert picture the owners don’t even pretend their home isn’t hovel. You’d spend five or ten minutes making it look a bit less council-house sheik if only for the purposes of the photo. They should at least invest in a piece of Ikea furniture and a decorative fruit bowl. Adding to the background a cardboard cut-out of an Aga adorned with flowers and James Morrison albums would show such utter and irresistible class, they’d be beating potential tenants away with a baseball bat and their barely-legal cross-bred terrier. Okay, so not all the places that accept guys look that awful, but the others are almost always populated with the morbidly middle-aged. It’d be like living with my mum again but without the cooked meals and cups of coffee every eight minutes. Moving in with anyone over 40 who isn’t related would just feel weird. But then with eleven days to go it might end up happening anyway. Stuck in a house with a 10pm curfew and a constant Spandau Ballet/Status Quo soundtrack would be hell. That verses a box outside the train station with fleas and a bag of glue is a contest simply too close to call.