Another Christmas is done and dusted. Each year the lead-up of seems to get longer with me dying for the break like a marathon runner nearing the finishing line. I find it an unnerving time of year, always wondering what’s going to happen this time around. Will my uncle yet again ask when I am getting married while wiping his nose furiously with a soot coloured handkerchief? Will the snow turn the roads to glass making it impossible to leave the house until cabin fever turns to argument filled delirium? Will I drink so much Prosecco a while day is spent groaning pitifully in bed?
Well this year it was noise; the rattle of doorframes being abused and shrieks rising through the rice-paper ceiling, while outside the birds are impatient for the dawn. Upstairs I twisted and cursed through gritted teeth willing them through the power of persuasion (without the actual persuasion bit) to go to bloody bed. ‘Them’ are my sisters; oblivious in a world of their own as only those in their early 20’s can be.
Now I have to admit that living on my own for five years has made me pretty intolerant to things, namely other people’s annoyances. But after living with others since I was 15 in the dorm mayhem of boarding school, when the opportunity arose to no longer pull someone else’s hair out of a plughole or be woken by a random guy going ‘Is this Lisa’s room?’ while I blinked furiously at the hall light and tried not to leap from the comfort of my covers to slap him senselessly around the head with a shoe, I feel entitled to my own space. So, when there are others in the space, noisy others that seem to find everything either shocking or hilarious going on the range of utterances downstairs, my body tightens into some kind of twisted seizure. It has to be stated that the walls are thin. So thin that outside is a quieter option and I would have decamped to the back garden only for the rain, the ambulance depot at the back of our house or the hedgehog so large the fire brigade were nearly called out to free it from a gate.
thereluctantranter 