We’ve been in the flat in Glasgow for about ten months now, and Ash’s tolerance of some of its interior “decoration” has finally cracked. Some grouting around the shower—that’s the shower in the bathroom with sky blue walls, dark blue ceiling and pale blue wood-grain laminate flooring from some alien tree—had of late started to crack worryingly, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone by redoing the tiling and repainting the rest of the walls.

On Saturday then, my parents came across to help us get started. The tiles were built out from the wall a little, with a dado rail-sort of cap to them, and ran all the way around the bathroom. Ash and I had always wondered why the previous owner had gone so tile-crazy, so it was with a fair bit of trepidation that I watched my Dad chip away at the first few tiles. I don’t really know what I had expected us to find hidden underneath—some scraper-resistant psychedelic wallpaper perhaps, or maybe a bit of water damage.

I could have dealt with either of those. Frankly, I could have dealt with a walled-up corpse if it came to it.

Unfortunately, what we actually found was a portal to a dimension of ultimate horror:

Cthulhu fhtagn

Cthuluhu fhtagn

The first few tiles beside the bath fell away from a plywood sheet damp with rot and black with mould. More prying revealed that the plywood had been screwed directly onto some tongue-and-groove panelling from around about the turn of the last century, with the dado rail nailed on top to conceal what lay beneath. We collectively reeled at the fungous horror spread across the wall.

We attacked the wall across from the bath next. It turns out that the fin de siècle panelling went all the way around the room, and that the matching tiles on every wall were not just the result of a questionable aesthetic decision on the part of the previous owner. Her methodology: hide that nasty, quaint old wood behind a hectare of indestructible ceramic blueness and hope that the suckers viewing the flat* don’t ask too many questions. The joiner who perpetrated this evil—and you have to give him credit for thoroughness—had obtained the largest single piece of plywood he could find, almost the full length of the room, and screwed it into the panelling behind at roughly 8″ intervals in a grid pattern. I’ve seen less robust anvils.

After hacking away at the tiles for hours, bloodying our knuckles trying to divine the location of the next screw, we eventually bought a nail detector from Homebase and marked the n remaining targets with big black crosses. Charlie picked me up at 6pm to head through to Edinburgh for a gig, and I left a disconsolate Ash staring at the destruction.

She called me that night just before the gig: “I’ve got that big bit of wood off,” she said. “I just battered away with the claw hammer to get to each screw.”

I almost wept with joy. My girlfriend is awesome.

* Guess who?