Memories

Another week over, which means that I now have two weeks until I am on leave. I can’t wait... Anyway, today should be a nice enough day, as I am not in the office again and should also be able to finish earlier than normal. Then I need to speak to someone later and they will give me £70 for my troubles. Very nice.

I was amused by this article on the BBC about house sharing. I have lived in many different places over the last few years (and in two weeks time will have owned my own place for a year. Wow!) and have had a mixture of successes. One place I lived, every day I got home from work my dinner would be waiting for me and if I was home quite late then it could just be popped in the microwave. However, I moved from there to living with evil landlady.

While I lived there everything I did was wrong. I got told off for washing up by filling the washing up bowl with water. I *know* how much of an idiot am I? The *only* right way to wash up was under a running tap – but it could not be run too fast or else that was wasteful. You could also only wash up using her super special German washing up liquid that she brought back in bulk every time she went to Germany. If wasn’t being told off for that then it was for too many crumbs in the toaster, for creating too much stem when I was cooking in the kitchen or horror of horrors, failing to put the lid down on the toilet. This led to the ultimate sanction of a yellow post it being stuck to the bathroom door saying “lid?” just in case I was stupid enough to forget. I left there a broken woman.

I then had a couple of years’ respite, and then I moved in with obsessive landlady. She was actually quite a nice person but saw no issue with tidying my bedroom and removing items she thought shouldn’t be in there. When she wasn’t available to do this, she would send her father or niece round to do it instead. The number of times I got home from work and found that she had been in my room, moving stuff about and had once again removed the rug from my bedroom floor. Rugs make a room look small you see – there was no connection to the room looking small and it actually *being* small. So small that I had to sleep with my feet in a wardrobe. Every time that someone came into my bedroom (don’t get the wrong idea, I’m not that sort of girl *cough*), they’d always ask where the end of my bed was and then I’d open the wardrobe doors and lo and behold there it was! But the rug was what made it look small…

I did, of course, also end up sharing with a mouse for a bit. At least it kept itself to itself and didn’t complain when I hadn’t done the washing up.