My tenancy tips for Melania
MELANIA Trump has finally moved into the White House and, for once, I feel a twinge of empathy.
It’s been hard to find points where Melania and I coincide; she is a former supermodel whose beauty regime includes eating up to seven portions of fruit or vegetables a day: I am a journalist and I can’t think of seven fruit or vegetables in a week.
But there’s something familiar about Melania’s gaze. It’s either the look of someone who has recently skipped bail, or someone who has recently moved home. Melania, I’m feeling you; you’re wondering whether you’ll lose the deposit on your last place.
I had the same problem when we handed back the keys to our student flat. Looking back, cleaning may have been our first mistake: dabbing at a coffee spill on the brown living room carpet revealed the original colour as blue, and the landlord charged us for having to steam clean the rest of the floor to make it match up again.
There was also a dartboard we’d bought after watching an episode of Bullseye. Four teenagers throwing darts displayed the same gift for skilled air-travel as Aeroflot in the 1970s. When we took it down, a dotted outline marked the wall, like the scene of the crime, so we got charged for replastering, too.
But it’s not all bad news, Melania. One of my flatmates was also a fake tan devotee and yet despite imprinting a modern Turin Shroud on the bedsheets, all that orange staining comes right out with a good biological powder.