Lifestyles with a difference

Related tags: General advice, Blog

There's another problem with winter. It's cold. And though I might live in a beautiful old Victorian house in Central London, it is poorly insulated with only single glazed windows and no draft excluders. In short, my heating bill is extortionate. Welcome to the real world.

Fair enough, but what can you do when your fellow student house dwellers cannot for the life of them agree on the thermostat level, let alone how many hours a day the heating should be on for? Then there's the tiresome quarrels over length of showers, amount of times the toilet is flushed, running taps whilst cleaning teeth, leaving lights on, charging appliances & using the landline phone to name only a few. Why does sharing bills have to be such a drag?

You see, my flatmate Fran's mum is a bit of a hippie; Fran never had any injections as a baby and has never even used a microwave. As such, she doesn't 'believe' in the concept of heating. She floats around the flat in multiple layers of clothing: thick woollen socks bought from a tiny stall on the shores of Lake Titicaca, gypsy style rainbow coloured cardigans with scores of discount jersey T-shirts underneath, a hat from Hammerfest and a Siberian scarf to 'keep away the chill'. She uses a wind up torch once the light of the day has faded and will only eat raw food. She cleans her teeth with rainwater that she collects from our roof terrace. It's all very admirable, if a little extreme.

But Phil is simply smack bang at the other end of the spectrum. He wanders around in nothing but his boxers, constantly leaving the heating on full and revelling in his recreation of the Mediterranean summer. He's scared of the dark and sleeps with all his lights on, insisting we leave the ones which track the route to the bathroom alight all night long too. Favouring slow roasted meat at the weekends (think nine hour racks of lamb) and softly simmered soups and stocks during the week, with his hour long showers and swimming pool-esque baths I wouldn't be surprised if a family of seven could live off his daily power usage and water consumption for a month.

This leaves me in something of a dilemma: Phil's missteps are glaringly obvious but to follow Fran's route is a tad drastic. When our quarterly gas bill arrived this week the ensuing conflict between the two polar opposites made me realise that sharing bills is one part of life that I could do without. Fran is refusing to pay on the grounds that Phil is accountable for considerably more than her, which is correct. But Phil will not pay more because Fran's room is bigger than his. Petty arguments more suited to a primary playground, I hear you cry. You're right. So I'm leaving. I'm moving into a new place where my weekly rent includes all bills, in a place where different lifestyles mean diversity as opposed to domestic warfare.

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