FOR SINGLE PEOPLE or couples in a pinch, it's at times like these that the room-mate situation begins to rear its head again. They might not have contemplated it five years ago, but I know a married couple who are preparing their spare room and advertising for a "lodger". Remember the "lodger"?
Wasn't he briefly extinct for a while? Well, he might have been, but he's back, along with cup-a-soups and leftovers for lunch.
Sharing your living space is undoubtedly a great way to halve your cost of living (particularly if you're young enough not to have grown ornery personality traits like indignation and impatience), but taking a room-mate can be a false economy. Sharing with the wrong person or people can lead to huge deficit in other areas. Take the reluctant re-streeting of your tired limbs on a Tuesday night as you wander around looking for somewhere to sit down, somewhere that resembles the atmosphere of a home as much as possible, but which is not home and never will be, for they are on your sofa watching their TV programme, on your TV.
People might argue that the onset of room-mate fail isn't as bad as an unhappy marriage, but honestly, I think it's marginal - it's never good to find oneself muttering a silent prayer as the key turns in the door, followed by the crushing realisation that they are home, and there's nothing worse than the unwanted drink in the deserted pub. Even in the most comfortable bar you can't take your shoes off and pad over to the fridge, and I don't know about you, but you'd never find a wall-mounted television and a cigarette machine in my ideal home.
Of course you can always move out, unless . . . you can't move out. Some people live in such uniquely rewarding apartment-shares that they are stuck there forever, and you can forget about annual bonuses, stock options and lucrative severance packages (you may as well forget about those anyway); I'll tell you what's a real pair of golden handcuffs.
Rent control.
The rent-control phenomenon is better established abroad, in countries where the rights of long-standing tenants have been protected more diligently by the government. There are some instances of it in Ireland, but they are minor, with the exception of the incredibly sweet deal you hear whispered about, the one wherein your sister's friend's cousin got to share a 10,000sq ft former monastery with the daughter of a property developer who needed it "looked after". But that's not rent control, per se. That's dumb luck, and luck is capricious, and when it skips town, make no mistake - you'll be the one who gets the heave-ho.
All the insane, semi-mythical stories about 100-a-month flats seem to emanate from tenant-protected New York, where the rental market never stops climbing, and your deal becomes better and better value as the years of stable, continuous occupancy stack up. One of the most incredible of those that I encountered was that of a guy who paid $500 a month for a 3,000sq ft art studio in Soho. He would skateboard from bedroom to bathroom not because he was a man-child with a lingering subconscious obsession with the 1980s sitcom Silver Spoons(although that was certainly the case), but because it was necessary.
This guy had to commute to the toilet.
In 2006 he was 56 years old, and a resident in this vast loft of some 25 years standing. The clincher was that he did not have to share this space with a room-mate, unlike most rent-controlled environments. After 20-odd years with a room-mate, I would imagine that 3,000sq ft isn't nearly enough real estate to share with a room-mate. But I often wondered whether he still wanted to live in an apartment, or whether he was bound by the deal and would otherwise have decamped to New Mexico, or the beach, or Connecticut.
The keys to the golden handcuffs are truly flung away when two people get their names on a lease, live there for years, and the economic advantages of remaining in this place continue to rise while their relationship plunges south. I was once the third, short-term room-mate (subletting a box room) in a three-bedroom apartment I shared with two people who had been living there for the best part of a decade, as room-mates. Their friendship had long since soured into a cheese rind of bitter dislike, and though scrubbed, painted and well-kept, this clean, bright and cheap apartment still stank - of resentment, and broken-down negotiations.
Cohabitation was now a game of chicken between two people who had grown to despise each other from having lived together for far too long. They would pass between each other on the way to the bathroom and I would watch them tensely, a newly acquired pet anxious to make its owners happy. They would talk to me in bright and cheery tones, but never respond to each other. And the problem was clear. Neither party would move out because quite apart from relinquishing their claim to a sweet deal, vacating the apartment would hand the other person unlimited access to the most beautiful deal of all - the beautiful place that could have been theirs if they hadn't blinked first.
Special torture.
Who has the mental fortitude to walk away from the cheapest apartment in the world in order that the person who irritates them most in the world can have it for themself? Not me. So beware the false economy and the unwanted midweek pint, and beware equally the lesser-spotted lodger. You might find out, when it is too late, that he is a Trojan horse.