Desperate Housemates
We are a funny bunch, us humans. Unless you are a rare breed of DPhil student, you probably like being around people most of the time. Company is nice. Man is a social being. We love to live in groups: in mud huts and caravans, in flats and houses, colleges and halls. And yet for most, the experience of living with others is seldom without some kind of irritation. No matter how much you love your housemates, there will always be someone else’s pubes in the soap. Friends become enemies.
New housemates want to throttle one another. Underwear goes missing. Cookies go astray. Housemates from all over the city jumped at the chance to rant about how and why they live with the people they do in the most intimate of household spaces. From luxuriant flats in Jericho to cruddy toilet holes in Cowley, every house has a story. Every glowing midnight window a tale to tell.
Ever wandered through the shady lanes of Oxford’s more affluent neighbourhoods and thought, “I wonder what goes on in that nice house?” Well, picture this: it is 4am on Monday of third week, and in a leafy enclave of north Oxford the ideal student house lays dormant. Its vine-entangled façade slumbers in the early morning twilight, and its plush, well-furnished interiors hum with the silence of warm, comforting sleep.
A young Medieval Literature student dreams of princesses, knights, and Heath Ledger. All is seemingly well. This is domestic bliss. Suddenly, like a fat man through a coffee table, the young student’s dreams are wrought from her brain by the splintering sound of an alarm clock going off in the next room, over and over and over again. Who else could it be but The Rower.
The Rower wakes up noisily with the dawn chorus and leaves a light, dewy sprinkling on the toilet seat every morning without fail. He smears breadcrumbs in the butter. He will come home very late, very drunk, and wake up Medieval Literature Student before her dreams of Albion have even had the chance to begin. She wishes a horrible death of boiling oil, burning stakes and hot pokers upon him. She is a Desperate Housemate and she can stand no more.
In a leafy enclave of north Oxford, Medieval Literature Student reaches for the extra hot cayenne pepper on the spice rack, and in the moments before The Rower rambunctiously awakes, sprinkles the entirety of the interior of his all-in-one with glee.
Surely not in prim and prissy North Oxford, I hear you chuckle! I am afraid so. Even Oxford’s own home to the rich and famous — Thom Yorke, Richard Dawkins, and the Vice Chancellor among them — is populated with housemates who live in the constant hope that those around them will cease to do so. Medieval Literature Student’s tale is a common one of injury and revenge.
It would seem that expensive fittings and luxury mod cons — even the sublimating glow of a flatscreen home cinema — are no barrier against the potentially life-threatening danger of living with someone who constantly gets on your tits. Hey, if it can happen to Chandler, Joey and the gang, it can happen to anyone. Students, perhaps more than anyone else, are beleaguered by the experience of being thrown together with people with whom they simply just do not seem to get along.
On a lot of occasions misunderstandings may be culturally rooted. After all, a house can be a very different thing depending on where you are from. For gypsy travellers in Britain, for example, it would be a matter of disgust to consider that sewage pipes run alongside fresh water — and through the kitchen of all places.
Social anthropologists have, however, yet to find a group of people predicated on the stealing of lacy underwear, as was the cultural misunderstanding for one poor young social scientist on Iffley Road recently. Expert social anthropologist K Kingsbury was happy in her shared house in East Oxford until her taste in luxuriant netherwear began to get the better of her housemates.
She was shocked when she realised that more than thirty of her incredibly expensive lacy undergarments had gone missing from her room while she was out dutifully studying. Miss Kingsbury lamented to us that, “this was, like, really sexy lacy lingerie that I could never replace because it was bought for me by a rich ex-boyfriend, and I could never afford to buy it again.Worst of all, the thief only stole the panties, meaning I have a pile of lonely bras that I can never wear because they are missing their other halves. My life has not been the same since."
The steely-eyed anthropologist has yet to discover whether her male flatmate was stealing her (both clean and laundered) underwear for pleasure, or her female flatmate was simply jealous, or vice versa. The tangled webs spun by embittered flatmates, like mismatched thongs in a tumble drier, are seldom easy to unravel. But hey, let us not put all the blame on the weird people that we live with. After all, variety is indeed the spice of life.
As one Cowley-dwelling student reminded us, it is important to remember that we are all a little weird once in a while. Just how weird depends on where you are standing, and whether or not it was your CD collection that got puked on when your flatmates were having a party. While living in the swampy surrounds of a cell-like flat off the Cowley Road, the student in question awoke to find himself uncomfortably reclined, naked in his own sick.
With a sudden, thundering guilt rushing through his body, he wondered what torments his all-female flatmates may have had to endure to get him safely into bed without smearing themselves in the same yucky goo that now stuck in his beard. These thoughts were, however, overcome by the sudden tugging from his bladder: it was now time to relieve the 1500 pints of beer sitting patiently in his body.
Our friend made a beeline for the toilet, but, in true Cowley style, was stopped when the doorknob to his bedroom came off in his hand. With only moments to spare before dousing himself once again in bodily fluids, two handy pint glasses presented the only option. With a sigh, he told us, he passed water and was almost human once more. Our friend casually jimmied the lock of his room, and walked downstairs to empty his vassals into the toilet.
It was only when he got to the hallway that he heard the muffled voices of his flatmate’s parents coming toward the living room door. In a mad panic, he rushed into the living room and crouched behind the sofa, naked and white like Gollum on a sick day, his manhood dangling apologetically, holding up two pints of piss like offerings to some obscene early morning hangover god.
When the living room door creaked open, surprisingly neither the flatmate, nor her elderly, Waspish parents, were in the least bit amused by the sight. So, it is important to have an open mind. You never know when the early morning alarm clock, the pubeinfused soap bar, the stealing of underwear and cookies or the offerings of pints of piss may be well-intentioned.
Whether it is that person at the end of your corridor who always leaves the used condoms at the top of their waste basket for the unfortunate scouts to remove, or the strange old lady next door who steals your rubbish, it is always good to put the shoe on the other foot. After all, you never know who might be living next door to you.
11th May 2006