London Rental Opportunity of the Week: Wipe Your Butt from the Comfort of Your Bed in Clapham

What is it? Don’t really know how to describe this one. Uhh: OK. Imagine if someone crammed a bed and an oven into a security guard’s outpost in among a block of flats, and then made someone live in that, like not as a prison cell but as a house. That.
Where is it? Clapham— and trust me, truly, I do want to make a joke about Clapham that isn’t "it’s just full of estate agents and Australians, locked together in some sort of infernal wine bar drinkaggedon", truly I do, but until Clapham shows literally any signs of not being that then that’s what I have to put for this bit, sorry;
What is there to do locally? Go to Clapham Common, where retired lads from the army are wearing long black vests and rucksacks and making affluent mums shuttle run between trees in a £40-per-hour exercise class that always seems to zig through the simple football game you’re trying to have with the lads; walk to Inferno’s, The World’s Stickiest Nightclub, where, if my one and only trip there is anything to go by, a really robust girl you just met at some mate-of-a-mate’s house will sprint at you during the 2AM unleashing of "(I've Had) The Time of My Life", and you’ll harrowingly attempt to hoist her into the Dirty Dancing lift, and the memory goes blurry then beyond darkness, really, and pain; limp home from Inferno’s, dignity and lumbar area both in bits, maybe stop for chips on the way home. I have never had a good time in Clapham;
Alright, how much are they asking? £210 a week, which is £882 a month, I reckon.

What’s the bleakest room you’ve ever been in in your life? Think about it. There are a lot of bleak rooms out there. Hospital rooms housing someone you love, yellow and dying. Administrative rooms, brightly lit, in the back area of banks. Have you ever, truly, spent time in a council building? Have you ever visited a morgue? A home for adopted animals? The silent, unmoving remains of a house someone just died in? Or, even more likely: those weird rooms you always seem to end up in at the after-party of an after-party, one wall compacted in with a punch, white paint peeling, fluorescent lighting, a strip of duct tape, for some reason, mattress on the floor, flat pillows, some lad in a hoodie ushering you over to do a line off a broken Reservoir Dogs DVD case: those rooms. All very bleak. Very, very bleak rooms. We’ve all been in a bleak room. I think this is the bleakest room:

What you’re seeing here – and I know it’s a lot to take in – is a ''''''''studio flat'''''''' for rent in Clapham, and I mean there’s a lot going on to deal with here: the single collapsed sofa, positioned directly facing a mirror (the mirror is both too high for you to actually see directly into from the sofa, but also too low to facilitate a wall-mounted TV to occupy the same space, so as best I can tell you are extremely limited, here, when sitting on the sofa, as to what you can look at beyond it, mainly "a reflection of the top of – but not the entirety of – your own head"); the thousand different angles that every cupboard in the kitchen seems to be sitting at, hinting at a deep rift in the ground beneath the flat that is causing it to sink in a hundred different places; the grey not-quite-double bed frame that seems custom-designed to handcuff people to; the rough head-of-sixth-form’s-smoke-smelling-office itchy carpet that underpins everything. There is no gas supply to this house, which adds an extra layer of coldness onto the whole thing. There is a lot to process. But I mainly want to talk about this:

Which, as you can see, is a door-mounted roll of toilet paper you could feasibly spool to completion from the comfort of your own bed.

I know we’re spoiled, us millennials. With our "wanting things" and "attempts to have hope". I’m realistic, and I get that about us. But I don’t personally want to see the thing I shit in from my bed. Like: call me a diva. I just don’t want that. And also: due to the angles of the flat, the one-room nature of it all, the smoke and mirrors effect of this whole layout: I’m not 1,000 percent sure the toilet and shower aren’t crammed into the same cupboard space, opening out steaming into the bedroom. Not my thing, thanks. Always been a very separate "room for sleeping", "room for shitting", "room for cleaning" at nearly £900 a month kind of guy. That’s just me.

Maybe you want that, I don’t know. I think we all watched Wallace & Gromit as a kid, didn’t we, and imagined how we could invent things that intersect with other things, to make life easier. That’s the future we all wanted, wasn’t it. No more walking down stairs, nah: why not tip down a slide, directly into your trousers. In many ways, the cook–sleep–cum–shit chimera in Clapham taps into that same spirit of wacky adventure: why do things need to be separate things, really? Do we really need a whole area of wall dedicated to mounting the toilet roll on a spool, when the back of a door will do? Do we really need a shower room to be larger than the person showering in it? How much space can a human take up, really? That much space? Maybe a little less? If it’s possible to do it less, a landlord in this city will find a way to do it less. Look out for that one in about three weeks' time.

@joelgolby