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  The sound a landlord makes when you slice round their knees with a box cutter and pry the patella out with your clawed hands is, “The tenants before you didn’t have parties, I’m not sure why you have to have so many parties.”

  The sound a landlord makes when you snip the webbing between their thumb and forefinger with kitchen shears is, “There’s been a break-in, but your contents aren’t covered by our insurance, so you’re going to have to pay for a new front door.”

  Between 1986 and 2012, roughly five million homes were built in the United Kingdom, and as per 2014 figures just over half of these are now owned by landlords. Or, context: in 1994 the number of private landlords in the United Kingdom was estimated in the tens of thousands, and today that figure is two million. In 1988 the Housing Act deregulated the rental market and created a legal structure that sided hard with the landlords. In 1996 the buy-to-let mortgage boom gave landlords a financial upper hand on buying up property if they weren’t personally going to live in it. They say there was a sort of housing crisis in the ’80s, because housing was so affordable that people rented for some sort of perverse pleasure—to see if they liked an area, to see if they liked the relationship they were in—and now we are sandwiched around another crisis, on one side subprime mortgages and on another a dangerously inflated property market. Millions of landlords did this. In the ’90s they wanted more people to buy houses and they made it so easy nobody can buy a house anymore. Inch by inch, ill-thought laws have created a new class, a subspecies, renters who now must live under the yoke of the landlords. Landlords get to win twice over: they get to pull our salary out of their wallets, and they get to drive up the price of housing stock by making it scarce, so when they finally sell, they sell at a huge profit. We lose double and get told to suck it up. When the war comes, I’m going to be at the front of it, heart on fire, strafing bullets into the landlords in front of me.

  I’m at a party, but I can’t open the back door to let some air in. “It’s the landlord,” I am told. “He doesn’t want cigarette butts out on the balcony.” I am at a party and the bathroom is streaked with black mold spores. “It’s the landlord,” they say. “He won’t let us open the bathroom windows.” A cheap fan embedded in the wall screams above me. “You have to hit it with the flat part of your palm,” I say (this is my house). “The landlord won’t replace it.” Tchnk, tchnk, tchnk, until my hand goes sore and the screaming stops. I have to hide my embarrassment at the state in which I live when it’s not my responsibility. I have to pay hundreds of pounds each month for the pleasure and not retch in the landlord’s faces. “Turn the music down,” I am warned at another party, at a high building towering over London. “Last time the neighbors complained to the landlord.” The landlord is always here, the boogeyman over everything we do. Always there. The specter of him, watching.

  Ten years ago I walked into a prison, but I didn’t know it. I had this fevered, diva-like dream—I wanted to live in a house rather than beneath an underpass, in a cardboard box—and I followed through on it. I walked through the double-locked gates and past the guards and jeering prisoners, and I walked into a small blue room with woodchip wallpaper, and a single bed and a desk falling apart at the seams, and a clothes rail in lieu of a wardrobe, and some leftover magazines from the previous tenant of the flat. And there I signed in blood a deal with the devil himself: in exchange for up to half of the money I make every month, you will provide very basic shelter for me, and occasionally fix pipes when they inevitably leak. And the devil laughed and said, Sure. The devil went, Though how are you going to save for a deposit on a flat of your own if you are paying all your money to me? The devil went, Once you start paying rent, you can never truly stop. Items I have lost moving house: a navy-blue perfect-fit shirt, a Timex Weekender watch w/ limited-edition strap, a stack of Viz magazines, my Rocky DVDs (my Rocky DVDs!), a mirror. We leave remnants of ourselves in every building that forgets us. There are people dwelling in the rooms I once owned right now, different steps on the same awful ladder. We’re all chained in. And I think: When I was twenty-one, I wasn’t this bitter. And when I was twenty-three, I was full of hope. And I desperately long to be that person again—paying £450 a month! Can you imagine! The luxury! Then I realize there’s a reason I have shed those people like a shell. If you escape your twenties in London without at least once moving in with a partner you’re not quite sure you love but know the situation will save you rent, then you have dodged a bullet that has shot me and others like me. If you get out of here with anything left in your overdraft, then you are, by my accounts, some sort of blessed saint. And the circle starts again: I need a new flat soon, I need to check Dimitri’s availability, I need to prove to another vile landlord that I can afford their exorbitant fee. Once again my lips form a horrible O around their sour teat. All I long to do, in my entire life, is choose what color a wall is painted. Not magnolia, or off-white. Not cream. Red, red, brilliant red. Deep red like the blood in the veins of every landlord who has wronged me.

