I was going to spend todays blog having a bit of a dissection of all the reasons I hate halloween given that the dreadful night is drawing agonisingly closer but as I was trying to pull these thoughts together something else struck me and it was a thought all about housemates and house-shares
Now I don't know about anyone else but there are certain times when I am absolutely plagued by past housemates. It all started in University I think, and anyone who's been in a combined accomodation hall (Especially those of you who shared mine) will know absolutely what I speak about. The problem with a hall like that which accommodates a lot of students is that nobody has the same waking hours. Obviously your first group of residents is your science students who are basically designed to get very drunk in a very short space of time, essentially as a scientist you spend many hours a day in the lab and so you have to get drunk in the evening but not so drunk as you're going to labs the next day hungover and tired (We wouldn't want you blowing us all up a purple mushroom cloud simply because you were up to all hours drinking tequila off the rim of a lavatory or some such). However for the arts students it's very different they have relatively few lectures and as a result spend their time drinking slowly and progressively throughout the day before desperately trying to sober up enough to do essays during the night, or in my case trying to do the essays whilst still drunk - or even on that one dreadful day doing an exam while drunk, not my finest hour I'll admit!
And within these two broad classes of student you get a massive range, some students will be out until the wee small hours at the pubs and clubs and stagger back about 6 in the morning, others (And I certainly fell into this clique) would drink until pub closing time then find someone who had an empty room and a few bottles of cheap wine and spend the night "Debating", "Playing Risk" and knocking out the greatest hits of Oasis with a some bongos and a stolen guitar. Others were of the academic persuasion and spent hours hermetically sealed within their rooms like some Himalayan sage, or others who (shock horror) didn't drink at all but would sing lustfully on the way to the bathroom at silly o'clock in the morning (Or, as is more likely, a perfectly sane time of the morning just you're too hungover to make your brain make the little sticks on the clock make any sense)
Anyway, back to my initial point, with all these different people sharing one communal living space you had to get used to operating on at best sporadic sleep, if you were lucky you could get a back seat in a lecture and prop yourself up behind a copy of the text you were supposedly studying and take "shifts" at sleeping with your friends jabbing you awake if you snored too loudly or started having a night-terror. However, more often than not you were in a constant state of not having had enough sleep but simply unable to fathom the idea of going to bed rather than the pub.
I was hoping that after I left communal halls things would improve and I'd actually start to get a regular sleep pattern, after all I'd blamed lack of sleep for my poor performance in my first year "Oh no I'd clearly have got an first but someone was staggering about singing My Way at a deafening yolume at 3am...... what do you mean that was me?" that kind of thing. Unfortunately by reducing the size of a household you actually concentrate the niggles so at first you struggle to sleep because there isn't some banging on your door in the middle of the night asking if you'd like to buy a traffic cone or some such nonsense then you get used to that but because you all have your own routine everyone overlaps and gets on each others nerves. I make no denials I was probably more drunk than sober in my second year at University and certainly I was at the pub until closing most days and I'm fairly certain this bothered my then housemates, however I am equally sure they would talk loudly when off to lectures at the wee small hours of the morning just to teach me a lesson for having staggered in at midnight and had a very long and very loud debate about the 18th century peasantry with the vacuum cleaner.
And of course one major problem was that my second year houseshare was shared with a couple. Now if I was to ever give anyone advice (And apparently it's in my job description) it would always be never to share a house with a couple because you will constantly in the way. Couples who get a flat always want to play house and the last thing they want is someone else there ruining it, particularly if that somebody else is spending their life in a sort of drunken haze. Plus there's nothing worse than hearing a couple arguing upstairs then a little later "Making up" in the room above you, particularly if you're single and all you have to share your bed with is toast crumbs!
Things only really improved in the third year when I got to share a house with other people who kept similar hours and so we were always out getting drunk together and pretending to have forgotten lectures at roughly the same times. I know I complain a lot about certain things that happened during that year but in terms of where I lived it was where I was pretty much at my happiest. The house was big enough to have your own space without having to seal yourself in your room but cozy enough for three historians to spend the evening over a few cans of beer debating about anything and everything. Yes it was filthy and yes towards the end of the year we'd all started to grate a bit on each other but it was homely and it was fun. More to the point it showed me that I could never do another house-share because over those three years I must have had about 30 housemates and they just drive you insane, the surest way to wreck a friendship it seems to me is to move in with someone. There are some exceptions, and they know who they are, but for me I only now want to live alone (Or with the nice girl from the train), and to be honest I think that's pretty much what my liver is desperate for as well!
Today Matt:
- Spent the day sneakily trying to organise a festive meal using a government computer.
- Found out Ocean Colour Scene are coming to Liverpool, Retro!
- Wondered why the government want to teach children how to sleep - just give them junior calpol!
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