As this is the student blog, it seems like a good idea to publish an account of our great efforts to get compensation from our landlord, as our flat this year was a bit of a hole..

We signed the contract for it in January 2004, little knowing the great amount of hassle that it would cause it. After moving in, in late- September, we quickly noticed that a lot of rubbish from the previous tenants was still in-situ (we had to remove it all ourselves), and that the alley that led to our front door had no light, making negotiating in the dark a slightly tricky exercise.

In the months that followed we experienced broken boilers, showers, lights, radiators, beds, toilet seats, and sinks, as well as having no gas or electricity safety certificates until last month. Thanks to Paz’s tireless phone-calls, letters, and emails, most of the stuff eventually got done, but the sheer amount of hassle that we had to go through makes this a quite salutary tale: choose your agent and landlord carefully, and make sure that you take pictures of anything wrong with your flat, and preserve any documentation regarding the flat.

After a 2 1/2 hour meeting with the agent and landlord on Wednesday we got £50 compensation each (we were asking for £125, but it’s better than nothing), and Paz should now become a much more relaxed individual.

We’re going to spend our money on a piss-up, which should be quite good fun. Perhaps we could also spend it on creating an effigy of our letting agent, which we could burn ritualistically..