To be honest it was probably me
I was never a truly untidy housemate- indeed I actively enjoy cleaning kitchens to this day and I've never stored excretions or the like. I do however look back on my housesharing with an immense sense of gratitude as really I was a bit weird.

First were the attempts to cook in bulk. I still do cook food that will do two or three servings but at university this was pushed to extremes. I bought the sort of pot you could boil Indiana Jones in on a shop on North End Road in Fulham and experimented with cooking at a quasi industrial level. One particularly ambitious bolognaise came in at about 20kg and required half the freezer for stowage. A trip around Somerfield at 3.55pm on a Sunday resulted in a gallon of leek and potato soup- nice enough but probably more suited to Noel Edmonds gunge tank than anything else. On another occasion, I curried an entire 11 lb turkey.

Then there was the hifi. I've always loved it but a lack of funds, an inflated sense of talent and more spare time did tend to push me towards DIY. After I built a successful valve amp kit that used cutesy EL84 valves, I figured I could scale up the same design and use whopping great 845 valves (imagine a 400w light bulb crossed with a hammer horror prop and you are most of the way there) in the same design. The resulting behemoth, pretty much destroyed the mains breakers and melted a neat square in the carpet. Another project involving horn loaded speaker drivers resulted in what looked like a pair of wardrobes that could easily produce 100db of (somewhat shakey quality) audio from a 7w valve amp. This coupled with erratic sleep patterns, a fondness for Japanese cartoons (this was the era of the Dragonball Z marathon) and the fact my course really wasn't very hard resulting in little overall work must have proved draining to my housemates.

And yet, bless them they seemed to take it with resigned good humour (or maybe they just liked soup). I still speak to most of them today and they seem to hold no grudges- indeed I marry one of them in 2010. In another household I could have just as easily been boiled down to glue in my big pot and buried in the garden. The only element of counter weirdness they ever showed was K, a quiet, impossibly elegant girl who had the room next to mine on the top floor used to have an elaborate thursday afternoon routine that involved a BLT, a long bath and a massive noisy wank when she assumed everyone was out of the house- she never blew the mains though.

Length?, three culinarally repetitive years.
(Leonard Hatred briefly did some work on, Thu 26 Feb 2009, 23:30, 2 replies)

Ah, horns...
If only I had the space.
(JohabMorelli is spenging merrily away, Thu 26 Feb 2009, 23:56, closed)

God I used to love the days of Nickleodeon playing
entire dragonball z sagas back to back :D
(thebdaman hmmm....., Sun 1 Mar 2009, 22:41, closed)