In my previous article, I said that I moved to Wembley after living with those Brazilian guys. But upon further reflection, the next place was actually in a borough called Tottenham in North London. The place in Wembley was after this.
Tottenham is, apparently, one of the major crime areas of London. This was also allegedly the case with Tower Hamlets, where I lived previously. But I never saw anything too sketchy. I rarely went out at night, though.
You saw a lot of Hasidic Jews in Tottenham too. At least the area where I was living. The area was called Seven Sisters.
So when I viewed the property, there were two mountains of trash on both sides of the front lawn. The lawn was completely covered with trash and it was piled high. I thought that this is odd but whatever. It will get cleared.
It was a couple of French guys who showed the property. I assumed that they lived there. No. They didn’t. They were just showing the property.
The reason why I was interested in the place was that it was for a single room. Not shared. Perfect. It was like £60/week so not much more than the £50 or £55 that I was paying elsewhere for a shared room.
Then they showed me the room. It had a bed in it and that’s it. It was a single-sized bed. You had to shimmy along the wall to get into the room. It was the smallest room I’ve ever seen in my life.
But fuck it. I don’t have to share this with anyone? I’ll take it.
I moved my shit in. There was room for my tv. I had a small tv. And there was a built-in wardrobe. You had to pull a hatch from the wall and there was a rod to hang clothes and store shit. But insanely small.
It was a house. In normal circumstances, this would be a family house. It was three storeys. I lived on the top floor. But they just turned this into a shared…property. There’s a term for this in the UK. HMO. “House in multiple occupation”. You have to get a special permit to turn a property into such a dwelling and there are costs involved and whatever.
There were two French guys living on the bottom floor (not the two French guys I mentioned before), another French guy, two Polish girls, and a Brazilian guy in his 30s or 40s living on the middle floor, and two Polish guys, a Hungarian couple, and me living on the top floor. Something like this. I don’t fucking know. People moved in and out and changed rooms. But this is roughly the line-up that I remember. It was like ten people living there.
The day I moved in, two of the Polish guys and the two Polish women were drunk and watching television and they invited me to join them. So I did. Reluctantly.
They’re asking where I’m from and whatever. The normal questions. They give me a beer.
Then one of the guys starts saying things like, “If you don’t want to be here, you don’t have to.” He was saying this because I was really bad in social situations. And by pointing this out, it doesn’t help. It only makes it worse. It only makes me dread being in social situations that much more because I know that this is going to happen. People are going to get offended.
But he was also right. I didn’t want to be there. But I didn’t want to be there because I knew that it would go poorly. So it’s something of a cycle.
I think that these two guys were dating the two women. But they weren’t living together. Not in the same room anyway. It was the two guys in a room and the two women in a different room. Maybe they weren’t dating that long or maybe they were just taking things slowly.
Those guys worked construction. I don’t know what the women did.
One of the French guys was a goth or something. He always wore black and leather. He constantly smoked.
He was actually relatively okay but the other two French guys were rude as fuck. The stereotypes are true. I also went to France years later. These are some horrible people.
One of them worked as a waiter. I don’t know what either of the other two did. But I know that the one worked as a waiter because he told me that he worked as a waiter in France too.
So it’s not like you hear about people who worked as doctors in their home country and then they work as a waiter in their new country. I can understand that because the language problems and whatnot. But no. Even in France, this guy worked as a waiter. He was a giant piece of shit. I don’t even want to get into it. Both of those non-goth French guys were assholes.
The Hungarian couple were fine. They moved in after I did. Very quickly, that woman started hanging out with one of these Polish guys, though. They got really friendly. It was uncomfortable.
The Brazilian guy kept to himself. He was quite a bit older than everyone. We were all in our late 20s or early 30s.
At some point, a fat Polish guy moved in. He was friends with the other two Polish guys. He was an asshole.
Every week, these French guys who showed me the place would knock on the doors and collect the rent. It was just paid in cash. These things were always done in cash.
I couldn’t leave any food in the refrigerator because these Polish guys would always eat it, possibly while drunk. I couldn’t even leave peanut butter in there. They would eat the peanut butter, seemingly just scooping it out with their hands. They’d eat half a jar in one day. So I had to leave all of my food in my room.
I complained about this to these two French guys who come to collect the rent and they said, “So call the police.” I said, “I’m not going to call the police over food” and then I deducted £20 from the rent for the food that these people stole.
They also hung up pictures of naked women in the kitchen. They’d get them from some porn magazine. Totally nude. Why they did this, I have no idea. I think eventually their girlfriends would tear that shit down.
There was always some low level chaos going on and it’s because these Polish guys were always fucking drunk. It wasn’t a restful place to stay.
I was doing volunteer work during all of this. I worked five days a week. I’ll discuss the volunteer work in the next article.
I was also trying to collect benefits during all of this and my application was refused. I discuss that saga here:
So I had no money coming in. And these fucking assholes are eating my food. It was an extremely difficult time.
People from the council, which is the local government, would sometimes knock on the door and ask for the contact details of the landlord. They wanted these mountains of trash to be removed. But we didn’t know who the landlords were. We only knew these French guys who came to collect the rent.
