What is it? Once there was silence and now there is this. Once this was just grass, and trees, and wilderness and beasts, and insects fluttering lazily through the air. Once this was rivers and swamp and reeds. Then we came and stomped it all down into our shapes: paths grew out of caves, which grew into roads wound into hamlets, villages, towns, cities, skyscrapers, airports. Once, this was something, and then we tamped it down to mud and gave it a name, and then it grew, grew, ever winding, the roaring feet of the Roman army, the Nordic invaders, layer upon layer of civilisation, settlements, battlegrounds, death. We grew limbs and crawled from the swamps, and now, thousands of years later, we evolved to the endpoint of civilisation, which is “having a big Spar just a short walk away from a little Spar”. How did it ever end up thus?
Where is it? Do you ever consider – when you are stood on the ground, or occupying a space, or lying in a hotel bed – do you ever get the intrusive thought: how many people have died on the exact spot I am in right now? I get it, all the time. Plague sufferers. Peasants worked down to the nub. Lords who partook of too much food and succumbed on the trail to gout. Billions of people have come before us, and all of them have died, and there are so few places to ritually do such a thing (die) – which might, if you think about it, explain some of our cultural resistance to assisted dying facilities: we evolved a lifespan longer than nature ever intended, but socially we never caught up, and we have a ritual for when we are born and when we are married and when we are buried, but we don’t have a ritual for dying; we resist flying to Switzerland to be demolished because we do not have hundreds of years of death tradition underpinning it; we need to invent our own at an astonishing rate – that they have, naturally, overlapped and died where you are now. The house you are in: do you think anyone’s died in it? It’s been around for a few decades at least, probably. You are unlikely to be the first person to live in it. Did someone die in the corner? Did someone flop dead in an armchair? Did someone spasm every muscle in their body at once and rise from the bed, stiff and long and dead? You never know, do you. Something to think about, though, every second you exist, for the rest of your natural life.
What is there to do locally? I suppose I am staring into the existential abyss, because a VIP mezzanine flat in Notting Hill does not, simply, “happen”. A house was built here, once. It was grand. People lived in it and grew wealthy in it and died in it. Society evolved. The population of the city stayed the same, but the need to segment space – protect it for the wealthy, and slice it down into tiny portions for the un-wealthy – became apparent. Landlordism became more rife. Houses were segmented into floors, floors became flats, addresses were amended from “111” to “111A” to “111B thru D”. We created smaller spaces for ourselves. And, little by little, it emerged, in Notting Hill: a tiny flat with a tiny balcony and a tiny special shelf for your bed to go on, clocking in at—
Alright, how much are they asking? £2,362 pcm. Every bad decision you ever made was built upon the bones of the dead. You check Tinder in the shadow of a battlefield.

Friends (you are my friends) familiar with this column will know of the emerging existence of the “mezzanine bed”, a property trend that swelled in the late terror of 2018 and sustained, ever more popular, through until now.

Mezzanine beds right now are “hip”. In 2022 – when I will still be cursed to write about hideous rental properties in London from my own hideous rental property in London – I will look back at the mezzanine bed craze with a wry smile, mezzanine beds just a distant nostalgic memory to me, like those Topman T-shirts with the coloured button-up collars, because mezzanine beds will have long been replaced by some new horror – “Why Renters in Dalston Sleep Inside Large Industrial Washing Machines to Save Space” – and the idea of sleeping on a double mattress flopped on a shelf looming horribly over your own front room will seem novel, luxurious, elegant even. But right now mezzanine beds are just mezzanine beds, and they are shit and they are everywhere, even in west London, where they are trying to charge you two-and-a-half grand (think what you could do! With two-and-a-half grand!) to sleep in one.

Look:

The thing with this mezzanine bed is it is the world’s poshest ever mezzanine bed, which means, strangely, it passes two of my most acid Rental Opportunity tests: The Airbnb Test, and The Shag Test.

