And lo and behold, what is she angry at me about? The fact that she didn’t receive a reply to a text she sent me last night, among other things. Hello, pot?

And! Just to make it all even more aggravating for me, I had sent her a reply. The situation last night was – it was lateish, and she texted me asking where I was and if I was ok, and I replied to let her know I was still at work and staying to watch a show. She then asked me what time the show was and if she could swing by. I replied to say it was starting now and apologies, but I’d let her know far in advance in future if I was going to see anything. This is the text she never received.

So I show it to her in my “Sent Items” folder, where you can see clear as day that I had sent it at 7:32pm last night. However! This is not good enough for the crazy flatmate. She laboriously checks to see if our phone times match (they don’t. I’m one minute slower. She’s like, “why is that so?” I am so flabbergasted by the stupidity of this query that I immediately say “why not?” a little snappily). She checks to see what time I sent the first reply. She reads the lost text again. She checks the message details and sent time again. I explain, repeatedly, that sometimes texts get lost in the network. It happens. I’ve sometimes not received texts from others, and others haven’t received texts from me. As she can see, however, I had indeed replied her last night. But no! The evidence on my phone is not to be trusted. She says she will contact 3 tomorrow morning to check that this text is, indeed, lost in the ether. If they say it is and verify that, yes, my number attempted to send her a text at 19:32 hours on 11 Feb, then I can stay, she says magnanimously.

At this point I am thinking she is actually certifiably insane, and even if she pays me to stay, I’m leaving. And then she has a hissyfit over the fact that the “I’ll be back late tonight” post-it note I left her this morning was 1) addressed “To Mona” instead of “Hi Mona” or “Dear Mona”, because on her whacked out planet, leaving notes with “To [recipient]” is rude, and 2) stuck on my door instead of hers (our rooms are next to each other and I was 100% sure she would see a note on my door so who cares where it was stuck?!). She also has a go at me about the fact that I went straight to my room and to bed last night without knocking on her door to say hi, since I knew she’d been worried about my whereabouts. I explain that I was zonked, and since she knew I’d been at a show, and I was under the impression she had received and not responded to my “the show is starting now!” text, that all was fine and dandy. I don’t think this was unreasonable of me AT ALL. Nevertheless, she is pissed off.

My colleague is convinced that she’s actually made up all the flatmates she’s lived harmoniously with before and they only exist in her head because no one could actually live harmoniously with someone like this. I am beginning to think she may have had a point there! Thank GOODNESS I have been evicted.

So after even more increasingly heated back-and-forth about electricity (she now objects to my electric blanket, which is, in fact, an eco-friendly model that uses less electricity than normal), and me constantly trying to call a ceasefire by just repeatedly offering to pay as much extra as she thinks is fair once the bills come, and her constantly responding with “but why do you want to pay more if you can just be careful and use less heating? i only use the heater for 20 minutes a day! my room is always cold!” (turns out when I said she didn’t object to me keeping warm, her idea of keeping warm is decidedly not the same as mine), and me trying to explain, quite unsuccessfully, that I would rather pay more and, y’know, NOT BE COLD – she was like, this is upsetting me, I have exams in two weeks, and I don’t want to talk to you about electricity anymore, this is the last time!

I was so steamed up that I actually gave some serious consideration to moving out, something that my colleagues have been urging me to do, as they are convinced I live with a total mental nutcase. So I asked her, if I were to move out, how much notice she would want me to give. And to my enormous surprise she’s suddenly all – “no, no, this isn’t about moving out, you don’t have to worry that I will order you to move out, you’re okay with everything else, you’re quiet, and I like you” (really?? I’m thinking, because you could’ve fooled me).

I’m wondering how to get my point across to her properly, because her English isn’t very good and she doesn’t seem to understand that I might want to move out regardless of whether she wants me to. I repeat my question again – if I want to move, how much notice do I need to give? And again I get the same oh-no-you-don’t-need-to-move response.

This is aggravating and I don’t want to snap and start being rude, so I give up and retire to my room.

I guess I’ll try and stick it out for a bit more, since I appear to be, you know, stuck. If this really is the last time we’re going to discuss electricity, and I can placate her and keep warm by paying more, I think I can live with that. I dearly hope these are merely teething problems. To be honest, the bar has been greatly lowered for me now; I am so irritated that I don’t now actually care if we get to be friends or not, I just want to be able to coexist in a somewhat civilised and harmonious manner and not get on each other’s nerves too much. Whether that’s doable – well, we’ll see.

I feel like I am living in a guidebook entitled “The Flatmate from Hell – Who Not to Move in With” or something. Did I mention there are two sponges in the kitchen sink, one for cups and one for dishes, and they are not interchangeable? Who does that? (I went out and bought my own sponges today. It just seemed easier.)

so today in the spirit of reconciliation and friendliness i made the mistake (or possibly wise move. i have yet to decide) of asking the flatmate if she had any particular concerns so far about my electricity usage, living habits etc that she wanted to talk to me about… and got an impassioned earful about how, when i bake, i not only take up electricity with the oven, but also take up all the space in the kitchen, which meant that she can’t cook, and that last night she really wanted to cook something for herself for today, and now had to eat a marks and sparks ready meal because she didn’t get the chance to cook last night. because of me.

