It leaves you feeling all sorts of conflicting emotions on completion. After several long months you feel overjoyed, disorientated, and even somewhat beaten down. You have reached the end of the road, giving in now is the only way you can be at peace again.
You have just signed a contract on a new flat.
I’m not referring to the buying market here. I’m sure that has problems of its own. The rental market however, in the UK, in particular (from personal experience) London, is staggering at this moment in time.
This summer I moved flat. This wasn’t a rare occurrence for me – I have moved year on year since starting University – but this was certainly the most difficult move to date.
They say the two most stressful events in your life are getting married and moving house. On that token, this summer I married, divorced, and fathered four kids in the space of a month.
If it wasn’t the slimy estate agents, it was the impossible viewing hours, unnecessarily forceful negotiators and – in several cases – criminals in our mists.
Take this one email I received from a lovely con artist called ‘Olive’.
Hello,
Thanks for the email and nice to read from you,i can assure you of the viewing but i will like to discuss some thing with you, as you know am in Liverpool currently and before i can come down to London for the viewing i will like to see a proof of your financial capacity and to know how serious you are in need of the property… You will pay 3 months rent cash (£1890) to any of your friend, family,after you’ve made the transfer finish you will be given a receipt from the western union agent,you will have to scan and email me the receipt…
You can view the property next day after you prove the payment or when you have time.
Best Regards…
Best Regards Olive? Best regards indeed. Your poor attempt to con me may have put me off the delicious fruit (I looked it up) of your name for life but you didn’t get any money out of me. In all seriousness, I know it seems somewhat obvious by the terrible spelling and wacky concepts (at one point Olive complained that prospective tenants always “banging the phone on me”), but if you request details in a property and get anything along these lines, just ignore it. Or write a sweary blog about it, highlighting what a repugnant coward somebody like ‘Olive’ is.
Interestingly, Olive has my phone number.
But enough from the faceless, looking for a flat wouldn’t be the same without the estate agents. You feel dirty after being in their presence for more than a couple of minutes. When you shake their hand you swear you can feel them melting into you. They could have been doing anything with that hand prior to you happily marrying yours with theirs for a few short seconds – but that’s the nature of the game. The only requirements you need to be an active estate agent are:
Own your own car.
Be a total tosser.
That’s it. And if you can chew on gum throughout the day without at any point feeling a little bit sick you’re promoted within an instant.
So yes. It may be that I just didn’t go to the right places, or see the right people. But to be honest, they all seemed the same to me (save a couple of genuinely nice estate agents I met along the way… if you’re moving to SW16 or SW2 any time soon get in touch). They’d sell a burning building to a granny if they knew they’d be able to rush a payment along in time. And as for dear Olive, or Clive, or Dave, or whoever she is, I wish you every failure in all that you do.
Thinking for yourself is soon to become a thing of the past. Facebook, the popular social networking website and all round orgy of unnecessary information has recently started a campaign to poke and prod users into re-establishing relationships with long-lost friends who, as they point out with great tact, “You haven’t talked [to] on Facebook lately.”
What a brainwave! Such a simple solution will mend broken relationships across the World! Maybe, but I suspect not.
A friend of mine recently noted that Facebook has a habit of suggesting she reconnects with her own mother. This is of course very comical, the idea that a few lines of code within a website can keep a family in regular contact through encouragement along the lines of “Send her a message”, “Reconnect with him”, or my personal favourite; “Help make Facebook better for her”.
But what next Facebook? Are you going to start hinting at us to reconnect with dead friends and relatives? “We’ve not talked on Facebook lately?” I’m not surprised, he’s six feet under – the WiFi is terrible down there.
I am, however, drawn into the idea of Facebook going down the the opposite route of suggesting you ‘lay off’ some friends. “You’ve been pestering her a lot recently, she’s clearly not interested – stop sending her messages”. I suggest this will go a lot further in improving your mass social circle than encouraging you to talk to somebody you used to sit next to on the bus for four years ever could.
If only the next time I argue with a friend I could have a single line of text saying “Leave it a couple of days” next to their name, that really would be a stepping stone. But until them I’m going to continue to ignore all interfering prompts.
I’ll make my own mind up Facebook, for the time being at least.
Completely by coincidence, last week the book I’m currently reading – The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell – went several chapters deep into what a fantastic and ground breaking show Sesame Street was, and still is today. And rightly so.
Although airing it’s first episode on 10 November 1969, Sesame Street was conceived several years earlier. A television producer by the name of Joan Ganz Cooney set out to use television in a way not even seen as conceivable to the people around her – she wanted to used television to teach children.
Up until this point television was seen purely as an entertainment device – the idea that it could be used to teach anybody, let along the most vulnerable, was seen as simply ludicrous.
