Community Life

The sombre sentimentality of the morning has worn off, the rainclouds are gathering, and it's time to go to the supermarket to stock up.

Community Living is what I call living with five other girls in one house. Five girls.

My culinary skills haven't made great headway, and the only thing I do is make noodles, which, of course, my cousin began doing when she was ten. I make decent coffee. I choose chocolate well. In fact, when my flatmates went shopping for chocolates to take home on a visit to India, they took me along for my oracular judgement.

I won't make the regular, meaningless statements about people surviving my cooking...I haven't done much cooking (potato curry and tomato curry- one disastrous, the other much-appreciated), and besides, bad-tasting food never killed anyone. I was rather apprehensive that I might be turned out for not being much of a chef, but I'm useful in other ways (say, as a 'connoisseur' of chocolate), so we're still hanging on together.

Living on your own means looking after your clothes. Washing and ironing them, to be precise. This gets a little difficult when you have more cotton clothes than anything else in your wardrobe, and the colours run, and you wait until the last scrap of clothing you own is in the unsightly heap building up in one corner of your bedroom. The casualty has been some of my favourite clothes being relegated to rough wearing at home; white ruined by the colour off someone else's clothes, purple frayed and faded from constant tumbling and wringing within the washing machine. Oh, okay, I wasn't ever too particular about the quantity of clothes I had. Sadly enough, now I have to be. My ironing is such that it drives my roommate to want to grab the iron from my hand and do my clothes for me.

My intentions are good. They know, and I do, so we somehow get on. I put the rice on in the electric cooker, and only occasionally do I forget to switch the button to 'Cook' from 'Warm'. Accidents happen. It's okay. Sometimes I spill some milk, but I've never left anything cooking on the stove and forgotten all about it, like my roommates sometimes do. (I don't expect you to say, "You never cook, so no danger of that"- you're not so predictable as that, are you?)

They like my hair, but not the way I look after it. Because I hardly do. They try to make me dress more girlishly, but frills and flounces have never been me. Sometimes it is frustrating when they'd rather watch a movie for the umpteenth time than let me watch an F1 race. Or when they wonder why I cannot be as open as the rest of them with my life. Oh come on, I tell them, I don't have anything to tell.

I'm at peace on this wonderful, work-free Saturday, only the thought that we need to go to the supermarket is gnawing at me. That, and the fact that I haven't got in enough reading the whole week. So it's bye bye laptop for now. Begone, I am off to read.