if it had been anyone else, she said, she might have thrown them out right there and then, but she thinks i’m just having trouble adjusting to living with someone again after living alone so long, which results in me forgetting to consider her kitchen needs, which is a habit that can be inculcated with time.

well. if last night had me almost in tears, this conversation had me so utterly shocked that i was too stunned to cry; there was a lump in my throat but my eyes stayed mercifully dry. i protested that she should’ve just told me she wanted to cook and i would then have shifted all my stuff to accommodate her (for i am, usually, nothing if not accommodating), but she said she felt it was i who should’ve thought about her, who should’ve considered that she might need the kitchen, and make allowances for this, and she was being polite by not insisting on using the kitchen last night.

have i really grown so inconsiderate of others in my year of living alone that i don’t realise it? is it really the done, normal thing to warn your flatmates when you’re using the kitchen…?

and then there was this whole kerfuffle about how much stuff i had brought with me. but i’m just going to ignore that, or try my best to, because i definitely feel that i am in the right here; if you’re going to limit storage space, you should say so to your tenant before they move in. and you shouldn’t seem all okay with it and then suddenly bring it up out of the blue while having a go at her about something else. i actually feel i have not been given the storage space i deserve because i have about 1/4 of the kitchen cupboards and half of the wardrobe in my own room.

sigh. how do i make this right? i never thought i was a hard person to live with. i always thought i had really easy, tolerable, pleasant habits. but apparently i’m rude. and unthoughtful. and just. sigh. okay. i think i can have that cry now.

Maybe, in the spirit of fairness, I should begin by saying upfront that my flatmate Mona is not a horrid person. Neither is she grossly unreasonable. She is actually quite agreeable and understanding. She doesn’t object to me blasting the heating because she thinks it’s unfair to make me live in cold conditions in the name of electricity-saving, and she doesn’t object to me using the kitchen and cooking at all sorts of odd hours, or frying bacon in the morning and smelling up the whole flat.

We have, however, had oven issues, which came to a head today. She walked in on me making muffins and immediately objected to my use of the oven, very firmly, albeit politely, and explained that the oven ate electricity like a black hole, and that she never used it herself for this reason. Therefore, she said, if I were to keep using the oven, I would have to fork out extra for electricity.

Feeling extremely put-upon I protested (probably weakly, as assertiveness is not my strong suit) that this had not been made clear to me before I moved in, and that I had never ever had problems with using the oven elsewhere before, and that I felt it was a given in ads that said “all bills included, use of kitchen” to mean that I was free to use the oven as I liked. Whereupon I was told that in Mona’s 5 years of flatsharing she had never shared with anyone who used the oven regularly, if at all, and that she had in fact lived in a flat once where her landlord expressly forbade use of the oven because it was expensive.

This rather flabbergasted me so I was kind of speechless for a while. It seemed impossible, and ridiculous, to me to restrict oven use in this flagrant manner, and more importantly, to just assume that I would know about it without making it clear from the start. I pointed out that my frustration in this matter stemmed from the fact that I wasn’t informed of this upfront, and Mona’s (again, apologetic, but firm) counter-argument was that had I told her upfront that I liked baking, and used the oven lots, she would have quoted me a different rent. The oven, she said, cost ten times as much as the gas stove, and she didn’t think it was fair on her to be paying for it since she doesn’t use the oven at all, and she is charging me very cheap rent anyway.

Again, maybe this is just me, but is oven usage really the sort of thing one needs to be clear about when negotiating tenancy?? Maybe I’m naive, maybe I’m just… ignorant, and stupid, but I felt (and still feel) so much that the onus should have been on her to tell me about the oven policy, rather than on me to tell her about my oven habits. Who discusses oven usage when meeting prospective housemates/landlords? For that matter, who has draconian oven policies like this anyway? The most bizarre thing about it all to me was that while Mona seemed to think it was entirely normal, I just… couldn’t (and still can’t) quite wrap my mind about it.

It was pretty clear to me anyway at that point that we were at an icky deadlock; while we both understood where the other person was coming from, we both felt that it was the other who should’ve been upfront about this matter from the start. I was close to tears and I didn’t want to argue anymore, so I told her I would pay the extra during billing periods when I had used the oven, and not when I hadn’t. We had some semi-reconciliatory banter about muffins, and she left me to finish up.

The thing is, financially, I don’t mind paying more, since it is true that my rent is incredibly cheap. I suppose ultimately what really bothers me is that I wasn’t told about this right off the bat. I suppose, at the end of the day, it is one of those frustrating, annoying, hair-tearing matters of principle; whatever principles of fair play I have are screaming out against my capitulation and telling me I have been very unfairly dealt with, that I should fight for the right to use the the oven, as it was on that assumption that I moved in, that I should at the very least stand firm and refuse to pay extra for this month (but do so for future months now that I have been informed).

I don’t know what to do. I tried not to cry about this while baking, though the heart had gone out of me; it was in a very dour and joyless fashion that i finished baking my muffins. I don’t even particularly feel like eating them now (which is good news for my office I guess). I don’t know if I am just being a whiny baby. I don’t know if I should feel as upset and ill-treated as I do. I just… sigh. And I don’t want to write this off as a bad flatshare and go out of my way to keep to myself. I want to try and make this work. We’re both civil and polite people with similar interests, so it must be possible to reach some kind of equilibrium, right?