I have decided that Leamington Spa is Warwickshire’s own cursed city, the Babylon of the Midlands. Those of you familiar with the Bible (King James, Good News or Rainbow’s illustrated) will be aware that there is a particular passage in which God promises not to try and actively destroy mankind. Go and look it up, it involved rainbows. If you have lived in Leamington, you will have had a biblical experience to finally prove that this was in fact complete bollocks. June 2007 saw me fishing out my exam notes from my own personal Noah’s Flood. One minute I was swinging about on my chair reading a book, the next I was ankle-deep in water. This had an annoying cinematic quality to it, which meant when I ran screaming upstairs, no one was inclined to believe I was being serious.
My room was pond-like at the best of times. I lived in a basement, which offered me the dual pleasures of eternal darkness and the extensive scenery offered by…a brick wall. Interesting green spores seemed to grow and shrink on my walls, leaving the odd splotchy pattern here and there. Fun as these were, I developed a kind of death rattle whenever there was an impending rainstorm.
Being a strident atheist and therefore needing someone more earthly to take the blame, I felt that my landlord, in this case was God. God, in this case, is a multi-millionaire with a monopoly over the properties of Leamington. Not only was his beard inescapable evidence, but it was always his emissaries and never the man himself who checked out the damage. This is the man who is everywhere and yet nowhere in Leamington at once, particularly when the toilet had sprung a midnight leak. I’d always had aspirations as a child to live in a house with an indoor swimming pool, though said aspirations didn’t involve me actually living in the pool.
With my second year exams due to begin the next day, I began to panic. I stood ankle-deep in water and watched my notes drift by with much the same horror that you’d watch an incautious squirrel drown. It was one of the better dog-ate-my-homework stories I could present to my tutors. The next day, our local and entirely useless estate agent dropped by. I opened the door to a trim, portly gentleman wearing the kind of pratty suede shoes which would inspire a feeling of bilious hatred in any feeling human soul. He had a comb-over and carried a man-bag. Purposely, I allowed him to lead the way to my room and watched with spiteful amusement as he soaked a pristine shoe in four inches of stagnant water. He swore a lot.
God sent his ministering angels after I kipped on the sofa to aquavac the remnants of the flood. Quite pikey angels from Leicester, who stole my rug and didn’t appear to comprehend that painting over the mould wasn’t actually akin to getting rid of it. By midnight, I was wallowing in a quagmire of theological housing despair. Much as I’d like to pretend that Leamington is a pit of sin being purged by a hail of terrors, it isn’t. It’s just full of students, locals and a bearded lady with an obsession with 50ps.
Following the stars across south Leamington in search of a bed for the night and bent under the weight of my worldly possessions, I pondered. Maybe God was trying to tell me something about the wider world. Is Leamington just a microcosmic version of the property ladder? I find myself beleaguered by rivers of sewage, locust-like landlords, a hail of useless agents and naturally, a plague of mice. I can’t claim that God killed my first-born, but that’s probably only because I don’t have one. Now I know how Job felt.
I have decided that Leamington Spa is Warwickshire’s own cursed city, the 
