Things I hate about my Flatmate

Salmonella dub

2009-04-12T13:37:00.002+01:00

There is a song by the band Cream, released in 1967, called Take it Back. It is one of the clearest descriptions of fear and anguish at the idea of militarism, and a reaction to the arbitrariness of the draft - a lottery of death. The song talks about the need to stay at home at take loads of intravenous drugs and fuck the fuck out of one's girlfriend, instead of suffer a cruel pointless horrendous death.

Its a good song. "I got this need, the need to stay alive". I understand. "I want to stay here and sleep in my own bed, need all your loving, long blonde hair". I also have this need, although my preferences are other people's beds, and red hair.

There are many motivations on the human psyche: to avoid conflict, to make love. And, dear reader, I've had my share of fear and loathing and arbitrary horror, which I shall relate now...

The other night I went out to dinner with a fabulous redhead. Redheads are awesome. I like them - I may have mentioned this. This one is particularly fine, and I will call her Siobhan. Since that's her fucking name. Anyway, I had planned to take Siobhan out for a really nice dinner at this new French restaurant in town. I know the chef. Who is incongruously called "Paul". I think he's Lebanese. He's usually pretty good at the whole cooking thing - he's got a gold star from a French tyre maker to prove it. He told me that the scallops would be real good.

So. I get Siobhan. We go to the restaurant. I ordered the scallops. Siobhan goes escargot. We ordered some really nice peppery red wine, and commenced to chow down.

I scarfed my scallops, which are served one on a bed of avocado and crushed artichoke, the other on a slice of black pudding. After a second glass of the fantastic merlot (of which I can't for the life of me remember the name - bastard!), my guts starts to growl like an angry maelstrom of retribution.

I excuse myself:

"Excuse me a moment, Siobhan."

I find the dunny, thinking to take a quick slash, and dislodge this aggressive fart. One thunderous flatulation, and I can get back to the merlot.

So I get my cock out and start pissing. And shit myself in an extravagant, rancid apocalypse of partially digested mollusc and fried pigs blood. I stood there in the echoing aftermath, shocked for a moment, trying to undo the horror with a kind of reverse peristaltic anal puckering, to no avail. I could feel the shit cooling on my arse cheeks.

Quell horreur.

I stripped off, and examined the contents of my Calvins, seated on the toilet. There was a good half pint of evil brown colloid, fizzing and flocculating in my underwear. It was hellish. Already about 100, 120 seconds have passed. Enough to be zipping back up, and washing my hands looking for the peppermint and aloe vera hand refresher and linen hand towel. I'm seconds away from a timely re-arrival at the table. Any second now I should be asking: "How were the snails?"

Instead I'm contemplating the disaster in my pants. What would MacGuyver do? A hastily contrived linen nappy? Never mind that. What would Jesus do? Probably make some archangels sort it out. Never mind that bastard: what would Obama do?

There is no stimulus package will fix this disaster. No, we bloody well can not, my good man - the shit has irrevocably "gone down", as they say in Illinois. Yea, though I shall walk through the valley of the shadow of shite, I shall fear no evil. No - I'm doomed, the night is ruined, I'm humiliated and will never see this succulent redhead again.

Despondently, I take off the infected Calvins and chuck them in the basket for the used linen hand towels, where they land heavily. Christ knows what Paul's dry cleaner will make of that. Or him, when he gets his laundry back. It serves the motherfucker right for poisoning me. I wipe away the worst of the cataclysmic colonic discharge, feeling right up to my backbone chasing the vestiges of evil smelling, effervescent waste. I even check the tails of my exquisitely expensive shirt for non-trademarked patterns. I scrutinise my trousers for the telltale Rorschach of anal leakage. I wash my hands in expensive peppermint and aloe vera lotion. Mmmm, moisturising... I carefully arrange the linen hand towel over the unspeakable menace below. I regard myself in the mirror - I am Jack's disgusted relief.

Clean, I return. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Onwards, Christian soldiers.

"How were the snails?"

Later that night there was a soft moan of appreciation as I gently bit the soft skin of her neck, and slid a hand along her yielding thigh. She gasped gently in surprise as she discovered I was, in fact, a member of her majesty's commando service, ready at a moments notice.

In the morning, while Siobhan was making the coffee, I lay there, still bilious, thinking about the terror of those few minutes in Paul's rest room. "I scare easily. Take that thing right out of here." I can still hear Clapton's guitar and the mocking of the harmonica.

So I get home. Walking through the door I text Siobhan: "blah blah, nice time... see you again soon, blah blah".

My flatmate is inconsolable. She is collapsed in her bed moaning.

"What's wrong?"

"Ooooh, my stomach! I'm dying."

Snap.

I remember everything now.

Lunch. The flatmate cooked a late lunch. I go to the kitchen. Everything is still there. There is a single miserable chicken breast, uncooked, but still in its package, festering gently on the bench. The other three had formed part of a rather bland stir fry. There is general detritus nearby. Some mushrooms, some of those fucking bean sprout things. I fucking hate bean sprout things.

"How longs this chicken been here?"

"I dunno. Since we got back from shopping."

WHAT?

She'd been shopping the night before last. I'd picked her and the groceries up from Sainsburys on the way home from the White Horse, and then gone back out with some of the guys from work.

The vector became clear. I'd been poisoned by my flatmate. Paul was innocent, acquitted by a novus actus interveniens. The flatmate was suffering the same intestinal Armageddon as me because we'd both eaten the fucking chicken which had developed bioweapons grade storm-trooper e.coli after sitting on the kitchen bench for almost sixteen hours.

Today's reason I hate my flatmate. Not only is she incapable of doing up the lid on the toothpaste; not only does she insist on putting her toothbrush in the same beaker as mine in the bathroom, where the bristles can touch; she cannot even unpack her own fucking shopping, and put the chicken in the fridge. What kind of fucktard doesn't know about chicken? You put that shit right the fuck away, safe in the fridge where it can't decompose into life threatening filth.

Now I'm in this position: Siobhan thinks I'm a kind of predator that refuses to wear pants, on the basis that they inhibit the cock's pendulous motion. I don't mind that at all. Paul, on the other hand, thinks someone in his clientèle, possibly that fucker in the Hawes and Curtis shirt with the gold cuff links, is so depraved that he will shit himself - in a Michelin starred restaurant, no less - will brazenly sit right there at the table with a glass of red wine in his hand, and shit right into his Calvins, and after luxuriating in its warmth for a few moments will take that shroud of turding, and drop it amongst napkins each worth at least as much as a ramekin of his creme brulee.

And I do love Paul's creme brulee. I'll never be able to spoon a single spoonful of that delicious, creamy, brown sugar encrusted alchemy into my face ever again, and for that I hate my flatmate.

Stonehenge

2008-10-28T13:37:00.000Z

Archeology is an interesting science.

It involves the digging up of things from the past.

There are a number of things I do not want to dig up from the past. I'll get to one of them shortly, which has erupted unbidden from the cold, dank past.

I went to a trivia night at the Wit Perd this evening. The caller was a divine symphony of hips and blonde hair. A towering ectomorph with no tits, like a cross between a 16 year old Robert Plant and a giant vulvine sex-snake. Just legs and jawbone. Thick as pigshit tho. She read one of the questions out, then immediately the answer. And repeated it three times while the audience laughed.

It being Halloween we were given, along with the usual picture round and music round, a pumpkin and a steak knife. We were told that there would be a prize for the best carving.

The only thing I know about sculpture I learned from Douglas Adams. Just look at your substrate, visualise your muse within, and simply hack off any bits you do not recognise.

During all this I ordered the wild boar sausage and mash. A very simple meal, which has all the requisite ingredients to allow a man to live forever. The little waitress we had was just delicious. A tiny meek little thing, subserviently seeking approval and asking if there was anything else I required, timorously lisping as she proffered a steel bucket full of condiments.

"Fuck off away from me with your shitty sauces and herbs. I require ketchup, and nothing else! Begone! You are occluding my view of Robert!"

I threw ice cubes at her till she fled, weeping hopelessly.

Midway through the sports round I turned my attention to the gourd. I looked at it, and could not find any inspiration within. All I could remember was that two weeks ago there was a report in the press that a world record pumpkin had been grown in Carmarthenshire. And that last week there was a national pumpkin shortage due to an exceptionally shitty August and the credit crunch. I looked at the other teams in the pub and saw them all doing Jack-O-Lanterns. Fuck that. I have to do something else.

Perhaps I should just carve "Ceci n'est pas un pumpkin" on the outside and be done with it.

But judging by the way Robert the sex-snake just pronounced "Galla-pay-gos" I figured this would not find favour with the judges. Not that kind of pub.

So I skinned it, and carved a brane. And shoved the steak knife into the amygdala when it was done. Garnished with splatter of Heinz's best. Fuck yeah.

Goddamn people can be stupid. I was in court this morning waiting to prosecute a breach of section 92 of the Trade Marks Act. Some cretin was waiting to swear a statutory declaration for some kind of piss-ant fine. She burst into tears when she couldn't read the phrase "... and I solemnly swear and conscientiously believe the same to be true ..."

The clerk had to help her: "Con...she...en...shuss-lee". I mean, it is an oath. The woman's gotta know what she's saying. Her immortal soul is imperiled!

It was all I could do to stop myself from standing up in open court, amicus curiæ stylee, throw £100 at her for the fine and exhort her to fuck off. Right now. And let proper people do some proper fucking work using the English language. It was costing my client that much to have me sit there and hate.

And tonight, when the sex-snake asked: "What is it that a heliologist studies?" some dickhead on my team spastically blurts out, in a whisper loud enough for the whole pub to hear: "Helium!"

There is a pitiful knowledge of the sciences in the current age. In the old days people like Einstein were like rockstars. People actually waited for his next album. It is gratifying to hear people shouting out the names of noble gasses. There's not enough of it. It is sad when people shout out these names just cause they know it sounds like a funny word they just heard for the first time. In this instance it was unfortunately followed by the unshakable belief that this could not possibly be wrong. Helium - Heliologist. It is irrefutable when you say it out loud.

"Dickhead! What is it that helium makes? Trust me; what is it I hold in my hands? Lo - it is a brane! Admittedly a sad grey vegetal pumpkin brane, but for certain it is a brane nonetheless. And It sings cerebral songs to me. Its lament is sweet and sad, and filled with chlorophyll dreams: "The Sun, The Sun!""

Alas, poor Curcurbita! They heed him not. I knew him well.

No, no, people are dumb. They do not learn. 2 Peter 2:22!

But archaeologists do learn. After another ground breaking dig, they've apparently learned that Stonehenge was some kind of religious site. (See what I did there? Ground breaking. Archaeology. Whatever. You wanna hear my impression of an extractor fan? I don't like tractors anymore. Nevermind)

And someone else who digs shit up from the past is British Gas, apparently. For fuck's sake. I left that last shithole habitat with my sanity and not much else. I left a wedge of cash which would choke a donkey - for the bills. But no. Apparently the flatmates had some kind of celebratory ceilidh immediately following my departure, where this fund was used for the purchase of lager and marijuana and pornography.

And didn't pay the gas bill. And now there is a Kafkaesque rigmarole to be gone through with some kind of canine debt collector. And do you know what? I have to go to court...

And swear a statutory declaration.

How to catch a bastard

2008-01-30T23:44:00.000Z

I see that scientists have decided that all blue eyed people have a common ancestor. Is there anything scientists can't do?

I think that this is patently bullshit.

How can it be that there is any possibility that I might be related to the fucking cretin that uses my Tabasco sauce without my express or implied permission?

And not only that, but as if to drive home this brazen disregard for personal property rights, this same retard doesn't screw the lid back on. For Christ's sake, Pope Leo said: "It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own, and this is expeshully applicable to a man's Tabasco". And I'm sure John Locke had something to say on the subject as well.

Anyone with the nous to steal Tabasco has to realise that if you don't screw the lid back on, it turns brown. And this will ruin the taste next time they steal some Tabasco sauce.

This displays either a profound lack of intelligence, or a deliberate expression of contempt. Even a goddamn parasite has more intelligence than to spoil the resources it takes from its host. If it is the latter, then of course this particular flatmate won't have any right to complain when they discover that the Tabasco has been adulterated with a very strong dose of Salvinorum A, a potent kappa opioid agonist substantially without flavour.

I have a very strong suspicion who it is. Very soon I will have the screaming, vomiting, insane, incontrovertible truth.

And another thing. Some bastard apparently has insufficient wrist strength to turn off the hot tap in the bathroom, after somehow managing to turn it on. This irritates the bejeesus out of me. I refuse to pay for the electricity to warm the fucking sewers under the house.

And judging by the subtle nocturnal noises emanating from certain quarters of this hellish habitat, that person has quite significant wrist strength indeed.

Other than these horrors, I have nothing to report. These degenerate dogfuckers I live with are all angels.

Totenkopf

2007-09-24T13:37:00.000+01:00

Recently The Geek has been declared the new black. The inter-tubes are awash with articles extolling The Geek. Geeks are good at this, excellent at that. Geeks are usually identified by their glasses and a T-shirt displaying a witticism like: Bacon is a Vegetable.

September 19 is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. In my earlier days I would have been all over that, and this post would have been very salty indeed. It is the sort of thing that Geeks do, and I would like to be one of these. Sadly I have a job now, and consequently have been very busy lately and although I could alter the date of this post, I choose not to*. So this post is 5 days late.

Pirates, as you are all aware, are Geeks. And they have a certain familiar style about them. Peg legs, tricornes, eye patches, cutlasses. Those colourful shoulder-mounted talking chickens. Depicted in glorious Technicolor movies which have all been rated ARRR! But the icon which has represented every pirate and a good deal of all the Geeks that have ever been is of course the skull and cross-bones.

This emblem was taken by the Prussians, and then the Nazis and then the USA for use as a kind of military insignia or badge. Its use in this way was characterised by the skull occluding the crossed bones, a distinction that might appear superficially specious. This conformation is also the contemporary warning for poison. This kind is bad. The jolly roger represents those original Hell's Angels of the sea, and is a skull suspended above crossed bones. This kind is good (supra).

In any case, this is a blog about my shitty fucking flatmates, not some ossuarine iconographic instruction.

Until recently the mild mannered Englishman has not really said a bloody word to me. He appears to have a rather debilitating addiction to World of Warcraft, judging by his TeamSpeak bandwith whoring. (This game may have pirates in. I'm not sure.) So I don't really see him much. He surely represents the Geek.

But like most people he eats food. And if you don't eat, you don't shit. And if you don't shit, you die. So he shits.

Yesterday he shat. Rather a significant beastie too. I went in to the bathroom this morning to complete the usual ablutions and was confronted by a turd the size of Conan the Destroyer's forearm. It appeared to have been marinating overnight. There have been babies born smaller who have gone on to have lucrative careers in the NFL as linebackers. It was a stunning and persuasive sight. I danced my little dance of squeamishness and rage, transfixed by this creature, as I tried to flush it, and then ran back out, squealing. There was a chunk the size of a cricket ball poking above the water. For a while I was too scared to go back in there to see if it was gone. The fucker might escape, and try to bite me, like a carnivorous Hankey the Christmas Poo. Or mate with me.

All other thoughts were banished from my mind as I tried satisfy myself with a theory of how this abomination was produced. Jeebus. It must have been aliens. Or a collaborative effort. Mebbe siamese triplets born with one arsehole, like a coaxial Shiva. Or Satan. It was Satan who did that. The thought of Satan climbing silently in through the kitchen window at dawn, with a cutlass in his teeth, for the express purpose of destructively defecating in our toilet didn't seem very plausible, and was rejected.

