Hello Roomie

Until a few months ago I was in a relationship with a guy I was beginning to think I was going to spend the rest of my life with. In short: life was cushy. Then, following a particularly heinous, abhorrent and altogether unpleasant blip on my otherwise untarnished record, we split up and I found myself instead facing a new outlook on life: namely, singledom.

To say I was absolutely terrified is something of understatement. I was anticipating visions of a cronky, wonky bedsit that smelt of cat piss (I don’t have a cat) with a mouldy bathroom, mouldy cheese in the fridge to match, stale cornflakes and a generally glum disposition. As it turns out, the prophecy has not been entirely fulfilled.

By chance (or fate, depending on your temperament) the aforementioned Sofa, an ex-colleague of mine, was also going through some changes. Returning from several months of traveling in South America – with a boy in toe – Sofa had now moved into a house share with her new Gypsy-lover, only for the romance to fall down around her and her to be left, stranded, alone, in a houseful of strangers.

(Okay, I’ll be honest: that last paragraph summarizes about 4 months of Sofa’s life, but I had to cut bits out and make it sound more dramatic for effect. You’ll get used to that. Embellishing the truth is a specialtiy of mine, and I have very little plans to share with you what bits of this blog are completely fabricated, what bits are just the trimmings to what really happened and what bits are the ugly, horrid truth. So there).

Anyway, at the same time as the meltdown of my life, one of Sofa’s stranger-danger housemates upsticks’ed and departed for the Continent (how very novel), and I found myself moving into the spare room, next to the kitchen, sleeping in single bed, in a room with a hole in the ceiling, a broken Roman blind and the sweet smell of rot coming at me from a) my over-worn trainers & b) the floorboards.

The house we lived in was pretty grotesque. In one of the drawers in the kitchen someone had left a half-opened packet of orange-flavored Fybrogel, the smell of which had fused with a pack of cheap incense sticks to give off an overpowering, almost medicinal smell that had managed to permeate through the drawer and seep into almost all of the cupboards in the otherwise spotless kitchen.

Oh who am I kidding? It was not spotless: in fact, the kitchen was so-far removed from clean (through no fault of Sofa or myself, or any of other current housemates either, it seemed), that no matter how many times we would scrub, polish, clean and wipe-down, it would forever remain filthy.

And, as a result of the medicinal-stench, the filth was also matched by the horror of almost being knocked-out by an migraine-inducing, all consuming presence that existed every time you bent down to open the glasses cupboard.

It wasn’t all bad though: In those first two months of living together we searched for a new house is haste – both because we only had two months left in the House of Horrors and because we were both desperate to escape its clutches – and we discovered some other interesting things too: Sofa can’t make poached eggs, Sofa can’t really work her iPhone, Sofa can’t stay up passed 11pm on a work night (unless drunk). We also found out we like to get drunk A LOT. I mean, we both knew this independently already, but by all evidence thus far, the combination of the two of us – together – is borderline alcoholism. George Best would be proud.

And so, after 8 weeks together, we are now in our new, sexy, slightly pokey flat, free of the dirty, festering meagerness of our old place and ready to take on the world. A word of warning to anyone planning to stick around for more: Sofa is a mean storyteller, and when her stories find their way onto this blog you will be agog with an utter compulsion to hear more. That or you’ll be hiding somewhere in absolute fear of being subjected to such garb.