Under one’s roof

I stubbed one of my toes on a piece of fur­niture last night. It hurt. But I had only myself to blame for this mishap.

Res­ults of social research reg­u­larly inform us that we’re a nation that increas­ingly wants to live alone, to have our own space. The num­ber of single-person house­holds is on the rise. We all want our own little boxes made of ticky-tacky. I am part of that statistic.

What this research doesn’t make clear is that there are side-effects to this social trend — namely, that all those people liv­ing alone are going to develop strange little habits. Noth­ing major, noth­ing that’s going to upset the del­ic­ate bal­ance of soci­ety; but odd char­ac­ter­ist­ics that they would prob­ably avoid if they lived with other people and had to be sens­ibly considerate.

Talk to someone who lives on their own and they will, sooner or later, let slip about the pecu­li­ar­it­ies that are an integ­ral part of their home life. Often, this seems to involve doing things in the nude: doing the house­work in the nude (with a strategically-placed feather duster), hoover­ing in the nude (care­ful with that nozzle, dear) or iron­ing in the nude (per­fect for get­ting rid of those creases and wrinkles).

For those of you cur­rently shield­ing your eyes behind your hands, you can come out now. My pecu­liar habit does not involve naked flesh and house­hold chores, I prom­ise; it’s far, far sil­lier than that.

At home, I rarely turn on any lights.

For a start, I’ve always had an almost patho­lo­gical hatred of over­head light­ing. If I were a designer on Chan­ging Rooms, I’d be the one installing about ten dif­fer­ent vari­et­ies of mood light­ing in one room. The prob­lem with all these small lights is, how­ever, that if I’m the only one at home, I really can’t be bothered switch­ing them on and switch­ing them off whenever I enter and leave a room. When it gets dark out­side, it invari­ably gets dark inside too.

If I’m listen­ing to music I prefer to sit in the dark (for the atmo­sphere, darlings). If I’m work­ing at my com­puter or watch­ing TV they provide their own illu­min­a­tion (although, of course, I’m aware that it’s very bad for my poor eye­sight). A bath in the dark, lit by candles, is won­der­fully relax­ing. So only when I’m read­ing, cook­ing or writ­ing do I really need some lighting.

The good news is that it’s doing won­ders for my elec­tri­city bills, but the news isn’t quite so good for my feet. I stub a toe or catch a foot on a piece of fur­niture every couple of weeks, and as I hop around in agony I can hear myself curs­ing, “Why don’t you just turn a bloody light on, you idiot?” I live in semi-permanent dark­ness (which, of course, I wouldn’t if I shared my home with someone). No won­der day­light can some­times seem so excruciating.

I’m sure that naked dust­ing would cause me far less per­sonal injury.