Just when I thought the situation with my house couldn't get any worse, it got bleaker...then blacker...and then ended up in a massive crescendo of pure hideousness last night. It got to the point where I thought that if I died and went to hell then at least I would have gone to a better place.

I can't quite convey in words just what a psycho nutjob my landlady is (although Gaz now refers to her as 'that fucking bi-polar cunt whore'). She was due to come round yesterday (for the fourth time in four days...we havent wanted her here on any of these days) to meet Ben for a final time before he left and to tell him she'd be taking shitloads of his deposit.

Unfortunately Jenn and I were slightly more concerned by the fact that our house had no heating or hot water (on a day when the tabloids were running stories like 'MINUS 10 DEGREES TEMPERATURE - BRITAIN'S WEATHER IS EPIC FAIL' or something like that). We could see our own breath in the living room so something needed to be done as a matter of urgency.

Jenn rang just to inform her of the situation, but ten minutes later we decided it really was an emergency, so I also phoned her to find out what could be done. She shouted at me (for a second time that day, the first being when she rang me at work and was hugely aggressive due to the fact that I didn't instantly agree to the cleaning costs she'd totted up. I didn't disagree, I just said I would like to discuss it when we were all togther in the evening).

So, she came round about the heating and began shouting her head off in the manner of an angry gibbon about how she was being treated like a servant and informed us we would be henceforth be 'facing her wrath' (if she and her 'wrath' dropped down dead suddenly I can't say I would be upset), and once Ben arrived ordered us to strip our beds (again) while her husband went around taking photos of everything. She may as well have demanded we take all our clothes off and handed them over for inspection because by the time she left at TEN THIRTY PM last night I felt every ounce of privacy we'd had in this lovely home was gone. We'd been violated, harassed and terrified. The only plus side was that her husband managed to tinker with our boiler to get our heating on again.

Ben didn't deal with the situation too badly, although there were still a lot of highly tense moments. She's making him pay for a lot of what I would call 'wear and tear' damage, which he really shouldn't be. There was one amusing moment in the course of the evening though, when she and Ben were arguing over an insignificant hole in one of the sofas. The landlady was insisting someone had put their foot through it, but Ben was adamant nothing of the sort had happened, so what she wrote on the inventory (and orated for us to hear) was, 'Hole at far right back of sofa, foot-sized in nature.'

I confronted her over coming in over Christmas and using a lot of my washing tablets and fabric conditioner and she admitted it in front of the three off us, then began bellowing about how I was petty (!) to have raised it. I'm thinking it didn't occur to her that I don't really give that much of a flying fuck about the washing tablets per se, but the fact that she came in the house and THIEVED my freaking belongings.

At this point I began enjoying fantasies of gripping hold of her head and ripping out large chunks of her ridiculously glitter-sprayed hair.

We just have to keep her sweet (which also means she will be coming in again and again, such as this weekend, because she wants to 'clean the house'. If we say no she'll get aggressive and demand we pay for it to be done professionally). I really don't know what I can do, but as soon as we're out and have our deposits back we're going to take some kind of legal action. Ben will probably need to take her to a small claims court to get his deposit back, but all I really want is for her to never be able to treat future tenants like this ever again.

I had been feeling sad over the fact my beautiful new home is not going to be my beautiful new home for much longer, but boy is it not worth that kind of treatment. I have never been shouted in such a way before. I wish I could say I was exaggerating what I'm writing but you really have to see her to believe it. (Ben even took her husband aside to enquire if she 'was ok'. He's delusional and just thinks she's stressed.)

Phew!

Where I will be living in a month's time is presently a mystery but I feel oddly ok. Jenn and I are house-hunting together.

On a completely different and far more positive note, I had a 2 o'clock start in court today, so went down the gym this morning due to waking fairly early. I ran my first ever 10 kilometres! (And then went to work and wanted to sleep as I was suffering from physical exhaustion). Running 10 k was pretty much the only goal I'd set for myself for 2009 and seven days into the year and I've already done it (to be fair I had a lot of anger that needed converting into some other form of energy). Need new goals...hmm, perhaps renting somewhere not owned by someone with severe psychological problems would be a start.

I'm determined to one day look back at this and laugh.

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