The Antisocial Socialist

Jeez, let me tell you something about old lady apartments. When I got kicked out of my college house because all the other tenants graduated, I went looking for another place to live. Now as it happened, I thought I was quite lucky because my dad had just been laid off from working for a certain Torontonian bank for thirty years, and they'd given him a chunk of money as a goodbye present, and he wanted to buy a house with it and use the rent as a replacement for the rather pathetic excuse for a pension they'd given him. So we both had problems and we thought we could help one another.

One day we went to see a house in the Green End Road (home of the Sinister Greenend Organisation, which would have been really convenient). So we were thinking as we walked up the path. The door opened, and an old lady who could possibly have been young when the Romans settled the town welcomed us in, followed by a large and bounding black dog. I mean, a LARGE black dog. The kind that horror novels are written around.

So we go and look around. It is pretty much okay for a house where it is. The asking price is about average; she's wanting to sell it and move into assisted living. But it's not just that the wallpaper was done just like the wallpaper shown above in the style beloved of old ladies everywhere (why is this?! if I go to Tazakhstan will all old women decorate like this? if I decide to live as a woman and reach the age of eighty will I get the sudden urge to redecorate?). I could have lived with the wallpaper. I could even have changed the wallpaper, if I'd moved in. No, that wasn't the big deal.

The big deal was that dog. The dog must have pissed in every corner of every room of that house. The stench was almost indescribable: I can only assume that people's noses fail when they get older along with their eyes. If my dad had bought the house, it would have cost thousands and thousands to fumigate the place as though there'd been giant roaches or something.

That dog. The dog she kept shouting at and calling back by name. You want to know what the name of this big black dog was? It began with N, and there were five more letters.

My dad did not buy.