It wasn't the Cypriot. He was doing his oily bear impression, entertaining a pair of horny Polish women at their house. The South African was also away. Something to do with Rugby and Jagermeister.

That left only one suspect. The Silent Englishman. Although given the extraordinary diameter involved in his exertions last night, I imagine that this was a very uncomfortable silence indeed. The sort of strained agony that could erupt into full blown ululation and catastrophic prolapse at the slightest mistimed contraction of the sphincter.

Today's reason I hate my Flatmates?** The unholy fucking miasma left after the disintegration of the Ultra-Turd, which took about 5 fucking flushes to be rid of, the stench abiding. The Silent Englishman, apart from laying the kind of egg from which a stone monkey could hatch at any moment, being a member, at least until recently, of a superior caste, nay breed, of homo sapien, to wit: the Geek; betrays his emblem, the jolly roger, and earns instead the Totenkopf. Stay out of my bathroom, you poisonous bastard.

*The time however, surrenders to my Geek.
** Oh, and someone moved my soap. I hate that.

A Promethean sparkle ...

2007-08-31T23:42:00.000+01:00

In my time I've wandered the earth. Good times, bad times, y'know I've had my share. I've seen stuff and some of it caused me to moan and complain. I've dealt with rats in NY, cockroaches in Sydney, slime and filth in London. And sometimes the flats have been appalling too.

I have cleaned up after people, educated them about the right way to live and behave. I've been astonished at the crudity and ignorance of my fellow man. And now I face a unique irritation.

Sometimes when you come home from a hard day at work you just want to rip the top off a beer and drink it unmolested. Today I was invigilating the delivery of a supercar for a client. I had to wait around in a Lamborghini showroom for hours on end while the finance cleared and the condition reports were checked and sundry minions fucked around. Not particularly hard work, perfect in fact for a Friday afternoon. But the drive home was a bastard.

I get in and find that all four of my Czech beers have been drunk.

Tweedledumb is half cut and says something to me. "Hoe hun debt" is about as close as I can come with a keyboard. This phrase when spoken in English by a South African is just as impenetrable: "Aahwse-it?" Some sort of greeting, I know that much. It certainly can't be about the financial consequences to a German farmer of buying tilling equipment on hire purchase.

He's unsteady and speaks colloquially to me in a tongue I know he knows I don't know. The cretin has just confessed to one of the worst sins of share house living. Drinking another man's beer. But he's a mountainous rugby playing South African, so I decide to be careful and play this one cunning, like a fox.

"Some fucker's drunk my beer. Was it you?"

"Aah. Yah, bro. Sorry mun."

As though it was a fucking accident: "I was just walking past and you wouldn't fucking believe it - it was just there. Open. And then it happened three more times. I swear to God I'm telling the boys at Guinness. Just fucking incredible."

Anyway he tells me in halting broken English, as I stare up at him frowning in concentration and nodding my head from time to time to indicate my comprehension, that I should investigate what is happening aaht-saahd. The other mountebank is doing something noteworthy. He indicates with an empty can of beer that there may be something to my advantage.

Sure enough, there is cold beer in the back yard. There is also a tarpaulin covered ankle deep in razor sharp shards of spent Jagermeister bottles, about 15 yards long. And capering barefoot on this catastrophe is the Cretan cretin, can in hand. Who the fuck is going to clean that up? I can see for years to come, long after we've left this habitat, people getting lacerated at back yard BBQs. Blood staining the ground. Future archaeologists puzzling over this horrific scene.

Honestly. Sometimes I just shake my head and I say O tempora, O mores, and then I despair. I've been all day in the slightly surreal company of the super rich and their parasitic sycophants, all fawning over a car with a 6.5L v12 which is big and stupid and ugly as fuck and the sort of thing only a Liverpool footballer could like. A kind of metal porn. A community cock we can all wank, but the lesser of us only vicariously.

I come home to a pair of drunken primitives, one a guilty, crestfallen and shufflingly embarrassed giant of so few words that language itself is a novelty, only the third generation of his people to walk upright, and the other apparently having lost his senses entirely, resembles the bastard love-child of Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur and Bombur and the Minotaur itself, wearing a disturbingly ecstatic expression usually associated with religious maniacs and lunatics, the goatee of a sex-predator hypnotist, prancing about on enough glass to mutilate a thousand emo children.

I just wanted a beer.

Now he wants me to join him for some bizarre homoerotic foot fetishism. Nevertheless I feel if I refuse then my masculinity is somehow less authentic. I open one of his beers. But there is the cold reality that I don't have his spatulate feet with their distinctive rhino hide. I will surely, reckless bravery or no, get slashed to buggery and require extensive expensive medical treatment and someone else's blood. What to do? What to say?

"Set it on fire, you pussy. I only walk on burning glass."

Broke the back of a monkey, hung him up in a temple by the tail...

2007-08-10T20:26:00.000+01:00

I understand that by the age of 14 Felix Mendelssohn had written 12 symphonies. He is considered by some to be the greatest child prodigy since, oh... Mozart.

Albert Hoffmann invented LSD and then went for the most famous bicycle ride evah. (Apparently the boys down at Cisco labs don't mind a bit of California sunshine). Fucker's still alive too. Elixir of life? Makes you wonder...

Some bastard somewhere in Russia called Perelman reckons he can solve the Poincaré conjecture without the conventional recourse to euclidean geometry, or some shit. Don't even want the accolade nor the US$1m. Punk mathematical.

These are examples of proper fucking genius. People who got shit done. Useful.

There are other examples of genius that are not readily identifiable by any great and lasting achievement. There is a woman somewhere with an IQ measured at about 185, one of the very highest on record. She writes an agony aunt column in an obscure American magazine. Her surname's Savant! Ha!

One time I gave an advice to the Chief Constable about a guy who had walked into police HQ and demanded a license to possess cocaine. To train his dogs. He purportedly owned a company that trained sniffer dogs. Genius! When I'd wiped the tears from my eyes and come to the sober realisation that there was in fact such a thing, and that sniffer dogs were not in fact sent on sabbatical to Columbia I made a few phone calls. Ninety minutes later I was the owner of a shelf company called Habeas Canis and three germain German Shepherd puppies. ZZTop's TenDollarMan was flashin in my brane.

None of the aspects of genius can be attributed to my hoppoes. (Hoppo - noun. Arch Greek hoplite, meaning in the context of a house of multiple occupancy, roommate, flatmate etc.) I shall return to them in due course.

Quite some time ago, before I moved in here, I was watching television, which is itself a rare thing and thereby bloggable. The program was concerned with the restoration of Roman bronzes. I saw a girl who was the absolute apogee, the very acme of geek chic. She was head restorer. That is to say, she restores the head. But preternaturally beautiful and so, so fucking eloquent. Big fuck off glasses and a mass of black curly hair tied back.

I was transfixed. Imagining her shaking out those locks while removing her glasses and suspender belt, obscenely stroking a nipple with her strange little brush. I knew her name and her museum, and so I stalked her, seduced her and took her to a nightclub (hoping that before long she would be restoring my head). Donovan's Superlungs (My Supergirl) was playing in my head.

On the next table to us was an obnoxiously drunk, squat South African with a sinister Mediterranean complexion.

He saw me and my breathtakingly achingly fabulous companion and felt himself compelled to approach. He yapped and yarped so long at Rose that we fled to a restaurant, Motörhead's No Class playing in my head.

Not too long after, due to three tragic misunderstandings with my previous landlady involving in quick succession: a small dog, a 17 year old redhead and a *ahem* her (that is: the landlady's) dildo, I had cause to find new premises, rapid. Alabama 3's Let it Slide playin sweet, goddamn pretty motherfuckin' country-acid house music in my brain.

And to my hoppoes. There are three. Tweedledum: a very large rugby playing behemoth throwback to the Neanderthals. A properly nice bloke with a vocabulary of perhaps 100 English and 500 Afrikaans words and a propensity towards the consumption of vast volumes of Jagermeister and ultra violence. Very effective on the blind side offense. A nahhce gahh. Bro.

There is Tweedletwee: a sort of minor computer graphics technician responsible for the background textures in a recently released driving simulation on the PS3. He is very British and doesn't speak a word of English, unless you grab the bastard by the throat, push him to the wall and scream, spittle flying, in the manner of a deranged Spider Jerusalem. Even then he only speaks like an embarrassed Hugh Grant, and apologises, terribly, for the inconvenience, won't happen again, I assure you, and would you mind ever so much, umm, how can I say this, um, letting me go. Oxygen, you see. No, no at all. My fault entirely.

And Tweedledumbest...

To my horror, on my first night in the new establishment, I walked into the hallway and saw the aforementioned Tweedledumb insensate on the floor, apparently trying to fuck something. I stepped gingerly over his giant, twitching, prostrate form, The Electronic Hole's The Golden Hour Part III playing in my brain, and entered the lounge area. What did I see?

One large, squat south African of indeterminate Cypriot heritage!

NOOOOOO!!!

Mendelssohn's Song Without Words starts playing in my mind.

Christ no!

The Nightclub Bastard!

"What kind of fuckery is this...?" sings Amy Winehouse...

Anyway, by way of introduction, dear reader, he optimises spam Google searches for anti-masturbation and gender re-assignment hypnosis mp3s. I shit you not. I cannot make this shit up. Into chi energy manipulation and walking on broken glass. Which is, I will reluctantly admit, pretty cool to watch.

Not really a bad bunch. None of them so far are particularly evil, and none of them appear unbearably unpleasant. But, dear god, why? Why must I live with these bastards? What the fuck have I done? How can I invite the astoundingly hot host of "Pimp my Statuary" here? One flatmate scurries in mortal fear of social contact, one leers drunkenly down at me from 6' 6", and one is convinced that by meditating he can change the size of his hands.

2006-09-16T19:52:00.000+01:00

Dear god.

To paraphrase the inimical Jules from Pulp Fiction, I've been travelling the world like Kain, having adventures and shit.

Since returning to civilisation, and the ubiquitous internet connection, I have secured employment. I have re-purchased all the necessary paraphenalia which every self respecting prosecutor surrounds himself with. A Mercedes. Stainless steel cufflinks which are designed to look exactly like an asprin, which unscrew to reveal... An asprin. HDTV. A fucking big television, washing machines, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest morgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure-wear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrasment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life.

Sorry.

I came over all Renton there for a second.

You see good citizens of the blogosphere... I enjoy your company. It seems strange to me that the flesh and blood humans with which I have to integrate are all somehow feeble. Weak and febrile. No-one seems to be full colour, full-fat, visceral pure and real. Everyone seems kinda pale and shit and stupid.

I suspect, in my weaker moments, that I have some dangerous superiority complex that is going to lead to a catastrophic Norman Bates/Christian Bale type conflagration. At other times I lament that I have been abandoned by Odin to be tormented by either by the Jotun, or more particularly a succession of fucking retard flatmates.

Having crested Huayna Picchu, swum in the Zambezi and bungied out of a fucking hot air balloon in a scorching, bleeding, blinding red sunset above a fucking desert, I foolishly believed that I was beginning to understand my place in the universe.

I came back to the UK and got the aforementioned job. And decided to get a place. It is a cottage in a tiny town near the city I live in. Surrounded by farms and deciduous forests. It takes me not too long to drive into work and park in my own space.

My housemates are Tigger and Loose. Loose is my landlord. She is lovely. She has a little king Charles spaniel, which is a cool little dog. Got a real personality. Or dogality. Whatever.

But of course good people, there is a lining of shit to this particular cloud of spun dreams.

You see, I am a cat hater. It is a personality trait which some people regard as a defect. It is how I am. I can't help it.

Tigger is a cat. A fluffy motherfucker. This thing yowls when it wants food. It yowls when it wants company. It yowls when it wants out. Sometimes, as far as I can scientifically determine, it just yowls.

So I come back from work in my suit on Friday. The place is abandoned, as it has been every day now for a week. My suits are fucking expensive. They have to be. And this cunt of a cat rubs itself all over my legs, yowling. I don't want to hurt the thing, but I have to dodge its foul embrace. I dance the little dance of squeamishness and rage. I hiss. I poke at it. I throw bunches of keys at it. I feed it, I usher it out, I attempt to placate it with fluffy squeaky objects.

The fluffy fucker persists. Ecstatically rubbing its head on my cuffs. It foams at the mouth, eyes rolling with pleasure. Sexual pleasure.

By the time its evil work is over I look like I'm wearing fucking Ugg boots.

I hate cats.

Hatred is a transferrable property of the possession to the owner.

The cat is my flat mate's.

quod erat demonstrandum, I hate my flatmate.

I am back.

Desiderata non fucktardibus

2006-04-21T13:37:00.000+01:00

I had a horrendous day at work today. I was arguing an inconsequential admissibility issue before a cantankerous goat, against a nebulous buffoon, which I knew by 10:30 was going to drag itself into a twisted hernia of spastically twitching uselessness and illogic. My learned friend was postulating long into the somnolent reaches of the afternoon and generally crapping on in the style preferred by counsel paid by the hour. I heard no (modern) case law, there was scant reference to legislation, regulation, delegation, code, node, matter or anti-matter. I was bored.

When I spoke it was with all the authority conferred upon me by Occam's razor and the inexorable gravitas of a mile long legislative ice-pick. And staccato brevity, if you can believe that. It didn't do any good, because someone wanted to run what sounded suspiciously like an argument derived from the Chewbacca Defense. The result? Adjourned. In all honesty we should have been out of there by 11, enjoying an affogato somewhere sunny.

At least Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith had, by all accounts, a lovely day. I bet she doesn't have to live with a pack of fucktards. Although, upon reflection, perhaps she does. But at least her place is fucking clean. I wish someone would give me flowers. And wipe my arse and put toothpaste on my brush for me. I'd been staring at the bitch's coat of arms all day, and felt oppressed by it.

After a long day I was hoping to get home and enjoy a godfather or three in the back yard while throwing pebbles at the neighbour's cat. "Honi soit qui mal y pense", my arse.

I opened the door and any thoughts of alcohol or recreational animal cruelty were immediately adjourned to a date to be fixed, with costs reserved.

I feel that this account of life with my flatmates is becoming derivative. There are novel things that are done to cause me anguish from time to time. But as each day passes and each new offence is catalogued in its phylum it must logically occur that at some point in time I shall merely be bleating about the variance in magnitude or severity. I do not pray that my flatmates will find ingenious methods of aggravating me. I know some of you sadists will.

Today I find The Artist, dressed in tie-dyed overalls, barefoot in the kitchen, re-potting a fucking Dracaena Marginata, or some hideous relative. That, in my humble opinion, is enough. I could stop right here. After having considered the issues and listened carefully to the arguments made by both parties I find these plants guilty of being shit. I refuse to have them in the Habitat. Ugly primitive bastards of things.

Her repugnant taste in plants aside, we have all the equipment outside for this very task. A task she observed last weekend as I re-housed the indomitable and resurgent Spathy. A task that is infrequently undertaken in a kitchen in civilised society.

I could see the last of my special mulch and about half a bag of cheap shitty potting mix (never buy this stuff - I've found bits of plastic in it) spread across the floor and her muddy foot prints all through the kitchen. They led outside and back in again. The retard had obviously gone outside to get the trowel, in order to facilitate the distribution of artificial humus and rotting chicken shit throughout the Habitat.

