The dangers of drink

As I’m sick of posting about writing, I thought I’d confess something instead.

Two years ago the Ours and I were living on our own for the first time; we had moved from a shared place to a rented one bedroom apartment. Our exhilaration faded slightly at the weekends, when the so called filters in the bedroom (basically holes in the wall covered by thin mesh) amplified the shouts, screams and sobs from the drunken hoards stumbling around the street outside. But it was still special, and we weren’t technically angels in the boozing department.

Case in point: one Sunday evening we got stuck into the gin, despite being a school night. It didn’t take us long to become unsteady on our feet and hike up the music to an obnoxious level, but we didn’t know our neighbours so no guilt was felt. We laughed at our reminisces and argued over our respective song choices. A typical night so.

Until the Ours rose to his feet and invited me to join him on the dance floor (made of slippery parquet). At this point we had ran out of mixer so we were drinking neat gin, so I didn’t think twice about jumping into his arms. He had all the moves; he twirled me several times and then dipped me, which was when the unthinkable happened.

The Ours suddenly lost his grip and I went crashing through the tv, setting it flying. While I was sprawled on the floor laughing he asked me if I was alright and helped me to my feet. There was a strange look on his face though, which he explained by pointing out the substantial hole in the dry wall that the flying tv had made. Thankfully it was a small tv so it could have been a lot worse, but still. We coped with the shock by drinking more gin.

The next day at work was hell for both of us, struggling in the horrors we had self-imposed. We worried about the hole, the view of which we had covered by the thankfully still working tv. But out of sight out of mind, until the moving out and deposit refund date loomed. The Ours covered the hole with mesh and plaster, and did a good job – unfortunately the plaster was of bad quality and started to crumble nearly immediately. By the time the agent arrived the wall looked patchy (probably only to guilty eyes though) so we decided to sacrifice our tv to cover the offending wall. If that wasn't stressful enough, later that day we’d both left the flat without keys, so the Ours had to break down the door and spend several hours gluing wooden splinters back around the lock.

Before you think we were terribly dishonest, the place shouldn’t have been rented at all; the bedroom suffered from terrible damp and we regularly had to tackle the hideous black spores that crept across the walls. The landlady refused to provide us with a dehumidifier and we couldn’t afford one, the cheek. We had also repainted the entire apartment including the bathroom ceiling, which was also impregnated with damp and mould. That place was sparkling when we left it, m'lud!