Inalienable truths.
My girlfriend and I are messaging and she tells me she admires that even from a young age I have always known myself.
She makes the comment after a WhatsApp exchange about my upcoming visit to see her in New York. I am reassuring her that she won’t need to entertain me the whole time and that categorically I will be staying in a hotel. She sends a laughing emoji and says I am the least likely friend she would worry about entertaining or feeling any sense of obligation to offer out her sofa to.
It’s true; I have always known things about myself and I have always tried to put measures in place to avoid the inevitable discomfort of these situations. This isn’t selfish, the discomfort isn’t solely mine, I know I will inflict my discomfort on others.
These are my inalienable truths.
First; I cannot be around other humans all of the time.
If I can’t afford to book my own decent hotel room I’d rather not go. I must have a space to go to at the end of the day, or in the middle of the day, where no one is talking to me or around me, to take a moment and re-group if required.
I find the very idea of room sharing, or even as some very strange grown-women do, bed sharing, on holiday exceedingly strange. It’s on the same level of strangeness for me as grown women who have soft toys on display in homes they have mortgages on and/or still call their parents mummy and daddy.
I recently shared a room with another girl, a very dear friend, on a weekend away. It was a two-bedroom Airbnb, which I obviously didn’t book, and despite my inner turmoil, my human decency overrode my usual standards. I gave up the double bed in its own room to my other friend who had been backpacking around Asia for a few months on a redundancy gap year. I slept in a single bed in a shared room and though I love my friend dearly, I slept dreadfully, comforting myself that this was only two nights and I would be home again on my own soon and I could do this!
The same views apply to staying at friends’ houses. I firmly believe that staying at other people’s houses that aren’t your parents, after the point you have a full-time job, is very strange and I avoid it at all costs. If you live within a reasonable Uber ride away, why on earth would you not want to go home? You really want to wake up hungover in someone else’s house and equally did you consider if the other person wanted you to be there when they woke up hungover? It’s just odd.
I would make an exception for a very close relative who can offer me an ensuited room.
Otherwise, I go by the wise words of a friend’s father who once said; you save to go on holiday, you don’t go on holiday to save.
Book your own room and go home at the end of the night.
My second inalienable truth; I cannot be in a group of more than 4 girls for more than 24-hours.
Many years ago, I thought I would test this truth and agreed to go on a 16-strong girl’s weekend to Denmark; it was awful.
Every large group of women has that one girl that sulks to get attention from the one unnaturally nice girl, one that wants everyone to follow them because they’ve been here before, one who is going through a life crisis and is infatuated by it, one who only gossips about everyone else, one who is a fussy eater and we all have to trapse around finding a vegan restaurant just for her and one who is just so boring.
I know this sounds as if I am a dreadful human but one-on-one in short bursts with most of these characters and I’d likely be fine. It’s the group setting that brings out the worst in me and in others. I find shallow conversation exhausting and inevitably in large groups that’s all you get. So, I end up analysing the group members to see what’s really going on with them and why they are behaving like that and going to great lengths to avoid that one woman who really shits me, has no redeeming features and who I can’t work out how on earth my friend can be friends with that woman and not see what she’s really about.
I’ll never do it again. It was a full 72-hours of hell and I couldn’t wait to get home. No reflection on Copenhagen; beautiful.
My third inalienable truth is a combination of the above two; I don’t need lots of girlfriends or to be in big groups.
I am the person that when I have had enough of people, I leave. Christmas parties, other parties, after work drinks; when I’ve had enough, I leave without guilt and without FOMO. I am equally comfortable saying no to attending events where I know I’m not going to have a nice time and will, shortly after arrival think ‘what the fuck am I doing here?’.
That two-night work trip to Disneyland Paris; I was on a train home by 9am the first morning.
Gaggles of girls have been difficult for me as long as I can remember. In primary school I had one good girlfriend and the others were just friends that I didn’t need to see regularly outside of school. I don’t need to be in WhatsApp groups of girls chatting, I don’t need to get the thoughts of the gang before I make decisions and I find it very strange when women, and men, still have the same friendships at the same degree of intensity, as when they were all in high school together; it’s like these people never actually left home; thus never grew up.
I love meeting new people and seeing friends but keep it to four women or less. Partners can be counted on top of the four as they add a different dynamic.
The fourth; I will not eat other people’s food brought from home and most particularly not if they have small children who like to ‘help’ in the kitchen.
I remember making this decision. I was 4-years old attending kindergarten and every morning tea we had to sit around a little kids-sized table and eat a piece of pre-cut fruit from a shared plate in the middle. Each kid had to bring in a piece of fruit to share. The fruit smelt sweet like it was on the turn and it was typically bruised or turning brown after having been transported to kindergarten in sweaty plastic lunchboxes. Even at that tender age I was considering the cleanliness of the household where the fruit originated from whilst watching children put their fingers all over it. I was repulsed.
Growing up in a family of church members it wasn’t uncommon for us to have what were referred to as ‘basket teas’ after evening services. All the mothers would bring in a plate of sandwiches or salad rolls and these were put on trestle tables for all to share in a community spirit. As an aside; the typical height of a trestle table is the face height of a snotty nosed, filthy fingered 4-year-old whose parents aren’t watching as he touches everything at grabbable height trying to find the exact sandwich of his choice.
There would inevitably be a plate of curried egg sandwiches sporting one side brown bread and one white; I’m not sure if this was to add exoticism to the sandwich or if the mother just ran out of bread and used what she had, but either way it did not increase the appeal.
I would make a point of familiarising myself with the plate my mother brought along so I could be certain I was only eating familiar food that my mother prepared in a clean house. I could not be certain of the levels of hygiene in the other houses and most particularly those houses with small children and interactive, hands-on mothers who liked to have their children assist in the kitchen. The thought of dirty little hands mashing up boiled eggs with curry powder and spreading it onto multicoloured bread was too much; I wouldn’t touch it.
The absolute most common victim to ‘kids helping in the kitchen’ is Rum Balls. They were quite common at the sweet treats stand at school fairs and for dessert options after the basket tea. In essence, it’s dry ingredients, chocolate based, rolled into balls and put into the fridge to harden. It’s a very simple, quick recipe that children can help with by rolling the balls in their filthy little hands and because there’s no actual cooking required, they are popped in the refrigerator, no heat is applied, no risk of burning children but also no risk of death by heat to the germs happily breeding away. You wouldn’t catch me dead eating a handmade rum ball.
