Live in co-habiting squalor by renting the space at the foot of this man's bed

A Londoner has come up with a not-at-all depressing money-making scheme – renting out an area of his bedroom floor just about big enough for a single mattress. If you fancy a fifth or so of a bedroom on Harrington Street, near Euston, you’re in luck.

The Gumtree advert has been removed now, but helpfully pointed out that the renter wouldn’t be getting the nice double bed with an inviting rose-motifed duvet cover, and would in fact be sleeping on a (possibly inflatable) single on the floor, like he or she was living a neverending slumber party.

That space can be had for £430 a month, which is low for monthly rent in London, but high for what it is, which is living like someone who’s been thrown out by their significant other and been taken in by an initially patient friend who has run out of patience and is demanding cash.

Imagine living there. Every day you’d be the last person to leave work, taking as long as possible to walk home, dreading setting foot inside someone else’s bedroom to sleep at their feet like a loyal dog. Maybe you’d meet someone special one evening, and enjoy a fleeting moment of happiness. “Shall we go back to your house?” they’d ask, and you’d look sad, and feel sad, and run away from them, and never look back.

Your relationship with your roommate would start out quite pleasantly and as egalitarian as possible. “Let’s hope we get on!” your landlord/tormentor would guffaw at the beginning, making a big deal of how equal you were, how you were just two people sharing a space. But the hierarchy would be there, the elephant in the room, the room that wasn’t yours. You’d always be aware that you weren’t actually truly equal at all, because if you were truly equal, you’d have a bed too. But you wouldn’t. You’d live on the floor.

Harrington Street, just near Euston, is a nice place. There are posh solicitors there, things like that. But it’s hard not to think, even if you’re a posh solicitor, or you work with a posh solicitor, that maybe it would be better to live in Zone 5 and have an actual bed than lay every night at the feet of a man you pay money to.