musings

over a porridge pot

I have lived my entire adult life in homes without central heating. Come to think of it , my childhood bedrooms weren’t all that warm either. My parents heated the living spaces in our family home (to which their room opened) but the ‘formal’ end of the house (which included their room) was separated from the familiar sector by a dark passageway and a closed door. My room door was always kept closed anyway unless I was passing through it, possibly because I was not the tidiest child. There was a rule that “where the carpet started, we stopped”, unless we were in the music room actively practicing on our instruments. The sitting room, dining room and music room were otherwise only used when company was present. Looking back, it seems a dreadful waste of real estate.

My first move from home, to a Victorian era terrace in the square mile city precinct that is contained within the green belt of the Adelaide parklands, a brief and disastrous attempt at cohabitation with a person (who turned out to be pining for his first girlfriend and later married her) was chilly whether summer or winter. From there I progressed through a series of share houses, a stint in a flat situated above a travel agency that appeared to only sell one-way tickets to Nicaragua and had previously been inhabited by a person who had (judging by the quality of the callers banging on the door at 2am) resorted to selling intimate favours in order to keep herself and left without paying the gas bill. It took me two weeks to convince the gas company that NO I would not be paying her bill in order to have the gas reconnected. This dwelling was pleasantly warm in winter and absolutely boiling in summer. I took to sleeping with the window open (on a side of the building away from the stairs and the 2am callers) and have kept the habit ever since.

When I could no longer bear the incessant sirens howling past the weird apartment (and the 2am doorknockers) I temporarily begged a bed back at my parents’ home while I sought the next domicile. Happily this did not take long. I responded to a newspaper advertisement looking for a female co-resident and in the ensuring interview found that my landlord-to-be was not only wearing the same skirt and t-shirt combination (in reversed colours…my skirt was black, hers was purple, my t shirt was purple, hers was black) but that we also shared Latvian heritage (and a magpie-like fondness for gold bracelets). I asked if my Border Collie dog and Burmese cat could accompany me and the response was “the dog is fine, dunno about the cat”. Kanga (the cat) must have passed inspection with flying colours because my friend keeps a Burmese cat to this day (nearly forty years later).