WordSmith: The phenomenon of phrogging
Have you ever heard of phrogging? Gerard Smith explains more in this week's WordSmith column...
I did a pre-recorded interview for a Cavan based podcast that’s due for launch early next year. It was recorded while we walked the wonderful woodlands around the Farnham Estate. It was a beautiful autumnal morning and I found myself talking about my London life in an open, confessionally cathartic way.
Our chat brought to mind two experiences, which bookend my decades in London. I’m sharing them in this column, because they exemplify the narrative of my life in the big smoke.
Experience 1: After graduation from NCAD I arrived in London with my degree show portfolio, and a big bag of ambition. I headed to a grimy hostel I’d stayed in during a college trip.
Being of no fixed abode, I gave my sister’s number in Manchester for contact after interviews. Feeling despondent after a week and no job offers, I phoned Maria from a payphone, she answered jubilantly, “A man phoned, he wants to offer you a job.”
The job was Junior Art Director in an advertising-agency; I started immediately. I shared an office with two men in their forties (I thought they were ancient). The agency was in a tower block by the Thames, overlooking the Houses of Parliament. It had all the glamour of a stylised movie office; in fact, it was used as setting for the film ‘How to Get Ahead In Advertising’ starring Richard E Grant. I felt like I was working in a movie, result.
I loved the job and London. The only downside was the hostel. My first Saturday I went into the office to work on ideas for an upcoming pitch, keen to make an impression with the powers that be. Come six o’clock, I readied to return to the hostel, but instead went to the boardroom. It was the epitome of corporate glamour: leather couches, huge TV, snazzy tea/coffee machine, and floor to ceiling windows that looked out over Big Ben. I thought to myself, ‘Why go back to that smelly dormitory when you can stay here?’ So I stayed the night, and the next... I secretly lived in that boardroom for three weeks; before I found a room to rent in Cricklewood.
Experience 2: Fast forward thirty years. My advertising career’s over, my bag of ambition’s shrunk to a small backpack; and my flat sale’s almost complete – Cavan is calling.
Friday evening, I returned to the flat and couldn’t find my keys. Never, ever, in all my years had I lost house keys, until then. I retraced my steps to shops and cafes, no keys found. My neighbour, who had a spare set, was away for the weekend, so I checked into a cheap flea-pit for two nights – no hardship.
It didn’t occur to me to get the locks changed, I only had a few weeks left in London. The flat is a brooding old mansion block with shadowy cellars and creaking stairways. It’s in the grounds of Kings College Hospital. It was once a Day-Surgery, and as such had two rooms up front and a long hallway that lead to rooms at the back. I lived down back, and a lodger (who’d moved out) lived up front. Neighbours lived above and below me; over time their muffled sounds became a comfort, routinely reassuring – Pablo’s morning shower: my alarm clock, Martin’s spinning washing-machine: a reminder to do my own weekly wash, the waft of Dawn’s fish curry: the cue to shut my kitchen windows.
One morning I was woken by the familiar shower sound; yet when I looked at my phone I saw it was 6am, ‘Pablo’s starting early this morning,’ I thought, turning over for another hour. Another night I woke to hear the faint sound of snoring, ‘Someone has a new lodger,’ I surmised. But in those final nights there came unfamiliar bumps and creaks that woke me. I felt unnerved in the flat, which I put down to anxiety about moving home.
Then an insightful morning arrived: I headed for the shower and saw a long black hair in it – I don’t have hair – someone was living in my flat, secretly!
The phenomena of people living secretly in properties is rare but real, it’s a movement that has a name and is on the rise: phrogging, a first cousin of squatting.
I did discover who my secret lodger was (that’s another story). I had the locks changed and returned home to Ireland.
Thus, I started my London life as a phrogger, and finished it being phrogged – that’s phrogging for you.
YOU MIGHT ALSO ENJOY