Rental Opportunity of the Week: A Child's Bunk Bed For Grown Adults

What is it? The first dashing of hope of 2022. You woke up on January 1st with a dry mouth and a spinning head and thought, ‘Maybe this year will be different. Maybe this year will be better. Maybe this year… maybe they’ll sort something out.’ No. Wrong. Idiot. Everything is still the same and worse. There are still bunk beds going in London for £700+ a month.

Where is it? In “Angel Islington”, which always sounds very glamorous when you play it on a Monopoly board as a 12-year-old dreaming of the big city lights, and then you turn up there and it’s just a medium-sized Boots, a branch of GAP, a fairly impossible to navigate set of intersections and, if you get there at the right time of day (Sunday at 9AM is my personal tip), a load of dazed-looking goths who somehow survived the night at Slimelight.

What is there to do locally? The Golbyian Theory of Wetherspoons™ dictates that branches of Wetherspoons are broadly separated into three sub-species: Big Light Wetherspoons, Bad Vibes Wetherspoons, Fine Enough Wetherspoons (there is no such thing as an “actively good” Wetherspoons).

Big Light Wetherspoons, I think, are fairly self-explanatory. For whatever reason, a lot of Wetherspoons branches – particularly ones in or near train stations – have an incredibly bizarre approach to ambient lighting, whereby they just stud the ceiling with downlighters and keep them blaring at all hours of the day, which creates this bizarre tight-skin too-awake airport feeling whenever you are in them and affects the vibe accordingly. Some scholars argue the Big Light Wetherspoons necessarily have to keep the lighting like this for some anthropological reason – the same way prison walls are painted muddily ambient colours to discourage violence (example: The Masque Haunt, Old Street).

Fine Enough Wetherspoons, again, you already know: a Wetherspoons you walk into that weirdly has a load of Kramer’s apartment-style levels and you can always more or less find a chair and the app service actually works and the toilet is clean and they actually cook the food all the way through, and it’s in a decent enough geolocation that all of your mates can get to it so yes, sure, it’s fine enough for us to have a few drinks here (example: The Montagu Pyke, Soho).

And then you have Bad Vibes Wetherspoons, which just have this horrible dark knife-edge energy to them, where nobody seems to ever be having genuine fun – like in a fun pub! – or plotting genuine crime, like in a shithole pub, or having a depressed pint before they have to get the commuter train home (a train station pub).

Instead, everyone is gripped by this amalgamative mood that is somewhere between all three: Every time you go to the bar you half-expect some man with a freshly skull-shavered head to accuse you of buying a “cunt drink” because you’re “a cunt” and all the toilet graffiti is done in biro. What always strikes me about McDonald’s is the nature of the great gears of worldwide logistics and centrally issued preparative measures means that a McDonald’s fry tastes the same in 1998 or 2008; or in Chesterfield, London and Tokyo – an astonishing feat of corporate control.

Similarly, it is incredible that all Dark Wetherspoons – no matter where they are in the country! Entirely unconnected to each other beyond the Wetherspoons livery, menu, toilet cleanliness doctrines and app! – have the exact same pulsingly dark energy, be it the one in Hackney, the one in Turnpike Lane or the one in Chelmsford. And what I am saying is Angel sits on strange dark leylines, deep beneath the surface of the ground, and that means that both its branches of Wetherspoons have exceptionally, deeply disturbing vibes. That is “what there is to do locally”. Get threatened with a pen knife by someone carrying a Bag for Life.

Alright, how much are they asking? £173 per week, which I make out at £726.60, but feel free to send me a very tedious tweet telling me my maths is wrong, because contrary to the tone of the previous sentence, I actually really like the Wetherspoons there.

Whenever I see an adult bunk bed in a studio flat in London, my first question is always: Is that an actual bunk bed you can buy from a bunk bed shop, or did someone have to make that themselves to fit? And in this instance, I truly cannot tell. The bunk bed has all the markers of bought from a shop by a landlord (cheap knotty wood, smoothed and beveled edges), but the dimensions of it seem like they were made specifically for this flat by someone who was so desperate to elevate their bed away from their kitchen that they got the wood out of a skip and did it themselves. There is of course a third possibility, which I’m not ruling out: Someone bought a bunk bed from a bunk bed shop, disassembled and re-cut the parts, and built this themselves to make it fit. I am not ruling that out.

Bunk beds are quite exciting when you’re a kid and then they lose their allure as soon as your parents take out the “play area zone” beneath your bed that’s stuffed with soft toys and a beanbag, and instead replace it with “a desk to study for your SATs at”, and that is the moment that sleeping slightly high up immediately stops becoming fun.

Why London landlords are convinced that this thrill persists into adulthood, I don’t know (I do know: They are lizard people, like Apprentice candidates, who have never been normal or interacted with a normal person before), but if someone were to build me a bunk bed and expect me to sleep in it at night and sit under the shadow of it on a sofa during the evening, I would at least ask that they erect it in a way where the bunk bed doesn’t actively block the only window so that I am occasionally exposed to sunlight. That is not what has happened here. 

The thing with the concept of a “studio flat”, of course, is the idea that it is a area that strips away the pretension and frippery of “separate rooms” to instead make more of the space that not having interior walls allows you. The shades of art and creation cannot be ignored, either: In a successful studio flat, you’ll have room to always have a big canvas on the go while, in a corner, as a bit of an afterthought but still functional, you might have a bed.

This is not a studio flat. It is so small that I am baffled anyone ever walked into it and thought, ‘this room would be good to put a sink in it’, let alone anything else. Let’s retread that: this flat is not bad because it’s a bunk bed next to a kitchenette, though that is canonically bad. It’s bad because the flat is not even big enough to have a kitchenette in it, even before you add a bunk bed into the mix.

If this flat were a room in my house I would use it for piling up old shoes I don’t actually wear that much, storing the big box my TV came in, and maybe having a bucket with a load of pieces of metal I might find useful one day. Tin of paint and what’s left of an 24-pack of full-fat Cokes I bought on a whim. Old Bluetooth speaker that I don’t use anymore but don’t want to throw away. That is about the exact limit of the function of this room. But someone wants you to live in it, instead. And not for free, or as a joke! For serious, and for money!

Anyway, it’s the 7th of January. We’ve established already that all those intentions you had from a week ago are already a bust. I know, I know, you were “going to get organised” this year. You were going to really Google what pensions mean and stop getting so much Deliveroo. You were going to join the gym and actually go this time. I know, I know. But no matter what you do, the harsh concrete realities of this stupid society we have built around us will still be there. This flat is evidence of that. Stop trying to make a running playlist on Spotify and get the last of the Celebrations down from the high shelf you put them on. Nothing out here is changing. Why should you force yourself to?

@joelgolby