My Ex-Roommate Romeo

The people the Universe brings into your life — and the start of a series of character profiles

Sevilla bedroom picture from the author.

Being a barely-surviving English teacher in Europe for most of my twenties, I’d always rent a room in a shared apartment. I changed cities in Spain every year and felt all Woody Guthrie with my guitar case and bags. I often wouldn’t even line up the accommodation before arriving.

I’d roll in with my entire life squeezed into two suitcases, have a cheap hostel booked for a few nights, and scour the internet for hours, usually taking the first thing I saw that was around two hundred euros a month.

I rented a place sight-unseen in Jaen, arrived at 9 pm, moved my stuff into a four-bedroom flat in the heart of the city, and ended up having one of the greatest years of my life with a cigarette-smoking Irishman, a tall legend from the south of England, and a Frenchman who refused to speak English and helped us Anglos practice our chunky Spanish. I’m friends with them all to this day.

I’ve obviously been on the wrong end of that and had to lose a deposit and change apartments after a few months of living with an unemployment-collecting-pot-smoking-wannabe forty-five-year-old DJ, who’d sit at home all day and berate me when I walked in the door because he’d taken the trash down three…