31 Postcodes - Poem 13

 

Sluggish

We are playing house

and so are the slugs.

They wend their slimy way

up the stinking bathroom walls.

Is that a metaphor?

We cook our stodgy meals,

drink too much (well, of course),

then slowly we dissect

our divisions, our mistakes, 

our too shiny boyfriends.

There’s a couch, an old TV, 

it is colder than we’d like.

We invite people round

to sing late into the night.

That keeps us warm.

RF 2021

Video/audio for this one here.

In my second year at university (1987-8) three friends and I rented a little terraced house just out of the town centre. It was a pretty standard student house of the time – small basic rooms (though we did have a sitting room, not always the case in student homes), one shared bathroom, nothing of a garden. If it did have heating I don’t remember it (and we fell out with the landlady big time but I’m not going into that here). I had the smallest room because I really only wanted a bed – I had the least sense of style of the four of us and very few interesting or personal possessions (though I did have some huge dictionaries). Despite the latter I rarely did any studying so I barely needed a desk. I don’t say this to sound cool, it wasn’t cool, I just had no direction academically and probably shouldn’t have gone to uni at this time of life at all. 

Anyway, with Margaret Thatcher having just won her third UK general election (and second landslide) earlier that year it was an odd time to be a bunch of rebels in a very conservative world (geographically and academically). We were all still involved in politics of some kind (student or otherwise) and I probably spent a good bit of the year in the crumby (and crumbly) student union office in the centre of town. I was the Women’s Officer – that sounds a bit ’80s now but I was voted in so it was grander than you might think. Just the idea of a Women’s Officer annoyed the toffs/tories no end and that was always high on my list of priorities. I hadn’t been specifically interested in women’s issues up till then (brought up by an older single mother with a fairly fierce attitude I don’t think I completely realised there was an alternative to the equality of the sexes until I got to Cambridge – it was pretty apparent there), but the left umbrella group needed someone to stand and, after a bit of umming and ahhing, I deciding to do it if I could stand as an independent. I don’t really know why I wanted to be an independent but I have, to this day, still never joined a political party or a religion or anything much with rules (I make an exception for libraries, and every now and then I have the urge to put ‘hedonist’ in the religion box on forms but can't even commit to that). The local FE college had a Women’s Officer too (from t’north like me except she was SO strong, like a lesbian queen of the fens) and we got on really well and coordinated various projects together. Maybe I would have been happier if I’d gone there instead (I did work in an FE college in the early noughties and really enjoyed it). A group of us went to an NUS Women’s conference (in Newcastle I seem to remember) and that was a bit confusing (so many motions) but very lively. I seem to remember about 10 of us slept in a friend of a friend’s room when we were there. It’s all a bit blurred.

Despite the boyfriends mentioned in this poem this applied more to my housemates than me in this house as I had a particularly quiet year in that regard (in fact my whole three years at uni was not exactly stimulating relationship-wise). It meant I ended up spending far more weekend evenings than I would have liked sitting watching TV (Friday Night Live) and drinking the previously mentioned Southern Comfort from a bottle (sad). I did have a big 21st birthday party in this house though, which was great (at least that’s how I remember it – mad dancing to Whitney and George Michael’s ‘Faith’ downstairs, pot smoking and political discussions upstairs), and there were plenty of other fun social occasions too (Pasta! Alcohol! David Bowie singalongs!). All four of us in the house loved a party. We were all from different parts of the country and pretty different backgrounds (though I was, unusually for Cambridge Uni perhaps, the only one who had gone to fee paying schools) but I guess the love of the good times, no matter how or where they happened, was one thing we had in common. That and hating the landlady…

Tomorrow: a long summer in the Midlands.

This poem is part of the annual Fun A Day Dundee project where participants try to do something creative every day for the month of January. You don't have to be in Dundee to take part and there are other Fun A Day projects around the world. People post as much of their work online as they want to (largely on Instagram but it can be elsewhere too). This year I am posting a whole poem a day (one poem for each of the 31 addresses I have lived at, covering the period 1967-2021). Videos/photos of the poems show the places remembered in the poems but were mostly taken from recent Google Street View. The videos are on my Instagram, maybe elsewhere too. Use the hashtag #fadd2021 on social media to see other people's online contributions.