Our House ...

I just so happen to live in a seven bedroom house, with five other housemates (notice the term; ‘housemates’, not ‘friends’). When first deciding to move into this house we all deluded ourselves into thinking that this year at University would be great, sadly we couldn’t have been more wrong. The phrase “the more, the merrier” came to mind when we decided to live with each other, I have since come to the conclusion that this phrase is complete tosh, and would like to request that this phrases be exiled from the English language indefinitely.

Let me first give you an incite into the house I live in. It’s big, really big. It has seven bedrooms, the spare one we use as a laundry room (to dry clothes) or a chill out room (to watch DVDs). It’s drafty, really drafty. A breeze constantly runs through the house, often carrying the smell of marijuana with it, it’s like sitting opposite Katie Price with her legs open and a copious amount of cannabis stuck up her snatch. It’s cold, really cold. My house is so cold a Polar Bear could freeze to death here. Being students, we have a limited amount of funds, so in order to keep the gas bill down we don’t have the heating on that much and even if we do it doesn’t make much of a difference. Our boiler is so small, it looks as if it has been torn out of a one berth caravan and poorly slapped up in our bathroom. Speaking of bathrooms, we have two, one with a shower and one with a bath. The shower is terrible; it’s akin to a fat man dribbling on you. Water barely trickles out of the fucking thing. I get wetter from the splash back out of the basin of the toilet when I flush it, than I do standing under the shower for three days straight. So therefore I have completely given up on using that shower and I know opt for the bath (which also has a shower attached to it) instead. This shower is better, due to the fact it fucking works as a shower should; dispensing large amounts of water, powerfully, but there is still a drawback. Once I climb out of the bath/shower I’m in the freezing cold air that fills the house. It’s excruciatingly painful as icicles form around my penis... told you it was cold.

Now you have an understanding of the house, I’ll move on to its inhabitants. Seeing as this could produce plenty of hate towards myself, I’m going to be general and not mention names so feelings don’t get hurt.

Of course in a house with this many people living in it there’s bound to be tension from time to time, but for as long as I can remember there has now been constant tension. There’s always an eerie atmosphere around the house, which I can only relate to the ambience that featured in my childhood home when my parents decided to get a divorce because they couldn’t stand each other. I keep thinking that housemate #2 is going to be waiting for me outside University one day, with a mover’s truck full of our belongings, telling me that we’re “never going to see housemate #4 again, after everything they’ve put us through”. Then I’ll be thrown in the midst of a custody battle between housemate #2 and housemate #4, with both of them telling me they love me more and the other one is evil.

The problem is people seem to think that they are doing more than the other housemates, everyone has this opinion. Of course, they’re wrong, because nobody does more around the house than me. And any attempt to voice opinions on what someone else has or hasn’t done results in primary school disputes about who really is the biggest dickhead and which one of our dads could knock the other dads out. I sometimes feel as if I’ve accidently wondering into a nursery and I’m the only responsible adult in existence. It seems as if people no longer do jobs around the house because they need to be done; instead people do the jobs so they can add them to a list to be used in the next heated argument. For example;
Housemate #1: “You never wash your pots!”
Housemate #3: “Actually, I cleaned all the leaves out of the gutter! So what if I leave my pots, nobody else does the guttering!”
Housework is then used as a type of arsenal to shoot down accusations of laziness. The bigger or more important the job you do, the better you see yourself compared to the rest of the house. But this leaves the little jobs undone. For example, vegetables are left to rot on the side in the kitchen, because throwing them away is not a “big enough job” for when the next argument comes around. I know I’m moaning about this now, but seeing as none of those vegetables are mine I don’t see why I should do it, because if I did throw them away, I know what would happen;
Housemate #5: “Where are my parsnips? They were on the side, that’s were I left them two months ago, now they’re gone! You can’t leave anything lying around in this house!”
Me: “I threw them away because they were all gross and maggots were slowly feasting on them, I thought seeing as this is a FUCKING KITCHEN, it’d be better if they were in the bin.”
Housemate #5: “You have no right to touch my stuff!”

I attempt to unease these common situations by trying to put together house meetings so we can air out our differences and put down some guidelines for us all to follow, but getting six people into one room for at least ten minutes seems to be next to impossible, I’d have more luck building my own house out of larger cans at the bottom of my garden – with running water and central heating. I’m only attempting to put forward some sort of democracy, so we can all have input. But I’m fed up with trying to get people to work together as a democracy; life would be easier if I imposed a dictatorship over my housemates. Now, I don’t want to get Hitlerish on people, but if I’m the only one that cares, I might have to. Imposing my oppressive regime on my very own housemates may seem a little harsh to some, but I just want to live in a house that abides to rules and regulations I lay down. I have good ideas and if everyone towed the line and followed them this house would be a much better place to live. The house would become a sort of totalitarian utopia, in which housework gets done and if it doesn’t people get taken outside and executed... for the greater good.