Wherever I Lay My Deerstalker…

I live in Azhar Mahmood’s house.
He doesn’t know.
I’ve lived in many other places too, of course. Lots of them next door to other famous people. All of them awful.

The current house has a Jacuzzi bath, maybe installed by the Pakistani one-day ace himself, but it’s still not right.

Mahmood doesn’t still live there, of course. I’m not his lodger or anything. In fact he must have moved out when his playing days for Surrey ended in 2007 (the Oval is just down the road), but I still get mail for him.
I get stuff from the Cricketer’s union, the PCA. I get fan mail. I’m always hoping to get a letter with an order from the PCB to turn up at some international venue with my gear as they need me to come on first change. I often wonder how far I’d get if I took this hypothetical letter to the gates of the Gadaffi Stadium in Lahore and presented myself.
Not very, I guess.

But anyway, I’ll be moving on soon.
You see, I can never stay in one place too long. I don’t know why. Itchy feet or something. But at least each move I make always seems to throw up something interesting.

It started as a child.
I grew up living next door to Jimmy Saville’s brother, Johnny. And since then there have been NUMEROUS famous faces over the garden fence:
Sophie-Ellis Bextor and her Blue Peter presenter mother Janet Ellis, David Attenborough, Jonathan Ross, Bonnie Langford…

In fact I even lived IN Father Ted’s house.
Not the Craggy Island one, obviously. But the actor who played Father Ted- Dermot Morgan- his old house.
He left his fags in a drawer. I smoked them.

I lived in a flat that used to be owned by the drummer from Status Quo. Rossi and Parfitt used to come over for rehearsals apparently, the frazzled looking woman next door told me. She didn’t look a great fan of three chord pub rock. Shame.

I also once lived at number 54 The Avenue, Surbiton. Where The Good Life was set.
Famously Tom and Barbara lived at number 53 and the Leadbetters at number 55.
I didn’t have a goat though. Or try to ingratiate myself with Lady Truscott.

But lately I’ve found myself moving around like a mad man.

It all started with a bassoon, you see.
That deep, low, farting instrument, designed to be heard at the back of the Royal Albert Hall but being played just above my head in a thinly built ex-council block.
A bassoonist had moved into the flat above me. She seemed to have nothing to do all day but practice over and over and over again.
Now Kemp isn’t an easy man to get on with at the best of times. The unfortunate girl I was living with had already had her fill of me sitting on the sofa in my underpants, watching the racing and, you know, I have a feeling she was looking for an excuse to get rid of me anyway. But when the Battle of the Bassoon begun, well, my number was well and truly up.

Men working in car horn factories often go mad, so I’ve read, from the constant cacophony. Well imagine if you had this aural assault at home, striking up at any time of day or night, only this time it’s a rogue bassoon, not a car horn, plaguing you.
You’ve just lowering yourself into a relaxing bath. HONK! Tucking into your egg and chips in front of the telly. PARP!
It was the never-ending, incompetently played, scales that really got me. She’d start high in the octave, descending slowly with ponderous fingers, until BUURPP! The bum note. I’d wait for it every time. Stood in the living room, staring up at the ceiling, braced. Half my face screwed into a ready-made wince. And off she’d go: BEE-BIDDLE-BIDDLE-BIDDLE BUURPP. Everytime.

Talking to her was no good. You’d go upstairs all reasonable and nice and come down with an exploded vein in your forehead, vocal chords shredded, a violent tick in your eye. All from her snooty, supercilious way of dealing with you.
“I don’t expect people like YOU to appreciate culture” she’d sneer. “Philistine!”
“A little man in a little job with a little life,” she’d waft at midnight when I’d gone up to tell her I had work the next day and could she knock it on the head for the night with those bloody scales.
Now it just so happens that I AM a little man, I DO have a little life and I AM a philistine. But it’s a bit galling to be told this just because you don’t appreciate 8 hours a day of scales. With a bum note at the end. I never heard ONE tune the whole time. And she didn’t take requests.

It got so bad that I was hearing her on the bassoon even when she wasn’t playing it. I’d wake with a start having dreamt I could hear the bassoon’s deep hum. I was forever stopping in the middle of conversations, cocking an ear upwards, finger raised, mouth open, craning to hear if that was the start of a scale. Even if I wasn’t at home. Madness had really set in.

The tipping point for the dread ex-Mrs Kemp came when she returned one afternoon to find me in my vest, hungover, leaning out of the window on a blustery day with what remnants I had left of my hair blowing about on my head, holding a long bamboo cane up in front of the bassoonist’s window above me, with an A4 piece of paper stuck on the top (also flapping about) with the words “Can you PLEASE stop playing that f*cking thing?!”
I’d given up going upstairs to ask.
The beleaguered girlfriend soon gave up on me.