First, The Airbnb Test: say you rock up to an unfamiliar continental city for a three-day mini break, and your skin is shrunken to your flesh from the air travel, and you’ve been up since 4AM, somehow, and the three celebratory breakfast pints of Guinness you had at the airport Wetherspoons have long since worn off, and in the cab you started to actually feel quite queasy as a result, and your partner is marvelling out of the window at the sheer wonder of a new world – a colosseum, look! An ancient temple! They drive on the opposite side of the roads here! – but you’ve had to put your head on the cold glass to try to cool down your forehead so you don’t throw up.

You unlock the door and this is your Airbnb. It’s nice, right? It’s actually really fucking nice. When you have exactly half a suitcase of belongings to store in it, a room like this is simply gorgeous. Quick shower to freshen up. That new shirt you got that you’re not brave enough to wear at home is on. Out into the piazza for an early evening Aperol Spritz. Later, you’ll come back here, and be slightly too drunk to successfully intercourse, but you’ll try it anyway. This house has: passed The Airbnb Test.

But passing The Airbnb Test is also failing The Airbnb Test, because the point of an Airbnb is you wouldn’t want to live there for more than three days. The situation is this: your flight home is cancelled and the host allows you to stay until all this coronavirus stuff settles down. Once you’ve stopped existing solely on charcuterie boards and those little ramekins of snacks Italian waiters bring you with your drinks, and you actually have to cook a meal, then all you really have kitchen-wise is a lone sink, a kettle and an oven–hob combo that is also directly next to your TV.

I suppose it’s kind of novel to watch TV while you cook, exactly once, but then after nine or ten days here – your partner is trying to watch Bake Off, and keeps shushing you when sizzling sounds get too loud for them to hear the Matt-and-Noel patter, and there’s no extractor fan, so slowly a fug of chorizo grease envelopes the room – and suddenly cooking in the same room you relax and sleep in feels less chic, less exciting, more wearying. You clatter in to the bathroom for a bit of peace and quiet, but you can still hear the TV booming alongside you, and then your partner sneaks upstairs to get what they call their “comfy socks” out of what’s left of the clothes in the suitcase, and you can hear every step, like they are walking on top of you personally.

There’s no washing machine here, so you have to lug all your clothes to wherever the nearest laundrette is, and the Citymapper app says, bafflingly, it’s 0.8 miles away. Slowly, the exposed brick wall and the sofa being six-feet away vertically and horizontally from your bed, and the tasteless metal wall art that just says the names of major cities, starts to feel less like a holiday and more like a prison: you wake up in the night, choking, and rush out to the 18-inch deep balcony to catch great, deep, lungfuls of air. The Airbnb app pings. The money already left your account. You are paying two-and-a-half grand for this.

And then there’s The Shag Test, which re-centres our imagined life in this room: you are back in Britain now, and single, and the night has gone well – one of those gorgeous summer evenings where the light sits high in the air until deep midnight, and you waltz and move around a basement club like you own the place, clothes slicked to you with your own dance-sweat, cider then beer then cider then cider then poppers, you feel sublime, you feel unstoppable, you get off with two separate people in the smoking area and take one home, fingers in the Uber, jacket off at the door, your keys skitter along the floor and then the lamp comes up— Oh, they say, is this it?, and you say, “What, is me sleeping on a bed that hovers ominously above my own kitchen a dealbreaker?” and they say Well, uh, let me— let me look, and they untangle themselves from you, and say Can I use the bathroom?, and you say, “It’s under my bed,” and they say Actually, I’ll leave it, and you go upstairs to the bed-shelf – they have to crouch slightly to get into the bed underneath the low looming ceiling, so they have to lie perfectly horizontal to get their top off, which loses a lot of the thrill of the allure of getting naked with someone new, and yes, yes, I suppose you do pass The Shag Test here – as if to say, you get it in – but they get quite nervous and skittish afterwards, the claustrophobic nature of the bathroom stall clearly spooked them, and they say I think I’m gonna go. I think I’m gonna go. I’m gonna go, and you go, “Oh,” and they go Can you get my Uber? I got the one here, and you begrudgingly say, “Yeah, I guess,” and actually the same driver who bought you both here picks them up, and you watch them drive off from your little balcony, then trudge upstairs above your own bathroom and sleep (due to the unsuccessful nature of the intercourse, there’s not even a wet patch), alone on your bed on the floor.