  Hot Sauce Capitalism

  I guess I didn’t really know who I was until I discovered chipotle-flavored Tabasco hot sauce. You know what Tabasco sauce is: it is the wire-red sauce in the apothecarist’s bottle that kicks things up in a tangy, vinegary way, and if you ask me it is a very obvious chili sauce but then it does the job, and you know exactly, with Tabasco original sauce, you know exactly what you are going to get. Chipotle-flavored Tabasco hot sauce is an entirely different beast: first, it is an extremely ugly brown, and if you don’t shake the bottle it is likely to go grainy and kind of gross, like a gray-brown rim of sauce pieces will stick to the bottle in a sort of tide: look past that. Flavor-wise it is at once hot and smoky and kind of barbecuey and kind of not, and honest to god I can and do eat bowls of plain rice with just some of this sauce on, I could just eat toast with that and no butter, this stuff is nectar, when we say the gods drank ambrosia we envision a creamy sort of almond-milk thing, white and innocent and full of mother’s-milk-like charm, but actually ambrosia is here, on earth, available in small long-tipped bottles, and it is called chipotle-flavored Tabasco hot sauce, and it is heaven.

  So we all recognize now that chipotle-flavored Tabasco hot sauce is the best commonly available table sauce on the market. We all recognize that when I now bring it to people’s new houses and flats as a welcoming present, despite the retail price being very low, it is a very thoughtful and perhaps impossibly perfect present I am giving them. “Here,” my gift says, for me. “I have bought you the gift of deep and delicious flavor. Cherish every drop of it.”

  The point is how this sauce changed me, and the journey it took me on as it did. Because I thought I was a completed and finished human being, before chipotle-flavored Tabasco hot sauce. The first time I tried this sauce was at Chipotle Mexican Grill, the burrito bar, and from the first taste of it I was altered as a human: I stole it, for a kickoff, the first time I’d stolen in my life, and continued to steal bottles from there because it was impossible to find in the wild. The sauce did not exist in shops, despite my checking every sauce aisle I ever walked down for three entire years, and yes, I did think about bulk-ordering it online, but the shipping cost was prohibitive, and so chipotle-flavored Tabasco hot sauce became my white whale—apart from the bottles I continued to steal from Chipotle Mexican Grill, obviously, my stealing techniques getting more and more brazen and sophisticated as the years went on. I went on detours to try and find this sauce. I took buses across the city to large supermarkets I thought would have it. Red-bottle Tabasco sauce? You can buy that anywhere. The weak, bad, green jalapeño version? Also commonly available. The deep-brown super-heat Tabasco? I know where to get it even though I don’t want it. But chipotle flavor eluded me, drove me to the brink of madness, until: until I chanced upon eight bottles in the corner shop in Stoke Newington one day. I bought all eight. Direct quote, from the shopkeeper, as I bought eight bottles of chipotle-flavored Tabasco sauce,
exhibiting euphoria close to tears: “What the fuck, man. That’s so much sauce.”

  And now, finally, years after discovery, it seems Tabasco has the logistics in place or whatever so that enough shops, now, stock chipotle-flavored Tabasco hot sauce in enough supply so I don’t have to bulk-buy it when I stumble upon it, and so you can more or less find it now, if you want it, it is in a lot of supermarkets but not all, it is available but not widely so. I will take that, for now. For me that is a little victory. I no longer have to steal from Chipotle Mexican Grill. But then one day I realized that essentially my soul and chipotle-flavored Tabasco hot sauce were palpably intertwined, and that’s when I had a bowl of rice and we had run out of sauce and I couldn’t find any nearby, and the rice and meal as a whole was disgusting, and I realized that maybe 80 percent of the meals I had cooked at home in the past twenty-four months had been chipotle-flavored Tabasco hot sauce augmented, and that now I am broken, in a way, and cannot enjoy regular meals without it. Yes: I have small portable bottles of chipotle-flavored Tabasco hot sauce that I now take everywhere with me. Yes: I have a backup bottle of the sauce in my cupboard, and another backup bottle of sauce behind that. I feel like I am among the top ten consumers of this sauce out of everyone currently alive.

