On shared living

I asked Jeff, one of the lovely people at my aforementioned favourite coffee place, what I should write about in this blog post. He gave me a couple of suggestions – one of which I may just hang on to for future times of need – but the first thing to come to his mind was “nightmare flatmates”. Now, before I offend anyone, I should quickly point out that I’m very lucky – I live with a couple of wonderful women, Natalie Squared, with whom I share a harmonious existence in our little corner of London.

In fact, ever since I moved back to London after university, I’ve been pretty fortunate with the people I’ve lived with. They’ve always been friends: they’ve either started off as such and continued on apace…or they’ve started off as relative strangers, and ended up being close friends. So far, so boring, I hear you cry – at least as far as “nightmare flatmates” are concerned. However, you can always rely on university to provide you with…interesting…flatmate scenarios, and my experience there was no different.

I am convinced that the flatmates I ended up with in my first year of university were sort of my own fault. I like to think I’m normally pretty resistant to the “only child” stereotype – I don’t think many people would accuse me of being spoilt or selfish. However, when it came time to move away from the homestead at the tender age of 18, I panicked a little bit. Unlike most of my friends who were staying in London or heading further south, I was packing my bags and travelling to the far flung north – York, to be precise.

This sudden alone-ness compounded my nervousness about the impending change. I grabbed at any chance of home comforts that I could find, and in the case of York…that meant opting for housing that included an en-suite bathroom. (“Aaah,” I hear you say, “there’s the only child in her – has to have her own bathroom, does she?”) In retrospect, this was a mistake. Whilst I did essentially have an “en-suite”, it took the form of a pod rather than a bathroom – one where you could sit on the toilet, wash your feet in the shower and your face in the sink at the same time. This was hardly luxury.

It also meant that my halls were full of the kind of people who weren’t so up for throwing themselves into socialising and communal living. We shared a kitchen, sure…but I’m convinced that something comes from sharing a bathroom that you don’t get when you can all sequester away in your rooms with your en-suite pods.

Here, then, is a quick headcount of the more “colourful” of my flatmates from first year: one Latvian computer science student who we didn’t see after the first term because he got addicted to World of Warcraft and wouldn’t leave his room; one karate-obsessed guy who allegedly had a teenage fiancée waiting for him in Egypt; one small-minded social work student who told me she thought being gay was “deviant”; and one very dedicated member of the CU who plastered our kitchen walls with posters that read “Why help a starving child in Africa? Because God wills it”. Aaah, lovely.

Though there were some more normal folks on my floor as well, I think it’s fair to say none of us really formed the kind of communal bond that I saw in other groups of flatmates in my college. And it’s a shame, because as a slightly scared, slightly shy girl from London on her own up north, I would’ve relished the ready-made social circle to fall into.

I can’t think of another time in life where you are so readily thrust into living with a group of people you don’t know, and quite possibly have nothing in common with. I lived happily enough with my parents as I grew up, and I have managed to live happily with housemates as a young professional in London – somehow choosing genuine, friendly people who have made my life better and not worse.

But perhaps this isn’t a good thing. Living with “nightmare flatmates” gives you a lot of skills that you’ll draw on in later life. If I hadn’t had to deal with small-minded social worker girl, I wouldn’t have learnt to be patient with people who had grown up in less liberal families than mine. If I hadn’t lived next door to karate-mad engaged guy, I wouldn’t have learnt various techniques for politely telling a noisy neighbour to lessen the number of midnight thuds and thumps (karate practice, I was assured).

So although I am probably luckier than most in the relatively low number of “nightmare flatmate” incidents I’ve had to suffer through, I hope those less fortunate will at least consider this – you’ve probably taken away many valuable life skills from having to deal with that particular nightmare. And, sod it – at least it’s given you a good story or two to tell, eh?