Thu 25th June 2009

Rather than going to for my regular Thursday night in The Swan pub, I took away any temptations to drink, by heading round my mates’ bookshop. When I arrived I headed off to the kitchen to make us a cup of tea, where I found a bottle of milk on the draining board. Since it was not found in any refrigerating device, I gave it an obligatory sniff before pouring. The fact I released a rather audible (and laughable) retch would imply that the contents of the bottle had probably seen better days. Actually -judging by the awfulness of the stench, they had possibly seen better millennia.

It gave me a flashback to my days living in a shared lad’s house, where selecting one of the numerous half bottles that had often rather curiously been left in close proximity to a radiator, became a punishing game of Russian roulette. Now let’s not beat around the bush, I am a self-confessed slob. In fact, my room was actually nicknamed the ‘grief-hole’. But when it came to slobbery I was no better or worse than the other inhabitants. If cleanliness is next to Godliness, then our house was quite literally condemned to hell.

I can still smell the washing up bowl which was like experimental soup, with its crutons of condiments and cutlery, the stray bin bags sitting fetid by the door, the carpet of yesterday’s papers strewn across the floor, mountains of cigarette-ends piled in the ashtrays. In fact amongst this anarchy, the tenuously balanced ashtray contents bore the only house-rule: whoever bought the tumbling stack of fag butts down would have to empty the ashtray and clean the mess off the carpet. Looking back I suppose it was as good a cleaning-rota system as any. At best it discouraged smoking and at worst, it brought a entertainment element, a kind of game which rewarded skills of delicacy; a sort of ‘ashtray Jenga’ I suppose.

In fact now I am older I have come to realise there were other short-term benefits to such a life of slobbery. Essentially the low-maintenance element which meant one had more time to apply to more pressing activities; such as sitting in front of perpetual ‘Only Fools & Horses’ re-runs on UK Gold, then heading off to bed for a mid-afternoon nap/quick wank, before getting up later to catch the repeat cycle of the earlier ‘Only Fools & Horses’ re-runs on UK Gold. Then one more off the wrist before bed. Not that the wanking had any sort of direct relationship with the re-runs of ‘Only Fools & Horses’ you understand. For some reason I feel an obligation to re-emphasise this was a chronological, rather than simultaneous reporting of events. It is not impossible there may have been an occasion when one of Del Boy’s early working class ‘dolly birds’ permitted a kind of arousing, gritty sexual frisson, but if this ever happened, I certainly don’t remember it.

Also, that washing up bowl in the kitchen may have been grim, but it will certainly have paid some great dividends in strengthening my immune system. And as for the strewn pile of yesterday’s newspapers – well, they came in particularly handy the night one of my housemates came back drunk and was sick all over the floor (easy to wrap up and throw away, avoiding any carpet-stain implications. It all aided the audacious argument to get our deposits returned at the end of the tenure).

Of course, I do not and would not wish to live like that nowadays. That was all just a moment in time. It’s not like I have not been conditioned to live like this like some Pavlovian dog or anything. But the point is, that even in the bowels of anarchy, our house managed to adapt to its own perverse system of ecology. Maybe there’s a lesson embedded in that somewhere, about chaos finding its natural order. I would explore the idea further, only there’s an eighties sit-com is just starting on the telly. I may have seen this episode before, but fuck it, I’m feeling horny.