What is it? It’s a screenshot of a Facebook flat listing that went viral on Twitter and was debunked on Reddit, and yes conceptually this one is going to be a little hard to keep up with but—
Where is it? I mean, technically in Dublin, but again, the advert isn’t real, so—
What is there to do locally? Irrelevant question as the flat listing doesn’t exist! The thing to do locally is “interrogate what is and is not the truth!”
Alright, how much are they asking? €1,700 a month, although with the obvious caveat that they are not actually asking that, because it’s not actually a real advert;
Alright, let us start with: here, look, is a tweet about a flat-listing in Dublin, and this ticks all of our LROTW boxes: it’s not in London, for instance, and has a bafflingly placed toilet (imagine shitting, unencumbered, in your kitchen! Just staring down from your throne! Perhaps the mist of every toilet flush would sit hovering in the air every time you tried to prepare food there! I feel like this would be the absolute worst place on earth to try to breed a sourdough starter!), and an absurd mind-spinning rental price, and also the wording on the listing – “due to high demand relisted” – which suggests that more than one person would want to live here, that a landlord might leverage desperation for more money, and I’d do that thing where I go on and then on and on a bit more about landlords, and how guillotined they all should be, and &c. &c. &c. You know the format by now.
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Anyway, sadly, no, because this viral advert isn’t real, exactly, as factcheckers were quick to find out. The photo in question was on Reddit a year ago, under the title “Luxurious apartment for student, Poland’” (and this is assuming it actually is in Poland: the photo could have been repurposed itself, for Reddit, from somewhere else) (very “How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Eyes Aren’t Real”, this, isn’t it), which suggests our boy Anton Nesterenko is a troll, a little Dublin – Rent, Let, House Hunting – Rooms, Houses, Flats, Apartments troll, and he should be dismissed as such. But then: do we not have to question what an easily-proved-false flat-listing – when pinpointed at the anarchic rental market in Dublin – can do to make us think that it is real? i.e.: despite being proven false, the listing, is it not worth looking deeper underneath why it was so easy to believe?
The conceit of this column is that: yes, it is.
Some points, in order:
- Obviously, a toilet in the kitchen is bad, but, very crucially, not so bad that it’s not as bad as something we’ve already seen on here. I would not like to shit, unguarded, in my own toilet: I admit that. But we’ve had listings before where toilets were in the kitchen, although imprisoned in a little coffin-like box: we’ve had listings before where a toilet is just, like, there, like a little decorative accessory in the middle of the room, like your mum has with those weird heavy white statues she had on the landing on the stairs. We’ve had listings where furniture such as beds have been raised on a custom-built plinth deliberately out of the way, as if their presence in the flat is an afterthought or an inconvenience. This photo of a flat is bad, sure, and nobody should have to live there. But it isn’t, crucially, so bad it isn’t unbelievable.
- I think that’s quite bad! That’s actually quite a criticism of the wider rental market! That’s bad! That the market is such that people would believe something that bad could be real!
- €1,700, the quoted made-up rent per month, is far too much for a single occupancy where you have to shit on a special shitting shelf while your Pot Noodle slowly grows warm and soft a few feet beneath you: yes. But is it beyond the realms of the current chaos of the Dublin rental market? Unfortunately, barely. It’s exactly enough to make people seeing the quoted price angry, but also, just too much where you could feasibly believe a landlord might ask for that amount. If you consider trolling a form of artistry – and we’re about a year away from doing that, I would say; install Donald Trump, orange and ranting, in the MoMA – then this quoted price of €1,700 is Michelangelo painting a perfect image of God on the ceiling. This is a laser-sighted sniper shot fired from a hundred-thousand yards away. This is the perfect amount of money to quote for saying a toilet in a kitchen is good. It is the exact amount to say a toilet is worth to make people lose their heads.
- This kitchen toilet is real. In Poland, yes, but it still exists. Somewhere, out there – not in Dublin, not in London, but in Europe, within a two-hour plane ride – there exists a toilet you can just shit raw into while a chopping board full of broccoli sits nearby. That this toilet-kitchen can be plugged on Facebook and so easily convince people that it could exist in Dublin is, if anything else, a horrid peek at the future that is yet to come: as soon as Dublin’s landlords figure out that it is possible to put a toilet in a kitchen, and that people would believe a toilet could be in a kitchen, they will start putting toilets in kitchens. Soon after that it’ll be London. After that? Every new-build in the UK will have an unfettered toilet bowl in the kitchen, gurgling away. This seems weird now, sure, but give it 30 years, when we’re crammed ten to a room in tiny alcoves within grey skyscrapers, paying a hundred-thousand pounds a month to rent a pillow without a bed: then, kitchen-toilets will be normal as pie. Heck: by then, they’ll be old hat. We’ll have toilets in living rooms, which we sit on instead of sofas to watch TV from. We’ll have them outside, in the street, special exposed communal toilets, paid for by the council so landlords don’t have to trouser the cost of installing them.
What I am saying is: the Dublin kitchen-toilet is fake, yes, but in 15 years it won’t be. What I am saying is: the rental market is such that we all thought a kitchen-toilet could happen, and that is bad enough information in its own right. What I am saying is: guillotine them, their blood running thick through the streets, the flesh of their necks – the pink meat, the pure white of newly-chipped bone, the undulating motion of muscles surprised to find themselves dying – the abrupt conclusion of their screams. Guillotine the landlords, before we all have to shit in our kitchens.
