A Day in the Life of a Philosopher.
“Sorry
I’m late!” I drop my bag and bum into a seat, my cup of tea sploshing
everywhere.
“Uh,
you’re not late Melody.” the lecturer says helpfully.
“Oh,
I’m not?”
“No.”
“Did we start early?”
“No.”
There
is a pause.
“Melody,
look around.”
I do
look around, and see, quite suddenly, I don’t recognise any of the faces
staring back at me. I’m in the wrong class.
So here I am, philosophy MA student- where
I am required to read a lot, have a lot of interesting conversations with some
of the most interesting people I’ve ever had the good fortune to come across,
whilst living in a house 40 seconds from the beach with very interesting
housemates (Interesting in a different
way…) I am a very happy philosopher and writer indeed.
I arrived in this new town the way I seemed to arrive in
most places- haphazardly. Not a lot of dollar or organisation or any official
pieces of paper, but a lot of optimism to make up for it. I had one email from
a professor admitting me onto the course and telling me sort out everything
when I got here. “Just ask Jaqui” his email had signed off with.
The
night before I am due to leave the vajazzled land of Essex, sleeping next to
two suitcases with all my worldly possessions, a thought crosses my mind. Who the fuck is Jaqui?
This is the picture that my friend Sophia and I stared
one evening in a Pizza Express of off Regent Street, drinking Pinot Grigio and
swapping war stories. Something about this poster did it. This is the picture that gave us our first real-life,
smack-you-in-the-face, kick-you-up-the-backside, full blown ephiphany and no, I don’t mean three
wise men showed up. I mean we had to quit our city jobs.
We both had good jobs. Job that paid good, looked good on
our C.V, jobs that made our Alumni year figures look good, with good tax-paying
people in very good London post codes. But in that epiphany, staring at that
piece of card on a rainy cold Thursday night, staring at that card in a room
full of other harassed-looking people laughing too loud and drinking wine too
fast, we learnt something very important. That your life belongs to no one but you. You don’t owe your CV, or your
parents, or your boss- you owe yourself.
You owe yourself to try and find out what it is that truly makes you tick, what
you’re passionate about, what makes your life worth getting up for, what your
talents and interests are and then to
exercise them, to stretch them out like a rubber band and realise the
potential you are more than capable of fulfilling. Nobody else can do this for you.
It
is not selfish to be happy, it is your right.
I don’t mean happy as in buy a load of chocolate, gorge on shoes, credit cards or
a trip to Vegas to see a scantily clad lady called Candy- that is a brand of
happiness that will never quench your thirst. I mean happy, being completely true, where there is no room for pretending
or moaning in any aspect of your day. Such a life exists and I refute all those
who try to convince me otherwise. If you are not happy, it is no one’s fault,
but it is your responsibility to do
something about it.
Do the unthinkable; if you skip down a nettled-infested forest
path rather than that smooth pavement ready-laid and waiting for you, a few
cuts and bruises won’t hurt. In fact, the forest of the unknown is much more
fun….
This, as you can imagine, is a short version of the
decisions that led my friend Sophia to trek around South-east Asia and me to a philosophy
department in Kent, (mine also involved a monk in orange robes in Oxford circus
if you would believe it,) but I was tired of being well-acquainted with other
people’s arm pitts on the central line, I was uninspired by a city that seem to
regurgitate me rather than let me in. Who says you have to live your life in a
straight line anyway?
So in looking for happiness (and for Jaqui) and in living
the philosophy of doing things that make you happy, this particular forest path
has currently led me to a town where Charles Dickens once lived, a place crawling with famous
writers (which bodes well methinks) has ice cream parlours that don’t bat an
eyelid if you want to eat banana splits everyday of the godamn week, and new housemates in Victorian seaside houses that keep me entertained and kept my pen very busy...
Connor is full of what could
be called straight-up accidental wisdom. Everything is said in a deadpan voice
accompanied by a shrug, and his face is so poker straight it’s extremely
difficult to read whether or not he’s actually joking when he says things like-
“If I had 24 hours left to live I’d just kill everybody that annoyed me.”
He
tells me that I annoy him, frequently, (something about me talking too much) so I guess I should be grateful that so far, he's free of incurable deadly viruses.
It’s thanks to Connor I must mention, that our house is kept running on a
constant supply of tea bags and sausage rolls, courtesy of the supermarket
giant he work for. All I need to do is lend him my flask he tells me, and milk
will be forever free-flowing too. (“It’s not stealing, it’s all from the staff
room. I’m staff, ergo- not stealing.”)
Things Connor likes; Call of Duty, Malibu(??!) and spaghetti
meatballs. Things Connor doesn’t like; the seaside, crap TV, (“I’m a Celeb is a
pile of wank; they barely get out of anywhere. It’s just a shit two week
holiday.”) and Simba the elderly albino cat which came with the house and the
furniture and is about as old as the house and the furniture. Simba molts white fur, is completely deaf and dribbles; a combination which makes this
particular cat Connor’s least favourite bedroom companion, a fact Simba ignores
every single night when he sleeps on Connors chest.
The other residents Connor can’t seem to shift from his
room are myself and Antony. Anthony lives in a room with a double bed he shares
with pizza boxes and cans of ‘Monster’; a more repugnant version of Rebull. A
creative music student at university he tells me, though I have to say, I’m not
sure I’m convinced considering I haven’t seen him leave the house apart from to
go to the conveniently situated off-licence at the top of our road. Since
Connor’s room has a sofa and flat screen T.V this is where we are to be found,
regardless of whether Connor is actually even in the house. I think Connor
likes us warming up his sofa- myself, Simba and Anthony, and I reckon really,
Connor enjoys being the host of such
gatherings, though he pretends to be annoyed that we’re always in his room, the
way he pretended to be annoyed the day I automatically wandered into his room
to watch ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and didn’t notice immediately that the poor boy
was in his boxers trying to get changed.