I ran through a few possible opening remarks: "What the fuck are you doing?" "I hope you intend to clean that shit up." "You filthy fucking hippy, get the fuck out of my kitchen."

You see? Derivative. I dismissed them all summarily.

"Good evening." Steely. Dead-pan. Emotionless. Menacing. Hopefully she will look up and see my well practised scowl and evilly glittering eyes, piss herself and flee.

But no. She trumped me. The final insult:

"Hi. Can you pass me my nose ring. I put it down over there somewhere."

The claimant rests his case.

The goo in the machine.

2006-04-10T13:37:00.000+01:00

For fuck's sake.

Here we go again. You know, I'd really rather be writing about lambs gambolling in the fields or the first daffodils or some other equally puerile concept.

Today's little extravaganza concerns the dishwasher. This is a machine descended from an invention patented in 1850. It is fairly common in households in the western hemisphere. We have one. I'm sure I've mentioned this previously. I mention these facts only by way of illustration: the dishwasher is not a new invention. It has existed longer than the computer, the mobile telephone and the Rolling Stones combined consecutively. Most homo sapien should be familiar with the modus operandi. One could almost expect homo erectus to be similarly capable.

The dishwasher is conventionally loaded up with the crockery and cutlery to be cleaned. It is charged with a dose of detergent. There are other substances that you can put in with the detergent, such as a particular salt to eradicate limescale, not to mention the non-ionic surfactants for the emulsification of lipids. There are enzymes as well. I like enzymes. I think enzymes are good. I understand that there are even some powders containing rutile available.

In any case the dishwasher is a labour saving device. Let machines do the work so that people have time to think. The thing is, most of the models I know about (and certainly the one installed in our particular kitchen) do not have fucking TEETH.

This is not a surprise to many people, but I will hazard a guess that there are some people out there who do not have the first clue about what actually transpires within a dishwasher. These are the same poor fools who think that milk is produced by supermarkets in pints and that steaks and cattle are unrelated: not somehow part of the same mysterious process of production. These people probably don't know very much about the refrigerator, and would be astonished to discover that the little light goes off when you close the door and are more likely than not to trap themselves inside a giant Kelvinator attempting to disprove this epiphanous fact.

These people are premium quality fucktards and I suspect that I am living with one, or perhaps a breeding pair.

Today I opened the dishwasher to put in my cereal bowl and coffee cup. I found inside a catalogue of horrors. The filter was full of lemon seeds and chunks of what was probably capsicum (I say capsicum you say red pepper). I think that there may also have been some stray penne. This conglomerate shit was slimy and feculent. I had to empty the filter. But it pained me to put my french cuffs into the machine lest I smear my cuff-links with partially digested putrefaction. So much so that I danced a little dance of squeamishness and rage.

Also inside were spoons encrusted with semi-dried pasta, bowls and plates smeared thick with Christ-only-knows-what. And a cooking pot with about half an inch of spooge-like cous-cous (Why, God? Why?). This craptastic motherlode of destruction would have done for the machine. And no doubt my third of the bond.

You see, good people of the blogosphere, when you put your shit into a dishwasher to be cleaned, it cannot chew the chunks you leave on the plates. There isn't a little Harry Potter in there with a magic fucking wand ("Expungio!" is categorically not a functioning magic spell). Hot water and chemicals do what they can to dissolve the filth, and this sludge must pass through the filter. Which you must clean. Regularly. But even the most diligent enzymes and surfactants are unable to deal with whole tortellini and severed fish-fingers.

Today's reason I am re-reading the escape clause on my lease is: the moron in this flat who is so extravagantly stupid as to equate to a malicious saboteur of both the kitchen generally and my bond particularly. This cretin is either an actual clear and present danger to itself and those it lives with, or a smiling assassin, bent on driving me into a blind and psychotic rage, forced to attempt some radical open heart surgery with a carving knife upon the nearest fuckwit to trespass across my path.

[sadly no picture atm... this will be amended the moment the picture posting panel performs precisely and promptly]

And his enemies shall lick the dust...

2006-04-07T01:40:00.000+01:00

Today I vacuumed the two busiest communal rooms downstairs. I discovered that on just those two squares of carpet it is possible to distribute approximately 250 grams of fine dust and a double handful of hair. I note with interest that the colour of these hairs changes about 10 millimetres from the follicle.

This is a minor disgrace, usually I cannot permit the accumulation of filth to this breathtaking extent. But it is sometimes necessary to signal to other occupants of the Habitat that I am not the fucking house maid, and my usual employment is not cleaning up after indolent and dissolute cretins. That and my mind has been acutely concerned with the harvest my stolen nail clippers recently reaped.

Dust is chiefly composed of dead skin cells and other tasty organic matter, some inorganic matter and the feces of the dust mites which feed on the organic matter. I prefer not to live with this substance.

What amazes me is that this amount could build up so quickly. I am convinced that the IT Bastard and The Artist are coming down in the dead of night and vigorously exfoliating each other and performing unspeakable acts of depravity with pumice stones, combs and nail clippers. God knows what other Satanic rituals are required to generate so much crud.

I was weak and cracked first. However, all is not lost. I managed to spread some of this collection on a pile of clean washing. For dust thou art, and your dust I shall return.

A triumvirate of grief

2006-04-02T13:37:00.000+01:00

I found my nail clippers today. I didn't know I'd lost them. Now that I do, I don't think I want them back. Oh - and I found them in the lounge room. I shudder to think what uncollected detritus remains in the carpet. Primitive mountebank whichever is responsible. Degenerate.
There is shit all through the fucking kitchen. For christ's sake people. You are a disgrace, a dual-core fuck-up of sensational performance. Learn to shut the fucking fridge door!!! And why the fascination with pig-fat in little jars, you decrepit bastards?
Shoes, bags, kites, bottles of water, more bags, mail, more shoes, CDs, coffee cups (apparently we own an impressive fucking variety and quantity of coffee cups), banana peel, scarves, sweaters, newspapers, bags, bags, how many lap-top bags?, handbags, man-bags - fuck the fucking bags! And a single boot. This is a census of the floor of the communal space in the Habitat.

Revenge is a dish best served cold

2006-03-27T13:37:00.000+01:00

I like food. I like good food better. I like to enjoy my good food secure in the knowledge that I am not going to be poisoned.

There are some several things I particularly like. Fresh rocket salad with shaved Parmesan and balsamic vinegar. Quail now too, since Cheney's lawyer-shoot. Goat's cheese. Pancakes with crispy bacon and maple syrup. This last is the national dish in Canada. And that assertion caused a stand up argument with The Artist the other day. Apparently she knows that this is false and that no-body on the entire surface of this blue globe eats crispy bacon and maple syrup on pancakes and only complete sickos would even joke about it and therefore, the syllogism inevitably flows that I am a perverse lunatic. My attempt to reason was futile. My invitation to jointly consult the oracle of google was not RSVP'd. My declaration that willful blindness on her part was tantamount to moronic stupidity was perhaps heavy handed, and it's result was steadfast howling and tears in gratifying volume. A pyrrhic victory then. Just to fuck her up some more I said: "Well, I'm having it every day for breakfast this week."

Anyway, the foregoing is just by way of introduction. The first course in a degustation menu of food farce.

Her gourmet fruit-juice (which I have been enviously observing) has finally gone off, unopened. The carton is bulging dangerously. On the day of it's hatching I will compel her to remove whatever pupae emerge. Pear flavoured face-huggers hopefully.
My 85% chocolate has a large chunk missing. I wonder if the choco-thief (and these fuckers are EVERYWHERE) was suitably surprised. That shit ain't exactly sweet.
Some idiot has bought frosties. Those fuckers are their own reward. God.

And now sir, some dessert? Oooh! But sir, eet ees onlee waff-er theen.

Honey. It is perhaps my favourite thing in it's purest form. There is manuka honey. I avow that manuka honey is magical, and has mystic properties. One can use it to control an undead army and blot out the sun. Another of my favourites, also from the antipodes, is Tasmanian Leatherwood honey. It is more potent than viagra and turns lead into gold. Best licked off golden haired virgins. The upper thigh area is de rigueur.

But recently I have been eating some French stuff, where the bees use sunflowers. It is a set honey and it is perfectly divine. Now the thing about set honey is that it is not viscous and translucent, but opaque and almost solid, usually with a creamy colour.

Now I came into the kitchen late on Saturday afternoon looking for my breakfast. It was a mess. Surprise sur-fucking-prize. I had, to the best of my knowledge finished the French sunflower honey. It was all gone. But as I stood in the kitchen blearily scratching myself I saw it there on the bench, quite clearly. With it's lid off.

Fucking chocolate larceny and now this!

I wondered if Pooh ever went postal. Popped a cap in Christopher Robin's ass, or something. Forced Piglet and Tigger into a deeply unnatural union at knifepoint. Plush snuff revenge for a lost love.

A pre-emptive strike was called for. I recklessly hacked off a chunk of sourdough bread belonging to someone else. Duke spoke in my mind:

Yeah. I know. I'm guilty. I understand that. I knew it was a crime but I did it anyway. Shit, why argue? I'm a fucking criminal.

Fuck the consequences - in the kitchen it is an eye for an eye. Consume the meagre remains of the honey, I thought, before them. They are watching, remember... Waiting. Eat the honey before they come back with the creosote. I spooned it on thick.

I lifted the bread, laden with luscious creamy goodness. In slow motion I looked down at the approaching precious morsel, slavering in anticipation of the sweet sweet motherload of French flavour. Pavlov's puppy ain't got nothin'. Behind the bread I saw, in slow motion, the carnage in the kitchen. Someone's been cooking pancakes...

The bread was in my mouth.

I saw a pan, thick with grease.

An empty sausage tray. Pork and sage. Nice.

I started to bite.

An empty bottle of cheap maple syrup.

Suffering fuck noooooo....!!! Not possible!

I spat out the foetid evil filth. Gagged. Retched. Something to drink. No- not the fizzy fucking pear juice. Cranberry.

Jesus.

I looked over the scene carefully. Some reprehensible, stupid swine had cooked sausages and pancakes. Not crispy bacon - sausages. Sausages and fucking pancakes is not the national dish of anywhere. Mebbe Poland, but that certainly isn't going to be confused with any culinary ratio decidendi carrying force in this jurisdiction. Sausages and fucking maple syrup is the last bastion of the most depraved lunatics of all. Worse than the coprophile or the degenerate donkey-fucker. Nothing that walks or crawls on planet earth eats pancakes, sausages and maple syrup.

That same gastronomic terrorist had then poured the cooling pig fat into my empty honey jar.

Lá Fhéile Pádraig

2006-03-20T13:37:00.000Z

Saint Patrick's Day. Total excuse to drink too much. Inspires all manner of non-sensical behaviour.

Me and the IT bastard went out drinking. Went to a pub on the river and drank the promotional Guinness. Acquired a large green leprechaun hat with a toucan on it as a reward.

I find that flatmates taken out of the context of the habitat are bearable even enjoyable company. But once in the Habitat the temptation is there to piss and moan about domestic rubbish. At least in the pub there is a lackey who empties the ashtray and takes away the empty pint glasses. This relaxes the reptile brain, and since the domestic disharmony is out of sight, it is also out of mind. This allows a more civil interaction with the possibility of enjoyment, given a sufficient quantity of Guinness.

Inevitably me and the IT bastard found ourselves staggering back the to Habitat drunk and laughing and carrying on. He's recently bought a very expensive power kite, the sort of thing that you fly whilst attached to a contraption like a buggy in order to be dragged along a beach. It's capable of 40 miles an hour whilst so employed and is an enormous amount of fun and not a little dangerous.

The IT bastard decides that he is going to fly the kite. At 2am in the biting freezing cold and howling wind. I called bullshit on him and so it was that, in order to salvage his wounded drunken pride, we found ourselves in a nearby park with a couple more cans of beer each and the Night Kite. I flew it and was dragged face down through the freezing mud. He was dragged into the sky and bust something in his foot when he came back down. I flew the kite really close to a great big oak tree.

This brought howls and whines and imprecations, quite naturally. I understand. The fucking thing is worth more than most family cars. So the Night Kite was snatched from my grasp. The wind picked up and the IT bastard was dragged forward about 5 meters and immediately flies the fucking thing straight into the aforementioned tree at 100 miles an hour under about 120 pounds of strain. The sound of tearing is prominent. The crashing of tree branches follows the instinctive attempt to retrieve by pulling, tugging and hauling.

Needless to say this reduced me to tears. There's that fucking Schadenfreude again. Talk about ROFLMAO. Smell the sesame oil.

Anyway, the next morning I had to put up with all manner of pissing and moaning. Thankfully it wasn't about the kitchen floor, or the fact that the downstairs toilet has no paper again, or that the TV remote is always on my chair in the lounge, or that my shit is always in the washing machine. Bah - I just found myself complaining about people complaining. I realise the irony.

"Oh my foot, woe is me, I have fallen and I can't get up."

"Oh my muddy shoes. They are forever ruined."

"Oh my head. I shall forswear alcohol forever. Thor forfend that I touch another drop."

Fair play. Drunken injuries. My own leather jacket has something very like dog shit smeared down the front. I can cope with that.

Then this: "My kite is ripped. If it wasn't for you it'd still fly."

Like fuck. You miserable cunt, you're the one who took it out, pissed, at 2 in the morning. You were the one who was holding the reins as it plunged suicidally into the immovable object. You and you alone decided to apply your full body weight to the lines to pull it out of the tree, while I laughed. You sir are the architect of the night kite's demise. Here's some fucking duct tape you prick. Do your mouth while you're at it.

Tea-towel paranoia

2006-03-13T13:37:00.000Z

Today I went into the kitchen. I discovered that the top of the grill has been indelibly marked, tattooed, with a remarkable image.

When I was a kid I used to get the packets of potato chips and shrink them in the oven. It was fun, it stank like cancer and produced miniature replicas of the original packets. You had to be dead careful not to get the oven too hot or everything would melt and catch fire and that would be a diabolical catastrophe. It was an art and needed vigilant supervision.

Today I see that the grill has the perfect reversed image of a bread bag. I can read the mirror image details of a competition to win some piece of shit, the bar code, the energy information per serving and the ingredients. The image is so good that it can't be an accident. I mean seriously... I spent five minutes casually dropping a loaf of bread on the bench and slowly lifting it up as I peered underneath to see if it is feasible to accidentally get the plastic perfectly flat underneath. I can't fucking do it.

But some malignant prick living in the Habitat can. Somehow the bread got perfectly placed on top of the grill so that the bag was flat on the top. Then that same malignant prick fires up the grill. And watches. And vigilantly fucking supervises. As the image is perfectly transferred from the bag to the top of the grill.

An accident? I call bullshit on this theory. After some consideration I have concluded that it is the most unlikely accident. Those bread bags are thin. They are prone to spontaneous fucking combustion. There is no way I can be convinced it's an accident. The bread was accidentally put on the grill in the perfect conformation, basted to perfection, and then taken off the grill at precisely the right moment, seconds before destruction by fire - and the resulting transfer left there - not cleaned off? When it would have been easier to scrub off hot?

But why? To what end would someone do such a thing? I need Sherlock Holmes for this one. There is another clue for those hardened skeptics among you. There is indeed a domestic Moriarty here for me to foil.