  Adulthood is a lot about realization, and this sauce made me learn a lot about myself. It made me realize I am in a thrall to brands. Adulthood, I’ve found, is about finding the specific brands of the various things you like and then holding them close to you like glimmering fragments of gold that will never be snatched away, and if the packaging is changed or the brand is in any way discontinued, then the grief of this is akin to losing a pet and you start a small but focused letter-writing campaign. So: Aussie-brand Mega Shampoo, but not the conditioner. Sure for Men compressed antiperspirant (red edition). Adidas Original black-on-white tube socks. I have longer relationships with these brands than I’ve ever had with, like, a woman. Oral-B Pro Expert toothpaste and Calvin Klein size L trunks. Reebok Workout Lows, the perfect summer trainer. There is an argument, a strong one, that says brands soften and distort the raw deal at the center of every capitalist exchange: that the temples they build around and in front of them, the projection of themselves as smooth-faced business empires, this false feeling of friendliness and trust, it masks the fact that you are paying them their costs plus a thick wedge of profit every time you buy something off them. I think adulthood is also about ignoring that fact if you find the right shampoo, if not conditioner. Chipotle-flavored Tabasco hot sauce made me realize that: Yes, everything is a lie, most particularly everything at the heart of any exchange of money. But I have spent a lifetime collecting my precious, precious brands, and if they discontinue them, I riot. If Tabasco stops making that hot sauce, I’ll fucking kill.

  A Can of Lager and a Three-Course Meal, or A Guide to Dinner Parties, If You Are Sort of in Your Twenties

  We used to have an informal monthly dinner club at work where you could only make mac & cheese (the nights we did this were called: Mac & Cheese Night). Mac & cheese is the perfect dish to make for crowds because any shoe-brained idiot can make it and it is endlessly remixable: bacon bits, a bread-crumb crust, four different types of cheese, vegetables (vegetables should not be inserted into a mac & cheese, but I would never tell someone that, in their house, while they are serving me mac & cheese and garlic bread). It was good: people would bring cheap wine and cheaper beer, and we would sit cross-legged on the stained carpet of various London rental flats (all adjacent flatmates would be told to be out that night, to accommodate Mac & Cheese Night, because Mac & Cheese Night was holy), and one time we sat and watched Godfather Part II, in full, and then, half pissed and carbed to hell and back, we got the night bus home, swaying slightly and smelling of garlic and wine and cheese. I’m not going to say, “It was the best time of my life” because come on, my life absolutely rules, but it was a good and pure and perfect thing, and obviously it was doomed to end once enough of us crashed into twenty-five, and job moves and relationships and babies and houses got in the way. Life, life has taught me, life has a way of ruining even the finest pasta dishes.

  The last time I went to someone’s house for dinner, they spent an extended amount of time melon-balling a carrot and used a special piping bag to put sauce on the plate, which was a special plate they had bought especially and not an IKEA-issue white one that came with their house. Someone made me a pie recently, and it was the best pie I’ve ever eaten in the world, and possibly one of the best things I’ve eaten in the world. Yesterday I had a forty-five-minute conversation with a friend about his sous vide machine. What I am saying is that things have changed, and everyone is into cooking now, and “Come over, we’ll order pizza and eat it on a rag rug” has become “Come to my house, where a table I bought (I bought a table) will be heaving with an Instagram-ready three-course meal,” and now I have to go to dinner parties. It is an adjustment I am still not 100 percent convinced I am ready for, but I have learned there are rules to navigating these evenings, and here are those rules, at least:

  DO NOT MENTION THAT DINNER PARTIES ARE WEIRD, THEY HATE THAT

  This is both the easiest rule and the one that took me longest to learn. When you turn up to someone’s house, and they have tidied everything and made it very neat, so neat it actually feels quite invasive to sit on their sofa properly so you just sort of sit on the edge of it, teetering, and you are surrounded by the following guests—1 x person you met at a birthday party once, who remembers your name but you don’t remember theirs; 1 x neighbor, inexplicably, and I think we can all agree neighbors have a very bad vibe; 1 x couple who are smiling too much for everything to actually be okay; 1 x person who turns up late and is just phenomenally loud—do not say something ice-breaking like, “This is strange, isn’t it!” or, “Isn’t this odd! Isn’t this very weird!” because nobody considers that to be good banter, they actually very much dislike it when you point out how unusual the atmosphere around you is, and perversely that works to make the surrounding atmosphere worse.

