A Landlord's Life

You cannot be in the letting game without, sometimes, having recourse to "Man with Van", usually found in the small ads, promising instant availability. As a piece of verse, he comes in all shapes and sizes, does "Van and Man".

You will use "Man with Van" to shift the damaged contents of a house after, say, a year's tenure by athletic students from the country whose indoor exercises range from national trampoline competitions, conducted on your Dutch couch, to competitive periods of horizontal jogging, on your beds.

Even the durable divan caves in and surrenders to pneumatic pile-driving of twentysomethings from Cork and Kerry, whose usual place of rutting is on the rugby pitch, but who, getting lucky at weekends, leave their indelible mark, so to speak, on the rented furniture.

Whatever the reasons, you will end up hiring "Man with Van" to dump the damaged furniture. If you're lucky you will get a reasonable "Man with Van". If unlucky, you will be treated to as wide of a variety of human dysfunction as survives outside Homes for the Deranged. Expect to be unlucky . . .

"Man with Van" is the refuge of the despairing, the gambling and the plain lost. After all, if you were down on your uppers, had left an almighty mess behind in a previous life and wanted to start all over again, what would you do? Move somewhere, and - until another fantasy life fell apart - become a "Man with Van".

If you had enough dosh to buy a vehicle at those cheapo auctions, you could, overnight, become - if not mover and shaker - at least a mover.

With the aid of a map, you could reinvent yourself in any city in the world, where a young, migrant population is constantly on the move between habitations. Did I say any city? Exclude Beijing, Seoul, Teheran and other ideological capitals where "Man with Van" is likely to be on the way to the Gulag, mit occupant, mit-out life possessions.

A definition of the West is that almost anyone could become "Van with Van". How else to explain the range of human fallibility that turns up on my doorstep when I hire a mover. I do not refer to reputable removal firms with land lines and offices. Real "Man with Van" usually works off on a mobile phone, which he answers while negotiating a tricky reverse into a narrow lane, his exchanges punctuated by urgent swearing, followed by a bang . . .

He will resume the conversation as if all's well in the wide world of moving - and risking - other peoples' belongings. You will not be surprised to see him arrive at the apartment, oozing perspiration and smelling, oddly at that early hour, of both booze and cigarettes. You will find yourself cast in the role of helper, because authentic "Man with Van" usually works for hisself, as no one of right mind would go within an ass's roar of employing him.

You, unfortunately, were within the sound of a yodelling donkey, when you randomly picked him from the long list of small ads, extolling the promptness, cheapness and reliability of "Man with Van". The previous guy told you he was just doing this to pay his way through the College of Surgeons, as you noticed how his hand shook on the steering wheel when overtaking a double-jointed petrol tanker.

As in all things, settle for the compensations. In San Francisco, the "Man with Van" turned out to be a handsome, blonde woman from Country Clare and we had a most interesting time exploring the city's architectural heritage. The buildings did not move, but the furniture did.

In New York, the blocky Russian emigre, built like a brick urinal, carried all the heavy stuff up four flights to my temporary home.

Along the way, he bombed down the wide avenues, as if driving a Ferrari, thumping to a stop at traffic lights, the while haranguing the lack of manners among the city's newest intake of taxi drivers, whom he called "African foreigners".

"My friend," he said, "de worst about them is - de no speaka de English. So how de a-know, a where-a to go, huh?"