Let a room without going spare - Telegraph

Let a room without going spare - Telegraph

In popular folklore, it is a sticky relationship. The landlord is prickly and suspicious. The lodger is surly and resentful. It is a purely commercial arrangement with the inevitable underlying frictions. No homeowner in their right mind would take on a lodger unless they had to. It is just too risky.

Or is that too negative a prism through which to view the landlord-lodger relationship? And what about the remote possibility of a lodger who becomes a friend?

Not every landlord has to be a Rigsby, the lech immortalised by Leonard Rossiter in the classic Seventies television sitcom Rising Damp. And not every lodger has to be as vapid as Alan, the long-haired medical student who drove Rigsby to distraction.