  YOU HAVE TO ENDURE A VERY LONG CONVERSATION ABOUT JUS

  Nobody who likes cooking just likes cooking, they have to cook like it’s replacing a small part of them that they lost forever in some incident they don’t like to talk about, and for that reason when you go into the kitchen casually holding a sloshing glass of wine and half-heartedly offer to help—“Can I peel a carrot, or something? Can I stir a pan?”—they will tell you no, actually, you can’t, but sit here and listen to them while they talk about, like, meat temperatures, or whatever deglazing is, or a new spice they had to buy from a special spice website that cost them $15 just to ship. I have a side theory about this, and it is that millennials, doomed, almost entirely, to live in worlds without formal long-term spaces for them, without home ownership, many of them without cars, plow their energy and resources into expensive hobbies instead, a brief taste of luxury before the grave, and that your friend with the $200 saucepan that you cannot touch because you’ll fuck it is actually cooking this big piece of lamb for you not—as you thought—as a nice special treat for you on this otherwise ordinary Thursday night but actually, in fact, because they are escaping the doom of reality in the only way they know how, and that is by getting some really expensive maple syrup and having a lot of opinions about olive oil. That is just a theory, though.

  DO NOT TRY AND ENGAGE IN CONVERSATION ABOUT JUS, THOUGH, JUST NOD POLITELY

  I have a pan in my house that has the rigid but ghostlike outlines of two chicken kievs I tried to cook two years ago and fucked up and now I can’t wash them off, even if I dig at the crust with a spoon, and that is my best tray, so if you are anything like that (you are), then don’t try and actually talk about cooking when your cooking friend talks about cooking. This is someone who can keep a sourdough starter alive better than you can look after yourself. Don’t try it.

  PEOPLE ARE GOING TO TRY AND SET YOU UP

  Hosting a d
inner party has a low-key flex about it, that you have enough of your life together that you can make your own pasta, and so for that reason it tends to be hosted by those very solid couples who have been sweetly in love for about three years but not gotten married yet. For them it is testing out a new kind of way of being responsible with their life: after this pot roast goes well, and after they wash up without arguing and then have some missionary intercourse on clean, ironed (!) sheets, they’ll lie in each other’s arms in the gauzy lamplight and think about having a wedding, or getting a dog, or something else grown-up (tattoo removal, giving up drugs forever, getting a credit card because you want better credit and not because you are experiencing a $400 emergency). Hey, they think, you know who else would like this bubble of bliss? Our One Friend Who Really Hasn’t Got His Shit Together and Actually Still Very Much Acts Like He Is Twenty-Two Years Old, and they try and set you up with their sister, or something, as if that’s ever going to work, as if she is ever going to fix you. The best way to ward this off is to walk through the door actively swiping on Tinder (“Man! Am I horny!”), make a few references to your disaster of a life, and ideally make some sort of nod to the fact that you are not really a consistent or reliable mate (“Oh, sorry, I dropped my herpes test results…which are inconclusive, by the way”), and they’ll never try and pull a romantic trick like this on you ever again.

  INSPECT THEIR BEDROOMS, THEY ACTIVELY WANT THAT

  At a certain time in their life people stop decorating their bedrooms to make them absolute base-level appealing to people they plan to have sex with and start instead making them appealing for more general guests, because bedrooms are often the truest expression of ourselves as people (it is where we go to rest! where we are sick! where we spend our coziest leisure time! where we watch Netflix and buy holidays on our laptops!) and so act as an indication of how our lives are going. They want you to look, is what I’m saying, so look. How many blankets does one person need? It is, apparently, five. How tidy can one room be? The room is so immaculate even the wardrobe is color-coded. What’s this box at the bottom of the bed? Is it…sex stuff? My friends, no: it’s fifteen more blankets. The sex stuff is in a special dusty shoebox on top of the wardrobe.