We’d booked a week in a London apartment, or more accurately a flat, though VRBO. It’s much the same as Airbnb, where people loan out a room, or a whole flat, when it isn’t just a rental property. I think VRBO’s claim is that you always have your own front door.

London is a big place, and there are literally thousands of homes to rent for a week here and week there, so where do you start? Obviously, the closer in to the centre of London then the more expensive they get, and the same applies to the A4/M4 corridor to the airport. But public transit in London is among the best in the world, it’s integrated, plentiful and it’s really quite inexpensive, so staying out a little way is actually quite a good idea.

When the good Mrs. Mayne suggested Hackney Downs as a location, I immediately thought that it would be an ideal base, especially as I’d commuted through that area, albeit many years ago now. Overground trains were available from two very close-by stations, and there are more buses than you can ever use, and yet this all came without central London prices, so a good base it proved to be.

The flat we ended up renting overlooked the large public park known as Hackney Downs, even though it was more accurately Lower Clapton. We had the entire the ground floor of a four or five storey terraced Victorian house. I say four or five floors because there was space in the roof, with large Dormer windows, so I don’t know how many flats the house had been divided into. Including the basement, up to five, but it may only have been three.

The main front door opened on to two more doors, one being the access to our flat, and the other to those above us. The hallway of the flat was long and narrow, and the two bedrooms came off it. On the left, and literally under the stairs (wake up Harry Potter!) was the world’s narrowest bathroom, although it did have a good sized shower, two sinks and toilet. Woe betide you if you wanted to turn around in there though!

That hallway then opened out into a broad, glass-ended room that looked over the garden, and a good sized kitchen to the rear of that. It was actually a fabulous room, marred only by there being far too much furniture, and what furniture there was being covered in all manner of interesting things, from candlesticks, to birds’ eggs, to pottery. The flat also came with a cat, a cat called Violet, who was very small but very noisy.

The slightly unusual thing about this flat was that it was genuinely someone else’s home, not a holiday rental. There was so much stuff everywhere, not strewn you about, you understand, but strategically, and probably artfully, placed. It made the flat seem terribly cluttered. Along with the eclectic furniture came the eclectic art, most of it created by the owner himself. Some of it was better than others, and some was a little on the homo-erotic side, although it wasn’t that causing the issue, it was simply the quantity of it. Goodness knows who cleans the place, and it was clean, but it must be so fiddly to do.

Mind you, apart from somewhere to hang clothes, we lacked for nothing. Never have I seen so many teaspoons and tea mugs in a single place, and there was all sorts of little things that you might (or might not) need, from curry powder to tea bags, lying around the place. We had no intention of cooking, but if we had we could have turned out quite a meal. On a slight tangent, the owner also left some visitor parking passes, which would have proved handy had we not taken the car back. But as I said before, there was no need of a car.

We had sole use of the garden, but it being November and very wet, we just looked at it from behind the glass. There was a kind of summer house at the bottom of the garden that could be used as a guest bedroom, and a toolshed with not only a washer and a dryer, but two trees growing through the roof. There was also an outside shower, a good ‘un, too, but the time of year wasn’t working for us.

The main bed in the flat was enormous and very comfortable. The room itself had a great view across the park, but for some reason I couldn’t fathom, people loved to stand outside on the sidewalk and talk. The first Sunday we were there, there was a person (I’ve chosen that word carefully), doing what looked like drug deals from the garden wall, and this was from about 7am until well into the morning. Then there were two people chatting at 2:45am, which was nice, six feet from the window. Hey ho, it was all good fun, though.

The thing was, though, that we didn’t spend a lot of time there. It was nice to walk in the park on the way to the bus stop or station, but visitors to London rarely want to stay holed up in Lower Clapton, regardless of the accommodation. Would we stay there again? Maybe, but as I said at the top, you really have a lot of choice, so perhaps we’d try somewhere else next time.