So I had to find somewhere else to live. My first port of call was a small bedsitter round the corner.
I arranged to meet the owner- a small Indian man, with an immaculate moustache and the ability to speak without opening his mouth- late on a Sunday evening. The place was disgusting. Cold, filthy, at the top of a seemingly deserted house. The curtains didn’t even TRY to reach the sill.
I turn to the small Indian stood there with his hands folded in front of his genitals, repeatedly grinning and nodding expectantly at the empty room.
It really was an awful place.
“I’ll take it.”

I awoke in my new home after a dreadful night’s sleep at 6am to sparks lighting up outside my window a row of surprised faces travelling past, looking in at me sprawled in my pyjamas.
It was only now, in the breaking daylight, that I noticed a tube line running just a couple of feet from my room.
As I held my head in my hands, every 2 minutes another tube train rumbled by. Needless to say, I couldn’t live like that.
I called the minuscule Indian. No, no, he informed me. I must give a month’s notice before I can move out. After shouting down the phone for 10 minutes we came to an agreement.
I gave a month’s notice before I moved out.

So I had a month of making my beans on toast in front of a rolling cast of returning office workers and curious school children. Towelling myself down after a shower with disturbed faces chugging by, yards from the window. I could reach out and shake their hands they were so close. And, of course, the rumble and clack, finishing at 1am, starting up again at 5.30am meant 31 days of red eyed fury for Kemp.

Where next though..?
I read in the paper about flats in Clapham. The block used to house all the workers for London Transport in the 1930s. Well, considering I’d been living intimately for the last month with several tube drivers and their flock, it seemed the right move. Wrong.

The pokey flat was on THE busiest road in and out of London. The 30s fittings that I’m promised (including a concierge in the foyer) never materialised. Not even near.
What I got was a dark corridored prison, reminding me of some old Russian hospital.
Mysterious shouting voices and the sound of running feet came from all angles of the building, though I never saw another human being.
I did frequently find dead rats in my toilet though.
I rang the landlord. He didn’t follow the same month’s notice policy. This time I must stay 6 months or lose all my money. I lasted 3 before giving in to the inevitable.

Next move, I think, I’m going to share with others. The loneliness of the last place drove me mad. And if others are living there the conditions can’t be that bad, I reason.
I ring up an advert for a houseshare and am told to come round and have a look at the place.
When I get there, the door is answered by the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. She shows me round the place- I barely take any of it in. She explains that everyone else in the house is out. I carry on staring at her, dumbly. If I came back tomorrow I’d meet the rest of them. I snap out of my reverie. “No need,” I say, flashing a smile and waggling an eyebrow “I’ll take it”.

I feel I’ve really landed on my feet here. The girl is a real tomato. The house is terrific. Surely when she sees me lounging around in my shorty little maroon dressing gown and sock garters she won’t be able to resist…

The phone rings. It’s the girl. She thinks I really should come and see the other housemates before I move in.
Begrudgingly I trudge round. The door is opened by Beautiful. I twinkle a roguish smile. I’m sure I detect a simper from her. She then introduces me to ANOTHER terrific girl. I feel in heaven…
“And this” says Beautiful, stretching out an arm “is my husband Fredericco”. Horror etches over every inch of my face as a loping great Brazilian chap saunters out of the kitchen in flip-flops. I begin to stammer. “Something’s come up. I won’t be able to take the house after all. Complications. Sorry!” I race for the door. Dreams shattered again.

Where next though? Back to the newspaper and phone. I ring another houseshare, this time with just one other person. She answers. It is the most erotic voice I’ve ever heard. “I’ll take it!” I say, instantly, having learnt no lesson whatsoever.
I go round a few days later to actually inspect where I’m going to live. I knock on the door expectantly, eager to see the girl behind such a seductive voice. The door opens to a plump girl in a deep purple poncho. Deep purple lipstick as well. She looked like she should be sat behind a cauldron.

She takes me for a tour of the flat. Cats appear from behind every item of furniture. Hundreds of them. All named after Bronte characters. “This is the kitchen,” Poncho tells me. “Feel free to use all the stuff. But NOT this mug,” she barks, taking down a rather ordinary looking cup. “Oh? Why’s that?” I say. She fixes me with a cold stare. “It’s personal”.
I make my excuses.

Then of course there was the house boat I went to visit on a cold, winter’s night. Slipped on the frosty deck and found myself swinging on a rope above the Thames, in typical Norman Wisdom fashion, explaining to the three stunned girls watching from the safety of the wheel house that, all things considered, I don’t think I’ll be taking the room actually.

And the time I took a room in a disused office block in a run-down area of south London. Cheap rent and all the wheely office chairs and anglepoise lamps I could want, if I just made sure the local hoodlums kept away from the building.
No problem, I assured them.
I lasted one night, until the local gang of 11 year olds started firing at me through the window with an air rifle.

And I won’t even begin on the pain of trying to live with a group of conceptual artists in the old Chelsea Art School. Oh good God…

Who knew that just finding somewhere to live could be so hard?

I bet Azhar Mahmood doesn’t have these problems, wherever he is now.
It would play terrible havoc with his slower ball after all…