A peculiar presupposition that has followed me around for many years is that I am obsessed with the television show Spaced. I hate it! It makes me feel grim and misread; like looking at a bad photograph of myself. And it is particularly annoying because until a few weeks ago I hadn’t ever actually seen it.
I started watching this wretched TV show after seeing Hot Fuzz for the first time one recent Friday night, and enjoying it so much it gave me what I kept pathetically describing as a “boost” which lasted “all weekend”.
So far I am enjoying it. It is gently paced and distracting. Not laugh out loud funny but also not the worst thing I have ever seen (which is coincidentally also directed by Edgar Wright, and is Baby Driver).
In Spaced, as you probably know, Tim (Simon Pegg) and Daisy (Jessica Stevenson), two virtual strangers in their twenties, find themselves living together in a London flatshare.
One of the things I do enjoy about it is that it is quite gross. The flat is nicotine stained, with ugly patches of damp across the walls. Every surface is covered in cold cups of tea. Cigarette laden ashtrays make for the centrepiece of any table. I can feel on my skin how it would be to inhabit and move around that flat. It has made me feel nostalgic for the communal grubbiness of the house shares I lived in during my twenties.
To live with another person is to know their body. You cook together and you eat together. You hear each other having sex through the walls. You share a sink, a shower, a toilet.
I recently gave a speech at one of my best friend’s weddings - someone I have lived with in various places across Manchester - and so have been turning over lots of memories, looking for the ones which characterise our twenty years of friendship. Two in particular, stood out to me.
One, in a house we shared, the morning after a night out in which I had brought back an ex-boyfriend. I had been very drunk and had vomited into my ex-boyfriend’s hands, which he had mysteriously cupped in front of him in order to catch it. Also, a little over the walls.
The next morning my friend came to check up on me, having heard his voice as he left. She filled a bucket with warm, soapy water, and together we cleaned my vomit off the walls, while I poured out my heart.
A year or so earlier, we had shared a similar conversation, in which she revealed something tender that was happening in her life, and we talked about it while sitting on the bathroom floor, taking it in turns to pull out enormous clumps of clogged hair from the shower.
These memories are strangely precious to me. I cannot remember the content of those conversations, but those images are seared into my mind. My Coca-Cola-brown vomit on the wall. The long muculent globs of hair, pulled from the drain. The reciprocal care. The corporeal acceptance. The mutual cleaning up of what we had shed.