My dear neighbours

The accommodation for first year students is assigned randomly and I ended up in the room in Angel Court. I always felt like entering a chateau corridor with identical little rooms for chambermaids on the sides. Although they were separated only by thin walls, for some reason I wouldn’t have noticed most of my neighbours unless they had had a name tag on their door.

The gyp room showed up to be the place of conflicts. I found out that the picture in my first English textbook “Stepping Stones” where there was drawn a pile of dirty plates in a sink with comment “Mrs Smith washes up plates on Saturday” is probably not far from English reality. Almost every morning, I could guess what my neighbours had eaten for their previous day dinner according to various colourful traces of sauces, vegetables, pasta etc. on their plates and pots. Some of them even didn’t bother to wash their plates when they were going back home for vacation. And not surprisingly, some didn’t care whose cookware they are using. I realised too late that it would be a good idea to keep my stuff in my room rather than leaving it in the kitchen cupboards. Before that my frying pan was heavily scratched when one girl didn’t realise that scrambled eggs shouldn’t be prepared with a metal fork on the non-stick layer.

When I arrived back to Cambridge for another academic year, I had already learnt that people living on the farther side of the Channel do their washing-up once they need to re-use their dirty cookware. However, the new housekeeper appeared to have the same opinion on this issue as I did. When the amount of dishes near the sink at different stages of dirtiness and mouldiness exceeded certain amount, she sent and email to all occupants of the house asking to wash up and put away the dished under the threat of disposing it. As expected, all the dishes were washed up on the eve before the deadline but instead of putting it into the cupboard they were left near the sink and re-used just few days later.  Then the whole cycle went again.

It was at the beginning of the third term last year when the housekeeper merrily told me that she confiscated a few pots left in the kitchen when all the students came back home for vacation. She washed them up and locked them in the storeroom. She told me that she was really looking forward to a moment when someone would ask the dishes back. Well, in few weeks time, she started to complain that nobody was interested in the dishes anymore…

Now for the third year I managed to significantly reduce the number of my neighbours. They are only two, one of them is my friend Tom whom you can hardly notice living directly below you. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the second one. Although he comes from France, I will probably always call him The Great Gatsby. He lives upstairs in a large apartment with separated bedroom and huge living room where he organised parties for approximately 20 people every day at the beginning of the term. Now he reduced the frequency to roughly once upon two weeks but his guests have not become less disturbing even at times like 5am when most people wish to sleep.

During one of those parties one of Gatsby’s guests got hungry which affected the further faith of my breakfast. It probably happened in the following order: upon finding that there are no frog thighs left one of the drunk French took a spoon, ate my yogurt and spread some of my jam on a piece of bread that he tore. On the way back upstairs he dropped the jam on the wall where there is now remaining a blue spot (the jam was home-made from jostaberry, which is similar to black current and gooseberry; very strong colorant indeed).

What will my next year neighbours be like? The risk could be certainly reduced by moving by one entrance where the common kitchen is shared by two students only. But it just crossed my mind: I have heard a story about two Cambridge students who were bought an entire house in Cambridge centre by their father, who is an oil sheikh. This way of dealing with problems associated with college living is inspiring. I will try to ask the foundation whether they would be willing to buy me a house too.