Escape From The A-Bomb House

Ten years ago today, I moved into the abode that I'd eventually come to know and ever after refer to as "the A-Bomb House". That first wet September day, handed a set of front door keys by the not-entirely-friendly Scottish landlord, it seemed like I'd landed on my feet; living in a grand old three-storey Victorian terraced house on the Scotforth Road, whose position in relation to the rest of Lancaster afforded fantastic views across Morecambe Bay to the snowy peaks of the Lake District from the upper floors. Although it had a tendency to get draughty when the wind blew (i.e. all the fucking time), and came equipped with central heating that seemed to possess some kind of malevolent artificial intelligence on a par with the blinking red eye of HAL, for a couple of weeks I was chuffed to call the place my home.

And then my housemates moved in. One of them - Rich - was already a friend of mine, and swiftly came to be the only other pillar of sanity in the A-Bomb House for the long year that we spent there. Which was quite lucky, because the other three - a trio of French blokes who I'll refer to as H, J, and C - had, for all intents and purposes, lost any sense of normal human behaviour they'd ever had somewhere over the English Channel.

It wasn't just that the French guys were permanently-stoned bill-dodging maniacs hell-bent on stealing anything they could lay their hands on (though admittedly, that was a large part of the problem). It was also that every decision they ever made, no matter how harmless, seemed to result in the further destruction of some part of the house, which grew more and more dilapidated as the year dragged on. Take the time H decided that using staircases was for tedious English people, and instead tried to make his way from the top floor of the house to the ground without his feet touching the floor - an escapade which resulted in him crashing bodily through the pane of glass in the kitchen door. Or that time when J was bored, so decided to smash a hole through his bedroom wall into H's room with a chair. Then there was the time they provoked our next-door neighbours with loud techno music in the middle of the night to the extent that the neighbours tried to kick the front door in, leaving it looking like Jack Nicholson had gone full-on "Here's Johnny" on the doorstep.

Add these moments of domestic bliss to the existing problems that became increasingly apparent within our humble abode - exploding lightbulbs, slugs in the shower (including one we decided to name "Brian" and keep as a pet), numerous faulty electrical appliances and a basement that looked like the hiding place of an escaped child killer - plus a few visits from the police when the French guys stole things that they couldn't really get away with (a vintage bottle of whisky from a pub, a crate of food and beer from a hotel, a load of computer equipment from an office) and you can perhaps see how stressful things got at times in the A-Bomb House. But as with any place, there were good times too. H, J and C could be a great laugh when they weren't tearing the place down around our ears, and even Rich and myself managed to unwind between the outbreaks of mayhem; in this photograph from Halloween 2003, we're all set for a fancy dress party, with Rich on the left Clockwork Oranged up, and myself on the right - still in the fervour of Stop The War Coalition righteousness - dressed as a UN Weapons Inspector. (I even had a little prompt card to present to other party-goers, asking if they'd seen any weapons of mass destruction. In 2003, this was as subtle as my political statements got).

In summer 2004, a month after the French guys finally did a runner and left us to take the blame for the Hiroshima-esque state of the house, me and Rich did a moonlight flit of our own to escape the landlord's wrath. Though I walked past the place countless times in the years that followed, I never again set foot inside after posting my keys through the locked front door and taking off down the road with my worldly possessions. More stuff happened in the A-Bomb House, both good and bad, than I can really remember; it remains one of those periods of my life that's great to look back on from a comfortable distance, but all the same, I think I'd rather remove my own testicles with a toothpick than go back and live through it again.

All the same, I'll raise a pint to the old madhouse this evening, and to whatever poor bastard's interned in her now. May they escape with as much experience as I did.