The hot oil dances on the stainless steel sink before disappearing down the dark plug hole. That definitely wont come back to bite me, which sounds like foreshadowing, but it’s not.
It really wont. It’s not my sink. It’s not my kitchen. I don’t own this house.
This is the tenant state of mind.
Not to be confused with the Tennent’s state of mind. This is brought about through prolonged exposure to golden Scottish barley and the methadone-clear waters of Loch Katrine.
No, the tenant state of mind is to be unburdened by cause and effect, and fixed rate mortgages sold to you by a broker named Gary who keeps asking why your overdraft limit is £113.80.
As a tenant, If I pour hot oil down the sink, I will not be visited upon by the ghosts of fat-burgs past, present and future.
While I may later complain that the sink doesn’t drain as fast as it used to, ultimately by the time the services of a plumber are required, I’ll be long gone. Scuffing the skirting boards of another poor sod’s second home.
The tenant state of mind has come to grip much of modern Britain. What started as a spore-based culture within poorly ventilated bathrooms, has now spread into a full throttle infection of our public spaces.
This is sometimes expressed as a breaking of the social contract, whereby in return for hard work and a percentage of your monthly earnings, you receive essential public services, and the opportunity to grow old in comfort.
The affordability of housing has deteriorated substantially since the late 1990s, with the median cost of a home in 2025 7.6 times the median total earnings of workers in England and 6.0 times in Wales.
But this goes beyond just ownership of the bricks, roof tiles, and 3-seater crushed velvet sofas that make a house a home. Forking out hundreds of thousands in deposits and mortgage payments doesn’t mean you own the land that the home sits upon. You unwashed mass.
Land studies have cited that around half of England and Wales’ so-called green and pleasant land – some 37 million acres – is concentrated in the hands of less than 1% of the population.
Stay in school, work hard, save what you can, raise a family, pay off the mortgage, retire at 67 and one day you too might live long enough to renew a one hundred-year lease to the King for the earth beneath your bungalow.
So forgive my fellow countrymen if we pour a couple jars of oil down the proverbial sink. This country has never been ours, and the Deposit Protection Scheme can’t save us.
Britain has simply become a nation of tenants in the broader philosophical sense.
Because ownership isn’t really about deeds or mortgage statements. Ownership is investment. Stewardship. The quiet understanding that one day everything you’ve worked for will still be here.
But what if you increasingly suspect it won’t?
What if your high street belongs to a pension fund in Singapore, your football club to a Saudi sovereign wealth fund, your local pub to a chain, your water company to whichever private equity vampire currently has its fangs in Yorkshire.
What exactly are you maintaining? The bins? The hanging baskets outside Halifax?
Like any tenant with six months left on the lease, eventually you stop reporting the damp and start putting furniture in front of it.
Viewed through this lens, some of modern Britain’s stranger acts begin to make a bleak sort of sense.
Smashing up your own town centre after a football match is irrational if you think of yourself as a citizen. Slightly less so if you think of yourself as an aggrieved tenant kicking a hole through the plasterboard.
Likewise our recurring habit of voting to make ourselves poorer, angrier and more isolated. Britain increasingly resembles a man furious at the condition of his flat repeatedly electing to fire the cleaner, sack the plumber and deport the electrician.
Immigration debates become especially strange here. Modern Britain relies heavily on migrant labour for healthcare, agriculture, construction, logistics and hospitality, yet periodically we respond as if Deliveroo riders and Filipino nurses have personally repossessed Surrey.
But now we get into the knottier issue of the ownership of national identity.
Cultural-capital, perhaps now the only UK export that doesn’t wind up with the obliteration of a Gazan playpark, has long-thought to be the preserve of the poor, feckless wits who continue to graze on artistic pastures like blissful cows unaware of the impending slaughter.
Led Zeppelin, Alison Hammond, J.M.W Turner, rave culture, Love Actually, pickie bits and pub gardens, Live at the Apollo, Notting Hill Carnival, and a thousand small rituals held together by rain and disappointment. Our Jerusalem.
But pause for a minute, anywhere you like. Personally I’d go with the meat aisle of your local Tesco Express. Nothing will help you dissociate more than £9.25 for beef mince.
Stand there and ask yourself: what exactly in Britain feels like yours?
The grim reality is the deepest tenant experience isn’t housing at all.
We no longer buy music; we rent Spotify. We do not own films; Netflix permits temporary supervised access and evicts the shows we love.
We’ve somehow become a nation paying subscriptions to our own culture.
The house? Rented.
The land? Owned by equity funds and people called Tarquin
The culture? Streamed.
The football club? Sold off.
The country itself? Increasingly managed by people who spend suspicious amounts of time referring to it as UK plc.
So if occasionally Britain behaves like a tenant pouring hot oil down the sink, perhaps some sympathy is due.
Because the first thing you stop repairing is a place you suspect you’ll never inherit.
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