It costs a packet to be a good landlord

"The front door's the worst bit," I explain as I open it to my prospective tenant. "And the hallway. Looks like a crack house, ha ha!" My prospective tenant surveys the op-art smears of rubber from bicycle tyres on the wall, the lifting carpet, the dangling spiderweb mausoleums. "Deters burglars, you see."

Trying to rent out a flat - the prerequisite of my moving house - is an eye-opening new experience. If you live somewhere for 10 years you become immune to how horrible it is. Then in comes an estate agent and looks at the carpet on the bathroom floor and says: "That needs to be tiled." And you say: "Why?" And then you say: "Oh. I see."

Also, oy, the cost! I spent the morning in the estate agent's office with a chequebook. "We'll just need a cheque for the Energy Performance Certificate." I wrote a cheque. "Oh yes, and one for the gas certification." I wrote, with heavy heart, another cheque. "Oh, and then there's the electri " My pen was moving before he got to " city".

The real gobsmacking came, though, when the prospective tenant said: "I'll take it." Then: "Can you be out by February 1st?" Now I'm really sunk.

* It's about time I left, though. The Brixton landmark that has been the one constant in my life here over the past decade is vanishing. Marie's - or All Nation Food And Wine, to give it its proper name - has closed after 21 years. It was a home from home; its kindly proprietress, Marie, installed behind the wine gums, watching EastEnders with a can of Kestrel at her side.

Marie's bounty included Strongbow, emergency loo roll, scouring pads, tins of Fanta from Danish multipacks, teeth-blackening wine, fags, yellowing bottles of tonic water and, for some years, an ancestral pattie preserved in its warmer like a museum exhibit. Now - though you can't really tell through the steel mesh - it is gone. I shall miss it.

* Among the consolations of losing my job before Christmas was one warming thought: I was never again going to have to listen to someone say "dat s*** gonna roll downhill", or address a colleague in a ham Baltimore accent as "McNulty" (played by Dominic West). My two closest colleagues, for an entire year, spent all night watching episodes of The Wire on DVD, and all day talking about it. Anyone who knows a Wirehead will recognise the symptoms.

When I came back and opened my post after Christmas, there was a parcel in it. A leaving present: series one of The Wire on DVD. Thanks, guys.