Day 1 - they have arrived

So, they have arrived. I heard people moving around at about 3 o'clock this morning. I had made up a bed for myself on a camping mattress on the floor of the boys' room and put my earplugs at the ready, so that I could close the door and try and get a reasonable nights' sleep in the knowledge that I would be getting up with the boys when they woke at about half past six.

I am writing this in the sun in the park. I had to get Babe to his music class for 9 so I brought my laptop with me. As we left I heard OBrother (the other is DBrother) ask how much it is. Other Half told him that it's £5. Actually it's £6.60. 'Per month?' the brother asked. Sweet Jesus. Was he in a dreamworld when he visited last Christmas and watched us shopping and taking him out all over the place? The bus into town is £3.90.

Anyway, when they did wake, the boys ran downstairs to watch telly only to find OBrother on the sofa. This is the brother who had sworn 'never to cross my threshold' after an argument we had in Albania earlier this year. I had tried to explain why his belief that he would earn more than Other Half does on a building site because he is 'a good tiler and works for a high daily rate' was not realistic since he does not speak English, and ended up losing my temper and calling him a bloody idiot. So perhaps he is making a point by not accepting the place next to his brother in our king-size bed in the main bedroom as he has said he will be renting a place of his own. I hope the reason he is on the sofa is not because he does not want to share a bed with his brother because, having given over the main bedroom to them, I have no intention of turning my sitting room into a bedroom as well.

Through all these hellish months of arguing about whether they would, should or could come or not, Other Half has made two claims:

1 It will not impact on me so what do I have to complain about? (Clearly untrue but more about that later.)

2 They (well, 'He' actually - another brother was only added to the list of arrivals just a week or two ago) will not live with us because Other Half will find him/them a room.

A few weeks ago, despite my continual assertion that this will not work (I'll give my reasons for that later, too) it became clear that they were indeed coming. And last week it became clear that the bloke OH knows from the gym who works for a lettings agent was not going to come good in terms of his promise to find them a room round here, so I swung into action.

Several things became immediately obvious:

1 Rooms in a shared house are not usually let to people in pairs unless they are intimate with one another

2 Two Greek brothers in their late forties/fifties who do not speak English and who want to share a room are not what people who are advertising for 'young professional wanted to join sociable shabby-chic household' are looking for

3 You don't get even a room for less than £300 a month; that's the going rate for one person (around £75 per person per week) and without references or the possibility of a credit check you can be asked to pay as much as six months up front.

Gumtree was clearly not the right place to start my search. So I started looking for numbers on the back of corner shop doors etc, and thanks to a sharp-eyed friend I encountered 'Khan'. He speaks little English but we managed to establish the fact that he has a room in a shared house that he is prepared to let two brothers share - on the understanding that they are working (I glossed over this a bit) - for £300 per month. This is 371 Euros, and about what a two-bed flat would cost in one of the cheaper areas of Athens. And more, incidentally, than we have in the bank at the moment. Make no mistake, we are not surviving on what OH earns but have decided to borrow, wing it etc etc until Babe2 starts school in September if we can. This could take me back to the list of angry reasons I have for objecting to them coming, but as I said, I'll come to that later.

So I went to see the room. After waiting outside the wrong house for a while first because Khan had got his numbers muddled up. Bloody hell. It's a long time since I did this, but shared houses can be pretty grim, can't they? And I do realise there are far worse dives than the one I went to look around. I've seen the news reports on bucket-loads of immigrants living in garages across swathes of suburban London. And let's not get onto what millions of others in the developing world have to put up with.

So, it was a large upstairs double bay. Some peeling wallpaper. Not especially clean but not smelly. Furnished 'adequately' I suppose. Clean enough very small bathroom. Large shared kitchen/diner with a huge box of over-ripe pineapples on the not-wiped table. In significant need of a deep-clean. The whole downstairs stank of curry. The other rooms (only one of which is let, to a 'good' single male) were all padlocked. The carpet throughout was awful. What a dilemma! Khan explained that he was tired of people. He slapped his head a lot while saying this. He wants good, clean, honest people. He can see that I am a nice clean lady so he will let the brothers live in the room. He said he had a cousin living in it for three days but that he would paint it by Friday. I didn't try and ask how he would paint it, if he had someone living in it. 

I was glad to leave, and said I'd call him back. What to do? It wasn't awful but it wasn't where I would want to live. It is as cheap as we're going to find and I know the brothers will consider it very expensive. I have already decided that I will offer to pay the deposit and can use our overdraft to do this. I suspect that they will see it and decide they don't like it. I have a hunch they don't want to share a bed. I would be letting them take it knowing in my heart that I don't believe they are going to find work. But the alternative means having another two men in my house for whom I will have to cater, after whom I will have to clean and tidy - don't suggest ground rules, because that is not a word familiar to Greek hospitality and they are men who are used to having women running around after them - while I sleep on the floor and lose my main bedroom and sitting room to their continual and (I believe) inevitably increasingly depressed presence. Could I let them stay for a fixed period of time, you ask? This would involve apply conditions to their presence that Other Half would not countenance because it runs at odds with the aforementioned and unstated rules around hospitality that exist in his culture. Hard to explain how or why, but simply put, it is just not a conversation I would be allowed to have. And even as I put that in writing I wonder when did I, an intelligent, educated and reasonably kind person, find myself living in a situation where some conversations just can't be had? 

Today the sun is shining and I hope that we will go and see the room, make an amicable decision, and then spend some time in the park. We can't go anywhere else because we don't all fit in the car. The forecast for tomorrow and most of next week is heavy rain and that will have an impact all of its' own. OH will be at work. Babe needs school shoes and has wide feet so we are going to have to visit Clarks somewhere tomorrow and I don't really want to go in convoy. More soon!