But Cooney did not let this put her off. She had dreams to reduce inner-city poverty and illiteracy by creating a ‘real’ kids show. A show kids whereby kids would learn to love and love to learn.
After joining up with Gerald Lesser (a psychologist as Harvard) and Lloyd Morrisett (of the Markle Foundation) they set to work building a show designed to teach literacy and numeracy to children based on advertising techniques. Sesame Street was born.
Sesame Street was subjected to more academic tests than any other television show in history. Cooney, Lesser and Morrisett did not rest, and indeed did not air the show, until it could be seen that Sesame Street increased the learning and reading skills of its viewers. As Gladwell put it in the Tipping Point; “The creators of Sesame Street accomplished something extraordinary… they discovered that by making small but critical adjustments in how they presented ideas to preschoolers, they could overcome television’s weakness as a teaching tool and make what they had to say memorable” (Gladwell, 2000).
Sesame Street’s main achievement, if you could only pick one, was being the first television show to pick up and run with the philosophy “If you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them”. Countless other children’s television shows, in the forty years since Sesame Street, have ran on the same principle with varying degrees of success, but it was Sesame Street that made this the standard for all to work up to.
Happy Birthday Sesame Street – here’s to another forty years.
Everybody younger than yourself is dreadful and careless in everything they do. Correct. Or at least that’s how the story should play out.
I’m at the age now whereby somebody can be a world famous athlete/singer/actor/x-factor contestant and not only be younger than myself, but their age isn’t even seen as an issue. No Fearne Cotton fanfair, no Emma Watson birthday countdown, nothing.
I recently found out that Rebecca Adlington, the Gold medal winning Olympic swimmer, is twenty years old – a year younger than myself. I have no issue with her winning a gold medal or two, well done to her, what I’ve got a problem with is the fact that it wasn’t reported as incredible that a girl of her young age (she would have been nineteen at the time) had been able to manage such a feat – how at this age we’re still children, and any success greater than going out without managing to be sick on ourselves more than once a week should be seen as a triumph.
But no, it was seen as a normal thing. Sure, she became the nations Diana for a couple of weeks, but by no means due to her age.
This brings me neatly on to School of Comedy – an E4 production that’s been airing for the best part of a month. If you haven’t seen it I’ll break it down for you: It’s a sketch show (sounds shit), where all the actors are about sixteen (sounds shitter).
The name alone, accompanied by flashbacks of a dreadful, dreadful film of a similar name is enough to force anybody to take the easy option by sticking their head into a techno-bucket tuned into re-runs of Live From Studio Five for the whole of eternity, but, due to the persistence of my flatmate, I gave in.
And am I glad I did.
Despite having everything against it and looking somewhat like a formula configured by adding letters together, Countdown style, to form an entire television show – it is fantastic.
You’re unconvinced, and you have every right to me. Sixteen years olds shouldn’t be fantastic comedians – they really shouldn’t. The last sixteen year old I saw asked on a crowded bus of adults, unashamedly and with no fear “Which one of you fuckers opened the window? It’s like the fuckin’ Arctic in here”. None of us fuckers owned up.
Obviously huge credit to the success of the show must go to the writers, but this should not overshadow the talent of these young actors, for making me totally eat my words and more significantly my preconceptions. School of Comedy is a incredibly funny comedy sketch show which uses ideas so simple yet so fantastically executed any thoughts of them being younger than yourself soon fade away, replaced by a view of pure professionalism and merit.
If you live in the UK you can watch the entire series here.
Have you strapped yourself in? Well do it, it’s important. For here marks the obligatory first article in anybody’s blog – the article that promises so much, yet has every promise picked apart, piece by piece, over the coming weeks and months of it’s online presence.
What is a blog anyway? A collection of words strung together by an adolescent who dislikes everything save ‘the concept of misery’? I used to write a blog as a teenager. To read it now would undoubtedly bring back similar emotions to those of looking back on video footage of my childhood magic show – hideous embarrassment followed by resentment for anybody that didn’t play a part in stopping me at the time.
Needless to say I’ve grown up since then. I am no longer a self-loathing, people-loathing, world-loathing imbecile, I am a twenty-one year old man with, in my humble opinion, a good grasp of human nature, intelligence, and lack thereof.
To find out more about myself, Benjamin Spall, visit the about page. Please excuse the lack of content – I spent the majority of the time looking for a good photo of a cat to put alongside my details – eventually settling on no photo at all. Also, feel free to subscribe to my upcoming ramblings using any of the means placed under the ‘connect’ header opposite.
About
Benjamin Spall lives to laugh. He does little else. Only Logical compromises of commentaries and compositions written on a semi-regular basis. For further information, visit the about page.
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