Many years ago in my second year of university I moved into a house with Bear and this lad we both knew from Peterborough. He was quite a strange fellow, rather emaciated in appearance, balding at the age of 20 and the personal hygiene of a leperous warthog with a faecal fetish. I mean this guy’s smell was awful, he hardly ever washed and used deodourant to spray on his clothes. He even slept in his jeans. But the worst part is that the odour permeated throughout the house as the only towel he had (of which he never put in the washing machine) was permanent denizen of the radiator, of which you can imagine when the radiators were on, stank the whole corridor with this odious musk. Seriously it smelled like chicken cooked in piss. He also had rather diminutive social skills which in retrospect I think we were friends with him through pity more than anything.

Anyway we moved into the house in the September and his parents helped move his stuff in. His mum seemed nice enough, albeit slightly bohemian and a bit mad. Think of Barbara Steisand’s character in Meet The Fockers. And his dad…a right little tough nut, you know thought he was one of the Kray twins. Problem is the guy was about 5′ 2″. After leaving all the stuff his parting comment was that if we ran into trouble he’d get involved and the boy knew what he meant. At this point I had to restrain myself from bursting into laughter as this guy was a midget. Who did he think he was? Willow? How the hell could he intimidate anyone over the age of 8? I can only assume that he had some kind of Gundam suit at home which he could climb into to engage into any kind of confrontation because seriously this guy was riding in his own hype.

Anyways after 4 weeks of living there we encouraged him to move into the front room downstairs as we roused to him that it was larger as he was in the box room but in reality he stank and it made me wretch in my own bedroom. Don’t get me wrong, we did get on. Even for his 21st birthday we bought him a present. We went around all the shops looking for an inflatable Spiderman we saw in a window once and thought it would be an amusing gift. He’d probably molest it but I guess it’s common practice to buy a guy a blow up doll on his 21st birthday at university. Anyways we couldn’t find one anywhere so we opted for a Spiderman glove with fired silly string as a joke present. Oddly, he really liked it! I mean REALLY liked it. Kinda odd you think?

We had an accord with us housemates that we’d split the bills equally, obviously if someone took the piss then it would be proportioned accordingly. Sounds fair, well it is. The only problem is that he slowly started to take the piss. Every week started coming up with the excuses that he didn’t have the money and he’d pay us back, and the rigmarole continued for months and by Christmas, he’d owed us about £200 each. Naturally being students Bear and myself required the money so after much discussion we decided to confront him about it, I say we, Bear actually did it because I was ready to crucify the little prick upside down over a vat of acid but instead we opted for the more civilised route. I sat at the top of the stairs eavesdropping and listened in on the conversation. As soon as Bear broached the subject that he owed us money I could hear this faint sound of whimpering. “Surely he’s not turning on the water works” I thought, yes indeed he was. Being a nice person unlike myself, Bear let him off and quietly exited the room. I was furious that instead of reason like an adult, knowing full well he was in the wrong he decided to feign tears.

And so the schism began, we did our shopping separate from him as we actually attempted to maintain sustainable and balanced meals polarised from his diet of fish finger snadwiches and chips. Seriosuly all this guy eat was carbohydrates. No surprise how one day we found a dookie in the toilet with the tensile strength of carbon steel which WOULD NOT FLUSH! Six buckets of water later and the beast was gone. Disgusting I know but still I have never seen the Loch Ness Monster populate a toilet before.

Another annoying and well, downright rude thing the pikey did was come into my room when I was asleep and play on my Playstation 2. I’m sure if I was at lectures and he asked me I wouldn’t see the problem, well in the beginning I suppose, but coming in when I was asleep and using my stuff was just not cool. I was only one duvet away from nudity so surely respecting one’s privacy is a given? Obviously not. It wasn’t just myself which he did this too, he did it with Bear as well, using his TV and computer when he was out. Plus he went to bed about 9 o’clock and had the audacity to tell us to be quiet. This was even on weekends. At university? Do me a favour.

I think the funniest true story about this time was the giant hissy fit. Remember the spiderman glove I told you about? Well Bear thought it would be funny to write the word “fuck” in silly string by the stairs. Being horrendously immature at the time we also wrote the word “gay” on the carpet with Vanish carpet foam. Bear and I were upstairs playing on the PS2 with a mutual friend of ours when we heard Pikey come in. Bear ran downstairs to have a laugh and all I heard was this almighty shriek. We’re talking borderline dog whistle here. He’d massively taken offence to the removable graffiti strewn around the house and slammed the door like an adolescent Twilight fan. Well we thought, you don’t like that, then you’ll hate this. So we wrote the words “TWAT” outside his door, “CAMBRIDGE UNITED” up the stairs (arch rivals to Peterborough apparently) and “BUFFY IS A LESBIAN” in a retort to his fetish-esque obsession with the attractive vampire slayer. I even wrote the word “TWAT” on myself because I can actually take a joke. Besides, if its not true why would you take offence. The hissy fit was merely retribution for the fact he owed us money and that still makes me angry to this day.

But he wasn’t just a big whiny gobshite, no. He was also a bloody snake. Bear had a family reunion and left for about 3-4 days to meet up with family. In this time the Pikey spent the whole time trying to weave and intricate web of deceit by trying to turn me against Bear in his absence. Obviously I’m not a easily led idiot and this only angered me further. It actually got to the point that I was about to snap. The dynamic had always been that Bear was the mediator but with him gone I flipped and threw a dining chair at him when he accused me of doing nothing in the house. Considering that I cooked and tidied up way more than him I found that a bit rich. This is the guy who just stood and stared at us when the washing machine broke a spewed water all over the kitchen floor to which the two of us promptly started mopping up only to have that twat’s gurning mug peer around the corner and ask if we were “enjoying ourselves”.

So yeah in the last semester he sent his parents to collect all his things and a note was left saying that he wasn’t coming back. In fairness the money owed was left behind for us and there was no apology in the letter for all the sloth and lies he played us for. We never heard from him again. Turning two best friends against each other is wrong and I never want to hear from him again.

Good riddance…I hope you had the time of your life.