Settling In

The heavy wooden door swung open to reveal a pleasant hallway. Manuals of organic chemistry neatly lined the bookcase. Duck-headed walking sticks josteled for attention in an enormous vase. A monstrous fern cascaded luxuriously down from the mezzanine above. I poked my head into the living room, which spectacularly failed to yield junkies, piss stains or fluffy mountains of coke. I wasn't in Glasgow any more.

I also wasn't in my flat.

That delight lay on my right, behind the locked door. It would be three months before the kindly family I live with described my employers as 'bastardos', but the flat gave me the first hint that the next 6 months weren't going to be all honey and blow jobs.

I dumped my cases and pulled out the laptop. I gingerly plugged the adapter into the wall socket. The socket lolled extravagantly into the skirting board and made an ominous crackling noise. I wrenched the plug out and tried another socket which, if I had to guess, had been installed around the time Caecilius was meeting his fiery end in Pompeii. The plug didn't fit, and the socket joined it's friend in the dark recess of the wall for a frantic electrical rave. I stopped fucking with the sockets.

Never mind, there was laundry to do. I searched the kitchen for a washing machine. No joy. Then I checked the bathroom. There, lodged between the bidet and the shower was a washing machine of indeterminate Soviet Block origins. It's ancient wires danced merrily across the room to a plug socket within broiling distance of the shower head. Tired, hungry and not in the mood I grumpily stuffed clothes into what I had wittily Christened 'The Bastard' and slammed the door. Immediately the waste pipe sprang from its foetid hole and pelted me with cold water and the accumulated grunge of too many foreign keck washings.

I sat on the sofa and weighed up my life. Here I was, a thousand miles from the nearest friend, unable to charge my laptop or phone, caked in soap powder and starving. I needed beer or a gun, and either involved leaving the house. No problem though, I thought, in a town of 30,000 there's bound to be a open corner shop open somewhere.

Dear Reader, was I ever so naïve?

I tramped up the road in a foul temper, past inexplicably closed bars, Tabacs and those shops you get on the continent that stock pink plastic children's tat and eye-watering Hardcore on the same shelf. Up ahead the lights of a garage bleared at me out of the mist. Thank Christ, hear was the opportunity to stock up on lager and Ginsters and retire until that mythical morning when 'everything looks better'. The sign said '24 ora' and it was, in a sense. That sense being that it had no shop, one pump and a general sense that muggings could happen regardless of the hour.

I turned around to see a party of vast Latino hags giggling merrily into the Gala Bingo across the street.

It was bedtime.