Next to the stove was a standard domestic object. It is a small piece of innocent cloth. Irish linen to be precise. It is called a tea-towel in the UK and a dish-towel in the US. It is mine. I brought it to the house. There are two others also in the kitchen, hanging off the oven door handle. They are standard cotton, I think. But mine has now got a six inch scorch with a complete destruction of the fabric amounting to several square inches. Why mine and not the others? Coincidence? Accident?

No, a message... or a threat...

I must be vigilant. They are watching... waiting...

Pasta-nalysis

2006-03-02T13:37:00.000Z

Spathy is recovering slowly.

Meals in the new Habitat are a communal affair. There has been a very agreeable and as yet unspoken co-operation in matters culinary as to the variegated gastronomic responsibilities of our little triumvirate.

Tonight was my turn and I cooked, in 21 minutes, some penne with a sauce comprised of equal parts capers, spring onions, chilli peppers, garlic, the finest chorizo I could get my hands on, cabernet sauvignon and vine ripened tomatoes. The pasta was boiled in a decoction of salt, oil and water (just like the Mediterranean) and Tabasco. This shit had a kick like a half grown rhinoceros. Divine (I know, I know... prego, prego). We ate it in the living room listening to Billy Bragg.

The graphic artist is currently occupied by a fascination of that famous student of Freud, a certain Carl Gustav Jung. Her collection of his works and image has taken over a room of the Habitat which houses our collection of wine, scotch, chartreuse and absinthe (and the George Formby Grill, still in its' box. In exactly the same way as a 19th century music box, when you open it and put meat in it, it plays that inimitable classic: "When I'm cleaning windows". Fucking thing is completely unusable). I'm not really sure what function this room has any more. It is part library, part shrine and part smoking room. The disturbing thing is that Jung's eyes never leave you. There are three portraits on the walls, and his visage stares blearily from the covers of various treatises and biographies. I can imagine that it is actually dangerous for the mentally infirm to spend too long in there.

Our collective unconsciousness was served desert in here by the Artist. It was, in the tradition of Blue Peter, one she'd prepared earlier: a rumball each, the size of my head, and gloopiliy delicious.

Dinner tonight was sufficiently intense under Jung's gaze as to inspire me to want to sit in the dark in my room and re-read some Frank Herbert while listening to Tool (ah... Atreides and Aenima). After the rumball in the Jung Hall, it was time for the washing up. Yes, dear reader, the trouble in the paradise...

The IT-Bastard stood up, scratched his balls ostentatiously, lit a cigarette and disappeared to go drinking with some of his IT-Bastard mates. Leaving the two of us staring in dismay at the pile of wreckage in the kitchen. A Mexican standoff developed very quickly.

The logic:

I was disinclined to clean up, having executed a triumph of timing, getting the pasta al dente and the sauce perfetto coterminously. To be honest cooking con gusto is tiring, and I was entering the somnolent reaches of the evening nursing some scotch (I like my scotch like I like my women: 15 years old and called 'Johnny'). It would be uncivilised to jump up now and start packing the dishwasher.
The Artist was apparently unwilling, perhaps in the belief that a pound of chocolate and a bewildering quantity of rum is sufficient to buy-out of any such obligation.

We have a fucking dishwasher for fuck's sake. It's not difficult to load. It isn't secreted in some recondite cranny of the galley. The operation of the device is achieved by the depression of a single button. Even without this labour saving miracle the clean up operation would have taken less time and effort than the making of the mess.

Why me? I'd done the shopping, paid for it, carried it home, chopped it, stirred it and alchemically transformed it. Why is it so bloody difficult to arrange the cleaning up with the same unspoken facility as the cooking? Is it the endorphins? Is it that sinister foil of the ego; the shadow? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of my flatmates?

I surrender! I'm considering the cowardly and disposable safety of Thai noodles delivered by motorcycle (the enterprise in question is called "Thai Fighter" and the delivery guy's helmet has a particular Sith-like quality, reminiscent of certain Lord Vader. Very droll indeed). Fuck you both, I'm taking my bat and my ball and my arrabiata con tutto and I'm going the fuck home!

Oh... wait...

PV=nRT, dickhead.

2006-02-22T13:37:00.000Z

Albert Einstein is regarded widely as a genius. I never met the man, and cannot say for sure whether or not he was, in fact, a genius.

One thing I do know for sure about Einstein: he is famous for is inventing the refrigerator. He and one of his students, Leó Szilárd, were awarded a US patent in 1930. The genius behind this version of the 'fridge is that it has no moving parts.

Some would say that Einstein's genius lay in the way he could understand something quite abstract (like, say: thermodynamics) and express it in a very simple way. The Einstein refrigerator requires no pump. You open the door, put in or pull out the comestibles you require and then close the door. It is so simple. Just like E=mc². Even a quailtard can understand it.

This afternoon I went into the kitchen and discovered that the 'fridge door was open. It looked closed, that is true, but I could see the telltale glow of the internal light escaping around the seal. Clear proof that the last person to use it has absolutely no regard for all the hard work of Leó and Albert, someone who scoffs at the first law of thermodynamics. Or perhaps the deliberate work of some adiabatic saboteur.

Now this is a terrible thing. Obviously some people are irreversibly stupid and careless. Some people may not have the best hand eye co-ordination. Some people just don't give a shit. Wherever I roam across this globe I find people of such insoluble and concentrated idiocy and simple-mindedness that I sincerely pray for some mild apocalypse. A bit of chlorine in the gene pool. But not closing a 'fridge door? Seriously... the central heating was on. I could hear the ghost of Lord Kelvin boyling with rage.

The thing is, a 'fridge is a very large white object. It is present in most kitchens in the civilised western hemisphere. People are familiar with them. What aggravates me is that most people have no fucking clue how they work, therefore no idea why you plug them into the fucking wall, therefore, no real idea how much electricity they use, or how hard it is for the ammonia phase-change to physically pump heat out of the fridge. Therefore, how important it is to make sure the fucking door is shut. For Christ's sake, I used to own a dog that could open the door, steal my gourmet sausages and close the bloody door again. He left the door open the first time, and received a flogging. Rather than cease his culinary kleptomania he just shut the door from then on. Good dog.

Today's reason I am infuriated by one of the retards I live with: Such intellectual luminaries as Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot laboured for years to understand thermodynamics so we could have fridges. Einstein himself invented an ingenious refrigerator. Scientists have provided us with the gift of cool. The world is gradually heating up killing all the fucking dolphins and polar bears and whatever just so we can keep our milk at 4 degrees Celsius and some stupid FUCKTARD with less brains than a German Shepard LEAVES THE FUCKING DOOR OPEN!

Eviction!

2006-02-10T13:37:00.000Z

It has been some time since my last post, and I apologise. My life has been cast into uproar. John has posted a remarkably prescient comment, which is so close to the mark that I suspect a conspiracy. You see the thing is that the Habitat was put on the market during my absence. No bastard told me. I have yet to be consulted. There has been an unconscionable lack of disclosure about this issue, and I am not fucking happy!

Apparently there was another inspection while I was gone, this time with the addition of some sort of property valuing type of person. This person then said a very large number to the Landlord (may he die choking on his own semen), who replied: "Sell the fucker."

This of course happened in my absence. And in the presence of The Flatmate. She was apparently smoking in the kitchen during this exchange, which is strictly contrary to the terms of the lease. Christ.

So the Landlord (may he suffer rape and pestilence) cancels the lease in writing, pisses and moans and complains in that letter about "cohabitation" and "signatories to the lease", kicks out the Flatmate and uses a very considerable chunk of my bond money to clean up her filth. This was bad, but one item on the clean up bill included "cleaning smoke damage from all walls".

This incensed me. What fucking smoke damage? It is simply there because he saw the Flatmate smoking in the kitchen. Was it not the irrepressible Bricktop who once posed the following magniloquence: "Do you know what Nemesis means? A righteous infliction of retribution, manifested by an appropriate agent." That bitch has a Nemesis now. Personified by an 'orrible cunt. Me. I'm going after her now. It is too much. I'm going to hire a fucking bounty hunter!

So when I returned to the Habitat, I found it empty. No Flatmate. I found a bunch of correspondence from the Landlord (may he discover his real father is a goat), explaining that the place must be vacated in 14 days. Another that explained that unless I got my shit out of there fast, it would all be sold. Another one the same as that, giving another 7 days. And a note from the Flatmate giving a bogus address to contact her in the case of any static about the Habitat.

You can imagine that, can't you? Standing in the empty, but admittedly very clean Habitat, with all my possessions (inclusive of a very sick Spathy) in a pile on the kitchen floor hopelessly clutching a letter evicting me and simultaneously robbing me of almost a grand. Welcome home. How was your trip? Dispossessed, dislodged, despondent. Exiled and expelled. Forced out and fucked off. Ejected and dejected.

So I've moved to the Capital. I have two flatmates now; a couple. A graphic designer and some sort of IT consultant who earns a fearsome amount of money. We live in a great place, close to the river. The new place is filled with happy, shiny toys. There is an air of exuberant optimism, almost glee.

And although everything seems fine now, I have already seen the IT consultant drinking my beer. This is a source of rage and aggravation. Thou shalt not drink my beer. We shall see. I'm watching you, motherfucker...

I return...

2006-01-18T13:37:00.000Z

Dear people of the blogosphere, hear me now.

I have been on a long journey. My analyst said I needed to go on a long journey. But that bitch would say anything to get me out of her bedroom closet.

I have been to Australia. I saw Fat Boy Slim on Bondi beach on New Years Eve. I have been to Singapore, and had high tea at Raffles as a drug mule and escaped the death penalty. I have been to India and South Africa. I have shared my last taste of the true black meat; the flesh of the giant, aquatic, Brazilian centipede.

I have not exerted one axon in the contemplation of this blog or The Flatmate.

I am happy.

But tomorrow I get on a plane home and some time next week I will walk back into the Habitat...

I have heard nothing from her. I have no idea what awaits. Was it not George Bush who said:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our Flatmate, dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the psychopath...

Some Replies...

2005-12-02T13:37:00.000Z

Salamander – Cthulhu, you are quite correct. Since I am already living with Shub-Niggurath, I have no fear of the Great Old One. He doesn't have the balls to enter the Habitat. I challenge Him. I'm puttin the fucken call on YOU, Cthulhu! Come get some!!!

Theloneblogger – I guarantee this work is absolutely not fiction. Some parts of it may have been exaggerated to protect the innocent, i.e: me. The bitch is utterly diabolical and I promise you that if I was petty minded I could complain about her once an hour.

MB – I love you too. I will move in with you immediately. Just help me bury one corpse, that's all I ask.

Tiger Lamb – I sometimes wonder myself whether I have inadvertently serialised myself. I am a big fan of dream sequences. In fact I'm hoping I'll wake up some day soon and have a good chuckle.

Estellite – secret webcam… deliciously evil. She has no human rights. And I have the publishing rights. To her ritual sex rites.

The city I'm in is having a 4 day festival of plastic and crap chocolate. Something to do with St Jeebus' Day later this month. The effect of this is that all the accommodation of the standard to which I have become accustomed has been booked in advance for a year. I have had to make do with *gasp* a B&B.

B&B is such an inoffensive sounding acronym. It couldn't possibly be uncomfortable. It suggests, almost onomatopoeically, a bedroom full of doilies, three ducks on the wall, warm, starched and deodorised, old fashioned, cringingly friendly almost subservient. It will do in times of crisis. (Impossible to send down for a Godfather at a B&B tho).

It doesn't suggest for example any scenes out of Hitchcock movies, where the main characters keep their mother's corpse in the attic. It shouldn't bring to mind banjos and the Appalachian mountains. The door was opened by a leering decrepit old man and his leering decrepit old wife. There was a collie cross shepherd bitch going bananas in the hallway when I got in. It got so excited that it shit on the carpet. Rather than lots of embarrassed laughing there was an earnest explanation about the dogs diet, how old she was and that she was excited because she doesn't see other people very often. Big Ben sized warning bell went off right about then.

The shower had a large yellow post-it note on the door instructing me to bring the bathroom mat from my room, to use it, and then to wipe down the shower cubicle with the towel provided. There was only one towel provided, which horrified me until I decided to wantonly disobey the contemptible and impertinent note. The bathroom door was adorned on both sides with different instructions about some shit or other.

The instructions for ordering breakfast were on a large yellow post-it, and they instructed me to write my order on a large yellow post-it and to affix said article to the exterior of my door, where Igor, or Thing would collect it. There was a large yellow post-it declaring that a particular room was the "dinning room" [sic] (I've always secretly wanted to use [sic] in a quote - such superiority!). A large yellow post-it warned me not to leave the front door unlocked lest "Jessie" escape. "She nows how to open it!"[sic].

I suspect that Jessie was probably the dog, not the landlady.

I asked the landlady for an iron and ironing board so I could do my shirt. I was invited down into the kitchen. There I was expected to dangle my Jermyn Street French cuffs into the fucking dog basket. The stench of dogshit was palpable. I could see fur. While I ironed, the dog barked and the landlady described a humorous anecdote about the time she dropped the iron on the carpet and Jim didn't shout at her or beat her, which just shows the strength of their relationship after all these years, which he would have done for a more minor infraction of housekeeping, isn't it funny how we are all bothered by the small things in life?

I almost want to get back to the Habitat.

The inspection did not start well...

2005-11-26T13:37:00.000Z

It was Carrie Bradshaw who saw it first. A fat, succulent, cockroach. Her squeal alerted the Landlord (may he contract prostate cancer and die suppurating).

"Just think of it as a sort of take-home bush-tucker challenge." I almost said.

"Fuck." I said, sotto voce.

What can you say in such circumstances? I am betrayed by the degenerate retard living with me. Who is not supposed to be living with me. So I cannot blame her. And I can't exactly blame the fact that I am out of town nearly 5 days a week either... It belies a certain sort of irresponsibility.

"aaaahaha..." I giggled nervously "An insect from the order Blattodea. Possibly Blattella germanica. A marvellous specimen. I shall have to put it back in my collection, from where it has obviously escaped. Less germs in one of these than the human mouth, you know..."

The carpet in the lounge was apparently stained. Stained by the sort of staining material which makes a stain that is invisible to the naked fucking eye, perceptible only to landlords and TV show look-a-likes. Perhaps they had on contact lenses made of that stuff they use in CSI to detect ejaculate under UV, and the stain was in fact the site of a semi-perpetual penetration of the Flatmate by the local horde of car-thieves.

Perhaps I should have asked them to look at my curtains for me.

The bathroom needed cleaning, apparently. "To gleam is insufficient." That is what was written on Carrie's clipboard, I swear to God.

I was in for another shock when we got to the Flatmate's old room. There was dust everywhere and all sorts of crap on the floor. Old bus tickets, receipts for crap, general kibble. I even found a *ahem* soiled G-string, but this was much later, under the bed. It had formed to the contour of the mattress and was quite rigid. In parts.

Anyway, I got a fairly robust excoriation for the condition of the Habitat. Which was reasonably unfair, but expected from the Landlord (may his balls host a thousand parasites). So I went down to Vox to debrief with Bav.

Because Vox is three letters long, the names of all the staff have to be three letters long too. Bav is the owner. Bob you know about. There's Joe, and Jug and Dāv. Ha ha... no that's total bullshit which I just made up then.

