Hands up who can remember The Sandman and his Guide to Sharehouse living. I have been having flashbacks to that fabulous little radio play all week.

I have met two of my roommates… There are currently four of us in the house, with one more to move in, but I haven’t met the third person (I don’t if it’s even a guy or a girl). The one in the room next to mine, who shares the (now much, much cleaner) bathroom with me, is a really friendly guy who for the purposes of this missive will be known as Doug…because he looks like a Doug. Doug is a very friendly guy, 27, arts student like me, we get on really well but he doesn’t appear to eat, he showers three times a day, and most disturbingly of all he talks to himself in the shower—which I can hear because although the walls are concrete rendered brick they may as well be tissue paper at eight in the morning. So I have invested in some ear plugs and finally slept past nine for the first time since I moved in. If it weren’t for these few “issues”, I’m sure he’d be a top roomie, but potentially being a member of a notoriously unpredictable group gives me pause. On the plus side we’ve had some really interesting conversations about some very deep shit, and he has no issue with the “gay thing” (for want of a better way of expressing it), so I guess we’ll have to wait before .

The other roomie lives upstairs. He’s 19, straight out of high school, about to start a science degree (in maths no less). I only met Nineteen yesterday and he’s already gone back home for the week—he’ll move in properly next week—so I haven’t really formed an opinion on him yet.

Phantom, the one with the big room upstairs, has been in and out in a flash once—Doug and I only know of their presence because we heard the shower running one night—so obviously we’ll have to see on them too.

After an afternoon with a bottle of bleach, a (now very bedraggled) toothbrush and a tea towel which is now totally white (due to lack of rags in the house), I managed to get our bathroom into a more habitable state. I also bought a new shower curtain, so the brown eighties affair has been retired.

One more thing… just did a load of washing for the bargain basement price of $2 per load. Once it finished I inspected the final product to see if it was money well spent. It wasn’t. The clothes were washed, yes, but I seriously doubt that they were spun in any way shape or form. A serious amount of water had to be wrung out of them before being hung up.

Every day this place feels more and more like the Sandman’s terrace.