I could kill Vanessa! I’ve told her time and time again not to scrub my cast iron wok, and yet she’s done it again – and with that terrible cheap dishwashing liquid of hers. I’m so furious, I’ve got half a mind to call a house meeting, but I know it’ll just blow back in my face because she’s ‘finishing her thesis’ and ‘doesn’t have time for trivial stuff’. Fenella might back me up – I know she’s a bit of a foodie – but she might also take Vanessa’s side and say I’m making a mountain out of a molehill.
At the end of the day, I paid a fortune for that wok because I appreciate the beauty of its design and the quality of its construction. I didn’t buy it for absent-minded housemates to burn eggs in before scraping off the perfect seasoning that’s accumulated through my painstaking culinary exploits. That might sound petty and possessive, but it’s not like I’d use up a bunch of Vanessa’s $300 perfume just because she left it in the bathroom – especially if she’d repeatedly told me not to.
I dream of the day when I can have a kitchen all to myself, and maybe even have a new one created just for me by a specialised kitchen designer. It would have hooks for my collection of pots and pans, and most importantly, no one to mess with their integrity. Best of all, I’d be entirely responsible for it, so it would be clean as a pin and stocked with only organic wholefoods and non-toxic cleaning agents.
I shouldn’t go too far down this train of thought, or I’ll start dreaming of custom bathrooms, and then all bets will be off: share housing will officially begin to look like a dud option. It’s not, in actual fact. It’s probably more that Vanessa is a dud housemate. Fenella has always been perfectly easy to live with – respectful and considerate – so it’s not a generalised housemate thing. It’s definitely Vanessa.