So it passes The Shag Test in a way that it doesn’t pass The Shag Test, which I suppose is, ultimately, not passing The Shag Test. 

So: you see how this flat is “not very good”. It’s a premium-luxury version of the shitty mezzanine bed flats we’ve seen before – it’s newly done out, immaculately clean, you cannot argue with the heart-of-west-London location – but it’s also still a bed hovering above your own kitchen which is also your living room and the bathroom beneath it is technically structural at this point.

This flat, to me, is the VIP section of the club: you’re still in the same club as everyone else, with the same threatening aura club-people and the same £12 vodka-coke – you’ve just paid a bit extra to feel like it’s special to sit down. What are you paying for here, exactly? The tastefully exposed brickwork? The un-tasteful wall art? The fact that the furniture it comes with is exactly two steps beyond the generic cheapest-pine-shit-we-could-find landlord runoff flats normally get?

What premium are you willing to pay to have your mezzanine bed flat be “nicely decorated”, rather than “actually big enough to house a human being for a week without them going mad”? If your price is “slightly less than two-and-a-half grand”, then I invite you to dig in to this. If it’s anything else, probably pick somewhere else and think about how many people might have already died there. 

@joelgolby

Heartwarming family stories are nothing new for Disney but one featuring a Filipino family like mine certainly is. Which is why I, along with many other Filipinos, was moved by the animation studio’s latest Christmas ad.

Released online today by Disney UK, the 3-minute animated short features a Filipino girl who grew up abroad. One of her connections to Filipino culture — Christmas traditions with her lola (grandmother). As a Filipino born and raised in Singapore, the video left me overwhelmed with emotion.

The short centers on the girl and her grandmother’s yearly tradition of making a parol every Christmas, a star-shaped lantern seen all over the Philippines during the holiday season. As the girl grows older, she loses interest in spending time with her lola. But in a heartwarming surprise, she decides to decorate their home with parols, taking her lola back to her younger years in the Philippines.

The video is part of Disney EMEA’s 2020 From Our Family To Yours campaign and was produced by Flux Animation Studio in New Zealand. It will air across Disney’s channels in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, as well as in Australia, New Zealand, North America, and parts of Asia.

The story hit close to home. Ever since I was a child, I would feel magic in the air and pure joy in my heart as soon as September rolled around. Filipino families typically start preparing for the holiday months in advance and we were no exception, even if we were in Singapore. 

Every year, without fail, we would deck our home in all kinds of decor, from our mistletoe-patterned tablecloth to the “Merry Christmas” sign on our door that greets neighbors who walk by. Any non-Filipino friend who visits is always amazed by the efforts we put in. 

I remember jumping up and down with excitement every time my dad placed the star atop our Christmas tree. But the highlight will always be noche buena, or Christmas dinner. My mom would spend the day preparing a special feast with dishes like sopas (macaroni soup), sapin-sapin (layered glutinous rice cake), and the must-have Christmas ham. Once the clock strikes midnight, we’d be sitting around the dining table, digging in.

Even though Christmas is still a special holiday to me, watching Disney’s ad made me feel a pang of regret over losing my childlike sense of wonder, just like the granddaughter did. As I grow up, I’d be lying if I said the excitement over Christmas hasn’t worn off even just a little bit.

It also made me miss my home in the Philippines. We try to visit and celebrate Christmas with relatives every year but we won’t be able to this time around because of the pandemic. Even though I was born and raised in Singapore, it’s all the Filipino traditions my parents brought with them that make up a large part of who I am.

