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I ask my new housemate if she is alright with me sorting out the living room- watering the dusty plants and un-obscuring the (actual working!) fireplace by moving a sofa. She tells me she is exasperated with the room, they have done as much as they can but it still doesn’t quite work. I ask what they have tried. It turns out they have cut an abstract wave out of silver cardboard and stuck it to the wall. Half has fallen off. The room is deemed obsolete.
I am thirty. I have never lived in my own home (disclaimer: this is one helluva privileged article). And I am so over sharing. I am over shared bathrooms- unknown pubic hair in my soap. I am over dirty oven tops and being the one who always empties the dishwasher and the unrelenting dirt and dust of strangers who will never quite become friends. I am done with houses that fight against your desire to turn them into homes.
There have been so many. So many beds and housemates and strange walls personalised by the same postcards. I have lived with Picasso’s Child with Dove for many years longer than any boyfriend.
I have lived in homes who’s quirks I have fallen in love with. Whose quirks have broken my heart when when the landlord has decided it’s time for me to go. I have made a garden- twice- only for it to be built over.
I still think of my tulip bulbs- under a foot of concrete in Oxford. I hope they lie dormant for a century. I hope they break through that foundation and bloom bright crimson long after I lie dead.
In my first house- leased in a burst pipe freeze of a Glasgow winter, neither the shower nor lights work in the bathroom. I write in my diary the romanticism of washing by candle light. Trying to convince myself of that this experience will be a memory well cherished. Someone has painstakingly painted the ceiling skirting with silver paint. I wear my pyjamas under my clothes when I get up for lectures, and write my essays in gloves- the ice forming on the inside of the enormous tenement windows. Another Glaswegian room is bright yellow, with a carpet of Autumn leaves. Yellow is the colour of daffodils, and the most frequent colour of room to commit suicide in.
I have got high in multiple rooms only to have to live within the same four walls of grating embarrassment. I have had one night stands, breakups, fall outs, falling in loves and friendships in innumerable different houses. I have slept in more beds than I care to remember. You can follow my own brand of bodged DIY all over Europe.
Once I lived in a room in which I could hear the snoring of my housemate so loudly and vibratingly- as if he were asleep right next to me- that in the first month of sleepless nights I thought I would have to move out. But much later, in the times he worked nights, I couldn’t sleep for the silence. One of my current housemates only eats reduced Tesco french baguette and porridge oats mixed with Cadbury’s Cocoa powder. The snorer used to buy microwavable American hamburgers- the raised white buns in a separate plastic compartment to the pinked meat circle, neighbour to limp plastic encased cheese slice.
What people we meet, in our in our long-term rental lives! How our contemporary circumstances have given us the opportunity to mingle, (seemingly forever) with those we might assume we cannot stand, but find, perhaps surprisingly, we are able to tolerate! Thank you, rising house prices, diminishing incomes, north south divide!
So far, I have £440 in my Help to Buy ISA.
