James

They ended up on everyone’s shit: door handles, shoes, mouses, hidden inside your pillow, inside suits, fish bowls. They were supposed to be for a birthday – because there’s nothing more erotic than a foot and a hand with a vagina shape cut into them - but they took way too long for that. Then there was the dildo on a drill, “Rambone”, a foot-long dildo on a 12-volt cordless drill that was given to our old flatmate as a birthday present. It would migrate from one place to the next, and then she moved houses and found it at her new place. She was not impressed.
When one of our flatmates went away last year for the holidays, we filled his room from floor to ceiling with balloons. But we didn’t think about the fact that when he opened his door the whole house would be filled to knee height with balloons for about three weeks. He managed to break a fishbowl because that was hidden in the balloons and he jumped on it – stood on the couch, jumped off it into the middle of the lounge, and landed on it. It took ages for them to go; we just waited for them to pop, then vacuumed them up. That, and someone got drunk one night and ran around with a knife popping them all. That was a bit scary for everyone else.
Our house is earthquake proof – hopefully we’re not tempting fate by saying that. In September nothing fell over, even though there was stuff stacked to the roof in one of the bedrooms. In February, a monitor fell over; some stuff stacked on a bookcase fell off, but apart from that nothing. Someone decided our chimney was unsafe so we got up there and strapped it together – it was like a Jenga puzzle; there was no mortar left, it was simply being held together by the will of God.
We clean, just not very often. We bought a dishwasher two months ago, which was a pretty good investment, because the dishes were getting pretty ridiculous. We have a lazy cunt of a flatmate… and by flatmate, we mean all of us. We’re all pretty shit.
We go through little phases where we’ll all cook at home solidly for two weeks, then take-out for three months. We all cook independently due to varying levels of income and varying levels of laziness. With our old flatmate we used to go through pots like nothing else. We’d just buy new shit instead of cleaning it. You go to the supermarket and can get a frying pan for $10, so its’ way better to buy a new frying pan than to clean it… yeah, we’re not really going to win eco-my-flat at any point.