It’s one of the few times I felt represented. From the ‘mano,’ a gesture used as a sign of respect to elders, to the parol, I loved seeing all the little things I grew up with. There are about 200,000 Filipinos living in Singapore but I rarely see us represented in the media. The Disney video made me feel like I have a place in this world and other Filipinos — many who grew up outside the motherland, like me — felt the same way. 

The feeling I got from seeing a face that looked like mine on screen is indescribable. I just hope it happens more often as it’s a feeling I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of.

What is it? Every week, I sit in my little flat and perch on my little chair and open up the flap of my little laptop and think of my little words and type them on my stupid moron keyboard, on and on and on and on, forever and ever, amen—
Where is it? We never confront the idea of limbo, enough, I don’t think. Heaven and Hell are a very accepted binary – there are good people (Heaven) and bad people (Hell), with no disambiguation in between, and when we die (when the jet black abyss rises up to claim us, with a thunderous whoosh), when we die, blink, gone, dead, we are taken instantly to the gates of either, for the tour. “Welcome to Heaven,” Saint Peter says, at the gates, as buoyant little clouds fizz around you (the sun, of course, is shining). “Everyone from life who you loved is here, waiting for you. Your family, your friends, your departed pets.” “Do I have to go to the toilet, Sir Peter?” you ask him. “It’s Saint Peter,” he smiles, beatifically, “and no.” “If I don’t have to shit and piss, does that mean I don’t get to eat and drink, either?” you say, and he smiles again. “There is no need for food up here,” he says, “you’re in Heav—” “Okay, but what if I like sandwiches? What if I like eating sandwiches? And drinking beer? You’re telling me I never get to eat a sandwich again? Ever? And that’s the good one? That’s the good option?” Saint Peter talks into a little walkie-talkie he has clipped to his robe, for a second. It emits a heavenly skkrr. “You— I— my child, you simply have no need of sandwiches in Heaven, for all your needs are met—” “Okay, but what if I want a sandw—” “You may eat sandwiches if you wish, child, but you shall find that you have no need for—” “Take me to the sandwich platter. Take me to Heaven’s Subway. I lived a good life, now take me to the deli meat spread.”
What is there to do locally? Or Hell, I suppose, which is worse on paper but has a spicy edge about it that makes it (to me, at least) sound more fun. “Welcome to HELL,” a vibrant red lesser demon says, while a rock lick plays, screechingly, forever. “You’re in HELL, brother!” “Do I get to shit and piss here?” “As much as you want!” “What’s the sandwich situation?” “They are filled with a thousand tortures!” I’ve eaten from the Boots Meal Deal fridge before and lived. Take me to Hell, mate. At least the fun ones are down here. I’d rather hang out with The Krays, forever, than Cliff Richard for one single day—
Alright, how much are they asking? I suppose we got theological there because the reality is this: limbo, the cruel grey netherworld between the two binaries of good and evil, is here, already, on Earth, and we are wading through a thick fog of it, just the same thing every single day – wake up again and brush your teeth again and have your breakfast again and check your email again, again and again and again forever – and only when we die (the abyss, the darkness, whoosh) do we feel any sense of peace, even if we’re condemned to eat spider sandwiches in Hell, because at least, come on, at least it’s something different—
Did you run out of space to answer your usual format questions at the start and have to invent a previous unheard-of fifth question, this one, in which to fit the actually quite pertinent information before the article (proper) starts? Yes I did.
What is it? It’s a very small studio flat in—
Where is it? I was saying where it was! It is in—
What is there to do locally? IF YOU LET ME FINISH I WILL TELL YOU IT IS IN TOTTENHA—
Alright, how much are they asking? —M ONE THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN POUNDS PER CALENDAR MONTH.

