Not Being A Hermit

As a depressed person… nah not this time. Change of subject?

Okay then, I agree with you.

   This evening I am going to talk about cohabitation. I am cohabiting at the moment and I'm finding it anthropologically fascinating. I am a British English teacher who lives in Seville and being totally honest with you I haven't done anywhere near as much Spanish language learning as I should or could have done. I currently live with a nice young lady, she's Chinese and she doesn't speak English so we've had some interesting moments together when discussing bin bags and washing up liquid. I've lived with the Irish, some British girls, some British boys whilst at university, I've room shared with a Belgian girl when I was working at a summer camp and of course spent most of my communal living with my long suffering mother, father and sister. They've had a grand old time of it with me and my boiled, fried, poached, scrambled and omeletted eggs. My dad actually counts the amount of eggs that are in the house when I arrive home and then averages them out day by day to see how many I have been eating. I similarly find his fascination with bacon equally amusing. "Where is the bacon? I never get to have any bacon.. you girls are always eating the bacon." He never gets any because he forgets it's there until he see's the empty packet in the bin and realises he hasn't had any of the bacon that was once in the packet. My sister has some interesting habits as well, she runs around her bedroom with no clothes on shouting, "I'm nakeeeeeddddd, don't come in!" She says it all in her very best Scouse. My mother is a different kettle of fish altogether, now she really is a conundrum. Ange, (as I like to call her) broke her ankle once and didn’t like the plaster cast much. Ange's method of dealing with it? Well, just remove the plaster cast with a kitchen knife of course. She took on the personality of a lunatic for a little while as she hacked and sawed away at the large lump of plaster surrounding her leg. My dear old dad wasn't best pleased when he came in from work and had to bundle her into the car back to the hospital ready to be casted up again. He was a lot less pleased when she did it again a few days later, this time telling my sister and I not to tell our father she had removed the plaster cast. I remember wondering how she thought he was going to notice all by himself at the time. We've also had some pets. Now, the best one was definitely Charlie. Charlie was the king of felines but sadly joined our other animals in the cat graveyard my dad has been fashioning for a couple of years last May. We miss Charlie, he made us laugh and he was as bizarre as the rest of us. He was a cat who thought he was a cat/rabbit/dog. He'd play fetch with you, try to catch birds in the TV, play with your heels as you walked past him, jump across the garden and chase butterflies. Charlie was a great one to cohabit with, never a dull moment on his watch.  

 

  One of the young ladies I cohabited with at university was a little on the odd side. I'd moved into the house a few months early because I was 'of' the city of Liverpool and feeling desperate to have complete control of the huevos in the kitchen so by the time she arrived I'd made myself a little bit at home. By at home I mean that kitchen things were in the kitchen and a mirror was in the living room. I went to work the first Saturday that she was living with us and came home to find that she had gone quite ballistic and rearranged the entire house having ranted and raved at the much quieter girl we were living with that I had 'taken over' the house. I was a little surprised but I let it lie. I didn’t have the house meeting she wanted though and after going hysterical about 4 rolls of toilet paper not being enough for her general consumption she left our little house and things became altogether calmer. Another housemate went off in a hissy fit because my boyfriend came round whilst she had guests, I was under the impression that if one student is in her bedroom watching a film with her boyfriend then another student should feel more than comfortable to have her friends over and all be in the same house together. I was wrong. I know of people who've had strange dealings with biscuits, the TV and other generally odd things when it comes to housemates.

  I have to ask myself though… what do my ex housemates have to say about me? I think that everything I do is perfectly normal but I bet they don't. I always like to keep pre washed dishes in the sink for example but the people I live with often prefer to keep them by the side of the sink. This simple act baffles me and I find myself thinking… but why don't you put the dishes in the sink? There isn't much room beside the sink you see, so I can't understand why the dishes aren't in it and comfortably out of both sight and mind. I always have a TV with me wherever I go as well. I might be putting on a wash or making the breakfast. You can guarantee that you'll hear the dulcet tones of Phoebe, Joey, Rachel, Monica, Chandler and Ross wherever and whenever I happen to be in the local proximity. They may also find the amount at which I like to sleep a little extreme, I love a good sleep. I've had housemates feel the need to check on me in the past and make sure I'm alright. They were up and out with the lark type people and I was more up with Loose Women and then back to bed after my 12pm breakfast at the time. I was a waster and they were seizers and we all lived together under the one roof.

  As I go through life I often wonder how I am perceived. If I think everyone else is wholeheartedly weird then surely they must think I am also a little strange? Or maybe I'm just really critical and should focus more on my inner wellbeing than the eccentricities of others. Either way, whichever way you throw the dice and whatever number it lands on you can't get away from other people unless you want to become a hermit can you? I don't want to be a hermit so I shall accept that my new housemate likes to turn the kitchen into a swimming pool every time she cooks and literally drenches every tea towel at least once a day because she's very nice and she made me churros earlier on.

 

Other people… can’t live with them and can't live without them so I'll just embrace and accept as I find and hope that they're feeling willing to do the same.