The joys of flatsharing

Damp courses. Mmmmm, everyone loves a new year damp course story don’t they? All full of the joys of spring and the potential for …. ok, maybe not. However this rather underwhelming yet essential procedure (is that even the right word? DIY aint my strong point) has brought to the fore something about which I have been ruminating over recent days… that of flatmates. Quite the jump I know, but bear with me.

Sorry, but the cleaning rota says
it's YOUR turn to do the bathroom 

You may have gathered from previous posts that I am now a Grown Up. With capital letters and everything. I say this as one of the traditional signs of maturity that I always supposed as a debt heavy, worry free, flat sharing twenty something, was possessing a mortgage. And a mortgage I do have, for my teeny weeny one bedroom flat where I live happily alone, ensconced with a chunk of solitude and a cleaning rota for one. That living alone was presumed to be a permanent state until earlier this week when the matter of damp courses arose. You see, one of my very good friends has a damp problem, poor chap. No, I don’t mean in the undercarriage department fortunately for both he and his wife… with a newborn son recently arrived I think they have enough nappies to be changed thank you very much. No, instead their home is riddled with damp, and with the arrival of both said newborn and the new year, now is the time to fix it. The builders are booked  and while the wife has the freedom of maternity leave to deposit herself elsewhere far away from dust, noise builders and all the other tell tale signs of getting your damp dealt with, poor Adam has to remain somewhere close by in order to commute to his daily grind, and Sophington Towers has come to the rescue. I shall have a flatmate again!

Please note, not my actual phone number 

Now flatmates has been a subject on my mind of late. On New Year’s Eve, the subject came up, (spurred on by a quick round of cards Against Humanity where ‘flatmates’ should definitely be an answer if they aren’t already) and some of my worst flat share stories came to the fore, including, but definitely not limited to:

    1. The flatmate who was overheard bellowing “milk me, MILK ME!” in the throes of passion one evening.

    2. The flatmate who was rumoured to enjoy a ‘danger wank’ on the stairs while we, his unfortunate fellow house sharers, were sitting mere yards away on the other side of a closed door, watching TV in the living room.

    3. The flatmate who had taken it upon himself to misappropriate some of my underwear because he “liked the smooth silky feel of them against his shaven balls” (QUOTE!) 

The 'danger wank' face, I can only presume....

    4. The flatmate who, upon my discovering him in our kitchen jar of my peanut butter in hand, (peanut butter scooped onto his fingers – he didn’t even have the decency to use a spoon!), responded not with the expected “I’m sorry”, but instead the brutally honest “Oh. I thought you’d gone out”

    5. The flatmate who refused point blank to buy loo roll, while using plenty himself leaving myself and my fellow female flatmate with the permanent fear that we might at some point have to resort to our bathroom housed cotton wool pads if we weren’t careful with our forward planning.

A pretty unfortunate run of stories I’m sure you’ll agree (once you’ve picked your jaw back up off the floor), and please don’t be surprised when I tell you this was all the, ahem, dirty work of just one flatmate. Ahhh university communal living, those halcyon days eh? No. Quite. Pity me people, I’ve been very, VERY unlucky.

Now, I’m not saying that I’m a perfect flatmate myself. That would be a claim that could be VERY easily refuted by the flatmate who discovered that in a fit of pique & PMT rage (never a good combo), I had locked all of my crockery and kitchen implements in my bedroom as revenge against constant food thievery. But I am pleased to say, I have now Grown Up (and moved out) and while I may not have anyone to share the cleaning rota with, I also don’t have to live with the constant fear of peanut butter thievery or wet patches on the stairs. So Adam, I say when the builders are in, COME ON OVER! We shall eat peanut butter together (spread with a knife, not our fingers), and revel in the constant presence of loo roll. But if I ever hear you declaring that you need to be milked, buddy it’s over. Us grown ups do have standards you know…