Monday 3 December 2012

A Day in the Life of a Philosopher


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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