A Landlord's Life

What do you do when an apartment which you had presented in pristine condition is delivered back to you a complete wreck? Grin and bear it, is my motto.

You may be within your legal rights to insist that walls are repainted, holes in plaster repaired and the foul impregnation of a few hundred currries removed from your carpet - getting it done is another matter.

Weep over the cigarette burns in the leather couch, disguised by a sinking pile of magazines and newspapers. The tenant should patch it? You must be joking. The loo seat askew above the cracked bowl?

Did he have a 20-stone visitor? Ask him to screw it back down. You may be invited to perform a similar acrobatic exercise - on yourself.

The washing machine, after years of valiant service, gave one last heroic spin and cranked to a stop. Football boots had been put deposited with the kit after a victory party (league final). The steel drum, which could do 1,200 revolutions a minute in its heyday, is now a groaning casualty, wonky on its axle, with flittered leather and metal boot studs bejewelled on its workings. Plus the wire from bra straps. Some party, hah! As for the carpet - you recall its original shape and colour.

Was it the deep blue you lovingly pondered over from the Carpet Mills, considering how its marine shades would complement the light pastel of sand-coloured walls of the apartment. Back then, years ago, when you bought the apartment and glowed with innocent promise to be a good landlord.

Yes, yes, that must be it, because tiny flecks of the original colour remain to be exhumed under layers of (sorry, this a family newspaper - ED). As for the bed and the orthopaedic mattress you went to some trouble to source, not wishing any tenant to develop curvature of the spine lying on a cheap bed. How is that mattress, now, do you think - eight years on? Is the Pope a German? More accurately, what shape survived, how many pot-holes of phneumatic bliss, after successive waves of twentysomethings, doing what twentysomethings do? Vigorously, repeatedly, with the apparent novelty that it is the first time anyone has done this, or - this? Wow, this a great bed, Bridget?

As a landlord, you took the precaution, odd word in the context, to supply a mattress protector, to guard against "biological stains" as the detergent adverts say. Except you find the covering dumped in the airing cupboard, where it seems to have been for a long time.

Not into covers, this last lot of tenants, not even on the pine dining table, where you had naively imagined they might have - wait for it - dinner parties for friends by candlelight. The dinners must have ended acrimoniously, to judge from the foot-long scars gouged into the surface. Or are they the deep marks of football boots? Is that a light flex dangling loose from the ceiling? What on earth could they have been doing on the table? Death by electrocution or the preying mantis? Practically speaking, who's going to pay for a new light fixture.

Can you add it to the list of compensation or write it off under "normal wear-and-tear". Suggesting to the tenant that dancing on tables might not be normal could have one straying into uncertain territory. You suspect he does it all the time, especially with female groupies after winning matches. Aye, there's the rub, as the bishop said to the actress.

One could sound dreadfully out of touch, asking for damages. As any landlord will tell you, departing long-term tenants nurtures a grievance of too much rent money paid over too many years. They could have bought a house with that much, if they had the sense to move. You will be hard put to convince them to cough-up, to restore your one-time palatial pad. Grin and bear it, and roll up the sleeves. In the time fruitlessly spent trying to persuade a tenant to make good the bad, you would have done the job yourself. You are, after all, a better man, Gunga Din. You are a landlord.