Things Ant likes; take away food, lie-ins, making weird music
on his Mac. The take away food thing is very handy when looking to save money
on your weekly food shop. Ant orders in pizza roughly on average about once a
day, but never finishes a whole one, so between Connor and myself, we have fed
ourselves on second-hand pepperoni pizza for about two weeks. I like cold
pizza, a lot. Therefore I like this unspoken arrangement. There was of course
the incident where I came home and automatically ate the remaining two slices
of pizza only to discover two new facts; 1. The pizza wasn’t Ants; it was Connor’s.
2. Connor doesn’t share food. But you’ll be pleased to hear I have since learnt
from this error of etiquette and am slightly more carefully when it comes to un
identified food.
Things Ant doesn’t like: Getting up early, getting up at
all, getting out of bed. I, on the other hand don’t mind an early start, and
enjoy the odd breakfast on the beach in the old hotel staring at the sea and
the curved bay holding little fishing boats. It never get old; no matter how
many times I look at it, I’ll never get enough of the ocean. Connor however, is
inclined to disagree.
“I’m
sick of the sea to be honest,” he tells me. “Everyone’s always like ‘aahh the
sea, the sea is so great.’ The sea is shit mate.”
This
is declared whilst sprawled across my freshly made bed. I had just moved into
the best bedroom of the house, my new room having a four poster double bed and
an en-suite bathroom that the boys had come to check out.
“Shotgun
having a bath.” Ant says eyeing up my Jacuzzi-shaped tub.
“You
can’t shotgun a bath.”
“Yes
you can.”
“Ok,
let me re-phrase, you can’t shotgun my
bath. It’s an en-suite bathroom attached to my
bedroom.” I give them my best serious face. “There are going to be no smelly
boys in my bedroom.”
In all fairness, they don’t smell. Well, apart from the
smell of marijuana that seems to emanate from one of the kitchen cupboards
though which cupboard exactly I’m not quite sure. First I thought it was the
dishwasher, but having stuck my head in it as well as the surrounding draws, I've concluded it’s definitely the cupboard with all the drinking glasses, and
though no source is to be found, I've given the whole thing a scrub with bleach
in case the land-lady visits and mistakes me for a pot head.
The other interesting fact about this house is the
mystery housemate. Every shared residence always has a mystery housemate; back
in halls as an undergraduate it was a bloke called ‘Dave’ who lived in the bedroom
nearest the kitchen, and though I often saw the door swing open and shut, I
never quite caught a glimpse of this so called ‘Dave’ character. Rumour had it
he was a photographer, a good-looking photographer, but no one was
ever able to confirm such hearsay. In this house, my invisible housemate is
called Oaty. It might be O. T actually, possibly Ottie- but I had been living
here a good few weeks with no sign of the man apparently living in our basement
and was starting to think that the boys had made him up, an enigma on their
Fifa Score board, but low and behold last Friday I heard someone scuttling
about looking for the reset button on the wireless router (it crashes about 35
times a day) and so I jumped at the chance to introduce myself.
“Hi!
Are you O.T (Oatie??) I’m Melody, I haven’t met you yet.”
He
shakes my hand whilst at the same time backing away.
“So,
what do you do?” I ask him undeterred by his body language.
“Business
management.” (He speaks!)
“Great,
so how long have you lived here?
“Uh,
a couple of months.” He’s still backing away despite the fact I haven’t let go
of his hand. I have a firm and convincing handshake. (You will be friends with me godamnit…)
“Cool. I've heard you’re a bit of a night owl, that’s probably why I haven’t seen you
or bumped into you, that’s funny isn’t it.”
Oatie
it seems, does not think this is funny. There is a pause which I decide is not
at all awkward before he adds in a slightly strained tone; “So, do you come
round here often?”
I
presume this isn’t a pick up line considering the guy looks pretty desperate to
get back to his basement dwelling but all the same, I feel the need to correct
him.
“What?
no, I live here. I’m you’re new
housemate!” I beam, letting go of his hand, which signals his opportunity to escape
and he scuttles back down the stairs into the darkness.
I’m definitely adding him to the list of my new friends.
Having settled in to my home as well as my classes I call
my old buddy; the infamous Bulgarian Luka Boy to update him on my new status as
an official big thinker and day dreamer. Luka has a CV even more colourful than
mine aswell as a background that’s far more lucrative so I’m not immediately
alarmed when he calls me back twenty seconds later in whispered and hushed
tones.
“Why
are you whispering?
“I’m
in the toilet.”
“Ok.”
I ask the inevitable. “Why are you calling me from a toilet?”
“I’m
on an internship for a management consultancy firm in London, if I get the job
I’ll be on big bucks yah!”
Luka,
it has to be said, seems to always be on an internship. He turns thirty this
month.
“What
do you know about management consultancy?”
“Nothing.
Listen, when are you coming to London?”
“I
don’t know yet, where are you living?”
“In
the Bulgarian Embassy.”
“What
do you mean?”
“I
mean I am living in the Bulgarian Embassy Mel.”
“You’re
living in it?”
“Yah!
Listen, I have to go, I been in this toilet cubicle too long but Mel-“
“Yes
Luka?”
“Please
send my regards to your Mother.”
I never quite know what to say when he says that.
Perhaps THIS is what we should be teaching the youth...
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