Anyway, Bav, who is a degenerate pig-fucker first class, wasn't there. This bastard looks like a malignant Gandhi. The sort of bloke who likes violence and abhors fairness. His glasses, instead of being innocuously circular are all sharp and elongated. He is rude to his customers, vicious to his staff and engages in date-rape at the birthday parties of his adolescent nieces. His beard gives you the impression that he knows the whereabouts of a cache of kiddy-pr0n and is pretty handy with a box-cutter. Despite these minor character flaws, he is good to know: he is highly knowledgeable about scotch and cigars and stocks some of the very best available.

His advice involved the use of Rohypnol.

Anyway, today's reason I hate my flatmate is fairly bloody obvious: she's a bitch and I hate her and she's crap at cleaning up after herself and she gets me in trouble with the Landlord (may his PA have a Grand mal while fellating him) and she still owes me money and I don't have any Rohypnol and I can't think of any revenge that won't also damage the Habitat and if she doesn't shape up soon I swear to Cthulu that I'm going to stab her in the eye with a shitty stick. And Spathy is dead now too.

Abandon all hope...

2005-11-25T13:37:00.000Z

This weekend, ie, tomorrow, there is an inspection of the Habitat, by the Landlord (blessed is his name, peace be upon him).

I return to the Habitat this evening. Last night I tried to communicate to The Flatmate the urgency of the situation. This gave me pain, because it involved speaking to her, which is bad enough, but I had to do it over the telephone. The same object which she abused so completely. And after my instruction never to touch the fucker again I felt that forcing her to pick it up by ringing it for 15 minutes might somehow be interpreted as permission to recommence the rape of my wallet.

In any case, the sullen wench did pick up the phone and listened sullenly as I informed her that the Landlord (blessed be his name and so forth ...) would be entering the Habitat at approximately 1400 hours, accompanied by Lord Vader and a guard of loyal storm-troopers, and that He wants no filth, dust, mould, garbage, thong-like underwear, shoes, dirty jeans or coke-snorting paraphernalia lying around like normal.

You see, gentle readers, the Landlord (peace etc ...)... No wait, I'll tell you about this malignant bastard first. He is a motherfucker of the first water. This prick is capable of the worst sort of snobbery and bastardry. In his mind, the fact of his ownership in fee simple of several luxurious real estates somehow imbues this him with the power to heal lepers with his bare fucking hands. This messianic Orangutan is always accompanied by a curly-haired-chick-from-sex-in-the-city-look-alike woman (god only knows what she is - PA, estate-agent, wife, girlfriend, pet crack-whore).

Between them they systematically criticise, threaten and insinuate. And they do it to within a nano-meter of the law according to the terms in my lease. I hate them for it. At the beginning of my tenancy he wanted to be paid in cash, which struck me as very strange and quite possibly contrary to the best efforts of the authorities who regulate income tax. I don't typically use cash and going to the bank is a ball-ache, especially if it is just for him. All my suggestions (even cheques!) were sneered at. This prick would have turned his nose up at gold bullion couriered to him directly by a naked Milla Jovovic. And given the sheer bastardry of dealing with him, I'm not exactly sure he will be so keen on the Flatmate, cause she's not really, in a total legal sense, completely on the lease. She's got 6 months squatter's rights and a bad attitude.

This visit has been in my diary for six weeks now and there's not a god-damned thing I can do about my impending doom. I will be homeless come Monday.

Anyway, the Landlord (etc, etc) is selling up. And apparently there will be another millionaire mountebank to deal with on Saturday.

So I informed the Flatmate about this inexorable farce, and she sullenly listened. Then with detectable glee she tells me: "There's five full garbage bags by the front door. I'm going away for the weekend. Have fun."

How in the name of Christ she has managed to fill five garbage bags is beyond me. Where this volume of filth came from is a mystery. I am afeared that she has conducted some sort of orgy in the Habitat, and these bags contain the forensic material. I am sort of glad she won't be there to fuck things up for me, but she still owes me bread for the phone bill. And this time of year those garbage bags will be covered in snow. It's been puking down at the Habitat apparently. So, I have to dig out five bags of her garbage and somehow dispose of them myself. God knows what the neighbours think of the midden outside. And I hope the Landlord (....) hasn't seen it.

Today's reason I hate my flatmate: she is positively enjoying the fact that I have to clean up after her before 2 o'clock on Saturday, that I have to put her filth in my car, that she can just swan off to whatever carnival of substance abuse and debauchery she has been invited to, while I labour under the interrogation of The Master of the Universe, Carrie fucking Bradshaw and some bastard who wants to own my crib.

The phone bill...

2005-11-11T13:37:00.000Z

One of Edison's contemporaries was a gentleman called Bell. Again, some people will tell you that it is he, and he alone, responsible for the electric telephone. But in point of fact there are about three possible inventors. In any case you all know about fucking telephones.

So does The Flatmate. Today I got my quarterly phone bill. By email. It has left me shaken.

Dear God. Here is a list of things I can't have, because I've paid that phone bill:

1. Ipod Nano.
2. Hash and pr0n trip to Amsterdam for the weekend.
3. Flatscreen TV.
4. Xbox360.

At this exact instant, here are a list of currencies to the same value:

1. 226.37 GBP
2. 336.49 EUR
3. 537.88 AUD
4. 2,662.26 ZAR
5. 46,489.65 JPY

This is an astonishing amount of money. Especially for something as luxurious as telephone conversations. Some of the calls made are apparently to overseas mobiles. What, in the immortal words of Ghandi, The FUCK!?! This is NOT the way of the Prophet, peace be upon him.

How is it possible to crank up this amount? Seriously, my calls were 6.73% of that total. It should have been 50%! The bitch must die! I am going to nail her bleeding corpse to the fucking wall, and shove the telephone deep inside her, reverse Caesarian style.

Today's reason I am actually sharpening an axe: My flatmate has allowed herself to spend 42 hours, 15 minutes and 10 fucking seconds talking to her degenerate family and drug fucked friends, on my telephone, at my expense, without warning or apology, without compiling an historical list of transcontinental telecommunications initiated by herself, without offer of compensation. Fuck you. I hate you.

Die.

A meditation on light

2005-11-10T13:37:00.000Z

Light is conventionally thought of now as being composed of photons. Photons themselves are either particles, like the corpuscles of yore, or waves (for example, it can be diffracted a la the double slit experiment), depending how you look at them. This forces an inescapable conclusion. Light is created. It has a source. Darkness doesn't have a source, and doesn't need to be created

These considerations can give rise to weighty philosophical arguments about the nature of God and the price of Orange Roughie in the Sydney fish markets. I recommend you all to go to the Sydney fish markets, buy one of these rare and endangered fishes, and barbecue the little bastard in Bondi. Particularly good if you can surround yourself with bronzed oiled bodies on a boat away from prying eyes..

But I digress. To live, civilised man needs light. Light is created. The wisdom of the day is that the excitation of atoms by heat or electromagnetic means will liberate photons. By manipulating the conditions of same, particular types and colours of light are produced. All very entertaining so far

This was given a practical and commercial existence by an entertaining bloke called Edison. It is said that the very first lightbulbs were made decades earlier, but "Alva" was the first to turn a profit. What is not universally known is that Edison's bulbs were built upon patents he had acquired from the previous inventors. His filament was actually made of bamboo, rather than tungsten. It was with the discovery of a process allowing tungsten filaments to be made cheaply that the bulb really took off as a domestic way of creating light. They are now about 10cents

I returned to The Habitat this week to discover that in fact some of the lightbulbs has expired. Shuffled off the mortal coil, as it were... Joined the choir invisibule... I was mildly annoyed, at first. I'm sure this is the correct reaction to a dead, unreplaced bulb - a mild annoyance and a desire to smash something small and inexpensive

As I journeyed through The Habitat I grew more and more furious. An halogen down light in the kitchen was gone, as was a large screw-in spot. Three of those little ones that are supposed to look like candles were gone in the living room, one on the stairs, two in my bedroom, all the lights in the bathroom and one on the landing. Unless The Habitat has become infected with the poltergeist of an anti-social goth, then I cannot see the demise of 12 lightbulbs as anything other than some deliberate sabotage by The Flatmate. Ironically I found myself incandescent with rage in the bathroom, filled with the desire to kill and maim. It was not the simple fact of the failed bulbs, but that they had been allowed to remain unreplaced for so long

Today's reason I hate my flatmate: Over the last two hundred years some of the most intelligent scientists, industrialists and capitalists have laboured for the rest of humanity so that there might be light. These demi-gods of invention have allowed civilisation to spread down the food chain to the level of my flatmate, who completely spurns their efforts because she is a cretinous philistine and not content with insulting the endeavours of these genii, insults me by deliberately failing to replace even a single bulb in the bathroom, which is dark now from 4:43pm in the afternoon until almost 7am, and which she uses in this darkened condition, probably spreading all manner of feculent bodily filth across the room in perfect anonymity and furthermore leaving me to attend to the purchase and replacement of the said bulbs without offer of compensation or apology.

In reply...

2005-11-08T16:00:00.000Z

Tempus fugit. My abiding apologies. I provide this excuse only to let my loyal readers know that I have been involved with some surprisingly enjoyable litigation and that this is the cause of my radio silence. It is of course no excuse to allow controversy and distemper to remain in the comments section of this blog, and for that I abase myself, prostrate.

Someone wants to know if I am from South Africa. I was born in a small town in the Karoo, in the Eastern Cape. I am South African. I am not in South Africa at the moment however. I am at work. I am qualified to practise law in three countries, none of which is South Africa. Some of my work involves intellectual property and copyright. It is for that reason that I would prefer people not to steal the artwork of the inestimable Kurt, but that if they do, that the appropriate props are made. For his benefit, you see. Additionally I have observed that the look and feel of these little pictures has become manifest across the blogosphere. On Kurt's behalf I take that as complementary and testamentary to Kurt's abundant skill and influence.

Kurt's work is iconic.

Please pardon that atrocious pun. I mentioned above my loyal readers. In fact, there are some several hundred of you who load up this page each day, probably with the hope that there will be some catharsis available. I am astounded constantly. Since I have been away from The Habitat for the last little while, there is nothing major to report. Oh, except for the fact that the Landlord is selling the place. This is certainly not going to prevent the necessity of my living with one of the stupider examples of humanity.

Self reference is not part of the art (it's all too post modern), and so I return you to your normal programming...

Affitto, bitch, affitto!!!

2005-10-25T13:37:00.000+01:00

... that there are certain things which are an inevitable consequence of being a flatmate. If you are a flatmate, there is an absolute certainty that you will have to pay rent. Rent is inexorable. The unstoppable force.

The thing about rent is that you are contractually bound to pay it. You have already promised to pay it. Whether or not you feel like it at the present moment. You can't change your mind. You have contractually guaranteed that you will not change your mind. You are fucked. You have to pay it. There is no choice.

So it is with a heavy heart that I report that my personal finances have now been raided by Her, as surely as if she marched me to the bank at the end of a sawn off shotgun. The Landlord, hallowed be his name, must be paid: "Your flatmate don't have the money? That don't confront me, as long as I get my rent money by next Thursday."

So I paid for both of us. Seeing as how there has recently been a conspicious absence of The Flatmate. And a corresponding vacuity in the kitty where the cash should have been. The absence is neither unexpected nor unpleasant. At least there is also a lack of filthy dishes. Usually she is drunk at the Russian's place, or coked out of her mind at some nightclub after-party somewhere. She usually turns up after a couple of days and flounces past the corruption she has wrought.

This time she was away for more than a week, probably closer to two. I actually found myself slightly worried. Perhaps in some ironic deal the Russian had sold her to a people smuggler who had to supply a specialty whorehouse in Irkutsk who needed drunken Westerners. Pre-addicted. Whatever.

But no. She's been in fucking Italy to meet a furniture removalist from Calabria she met somewhere in Greece. For fuck's sake.

Today's reason I want to gut, clean and skin my Flatmate: she is incapable of feeling any remorse whatsoever concerning the expenditure she causes others, feels no compulsion to make any offer to repay or otherwise compensate for same, and instead spends Christ only knows how much on international air travel, Campari, chinotto, cappuccino and gift-wrapped fucking biscotti. I didn't ask for the fucking biscotti, I don't want the fucking biscotti, you obviously didn't buy me a weeks rent worth of fucking biscotti, take the fucking biscotti and shove them right up your fucking posteriore, and give me my fucking rent.

Ciao, beyatch.

Just do it...

2005-10-14T13:37:00.000+01:00

OK, now this is beyond a joke. I've been monitoring a pile of dishes in the sink for a while now. I haven't mentioned them before, because there have been other fiascos of a more pressing nature to deal with.

About three weeks ago The Flatmate mentioned that she was going to do the dishes. Due to the subtle nature of cohabitation with someone you passionately hate, but have not yet disclosed said hatred to, combined with the more normal facade required of 2 cohabitees, I did nothing more than grunt noncomittally. You see, to have done anything else would have been wrong.

This is the way I see it. She says that not because she intends to do the dishes. Quite the reverse. Nobody ever intends to do the dishes. For example:

Bob: "Hello Jane, what are you doing this weekend?"

Jane: "Oh, Hi Bob. I intend to do the dishes."

No. It simply is not something that is ever given any more importance in a person's life than some vague intention in the future of cutting down on carbs, or maybe joining a gym, or recycling more, or donating to charity, or changing your old postal address, or registering to vote, or writing a will.

The Flatmate merely says this because she is aware that I am aware of the swaying tower of filth in my kitchen, and by doing so she admits partial responsibility therefore and attaches thereto a benign quasi-promise so that I do not have to worry about it, because after she has amended the codicil referring to the executor and calculated what BMI she should have she might get around to the dishes, that is if she doesn't get distracted by the pressing desire to call aunt Gracie in the Upper Limpopo, who she hasn't spoken to in simply ages. She just doesn't want any trouble, now move along, preferably out of the kitchen.

So, for me to do anything other than grunt would be to pass some form of moral judgement on her ranking of this task in the list of shit to do. And for cohabitees this can involve a distribution of karma.

Now she knows, and I know, that the reasonable period of time for her to carry out this quasi-promise is elastic. But it must be her that does the dishes. She has ownership of that task. For me to do them would involve trespassing upon her personal list of shit-to do.

It would be like saying: "You fat bitch, join a fucking gym. How can you go out in public like that? Look at you! And for Christ's sake donate to charity, learn to draw with charcoal and read more you degenerate philistine. And that fucking Aunt of yours called again. In tears. You bitch!"

And so; I restrain myself.

And so does she.

Today's reason I hate my flatmate: she is a degenerate philistine who cannot draw with charcoal and would rather drink so much vodka that she is late to work too many times in one week, losing yet another job, blaming some malignant employer for sacking her arse, spending all her remaining money on cigarettes and expensive face cream instead of rent and NOT DOING THE DISHES LIKE SHE SAID SHE WOULD!!!

"Oh... That wasn't me."

2005-10-08T21:48:00.000+01:00

I cleaned up bigtime today. The Flatmate came home, smoking a cigarette and coughing. She's got the flu apparently, and hasn't been to work for three days. Fuckall wrong with her that I could see.

The enquiry about the amount of unwashed dishes in the sink was brushed off effortlessly. The discussion about the broken vacuum cleaner was brief. Then I asked her about leavnig the washing machine on.

"Oh... That wasn't me."

In the immortal words of Aristotle: "What the FUCK?"

She was the only person in The Habitat for the last four days!

o_O

... or was she...?

Incredible. All that in one day.

