Graeme Baker: Sorry, you're too messy for muggers' alley

Opinion

It's hard to remember a time when I lived in a "home" rather than a "house" - one I felt at peace with, and could say I was settled.

Perhaps it is the modern way; most of my friends never stayed anywhere for more than a year until they nested with some other half, and there doesn't seem much chance of that with me in the near future.

But, having moved about a lot I have, I think, learned to adapt. I don't need throws and cushions.

I've lived in condemned buildings in Leeds, complete with scratchy rodent sounds, sewerage problems and dodgy gas fires. I've flitted from one overpriced London flat to another, most of them attracting bonds of more than £1000 ($2230) that I never saw again. Actually that's a fib - one was 10 per cent returned because I was a "good tenant".

I once struck lucky and convinced a friend to rent me his small but upscale pad in St Pancras for half the going rate - but snatched disaster from the jaws of triumph by annoying the neighbour above who rapped into a microphone all day and kicked at my door in the wee hours for fun.

I once lived in an Auckland flat where the downstairs neighbour's opening gambit to my ex was, "I will be able to hear everything you do". That was as true as it was creepy.

She later sold up in a huff to an alcoholics charity, which moved in recovering soak after recovering soak with various interpretations of "good neighbourly conduct".

One used his garden as a toilet and a 7am impromptu party venue; another would forget he lived downstairs and crash through our door instead.

Four months spent in a hotel in Abu Dhabi, with a 24-hour nightclub three floors below (The Rock Bottom Cafe - by name and nature), was about the strangest place I've ever lived.

But I got used to the very good laundry service (they ironed my undies) and medium-rare burgers on a silver platter at three in the morning.

They let me keep a bike in my room and, after a while, even the kathump of Lebanese disco pop began to soothe rather than grate.

Returning to Auckland this year, I lived in a tiny hotel "lifestyle" box for several weeks. The cleaner left two bars a day of funky soap with chequered flags on them. Given the size of the room, had I stayed there long enough I'd have been sleeping on a mound of it.

Summed up, I've experienced some rather unsuitable flats. But never have I suffered the indignity of being rejected as "unsuitable" to live in one. Until this year.

After spending four months in an unheated Ponsonby unit, battling a winter chill and a mould that ate my wardrobe, I decided it was time to move on. It was so damp the mice were strangled by an octopus (copyright Johnny Vegas).

Apparently there is a glut of good flats on the market, but I've yet to see them.

Instead the game appears to involve choosing the concrete box that gives the least sensation of being slowly buried alive.

But wait - references are required, and that's where the real fun begins.

They are not credit checks or inquiries to the police about whether I'm an axe murderer. They have largely involved random office workers calling my hostile current landlords and my friends to ask whether I'm "good with my money" and whether I can be "trusted". Erm, I'm trying to rent a $300-a-week hovel with a fridge above a Korean restaurant. I should be asking them if they can be trusted.

So it is with great shame that I was deemed unfit in one of my recent applications (a flat in a dimly-lit mugger's alley at the back of Myers Park). The reason? According to my soon-to-be-former landlords, I am "messy". A single man in a rented flat. Hmm.

Not two weeks before this episode I gained my New Zealand residency. Is that irony?

So the options:

Flat share? Been there, done that, got the T-shirt stolen 10 years ago. Plus I'm a Pom, I work weird hours and I enjoy weirder music - who would have me?

Go back to where I bloody well came from? No thanks, Abu Dhabi didn't agree with me.

Return to the 'lifestyle' box? Well, yes, it's cheap, you get funky bits of soap with chequered flags on them, and at least I know they'll have me.

Since this was written, an agent has taken pity and allowed me to rent a nice roomy box in the city centre. Now, does anyone want to buy a sofa?

* Graeme Baker is deputy news editor at the Herald and occasional blogger at nu-zealand.blogspot.com