Back when the bedsit was the height of sophistication

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Like war stories, we all have our bedsit tales from back in the day – life in pokey holes that you’d have imagined were too small to be freezing and yet, in the absence of insulation, still managed to be colder than the proverbial well-digger’s ass.

They were the tenements of the 1970s and 1980s generation before the Government insisted on a minimum size for rental accommodation – signalling the end of the dank room that doubled as a student’s one-stop shop.

And for the benefit of the apartment generation, the bedsit was a space that had a bed and a bit of a kitchen, with shared access to a manky toilet down a corridor or, worse still, down several flights of stairs.

Sometimes there was furniture – as in, a couch or a tiny kitchen table – but for the most part these sort of luxuries were really just impediments to stop you from getting from the sink to your bed before the light went out.

I remember one place where the room was divided by a large wooden partition – part wardrobe, part storage space – which allowed you to push up the bed into it in the day-time before unleashing it to fill the entire room at night.

There was no real point to this illusion of space because when the bed was tucked into the wooden wall, there was no furniture on the floor – there couldn’t be or you’d have had to move in out onto the street when the bed came crashing down at night.

On the other side of this wooden partition lay a small sink, a cooker and a fridge. The cooker was a symbolic nod towards domesticity because I’ve no recollection of it ever being required for more onerous duties than making toast and frying sausages.

The fridge was handy for keeping things cold, but this was a different era when students went out for pints instead of bringing back trays of Polish beer to drink before going out in the first place – so we didn’t really require cooling facilities either.

Anyway, if you just left beer or food in the middle of the room, most of these bedsits came with built-in chilling amenities for free; the only danger was that the liquid would be actually frozen solid from the draught coming through the cracked, single-pane window.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.