This rental life

This morning I blearily stumbled out of bed and down the hall until the kitchen got in my way. Finding that I didn't have enough of my own coffee, I grasped blindly among the plastic tupperware at the top of the fridge until I found my flatmate's bag of year old coffee. Yawning madly, I scraped the mould off the top of the coffee, threw away the coffee, and drank the mould. I know better than to put year-old coffee into my stomach.

Perhaps this may shock you, but if you don't tell my flatmate he won't know. After over a year renting the same place, I've become completely barbaric in my ways. I sleep on sackcloth and ashes at night, though in the past month or so I've had to throw my sackcloth away. Meanwhile, the situation with my books is becoming ridiculous. I've taken to stacking them up in the fridge and the freezer. The other day, I caught my flatmate cutting up a thin stew based on two volumes of Herodotus, having only before finished mopping up the gravy with an original copy of Aristophanes The Wasps. It was only after the strongest denunciations and the fiercest perorations that I was able to persuade him to have it with salt.

All this is by the by, one of the joys of sharehousing. But I have to admit, when my flatmate started grumbling to me the other day about cleaning and bills and a List of Duties that we both had to draw up, I said to myself, "Tim: it's time to move out."
After all, if I'm going to keep paying the bills, I want the pure masochistic thrill of having my last cent wrung out of me by electricity executives and water bureaucrats all to myself.

I'll keep you updated...