2005-10-07T13:37:00.000+01:00

1. The fridge. Oh my god, the corruption.
2. The bathroom. Oh my god, the putrescence.
3. My DVD player is broken. FUCK, HOW!?

OFF!!! Turn it OFF!!!

2005-10-06T13:37:00.000+01:00

I crept into The Habitat last night after being away all week, hoping to see all her shit gone and a note with some rent money pinned to it on the freshly cleaned kitchen bench.

Bah. Was it not Martin Luther King Jr who uttered those immortal words: "We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope"? What was I thinking?

I immediately noticed that The Flatmate had left the brand new washing machine switched on. I hate that. There is an off position. When you have finished you turn it off. That is what you do.

Furthermore you do not leave it on and leave The Habitat and go god knows where for days. No. That is not what you do.

Today, I hate my flatmate for not switching off a very expensive brand new washine machine, which I bought so that there would be less of an excuse to trip over piles of her fucking clothes when I get home, because "oh... That old machine will simply ruin my DKNY undies..."

An unexplained absence...

2005-10-04T13:37:00.000+01:00

I have not seen or heard The Flatmate in days now. I still hate her. She will bring catastrophe back with her, of that I am sure. And poor Spathy is still wounded and limp.

It is quiet.

Too quiet.

Sleep is precious

2005-09-26T13:37:00.000+01:00

Ok, now this time she went too far.

I was in The Habitat on Sunday night and went to bed. The Flatmate was not in evidence. Good, I thought, probably get to sleep without having to put up with the incessant sounds of her midnight ablutions. Why, for chrissake, at the conclusion of this ritual does one need to bang one's toothbrush against the sink 10 times? It is beyond me. Perhaps its not a toothrush at all. Perhaps its the spoon she uses to load cocaine into her own arsehole, to avoid damage to that perfect septum in that pretty little nose in the middle of that lovely face on the front of her completely empty skull.

I digress. There I was, sleeping. My phone rings. Jesus! I thought. An emergency! It is 3am! Then I see the caller... The Flatmate.

Me: "Hello?"

Flatmate: "Itsh me." Drunk. Of course.

Me: "What the fuck do you want? It's 3 in the fucking morning!"

Flatmate: "I know. Can' oppun door... Fuggen stuck. Come down let me in."

Oh.

My.

God.

Today's reason I hate my Flatmate: She gets too trashed to open a door at 3 am and rings me to come down stairs to open it for her on the day I must travel across the fucking country to get to work by 9am.

2005-09-24T21:34:00.000+01:00

Toilet paper. Lack of. This requires no further explanation.

I will never know Scheissenbedauern

2005-09-24T13:37:00.000+01:00

It is always as bad as I thought, or worse. I suppose technically that makes me an optimist.

I spent the day today cleaning up the disasters left by The Flatmate. I had a latte with the newspapers, did a bit of gardening. And started cleaning up around the nest The Flatmate has created on the lounge. I have to go digging in there for the remote. There is all sorts of shit in there. I swear to god I wouldn't be surprised to see a leathery egg incubating in there.

I cannot bring mysef to touch her shit. And that means I am surrenderng territory to her. It becomes hers, unassailable and feculent.

Anyway the house was starting to look presentable again at about three o'clock this afternoon. Then She came home, still drunk. She muttered something about vomit, dropped all her crap right in the middle of the floor in front of me and stormed upstairs.

Todays reason I hate my dickhead flatmate: She comes home drunk, again, and immediately pollutes a newly cleaned house. What a fucken princess.

Vacuuming sucks, apparently...

2005-09-23T13:37:00.000+01:00

The bitch has broken my vacuum cleaner.

I cannot stand this anymore. I have been away all week, but before I left I said: "Do you reckon you can help me keep this place tidy? Maybe do some vacuuming?"

To which the reply was weary acquiescence. I am becominig resigned to the fact that there is a certain inevitability to life. Something bad is gonna happen. And whatever it does, I am never sure just how much of it is deliberate and malicious.

And when you couple a perfectly reasonable request to do some fucking housework with the fact that the instrument involved is now non-functional, it's operability sub-optimal, then it is very difficult to believe that the cause is simple incompetence.

Of course The Flatmate didn't deign to apologise or offer an explanation or compensation or anything of the sort. No, the remains of the machine are still there in the middle of the lounge room, gently smoking, humming with electricity. I have no idea what killed it, but I'm fucked if I'm shifting it.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off: In a fit of pique she destroys the vacuum cleaner in order to avoid ever having to ever vacuum anything ever again. And then leaves it in the fuckng lounge room!

P.S: Today I bought a brand new Dyson. Kill that if you can, bitch.

Schadenfreude

2005-09-14T13:37:00.000+01:00

The exigencies of my present employment mean that for the next little while at least I will be on secondment in another city 3 or 4 days a week. Thankfully I am provided with the luxury of solitude, amongst all the others, in my hotel accomodation. I can have smoked haddock with poached duck eggs brought to my room for breakfast if I like (I don't even need to ask for the tobasco - it is already there). I can tell reception: "No calls please, but can you send up a godfather, or two?" (A godfather is a wonderful thing... One part amaretto, two parts good whisky over ice and some gomme). Life is pretty bloody good when I'm away. It also reduces my contact with The Flatmate to a few days a week.

This doesn't stop me worrying about what The Flatmate is doing while I'm away. I have to confess that my chief concern is that she is getting drunk and inviting a parade of debauched visitors to come and thieve my things and fornicate on my lounge and ejaculate into my curtains. But this may simply be unfounded paranoia. Certainly, sniffing my curtains each time I get back will be seen as a sign of mental weakness.

So when the phone rang today and I saw it was her my immediate reaction was to howl in preparation for some new fiasco. Our conversation went a bit like this:

Me: "Hello, Paula..." *gulp*

The Flatmate: "Mmmphh garp phphtttt..."

Me: "Oh... I see..."

The Flatmate: "ffffclucking dethtitht!!!"

Me: "Deth-thitht? Dentist?"

The Flatmate: "Yeth! Phphpttt garg bloop thutht impacted blarg choop phtpht wisdom teeth extraction."

What glee. O happy days. In the immortal words of Trey Parker: "Fuck Yeah!"

Herbicide most foul

2005-09-13T13:37:00.000+01:00

I had a lovely Spathiphyllum Clevelandii. I have had this plant for about 6 months. It was really beautiful. I had looked after this thing with care and attention. Trimming off any dead leaves, making sure it got exactly the right amount of light and water. I dusted it. It was the healthiest fucking Spathiphyllum on planet earth. It gleamed.

I discovered it lying on it's side in the back yard, absolutely covered in a horde of giant slugs (I'm not kidding, these babies were 4 inches long), and almost completely destroyed.

Utterly beside myself with rage; I enquired what possible fucking reason The Flatmate could possibly have to touch my Spathiphyllum, what possibe logic in putting it where she did, and Christ Almighty why leave it there for three fucking days?

Apparently she put it outside to get some light. But some nasty slugs crawled on it and it fell over. And she couldn't go near it because they might bite her or bark at her or jump up off the fucking ground and gnaw on her fucking spine. And so she left Spathy there to die.

Today's reason I hate my flatmate:

She's a fucking murderer.

Take her anywhere... Once

2005-09-11T13:37:00.000+01:00

Curious that The Flatmate didn't really feature in that last post... The hatred just flows from everything she touches. Anyway, the conclusion to the boiler debacle is welcome.

This weekend The Flatmate and I went out for a drink, and some tapas. I sometimes wonder why I do this sort of thing to myself. I mean, she is irritating in the extreme. But even a goddamn werewolf has its good points. So, ever the martyr, I persevered and decided that, what the fuck, I'll go have a meal with her just in case she's learned to behave.

So we're sitting there in the restaurant with our drinks (hers was the inevitable double vodka and coke), waiting for the food and she starts to really scoff her vodka. Before long she's drunk. She's talking really loudly and swearing a lot. The waiter, who was happy to see us, is now frowning at her. This is really starting to embarrass me.

Then a friend of mine (who happens to own a couple of bars in town) walks in with his wife. The Flatmate is duly introduced to the pair and proceeds to slur and swear at them. Then from out of nowhere, and for no discernable reason, she insults my friend's wife (who is a more than competent masseuse) by insinuating she is a hooker. This precipitates a brief shouting match and my friend takes his wife (who is now crying) out of the restaurant.

Needless to say I was fucking fuming. I am going to struggle to make any excuses for her, and to be honest, I'm fucked if I'm going to.

In hot water...

2005-09-10T13:37:00.000+01:00

When I got back into town on Thursday night I decided to fortify myself with a few tasty beverages at my favourite bar, before heading into the Armageddon wrought by The Flatmate.

There is a barman at this establishment who is truly wise. His name is apparently Bob, an appellation so superbly incongruous that it can only be real. Bob is about six and a half feet tall and appears to be part brown bear. He has dreadlocks and the sort of beard that gives you the impression that he knows the whereabouts of a significant quantity of doubloons and is handy with a cutlass.

Bob and I discussed, amongst other things, the situation with the boiler. He suggested that I take it apart myself and try to fix it, rather than pay a god-awful amount of money to some thieving degenerate with a monkey wrench.

Six pints of Veltins later found me trying to prize open the sensitive innards of the boiler with a kitchen knife. I discovered a surprising amount of wiring and even some PCB. I decided to unscrew everything. I pulled the cover off another box inside the boiler and found it completely empty. I poked around a bit more and found the "Overheat Cut-Out Override" switch. I depressed said switch, and the green status LED confirmed we were ready to rock steady. So I turned the boiler on. There was a small click and nothing.

"Hmmm..." I thought, feeling very much the Handy-Man, "No demand..." So I went into the en suite and turned on the hot water. Immediately there was a sort of whooshing, rushing sound.

I ran back to discover a diabolical blue conflagration erupting from the small empty box I had discovered earlier.

Today's reason I hate my flatmate: The problem with the boiler was non-existent. The push of a button fixed it. That and the fact that my attempt to fix the fucker nearly burnt down The Habitat and scared seven shades of shit out of me. Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Plumbum in Extremis

2005-09-08T13:37:00.000+01:00

I am in fear. Today I leave this city and return home to the Habitat. I'll get there about 7:30 tonight. The Flatmate has found a temp job. Which ordinarily would fill me with unbridled joy, but on this particular day I would prefer her at home...

The plumber commissioned by the demonic Flatmate from Hell has decided that he needs a particular part. A particularly rare and expensive part. A component of such recondite specificity that it must be ordered from a galaxy far far away. The cost of this widget has been estimated by our esteemed plumber at somewhere between the amount of money I've budgeted for my trip to Amsterdam, and the premium for my professional indemnity insurance for the next year.

I have spoken to the Plumber ("Andy" apparently), and he was full of all manner of vague assurances and guarantees. But was unable to tell me WHAT WAS FUCKING WRONG, or what PRECISELY it was that needed to be replaced.

He has also apparently forgotten the make and model of the hot water system. And so cannot order the part. And so either the Flatmate from Hell will have to do it when she gets home (this will undoubtedly involve the complete collapse of the entire top floor, a minor explosion, and the combustion of all my favourite suits), or I will do it.

Of course at 8pm all of the plumbing outfitters in the galaxy far far away will have shut their blast doors for the weekend, and so I will have to shower in freezing water for the foreseeable future.

Today's reason I hate my flatmate: This whole fiasco is somehow her fault. If she was predictably useless she could have dragged her lazy arse out of bed and told this piratical plumber what he needed. But no. She had to go and get a fucking temp job, for which she will not even earn enough to pay for 2 hours of plumber-time, thereby forcing me to shower in freezing fucking water for the rest of my natural weekend. Oh - and hiring the world's worst fucking rip-off merchant. I despair.

She is the Destroyer of Worlds...

2005-09-07T13:37:00.000+01:00

I am astonished at my flatmate. She has an almost mystical ability to fuck my life up from a distance. I don't even need to be back at The Habitat to suffer.

It would appear that today she destroyed the hot water system. I can assure you that there was nothing amiss this morning when I had a shower. I was able to draw enough hot water to shave, as is my wont, with a razor. There was no problem.

In the middle of an important data protection meeting this morning my phone went off. I could see it was The Flatmate. I killed the call. After the meeting, while I was on a boring call to a lawyer after the meeting I checked my voicemail:

Steve the Lawyer: "... and so I think that to preserve your position we should issue..."

Me: "uh huh"

Flatmate (in hysteria): "Oh my god, oh my god I don't know what I'm going to do - its terrible..."

Shit. Fuck. Shit-fuck. What has she done?

Steve: "... will of course involve a considerable amount of work, and we should definitely involve counsel..."

Me "I see. How much will that cost?"

Flatmate: "... no hot water ... So I turned the fucking tap off and then turned it on again, and guess what? Still no hot water..."

Me "Fuck"

Steve: "Sorry? *ahem* Well I suppose the fees could be reduced if we used junior counsel, like Wilkinson..."

Flatmate: "... fucking hot water? What am I supposed to do?! My hair is terrible! It's a fucking emergency! You've got to call me! NOW!"

Me: "Stupid fucking bitch."

Steve: "... *cough*.. well, we could use Davis, but he's not much better."

Today's reason I hate my flatmate: The lazy bitch gets out of bed at 10:30, and rings me at work about the hot water, thereby fucking up my office feng shui and putting me in a shitty mood that was only soothed by my leggy PA bringing me a latte and complimenting my tie.

An Introduction to the Flatmate...

2005-09-06T13:37:00.000+01:00

I have recently moved in with the new flatmate, hence the resurrection.

I thought it was going to be a safe and simple existence. I had secured a reasonable sized 2 bedroom flat close to work, and figured that a flatmate would be the sensible way to defray the cost of rent. With an eye to the immediate past, I carefully selected a few really safe looking applicants.

Of the lot I liked Paula the best. She was funny, which I like in a flatmate. She has (or should I say had) a professional sounding job - legal executive. Sounded great, no worries about getting the rent money, and a possible source of free legal advice. Great. In our negotiations by email she said: "Don't worry, I'm domesticated." Even better I thought. Someone with a penchant for housework, which would make a change. And she is also hot, as in Daisy Duke hot.

Now, after a few weeks living with her I am beginning to wonder, domesticated in what way? Domesticated like a family of ferrets? Domesticated like a wild fucking pig? Domesticated in exactly the same way as an obdurate epileptic wombat with severe feculant proclivities and alcoholic Tourette's!

Since she moved in she lost her job. I am as yet unsure as to the precise details involved in the termination of her employ, but I suspect that it has something to do with alcohol. You see, nearly everything she does involves alcohol. And not in the way you might associate with a slender professional, more along the lines of a football team.

So of course she is behind in her rent.

And somehow the house is still a sty. Notwithstanding her abundant free time and self proclaimed domestification.

Todays reason I hate my flatmate: she is an unemployed drunken disgrace.

Resurrection!

2005-09-04T13:37:00.000+01:00

I am back. With a vengence. I have a new flatmate. And she pisses me off.

I'm living in a two bedroomed flat with a small living room and a combined kitchen/laundry. I call my place "The Habitat". It is like a place that wild animals live in. It is always filthy. I work four days a week in another city, so my flatmate has plenty of time to clean up after herself.

Todays reasons my flatmate pisses me off:

The beyiyatch came home at midday, still drunk, and dropped an empty kebab wrapper on the kitchen floor, spilling lettuce and chili sauce on the floor, next to the garbage bin. She could not understand my objection to this behaviour. She just burped and went to bed.

