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A messy student lounge in Dunedin. - Source: Supplied -
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I'm no stranger to squalor. I've done my time as a student in Dunedin, after all.
I once lived in a flat so appalling that my father would stand on the front porch and yell into the hallway rather than dare to enter the premises.
The floor was uneven - non-existent in places. My room was so small that it would've provided greater floor space had it been tipped on its side; the walls were lavishly decorated with mould.
The shower pressure might have been generously described as a trickle; the kitchen so cold that we'd put meat out to defrost in the morning and return in the evening to find it frozen solid. Good thing we had Sky.
My experience was by no means the worst. We had friends up the road who enlisted the services of a rabbit to deal with their litter problem; only to find themselves with an unwanted excrement problem.
There's also the dubious tale of the flat that came down with a dose of scurvy after living off nothing but beer and chips for six months.
So after six years of flatting in Dunedin, I jumped at the chance to inspect the Otago Students' Association's official Worst Flat of 2011. I was prepared for anything.
But nothing could have prepared me for this.
The moment 49 Brown Street's current tenants - Natalie and Britney - answer the door dressed as a pirate and a Tongan rugby's biggest fan respectively, I knew I was in for an experience.
I'll spare you the sordid details, but suffice it to say Natalie and Britney are at loggerheads with their landlord. They say they're not up to date with their rent, and claim their landlords are dragging their heels over major repairs - and it's snowballed from there.
"It was fine at the start of the year, until..." Britney says, before trailing off and breaking into a rueful-cum-mischievous smile. I feel like finishing her sentence with "until the whole thing degenerated into the post-toga party scenes in Animal House?"
It's certainly not my place to pass judgement on how others live, so at this point I'll merely point some of the sights I beheld during a guided tour of house and surrounds:
A box of congealed KFC on the hallway banister, clothes strewn knee-high across a ground-floor bedroom, dishes stacked impossibly high on every kitchen surface, mould-covered mince in a bowl on the stove; a lawnmower stranded in grass a foot high, planks of wood nailed over the fire exit (it's later revealed that the wooden fire exit stairs on the other side of the door have collapsed), pots and pans lying in the back garden where they've been thrown, broken glass on the back path, a mat of hair on the bathroom floor, fire burns in the carpet, a wooden pillar holding up one corner of the house, the kitchen floor sloping alarmingly towards the window. I could go on.
What makes this all the more upsetting is that this is the famous "Scarfie House"; the setting for Robert Sarkies' 1999 cult film "Scarfies" which quickly become an integral part of New Zealand's cinematic canon.
The impressive corrugated-iron spires that give the house its distinctive outline remain intact, but they're rusted and their wooden supports are decomposing, creating the feel of a German expressionist nightmare.
Britney finds me standing in the kitchen with a look of stunned disbelief on my face. "It's got a good fridge", she says proudly.
Natalie and Britney shrug off all the squalor with a laissez-faire attitude that's both endearing and slightly worrying.
"The inside is probably our fault, well, definitely our fault", concedes Natalie.
There seems no use in cleaning it all up now; such would be the enormity of the task at hand. Perhaps the best outcome for all would be if the grand old house comes down.
They're not the worst tenants in Dunedin. Not by a long shot. That award has gone to some Leith Street lads who, until a few days ago, lived in the company of mountains of crushed beer cans. And a pig.
They've had to clean up their act since receiving a rark-up from their landlord, but by the look of old Chompers (the pig), he's not going anywhere fast.
OUSA welfare officer Shonelle Eastwood is bemused.
"Students seem to think it's a rite of passage to live in disgusting flats", she says, "but simply flatting is a rite of passage in itself".
"The advice we give students is not to rush into anything. And if they are having trouble with their landlords, we're here to help."
On the one hand, the experience has left me relieved that the traumatic scenes I've witnessed today were never part of my daily student routine.
On the other hand, I'm secretly disappointed that I will no longer be able brag to my children with any authority about the squalid conditions I once lived in.
I thought I had good stories. Turns I had nothing on these guys.
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