Here’s a little room you can rent in Tottenham, if you want. I wouldn’t! But it’s a little room in Tottenham you can rent, if you want. If you want to live in Tottenham, in a little tiny room, you can, here. It costs just over one thousand pounds per month, to live in a little room, in Tottenham, if you want. The little room in Tottenham also has a bathroom attached to it. Only two photos of the little room in Tottenham exist, because that is all there is to it. There is nothing else to photograph. Just the little room (in Tottenham), and the piss-and-shit alcove next to it. £1,067 a month:

This has been finished to that generic grey-skim “high quality” that landlords and property agents and Mrs Hinch like, and no one else alive does, which means this is a pre-meditated attack on the property market, and not an accidental one. The room is scuff-free and unfurnished because nobody has lived in it before.

That is to say: over the past nine months that we’ve all been living through the Hell (see intro) of the pandemic, I’m imagining a landlord and a couple of builders were colluding to make this, a little tiny room in Tottenham, with the hope of renting it out to someone for £1,067 per month.

Side-note: this is a modest proposal, and one I’ve been working on for a while, but: take one human right away for every property someone buys beyond the one they live in. That would genuinely solve like 80 percent of the housing problem.

But listen: we’ve talked about grey soullessness and a near-deliberate lack of space and locking landlords neck-first in a gulag before – these are old topics to us. What I want to point out about the little tiny room in Tottenham is this: there is nothing in it. The little tiny room – i.e. the main room that you have to use as your bedroom and your kitchen and your living room – is unfurnished at the very primary level, as in, it doesn’t have a bed in it.

Do you own a bed? I have been renting in London for ten years, and never have I owned a bed. Also: the kitchen doesn’t have an oven (do you own an oven?) or a fridge (D.Y.O.A.F.?) or a washing machine (do you own a washing machine? Can you conceive of a world where you would own a washing machine?) in it either, so essentially what you are renting here is “one room with a sink in it” and “one adjacent room with a sink and a shower in it”. That’s it.

If you want to sleep here, that is going to cost you extra. If you want to eat hot food here, that is going to cost you extra. If you want to wash your clothes here, that is going to cost you extra. If you move out of this place in a year, to a flat that already has white goods and a bed inside it, you are going to have to sell the units you bought, at a loss. I don’t think it’s wildly welcoming to make people pay for their own bed and oven and washing machine up front, just before they can fully make use of the shitty little room. If you made me pay up front for any of those things at any point in my twenties I, simply, wouldn’t be able to. I’d be sleeping on the floor, eating Pot Noodles for a few months, until I got my money right enough to live like a human instead of an animal. 

Tottenham was one of those areas that, a couple of years ago, was breathlessly lauded as the “new Peckham” (the London property market is constantly “looking out” for a new area that is poised to “come up” [i.e. get a Franco Manca and destroy a council estate, raising house prices by more than the median salary]), and those buying property for the first time get very excited about the idea of their precious little investment accruing money, so they can sell in five years without ever having made a dent on the community, then move to whichever new “new Peckham” there is at that moment, and do it all again, on and on and on, smiling throughout – “We painted our front door yellow!” they say “It’s Farrow & Ball! We don’t know the name of a single person who lives in our postcode!” – on and on, yellower and yellower.

You have to wonder, I suppose, on the morality of that – the Heaven and Hell – if this is the state the neighbours above, beneath and to the side of you are forced to live in so that you can afford a nice little two bed in commuter distance to the station and in the catchment of a nice school. I think it’s too late to suggest that gentrifiers (and by that, I also mean tactical house-buyers in set-to-explode areas) are, bit-by-bit, ruining this city – the city is already ruined. But I think they are starting to tug on the thin fraying threads that hold actual society together, too, and beyond that there’s only the whoosh of the abyss.

You could rent this little room in Tottenham, if you want. Or you could move far, far, far away from here, and live a life you deserve, in the few little years between birth and death. Your choice!

@joelgolby