Final post

2005-03-09T14:10:00.000Z

I'm afraid people, that this blog has come to an end, I'm moving out today. I've had enough of this hell hole to stay any longer. The reason I didn't kick out my flatmate was because she was the only one on the lease - I was in no position to get rid of her. The reason I didn't move out sooner was because an agreement was made that I would stay until a particular date, and it was not economical for me to move out earlier. Thanks for all your posts and emails. Feel free to take the pictures and use them for any purposes you like.

But, for the final post, I have one last reason my flatmate pisses me off.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off is this morning she didn't flush the toilet after leaving the bathroom, leaving me to be greeted by a large turd in the toilet bowel when I wanted to use the bathroom.

Losing one's keys

2005-03-07T14:11:00.000Z

Last night at 1am I was woken by the door bell ringing, and was greeted by my flatmate apologising because she claimed to have lost her keys, again..

Before I left this morning, my flatmate asked to borrow my keys so she could get a new set cut, and casually mentioned that hopefully someone will return her keys because she had her name and address on the keyring. "Are you serious?" I said disbelievingly. "Yes, after loosing them last time, I thought it would be better if anyone who found them had enough information to return them". I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Her stupidity is just to great for me to tolerate. "So, you know now that someone might have the keys to our apartment, and know where our apartment is... right?". "I guess so". "Do you think that might be a problem?". "Umm, maybe..". Oh dear, this bitch has no idea where I'm going with this. "OK, you're staying here today. You will not leave this house. I will put a new lock on the door."

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off is she lost her keys which had her name and address on them, and didn't understand this was a problem.

No voice

2005-03-07T02:32:00.000Z

Today I'm not in any way pissed off with my flatmate. She has lost her voice. In fact I'm so pleased I don't have to hear her talk, I'm not going to complain about her today. I hope her voice doesn't come back!

What's a thermostat?

2005-03-06T01:24:00.000Z

Somehow, the concept of a thermostat is one which seems to escape my flatmate. Last night I walked out of my room to find the living room at a very toasty temperature. Now, I'm not a complete facist when it comes to using the heater (if it's really cold you need to turn on the heater, else try putting on a jumper first) but the temperature of the room was cooking, and while it was fine for the heat to be on, certainly not to the level it was at. So I walked over to the thermostat to find it set to the maximum temperature. A quick turn of the dial showed that the temperature was at that level, and I moved it down to a more comfortable temperature of 20 degrees (that's 68 degrees Fahrenheit for you imperialists).

When I questioned my flatmate why she had turned the temperature up she said she turned it to the maximum to heat the room faster (and then left it on). I had to explain that the control dial wasn't a power level, but a thermostat, and turning it to the max would make no difference to the speed by the room would warm.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off is she struggles with the concept of a thermostat thereby wasting electricity.

Hide and seek

2005-03-06T01:15:00.000Z

Today when I went to make lunch, I discovered that the quantity of cutlery, plates and the like in the kitchen cupboards were much lower than usual.. There weren't even many dirty dishes in the sink. So I decided I would go on a hunt for missing kitchen items, first stop my flatmate's room.

She was out so I stuck my head in to see what I could find, and to my amazement there was a pile of plates and glasses stacked precariously on her desk. The sickest thing was the half drunk glass of milk that had now formed a solid consistency, and by the smell of the room, I estimate it had sat there for around 5 to 6 days.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off was she decided to horde a stack of dirty plates and glasses in her room.

Leaving the milk out

2005-03-02T18:46:00.000Z

We have had a recurring problem with the milk not being placed back into the fridge after it has been used.. It's come down to me placing a post-it note on the milk carton with the remark "I require refrigeration. Put me back in the fridge!", which worked for a few days, but now has no effect. I decided to confront my flatmate about it. "Could you please make sure you put the milk back in the fridge after you use it?" says I. "Yeah ok... but UHT doesn't require refrigeration so it doesn't really matter". I almost exploded into a fit of rage, but doing so wasn't going to help the situation. "First off, this isn't UHT milk. Secondly, UHT milk can remain un-refrigerated until it is opened. This milk is open. This milk is not UHT. Refrigerate it." "Oh, I thought it was UHT".

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me of is that she continuously leaves the milk out, and has absolutely know idea about the whole concept of Ultra high temperature treated milk.

Television

2005-03-01T14:13:00.000Z

As you may know, I'm not a huge fan of the television, although occasionally there will be something on that is worth watching. Televsion programs are more likely to make me interested if they are; informative, interesting, funny, thought provoking, original, and critical. Obviously not all of the shows I watch fit all of these catagories, but the more the better.

This morning my flatmate turned on the television to watch re-runs of "Caught by the Bell". For those who haven't heard of this series, count yourself lucky. I could feel my IQ being sucked out of my brain just by sitting in the same room as the television. This 1980s American trash should never have been produced. It would most certainly a crime to broadcast this program in some parts of the world, but somehow, this show appeals to my flatmate. In fact every morning she is up before me, she will be sitting on the couch watching it.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off is she continuously watches trash television when she could choose from a near limitless number of other channels.

Update: The show is called "Saved by the bell", not "Caught by the bell". Thanks for Jamy for pointing out my ignorance of this poor quality program.

Let's eat together

2005-02-25T03:23:00.000Z

There has been some pressure by one of my other flatmates recently to occasionally cook together. Now I'm not completely against the idea, I mean, it could save some money, and I could learn a few new ideas in the kitchen. But I'll be honest, I'm scared. I'm scared because my flatmate isn't clean. I'm scared because my flatmate never, ever washes her hands before preparing food. I'm scared because she drops kitchen utensils on the floor, and then put them back into what she is cooking. I'm scared because she is a re-dipper - she will dip with a spoon, put the whole thing in her mouth, and the dip again, even when the food is not just for her). I'm scared because she cuts up meat and then vegetables with the same knife, in that order, often when the vegetables are not being cooked. For the time being I've managed to postphone the idea of communal cooking, but unfortunately the idea is still circulating. I'll have to cull it off once and for all.

Where is the remote?

2005-02-24T14:14:00.001Z

I'm not much a of a television watcher - there are rarely many things on that I like to watch, but I don't mind sitting down to watch the news to keep up on current events.. So when I sat down last week to watch the news I started by looking for the remote control. Ususally it's either somewhere near the television or the couch, but a brief scan of the area failed to bring any results. It wasn't on the coffee table nor behind the couch. Ok, well I'm just going to have to pull this couch apart. Despite finding 2.55 in coins, half a packet of stale corn chips and a bunch of toe nail clippings, I was unsuccessful in finding the remote. Where the FUCK could it be? In the end I just gave up and resorted to the old fashion way and turned the television on by hand and found the right channel.

We have been remoteless for the past week until this morning. Magically the remote control had reappeared on the coffee table when I walked into the lounge room this morning. Before I left the house, I asked my flatmate where it had been, and apparently she had found it under a pile of papers in her room while resorting study notes.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off is that she lost the remote control to the shared television in her room for a week.

Mouldy cheese

2005-02-23T04:01:00.000Z

So I'm in the kitchen while my flatmate is preparing some food for herself.. As I was reaching for a glass I noticed there was some stuff on her cheese she was grating. "Hey, what's that? Is that mould?" "Yeah, of course it is, cheese is suppose to have mould on it" she replied in a ever so knowing way while wobbling her head. "Yes, some cheese do, but not cheddar, right? I don't think that mould there has been cultured in a cheese factory". But there was no point arguing with her. Besides, she could do with some more protein in her diet, even if it was coated on large qualtities of fat. And hopefully it would make her sick.

Three things

2005-02-22T15:32:00.000Z

1. I came home to find the front door wide open and my flat mate in her room.
2. The house still smells of my flatmate's feet (perhaps this is why the door was wide open?)
3. Still hadn't cleaned up her shit from the weekend.

Untidiness is not a virtue

2005-02-20T23:12:00.000Z

After coming home from a long weekend of outdoor activities the last thing you want to have to deal with is a mess. As we were approaching the front door, my partner whispered to me, "Oh, she's home... I can smell her." At first I just laughed, but upon opening the door my flatmate's "special" fragrance hit me, and it was clear that indeed she was home. This was confirmed almost immediately by sight when I entered the lounge room. Her shit was sprawled liberaly throughout the room, evenly distributed over the floor, table and counters. Amoungst the calamity I spotted her eating crisps on the couch, while watching TV. I casually asked, "Doing a stock take are we? Anything missing?" to which she replied "Oh, yeah sorry about the mess, I'll clean it up soon". 'Yeah, fuckin' oath you will clean it up soon. How about right now?' I thought.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off is she thinks it's perfectly fine to deposit her entire worldly possessions throughout the common areas of the house.

That doesn't go in the rubbish

2005-02-18T03:34:00.000Z

So it's that time of the week again, when the rubbish must be put out so the garbage man can collect it.. So as I'm emptying the bin to take outside, I inadvertently snagged the bin liner on the edge of the bin, tearing a small hole in the plastic. Sure enough, the bag of rubbish starts leaking all over the bin, the floor and myself. Jesus suffering FUCK, this is a punishment no one should have to endure.

So as I'm soaking up the mess with paper towels, I notice the colour of the liquid is distictly orange. Than it hit me - my flatmate had thrown her fast food drink container still half full (judging by the quantity of the 'crème de bin' that had leaked everywhere) into the bin the night before.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off is that she threw a half full soft-drink container into our trash, which subsequently spilled all over the bin, the floor and myself. Bitch.

Copy Cat

2005-02-16T19:04:00.000Z

It has come to my attention there has been an attempt to copy this site. Now I don't mind if someone else starts their own site to hassle their flatmate; it's not like I'm the first one to do it. But when someone copies the exact title, and cuts and pastes the postings word for word from my site, simply modifying the 'she' to a 'he', I think that is pretty lame.

The site http://flatmate.rediffblogs.com/ has now been pulled, but Rohan Chatterjee, the author of the copy site still has his other blogs up and running at http://filthyneighbour.rediffblogs.com/
and http://rohandiary.rediffblogs.com.

Update: You can see this copied site on google's cache here.

Dripping taps

2005-02-16T12:47:00.000Z

My flatmate has the tendency to not turn off the taps properly, meaning they dribble all day and night until I see it leaking and turn them off. Now I'll admit that the taps aren't particularly good in this place, but they only require an additional slight twist and they stop dripping.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off is that she continuously leaves taps dripping in the apartment.

Yucky phone

2005-02-15T22:19:00.000Z

Last night I needed to make a phone call so I went out to the living room and grabbed the phone and went back to my room.. This phone has quickdial, so I chose the pre-programmed umber and casually raised the phone to my ear. As I brought the phone to my face I smelled raspberry jam, but it was too late, it was all over the side of my face. I don't know if the jam got there by her fingers or mouth, and to tell you the truth, I don't really want to know. But she knew about it when she got home.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off is that she left raspberry jam smeared on the phone which subsequently ended up on my face.

Recycling

2005-02-14T15:51:00.000Z

Recycling can be a great way to help the environment by reusing resources. Fortunately, our local council recognises this and has a weekly recycling collection service, along with a recycling tub to hold the material to be recycled. Now, I don't know how many times I've asked my flatmate to crush her things but she fails to do so every time, so when I go to open the cupboard to where the tub is stored I get a river of plastic bottles and cardboard boxes bursting out like a dam breaking.

And not only that, but my flatmate has the tendency to attempt to recycle things that can not be recycled, like wood for instance. The whole term "recycle" implies that the material has already been processed, and you are going to reusing the same material again. For example paper is basically made from wood that has been crushed down to a pulp of fibres, and then pressed together. Paper is recycled to make more paper. Wood therefore can not be recycled into paper, because it is not yet paper. In the same way, it would be like me putting a bucket of sand in the recycle bin. Glass is made from sand, and glass is recycled to make more glass. I can't just throw some sand into a molten vat of glass and expect it to turn into glass.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off is that she doesn't crush her recycling material and tries to 'recycle' material which can not be recycled.

Frypan

2005-02-13T16:29:00.000Z

There has been a development in the quality of cleaning in our apartment. It's gone from poor, to none! Yes, that's right, let's just bung the dirty utensils back into the cupboard! No one will notice!

I got up yesterday after a decent sleep in and thought 'a big breakfast would be a great start to the day'. So I start chopping up some bacon and tomatos, mushrooms and the like, but when I pulled out the frypan out of the cupboard, it was caked in fat from my flatmate's previous meal. What kind of fucktard does this?

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

She has now started to replace cooking utensils completely uncleaned.

Freqently Asked Questions

2005-02-11T14:40:00.000Z

This is in response to the comment "Since so many people are reading your blog, you could at least take the time to answer some of their questions."

Yes, you are right.

1. "JUST ONE QUESTION? ARE YOU A GUY OR A GIRL? SOME PEOPLE HAVE CALLED YOU GIRL AND OTHERS GUY. WHICH ONE ARE YOU?"

I post in anonymity for my protection. It doesn't really matter if you think I'm a guy or a girl.

2. "Flatmates? In the plural? I thought you only had one."

I live with three girls, however there is one in particular that is the problem.

3. "Great page... Even Better pics... where do you find them?"

All images are created by a friend who is a graphic designer. They too wish to stay anonymous.

4. "instead of posting all your ailments about your flatmate why dont you confront her?"

I have. Each and every one of these posts has been already been brought up with my flatmate
.
5. "Perhaps you should get your own place. Ever think of that, genuis?"

Yes, every day.

6. "John Doe -- your shagging her, aren't you? Just admit it -- you're in the sack, giving her a good rogering and then get online, and whinge about how she sings to you."

If only life were like that. There is no sexual relationship here, and there is no sexual tension. I could not think of a more repulsive act in the world than to have sex with my flatmate.

Stinky bathroom

2005-02-11T14:08:00.000Z

Our bathroom has a can of air freshener conveniently located next to the toilet, so in the event of any hostile stench that remains after taking a shit, you can spray the room so subsequent persons who use the bathroom don't have to enjoy the smell of what you ate a day ago. The bathroom window is also readily accessible should odours persist. But performing these tasks is far too much effort for my flatmate. I've learned (the hard way) to wait a good half an hour before entering the bathroom after she has used it.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

Not clearing the air in the bathroom after taking a disgustingly smelly shit.

This isn't clean

2005-02-10T15:06:00.000Z

Our household has the basic rule - you wash up what you dirty. It works remarkably well, and much better than a rotating roster system which I've used in past households (invariably you get some lazy fuck who waits until there is not a single clean item in house before they washup, or you get some studious fuck who cleans the first 2 plates they see and then claims they've done their fair share). The main problem in our household however is the quality of the cleaning. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't find an allegedly 'clean' glass that has lipstick on the rim and/or greasy hand prints smeared around it, or a plate with caked/baked on food. Cutlery goes back into the drawer with bits of food still stuck to them, and coffee mugs have a suspicious brown ring left in the bottom.

This post goes out to the whole household.

Today's reason my flatmates piss me off;

They are unable to clean plates, glasses and cutlery to a degree where they no longer contain food.

Long showers

2005-02-09T15:56:00.000Z

My flatmate has the tendency to take excessively long showers.. I'm not talking about 20 minute or 30 minute showers. I'm talking lengths of upto 45 minutes. Perhaps because she showers so infrequently she thinks it's ok to take showers of this length because her daily average is still within reasonable limits. Other than the fact she is being extremely wasteful with a finite resource, it means that subsequent persons using the shower get only cold water.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

She takes excessively long showers that use all of the available hot water.

