Sinister: Housemates for Dummies

[vodkabird at xxx.com]

What with Sinisters and Sinisterettes currently undergoing some kind of crazy exchange program and indulging in some frantic flat-finding, house-sharing, 'that's MY toothbrush, you skanky bitch' settling-in phase and the subsequent 'My flatmate is a serial killer/stripper/fire-eater in their spare time and doesn't do the washing up' revelations, I'm left with no choice but to roll my eyes and think 'You think that's bad.  You know NOTHING!'

It's true that some people can read auras and some people can tell those who indulge in lewd acts involving rodents (or dead pop icons), but I had a loonydar.  Indeed I had the pleasure of sharing houses with some of the scariest, irrational, downright wrong individuals on the great worldly accommodation list.

Where do I start?  Yiannis the trumpet-playing Greek is as good a place as any.  This man, situated in the room above me in Uni halls played incessantly.  I wouldn't have minded really except that after a year of tootling and parping, he was as shite as when he had moved in.  My musical madman magnet didn't end there; having moved into a house in Bradford with a soon-to-be-convicted stalker (that's another story) I was subjected to Jean-Michel Jarre's poor pit-worn cousin who lived in the house opposite mine.  Not only did he play his one-step-up-from-a-Bontempi right in front of his bedroom window, but he enjoyed doing so shirtless.  It was like watching a middle-aged pigeon strangling a piano.

Not to be outdone, I moved in with some friends all of whom listened to dance music into the wee hours.  It even became too much for the local crackhead who insisted on breaking into our house eight times in an attemept to get rid of the offending CD/stereo system.  I like to think he would have taken the whole lot down to the skip.  

When I moved to London, I ended up sharing a house with a couple of trainee teachers.  One must have followed me from the previous place, and the other insisted on shagging her boyfriend at X-treme volume for many hours through the night.  I was eventually asked to leave after I broke an 'antique mirror' (read 'Old piece of shitty glass propped up on the bog')  so I moved in with a newly-married 30-something woman.  Success! I thought.

The fact that she kept the polythene covering on the three-piece suite, left her smalls soaking in a bucket of concentrated bleach and washed herself with Dettol should have alerted me to her psycho status.  She would also spend so long each weekend cooking chicken and rice that the kitchen smelt as if the local battery farm had committed suicide by mass incineration in a paddy field.  Fortunately she decided to return to the US (where I'm sure bleach is cheaper and far kinder on the skin)  and I was forced to move yet again.  This time into a basement - but I did not hear the warning bells! - room owned by a middle aged woman who lived with her young kid.  My room was the local hang-out for slugs which was fine, because it was the only company I was allowed.  The old troll gave me my notice after 2 days because I had invited my then-boyfriend over for 2 nights in a row.  Shame on me.

So I moved into a house with 8 people - some students and some workers.  Bingo!  Life was fine for 6 months aside from a nightly repertoire of arias from the Italian across the road, until I had a run-in with a flatmate's fist.  It's a long story but fuck it, I was right and she was wrong.  Consequently after a battle with the landlady to release me from my newly-renewed lease so as I could save face (well, mine preferably...from another black eye) I moved into a lovely flat with an ex-flatmate.

She turned out to be a born-again Christian bulimic (mutually exclusive I'm assured) who used to get up at 5.30am to go for a jog, and with the final line she uttered to me was 'I didn't realise my being sick put you off your food', I bowed out.  Since then my only flatmates have been a few silverfish in a bathroom in Birmingham and the clanging sounds of Hare Krishna tambourines.

So, I say to you who tut when a dirty spoon is left on the draining board, think yourselves lucky.  

Love you all (as long as you clean up after yourselves)

VB xxx


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