In 1998, I lived in a horrible flatshare with an Australian woman from Brisbane who insisted that everything (TV, food, weather, you name it) was soooooo much better at home (leading to the oft-thought but seldom-expressed question: “then why don’t you simply go back there?”) and an Irish guy, who couldn’t bring himself to say the word “lesbian”.

We had absolutely nothing in common - nothing at all. It was when I first moved back to London, and I was renting a room in a flatshare in a dingy house in Putney. He never said more than four words to me, unless he’d had a drink, and then he’d rant endlessly about ‘darkies’ and ‘feckers’ and other racial slurs (ok, so ‘fecker’ isn’t strictly a racial slur, but he substituted it for just about any other noun - “Yer feckin’ post’s on that fecker by the door” he’d shout in the morning, to no-one in particular, where “fecker” means “table”) and the like, or shout at the TV while the rugby was on (”Come aaaahn you fecker!”).

In short, a horrible man. In fact, a short horrible man.

He went out one night in Soho, which was rare, because he preferred the local boozer, and when he got in, I was making a cup of tea. I asked if he’d had a nice evening.

“Yes,” he replied, “but the feckin’ bar we were at was feckin’ full of….feckin’ Libyans!”

I balked slightly. “What?” I asked, “How could you tell?”

“Oh, they were all over each other,” he replied, “feckin’ kissing and all that.”

Curious, I thought, I wasn’t aware that the people of Libya were famous for their tactile social interaction. Then he continued.

“An’ they all had feckin’ short hair,” he ranted, “it was feckin’ disgusting.”

I viewed his own cropped noggin with amusement.

“It shouldn’t be feckin’ allowed, I’m feckin’ telling you,” he continued, “feckin’ women, with other feckin’ women. In feckin’ public and everything. Feckin’ Libyans…”

And with that he pottered off to bed. I didn’t know whether to laugh or thump him. So I did neither.

But I moved out two weeks later.