Worst. Flatmate. Ever.

I had to live once with a man that pleaded guilty to stealing £230 from me. He spent it all on porn. The two important lessons I learned from this is that there is enough information on a Coop till receipt to buy things over the phone. And that the police can't make people homeless. Even criminal ones. So after he'd peaded guilty we had to take him back in.

The police had turned up unexpectedly to make the arrest. Twelve of them. At 1am. While me and my friend desperately sprayed air freshener to hide the smell of weed, the police barged through the thief's door and started asking questions. When they found the phone he'd used to steal the money, they marched him off. Leaving us to poke nervously around the room.

He had a pile of bin liners in the corner, propped up against a wardrobe door to push it shut against the weight of the other bin liners inside. They stank. Not just a bad smell but a presence that clung to your clothes and haunted you hours afterwards. There was a hole in one of the bags where a policeman had torn it open to see what was inside. I looked. It was used tampons. Each bin liner stuffed to a full, fat 'ready to throw out' size with soiled sanitary products. He'd lived in the house for three months with this stuff. With us. It turns out he got off using it as an aid and was trying to sell it to like-minded people. He'd collected his impressive stash through his job - cleaning at the local girls school.

It took a month to get him out. The bizarre legal twist meant we couldn't stop him living with us - even while he was awaiting trial - because it was his home too. I even recieved a verbal warning from the police after I stopped him using any part of the house besides sleeping in his room, and made him get out during the day. Turns out restricting access to where a person lives is illegal. I tried to point out that spending over two hundred pounds of someone else's money on skin mags wasn't exactly a moral grey area. “Sorry,” they said, but he'd logged a complaint and I had to give his key back. He did move out eventually after some friends came around and told him to leave or they'd burn everything he owned. He went, carrying two bin liners at a time, on the bus.