Don't sing to me

2005-02-08T11:42:00.000Z

Quite regularly my flatmate will come to me completely randomly and ask me if I know a song. Because her taste in music does not at all correlate with mine, I invaribly never know the name of the song to which she will start singing the song to me, in the hope that it will jog my memory and miraculously I'll remember it (she doesn't understand that when I say I don't know it, I really don't know it). The saddest part about this isn't that I have to sit there listening to her sing, it's that she has a terrible voice. And even if I say I know the song, hoping it will prevent her singing, she will still sing it. I can't win...

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

She has a terrible voice and repeatedly comes to me to sing.

Lock the door please

2005-02-07T14:08:00.000Z

Last night I woke up and went to the toilet to find our front door unlocked yet again. This is after I have asked numerous times to make sure the door is closed and locked at night, and placed two signs on the door as a reminder. I don't know what it will take to get my flat mate to do it.

Today's reason my flat mate pisses me off;

She is unable close and lock a door despite being told numerous times and ignores the reminder signs on the door.

UPDATE: For those people who don't understand this post, this reason differs from a previous complaint - the last time my flatmate didn't close the door. This time she closed it properly, but didn't lock it. Small steps... small steps...

Who would have thought

2005-02-06T23:09:00.001Z

I woke up this morning and went to make some breakfast.. I wasn't feeling that hungry so I decided I would just have some toast but when it came time to butter my toast, I opened my margarine container, to find an excessive amount of bread crumbs and rasberry jam. I asked my flatmate if she had done this, but she denied it. That's funny when she is only person in the apartment who eats rasberry jam.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

Using my margarine, contaminating it, and then denying the event ever took place.

Sticky Floor

2005-02-05T13:05:00.000Z

I came home tonight to find the apartment smelling of some kind of cleaning product. This has got to be a good thing! The next thing I noticed was that when I lifted my feet off the floor there was a tacky sticky sensation. On closer inspection I noticed that the entire floor was covered with a waxy cleaning polish. I asked if it was her that 'cleaned' the floor. She proudly admitted to it. I said "You know, when you polish a floor, you have to actually polish off the wax compound, otherwise it's not polished, right?". "Oh tried to do that but it wouldn't come off". I was obviously dealing with a fucking idiot, and there was no point continuing this conversation. "Don't worry, I'll fix the floor", to which she realised that she had fucked up, yet again. She insisted that she help, so I started on one end of the room and she started on another, but with in a matter of several minutes, she screams out loud that she is late and has to leave. She gets up, gets changed and before running out the door she had the insolence to ask me if her shoes looked appropriate with her dress. She stormed out of the apartment only to come back almost immediately to start knocking on the door. I get up off the floor and open the door to find her scrambling for her keys "Oh sorry, I was just checking if I had my keys".

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

She made a complete mess of the floor while thinking she was doing everyone a favour, and then promptly left the house when she realised that it was going to take a serious amount of work to rectify the situation.

Digusting food

2005-02-04T13:48:00.000Z

1. It must contain cheese
2. It must contain a shitload of grease and oil
3. If it's not fried, then deep fried
4. It must smell absolutely dreadful
5. There must be a tonne of it
6. Must use all available utensils in the house to prepare
7. Only to be eaten with fingers, in front of the television, with smelly feet on the couch
8. Preferably drips over the person eating it, the couch and the floor

Toilets and tampons don't mix

2005-02-03T16:33:00.000Z

tampon n. A plug of absorbent material inserted into a body cavity or wound to check a flow of blood or to absorb secretions, especially one designed for insertion into the vagina during menstruation.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

The purpose of a tampon is to basically soak up liquid.. As they absorb more liquid, they expand in size, directly proportional to the amount of liquid absorbed. With that in mind, you probably would think flushing one down the toilet was a pretty stupid thing to do. Not my flat mate. Of course, all of this became clear to her AFTER a plumber had to come and rip up the drain pipe to remove a piece of bloody cotton that had expanded to the diameter of the pipe.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

She blocked our toilet with a tampon.

Don't you hate it when...

2005-02-03T12:09:00.000Z

...your flatmate leaves open the drawer that contains all of your clean cutlery while she is cooking and preparing food, meaning the drawer invariably catches all of the food scraps that fall off the counter?

Mouse problems

2005-02-02T12:31:00.000Z

The rumour is that there is a mouse sharing our apartment. I've not yet seen it, but my flatmate's claim they've found mouse droppings, and there is a mouse sized hole in the ceiling.

Now you would think if you had a mouse problem, you would try to keep the place clean, and not leave food out. Well not according to my flatmate. I came home late the other night to find all of the lights on in the living room, but with everyone in their bedrooms. So, being the resident maid, I went about turning off all the lights people had left on, and in doing so I almost trod on a big splat of food (it looked like salsa, or something tomato based) that was just laying on the floor. I didn't even bother going to her door and knocking, I just screamed out her name saying that she had left food on the floor and she had better come to clean it up. She came running out apologizing and cleaned up her mess.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

Complaining about a mouse problem, but then leaving portions of food on the living room floor, after going to bed without switching off any of the lights in the house.

Congratulations! You're a winner!

2005-02-01T13:43:00.000Z

Today's prize for the World's Stupidest Flatmate goes to you, for using an oven mitt to turn 'chicken fingers' (in the process filthifying the mitt), instead of using the pair of tongs that were in the drawer!

Fire Hazard

2005-01-31T14:06:00.000Z

One problem about my flat mate's complete and utter disrespect for cleanliness and tidyness means her room is an absolute disaster. But usually I don't mind what they do in their room as long as they don't mess up the rest of the house. But I do care when random pieces of clothes and other flammable material are left draped over power sockets and cables, and covering heat exausts of electronic equipment. Desipite being asked numerous times, she is too lazy to rectify the problem, and the fact she doesn't understand this is a fire hazard, she is either completely stupid or unbelievably pathetically naive. Unfortunately, I'd say it is a little, sorry a lot of both.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

She creates fire hazards in her room without considering the consequences.

Cheese

2005-01-28T14:27:00.000Z

When I walked in the door last night, I was welcomed with the most offensive smell - some kind of half decayed cheese had been cooked. It was so strong that I could smell it down the stairwell on the way up to the apartment, and it had leeched into my room even with the door shut. I had to open all the windows in the house, burn incense and say three 'Hail Marys' to exorcise the smell.

But after all the smell had gone, she still hadn't cleaned the stove top which is still covered in grated cheese.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

Again she stunk the house out, and then didn't clean up her mess she made.

Dismantled bin

2005-01-27T14:59:00.000Z

This morning my flat mate decided to empty the trash, and actually take the rubbish out of the house for a change. Congratulations! But wait, don't get your hopes up that she may have reformed her usual ways. Removing the garbage from the bin AND putting a new bin liner in, and putting the lid on, seems simply too much work. Instead it's much easier to just leave the lid of the bin split into two seperate pieces, strewn across the living room floor, with no new bin liner placed in the bin cavity and then just LEAVE. Words can't express my sheer frustration living with this fucking moron.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

No concept of what is involved in emptying a bin.

Not again

2005-01-26T13:31:00.000Z

I don't like to repeat reasons why my flat mate pisses me off, but she has just walked from the shower to her room leaving a trail of water through the house - right in front of my face, AGAIN. I can't believe it. And for those of you wondering, yes, she did have a bath robe on (thank god).

Today's reason my flat mate pisses me off;

She made a brazen stroll from the shower to her room leaving a trail of water behind her, and in my presence, again.

Did you know?

2005-01-26T02:20:00.000Z

Her room is such a catastrophe, you can not see the floor, hence her floor hasn't been swept or vacuumed in at least 5 months.

Smelly fridge

2005-01-24T15:48:00.000Z

One of the disadvantages of my flatmate's smelly cooking is that she often doesn't finish eating the food, wich ends up being put in the fridge. That's fine, except she usually doesn't put the food into a air-tight container, or properly cover the plate/bowl with cling-wrap. The consequence is the fridge and its contents end up smelling disgusting.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

She stinks out the fridge with her poorly sealed food containers.

Sick

2005-01-23T23:59:00.000Z

My flatmate has been sick again recently, well actually for the past 2 weeks. Now normally, this isn't something that upsets me, it's just a fact of life that people you live with get sick, and there is a risk that you will get it. Unfortunately I too have become sick.

There is a chance I caught my cold from another source, but I'm always careful to wash my hands after using public transport, the toilet and all the rest of the places where you might pick up bugs. And this is the second time I've been sick since I moved in, and before moving into the house I'd not had a cold/flu/respiratory infection in many years.

Which brings me back to the introduction. People get sick. Some times there isn't much you can do about it. But when your flatmate's personal hygine is sub-nominal, and she is always going through stages of being sick, and I too all of a sudden start getting sick more frequently, it makes me angry that her inability to maintain to keep clean means that I get sick. Grrrr....

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

She is always getting sick because of her poor hygine, which invariably means I also get sick.

Definition: Tea Towel

2005-01-22T12:16:00.000Z

tea towel n. A cloth for drying dishes; a dishtowel.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

A relatively simple tool, used to drying things with which you use to eat. Things that will no doubt, in some way or another will come in contact with your mouth. With that in mind, would you think someone would say, drop a tea towel on the floor and then put it back up to be used (or for a change not, and just leave it laying there)? Or perhaps even wipe up food dropped on the floor and then put it back up where it belongs? Until recently, I've not had the pleasure of meeting anyone who would do such a thing. It's quite horrible, to reach for a tea towel to dry a plate and find that it is actually dirtier than the bottom of a shoe. Essentially everytime I use the kitchen, I bring out a fresh tea towel because I can not trust the cleanliness of the existing towel. I have, until recently, been the only one in the past 4 months to wash the tea towels.

Today's reason why my flatmate pisses me off;

Using tea towels to wipe the floor (and god knows what else), and then returning them back to the handle of the oven to be used unsuspectingly by others.

Smelly cooking

2005-01-21T23:40:00.000Z

My flat mate has a tendency to cook the most strong smelling foods, the kind that are really pungent and tend to linger. Garlic seems to be one of favorite flavours, and while I don't mind garlic, its use should only be in moderation. Where the normal person would use a clove or two of garlic, she will use an entire bulb. Tonight, it wasn't garlic (although I no doubt it was involved in some way). I'm actually unsure of what went into her concoction, but it certainly involved some rank meat (probably dodgy lamb or uncastrated pig), and some overwealming strong sickly sweet ingredient. And there was no attempt to use the range hood to evacuate the toxic fumes.

Today's reason for why my flat mate pisses me off;

She stank out the house with her revolting cooking.

Hocking

2005-01-20T14:31:00.000Z

While sitting down to have breakfast my flatmate decides to sit down in the room and watch the television with us. Within in a matter of minutes she is coughing and splatering, hocking up the most aweful things from her lungs. I don't want to hear this shit when I'm eating. So she goes to the bathroom which was actually closer to the table than where she was sitting to hock the rest up, but didn't think to close the door. Disgusting.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

Expectorating the most vile of contents from her lungs while I'm eating breakfast.

Emptying the garbage

2005-01-19T12:53:00.000Z

Our household has a relatively large garbage bin which is great because you don't have to empty the bin as often. This of course is its biggest down side too. By the time it is full - depending on the content - it can be quite horrifing to deal with. Last week when my flat mate emptied the bin - I'll give her that; she did actually empty the bin - she took the garbage as far as the front door, and dumped it there. Now, I don't know about you, but when you have a large bag of rotting waste that absolutely fucking stinks, and because it is so cold outside, all of your windows are closed meaning there is no ventilation, you don't just dump it in your living room, you dispose of this bag immediately. And you don't leave it there for someone else to deal with.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

She leaves rotting waste in the living room for others to deal with.

Did you know?

2005-01-18T14:06:00.000Z

Her towel in the bathroom has not changed in at least 4 months.

Coffee Expresso

2005-01-17T12:41:00.000Z

Having not seen my flat mate in the past day, I'm going to refer to an incident that happened in the past, to make sure I complete my daily quota.

When I first moved in, I bought a brand new coffee expresso, the stainless steel kind that you put on your stove and let the water boil up through the coffee. You know, the really expensive kind. Being a generous person, I was happy for others in the household to use my things, just as I was using much of their things in the kitchen. But it wasn't a week before I came back to use my coffee expresso that I found it was no longer silver, as chromed polished steel should be. It now had a golden tinge, and the underside was completely burned. Because it had been left on so long on the stove, the metal had burned and changed shape, meaning that the correct temperture and pressure for the water to come through was no longer correct, and I would now get luke warm coffees.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

She destroyed my $70 coffee expresso within a week.

Dirty floor

2005-01-16T22:22:00.000Z

After eating breakfast on saturday morning, the kitchen was swept and cleaned. The kitchen was not used again by us until sunday morning breakfast, but the floor was dirty again with crumbs and pieces of food all over the floor.

So today's reason my flat mate pisses me off;

Making a mess in the kitchen and not cleaning it up.

Late night antics

2005-01-15T18:12:00.000Z

Having lost her keys (again - but this time apparently for good), she made several calls after midnight last night explaining she had lost her keys, and that she wanted the door left open for her. My other flat mate who received the calls didn't feel comfortable leaving the door unlocked (it wasn't a couple of months ago there was a shooting just down the street) so after 2am she was woken again to open the door for her. Despite being asked not to the slam the door, she slammed the door without thinking (or listening) waking up me in the process.

So todays reason for my flat mate pissing me off;

Loosing her keys and then waking up the household on three separate occasions after midnight.

Unable to close the front door

2005-01-14T13:07:00.000Z

In recent weeks after having our front door frame replaced and the lock on the door also replaced, the front door now requires a slight amount of force applied to make sure the bolt from the door lock propery enters the hole in the door frame. Despite a series of cases where I have woken up in the morning to find our front door wide open, led me to put a sign on the door as reminder to make sure the door is closed properly. But the door has continued to be left open. In the most recent case, the sign had been removed by my flat mate, and the door was left open all night. To remedy this, I replaced the sign on the door and casually mentioned to all household members that the door must be closed and locked at night. However, while my suggestion was open, and not directed or targetted at anyone even though I knew who was at fault (again) , it led my flatmate to burst into tears claiming that she was under too much stress.

So todays reason for my flat mate pissing me off;

Being in denial about her responsibility for closing and locking the front door properly.

Extreme case of foot odour

2005-01-13T12:36:00.000Z

Her poor personal hygine combined with her habit of infrequently washing her clothes has led to an extreme case of foot odour. For the past number of days the smell coming from her body has been almost unbearable. But my main concern has been that the smell remains on basically everything she touches in the apartment, for example on the couch, and where she leaves her boots near the front door. And due to the unfortunate fact that the doors to our rooms are next to each other, each time I step out of my room, I'm greeted with an overpowering pungent stink that I've tried unsucessfully to mask with my deoderant.

So today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

An extreme case of her foot odour has taken over the apartment.

About this blog

2005-01-12T16:00:00.000Z

In this blog, I intend to list one event per day that my flatmate does to piss me off. It shouldn't be hard. It's 8am in the morning and she has already done something to piss me off.

Today's reason my flatmate pisses me off;

She walked from the shower to her bedroom without drying herself, leaving pools of water in the bathroom and throughout the house.