Recently I’ve been dreaming of a little more than a room of ones own, I’ve been making lists in my head of all of the different flowers and fruits and vegetables I would like to grow in my very own little kitchen garden, of how my kitchen would look and all the cast iron pots and madeleine tins I would load it up with, not to mention a beautiful little kitchenaid in the corner, it would be domestic bliss and I truly believe I would be the happiest girl in the world (just felt odd referring to myself as a girl, at what age do I have to stop doing this? I’m still a girl at 25 right?).
Don’t get me wrong I’m not a fan of living alone and I don’t expect I would actually be able to afford a little garden flat all on my own, especially as I’m leaving my job in a little over two months, but I’ve come to realise that this house share thing has ran it’s course. As I write this the smoke alarm is going off for the second time today (the first time was 8am this morning, on a fucking Saturday I ask of you, and he was only poaching eggs), I am just trying to rid my mind of the image of my scrawny housemate stripping in the kitchen so that he can just put one wash on, and I think one morning soon I will not be able to remove my ear plugs that I have been pushing farther and farther into my ears in the early morning hours when there are random strangers stampeding up and down my stairs and playing ‘The Snowman’ on the piano directly below my room.
Housemates from hell are not the only reason I think I’m feeling like this, in the years I’ve been renting a room in various places I haven’t exactly been an angel myself, there was the time that I met some people out and a group came back to mine and shortly after they left we realised the telly was missing, and of course the friend I had over who broke up with her boyfriend one Sunday morning when everyone was hungover and the noise was, well it was like nothing I’d ever experienced before, I just remember lying there vomiting into a plastic jack-o-lantern and crying. Anyway, I digress, what I was trying to say was that I have a rather uncertain year ahead of me, I’m packing up and leaving Oxford, my job, my friends, I’m going to travel for a bit, there’s a course I’m going to do late August, then I’m going to hopefully do some good old fashioned manual work on a farm somewhere in Europe up to November time, and then I’m heading for a different city and a different job (with a big pay cut).
I’ll blog more about what I’m doing and where closer to the time, but for now I’ll just talk about this weird limbo period I’ve found myself in. How there’s so much ahead that I’m excited and nervous about, yet for now there’s not much I can do, I have no money to do anything for a start, it’s all save save save, I’ve had this past week off work and had some vague plans to do some sorting and head to Brighton on one of the days , but none of it materialised, I sorted out my baking cupboard, my clothes into keep, sell, charity shop piles, I read 3 books, and did a spot of crocheting (I’m making a tricolore zig zag blanket, it’s going to take about 5 years), I just couldn’t trust myself in an area with that many shops filled with things I’d want to buy, because even if I could afford them I have nowhere to put them. It’s almost like I’m already in the departure lounge awaiting the plane, should I really buy that dress/dvd/cookbook becomes magazine/toblerone/tube of pringles, it all boils down to having to find somewhere to put it once you’ve gone (tobler and pringles are a bad example as I always know where to put them).
I wonder whether this is always the way, when you face uncertainty you crave the security of a home crocheted blanket and your own cutting flower garden, and when you have the perfect domestic life you crave clutching onto your backpack and avoiding getting too close to some dreadlocked guys armpit whilst being on some packed bus teetering dangerously close to the edge of the road in some swelteringly hot country. Maybe the latter was another bad example.
I really shouldn’t grumble, and I’m not really, not about my plans to go away anyway, I am however complaining about this house and the inhabitants and I shall continue to until that wondrous day when I can whole-ass out of this joint (as bugsy malone or someone might say).
