Hello all.

Gosh, I'm tired. It's been one of those weekends and I have the feeling it's been the same for others I care about.

I moved out a while ago into a houseshare with 3 others who I didn't know. At first I thought I'd 'got lucky' in the sense that although we are all very different, we seemed to manage to live together pretty easily. problems, however, do emerge over time when you're sharing communal space with people. One of my housemates recently moved his girlfriend in (with our permission). I didn't mind the suggestion at all, she is very quiet and tidy, so i actually figured that (seeing as he is probably the messiest man alive) she might actually help the situation. Anyway, in the run up to 'sadistic love day', he was hinting to me, asking me whether I was going to be home... and I told him I would be. the tension has been building between him and I for a while. He owes me quite a lot of money for communal bills and that's frustrating in itself. Then... saturday morning dawned.

I went downstairs where the following conversation began.
him - 'morning'
me - 'morning'
him - 'what are you doing tonight?'
me - 'boyf is coming over. why?'
him - 'well i want to do something special for my girlfriend'
me - 'right...'

it went on like this. he repeated and repeated that he wanted to 'do something special' and i repeated that i was going to be home. to try to get him to make his point, i said: 'what do you actually want? do you want me to get out of my house?' and that was when he exploded. his reply 'are you really that f*cking stupid??' which was nice. especially seeing as he's huge and ginger and at the time was slicing bread with a sharp knife.

anyway, the result of this argument was me telling him that i won't be spoken to like that in my own home, and him screaming and storming off. he's 28 years old and i genuinely think he must have ALWAYS got his own way.

house-shares are very strange things. but one of the main rules of house sharing is just that... you share. and so, you can't expect your housemates to get out of the house just because you want to do something special for your girlfriend who you live with, depriving your housemate of her (might i add) first EVER valentines evening with a man. in my eyes, even saying 'would you mind giving up the lounge for tonight' is a redundant statement when you live in a househare, and if you want to do something special for someone you're going out with, you should probably book a table in a restaurant.

anyway. the sum total of all of that, was (as you can tell) me getting very worked up, ringing the boyf and him fixing the entire night so that we went for dinner at his place with his housemates. was all very civilised actually. and i did really enjoy it. and receive my first ever genuinely proper valentines card. and my first ever genuinely proper valentines gift.

i conclude, however... that valentines day is for idiots.

xxx