One day, three Hasidic Jews came in. They were really aggressive. And they went into the basement. One of them, some old man, asked why I was there. I said, “I live here.” He said, “Do you have a job? Do you work?” I said that I do.
Then they left. Then the electricity shut off.
Later that night, one of the Polish guys went down to the basement to see if he could figure out the problem. The Jews had put some kind of metal cap somewhere on…whatever it is that controls the electricity. So he took the cap off and the electricity was restored.
The French guys stopped coming around to collect rent.
About a week later, the Jews came back. This time I decided to watch what they were doing. They would block me and they were aggressive. They would say things like, “This is his property. He can do what he wants.”
They went in the basement and they removed some big thing that controlled the electricity. So the electricity went out again. I called the police. I gave the police the license plate number of these Jews. The Jews weren’t remotely concerned. They just made mocking comments.
The police never arrived.
So I went to the council. I spoke to somebody at the housing department. I told them what happened. She couldn’t understand why they were doing this. Indeed. None of this made sense. These Jews just one day decided to turn the electricity off.
She wrote down my statement and said that she’d send somebody to investigate.
One of the Polish guys did something to the electricity to get one outlet to work. So we had power from one outlet. I put a power strip there and people were able to use electrical stuff from that.
Then one of the French guys, the one who was a waiter, destroyed a toilet. I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know when he did it. I just saw that one of the toilets was destroyed. It was just shattered into a bunch of pieces and only a part of the very base remained. I never saw this French guy again.
The other French guy also moved out.
There was an incident where the fat Polish guy stole a lighter from the goth French guy. The French guy asked if he could use my window. I said that he could, not understanding why. So he went out my window, went into the window of this Polish guy, and stole his lighter back. The Polish guy caught him doing this and was unhappy with the behaviour.
That French guy moved out that day.
The Hungarian couple moved out.
I believe that the Polish girls moved out.
Some other Polish guy moved in.
So at this point, I think it was just four Polish guys and the Brazilian guy. Now that I think of it, there were also two Italian guys. I don’t know at what point they moved in. Maybe they were there from the beginning.
This guy from the council was coming to investigate my complaint. And we were all cleaning up. There were loads and loads of bottles of alcohol from these Polish guys that we had to dispose of.
The guy comes in and we’re telling him what happened. He’s writing shit down. He’s sympathetic. He’s also baffled that any of this has happened. And he says, “Okay. Somebody come to the council tomorrow.” I guess it was to discuss what to do from there.
I was working but one of the Polish guys said that he could do it.
Next day, I come back from work and ask how the meeting with the council went. He didn’t go. He was drinking.
The Italian guys move out.
The Brazilian guy moved out.
Everybody was moving out. And I had no fucking money. I didn’t have a paying job. By this point I had won my appeal against the decision not to give me benefits so I was getting benefits again.
One day, the Jews come back with a police officer. And the police officer starts asking how we hooked up the electricity. I explain what happened, that we live here and then these guys came in and turned off the electricity. One of the Jews says, “Do you pay rent?” And I tell the police officer that the guy who collects rent stopped coming.
The police officer makes some reference to my accent and asks if I have a visa. I say, “What difference does it make? I’m here legally and you’re here to investigate this electricity issue.”
Then they leave.
After that, even the Polish guys say that they have to leave. So it was just going to be me staying there. The Polish guy who moved in most recently said that I could move in with them. There’s a spare room. But it’s £70/week. This was more than I could afford, I was living on £72/week, so I had to decline.
I quickly found another place. It was in Wembley with some Sri Lankan guys. But I hadn’t moved yet.
Then one day, the Jews come back along with a big, burly Jew and like a high school aged Jew. They say that everybody has to get out. Really aggressive. They were insulting. They were demanding money. They were locking all of the doors and confiscating keys.
Then the police arrived. There were also two Polish guys who were going to stay in the house overnight to make sure that nobody entered. And we all had to get out.
I moved all of my stuff to the pavement. I called a taxi. I’m talking to the police officer and I tell him that this can’t possibly be legal. You can’t come in and demand that everybody leave immediately. He says, “It depends what you agreed to in your lease.” I said, “Nobody would agree to no notice.” He said, “That’s true.” And yet he was still there enforcing this.
So the taxi arrived, I put my stuff in, and I moved to my new place in Wembley.
I was at this place for, I don’t know, six months maybe.
They just wanted to evict everybody and didn’t want to go through the proper channels because the whole thing was shady from the start. Rather than even telling us that we have to move, they just turned the electricity off.
This is why Jewish landlords have such a bad reputation. Especially Hasidic Jews. They consider non-Jews to be sub-human. This is why from here on, I was always careful to make sure that my landlord wasn’t Jewish.
I slipped up one time, years later, because the woman used a fake surname. But yeah. She was Jewish. And there were the usual problems that come from dealing with the Chosen People. Things don’t get fixed, everything is done on the cheap. So I moved out a month after I moved in. Not going to deal with that shit.
Gee I wonder why they were kicked from 109 nations.