I am writing this article with the full knowledge that I am only prolonging the inevitable. Somehow, again, the dreaded day has come — it is my turn to clean the kitchen, and when living in a flat of seven girls, that is no small undertaking.
This was not always the case. Last year, naive and hopeful as we were, we decided against any kind of rota because were we not all adults, capable of cleaning up after ourselves? One exam season later, it became blatantly obvious that we had not transcended the lazy student cliche just yet as dishes piled high, pans sat too long on the stove, and even our endless supply of tupperware began running low.
At the end of our first year living together, frustrated, I decided to try and instigate a little bit of democracy. So, I did what students do best and made an anonymous Google Form and sent it to my flatmates with the gently probing question of “What would you like to change next year?” Across each answer, one point recurred: “cleaner kitchen!!” “tidier kitchen!” “please, God, a kitchen rota…”. The people spoke, and today, procrastinate though I might, I will hold up my end of our flat manifesto, because this is unfortunately not an autocracy. I suppose what we discovered is that even when living with your closest friends, everyone must bring their various approaches together to create a new way of going forward.
Growing up in the same home as both my parents and my grandmother, I personally watched two juxtaposing ideologies face off at the dinner table. The postwar German pragmatism that drove my grandmother was a far cry from the lenient, easy-going approach of my English father; where the former demanded no crust was left behind, no vegetables pushed to the side, and most certainly no dessert without finishing your main, the latter quite frankly couldn’t have cared less if we had a banana split for supper so long as he didn’t have to spend the evening either cooking or arguing over it.
For my mother, mediator-in-chief, this divide necessitated finding an alternative for the future wellbeing of our dinner table. To her, the non-negotiable elements were clear: having grown up often with nothing at all on her dinner table, it is totally understandable that my grandmother cannot abide food waste; for my father, whose parents bickered relentlessly, he will not sacrifice a peaceful meal for the sake of a few lone peas. So, maybe instead of watching me push said peas to the side and have to forgo dessert, she would simply cook carrots instead.
Looking back now, I feel I have perhaps unconsciously mirrored her tactics for building a more productive future: not simply finding a middle ground, but changing the conditions that created the issue in the first place. Where once we might have let the blame for our kitchen’s state percolate until one person snapped and spent hours restoring the room to rights, today there is no such tension — unless I wrap this article up quickly, trial by flat group-chat awaits me.
While the world of course operates on a scale far beyond my dinner tables, I have perhaps been influenced into believing the power of individual action can alter it a little at a time. In light of the recent EUSA referendum, where several new levels of student representatives will be created, and considering that we are still well within the strike period without any sign of institutional movement, I can’t help but wonder if it’s time that we all take on a more active role than designated complainer, and find a solution that doesn’t involve retreating to the middle ground. Alas, before I start fixing democracy for the masses, I must fulfil my obligations to my electorate of 7 and tidy that damn kitchen.
Illustration supplied by Hermione Grant (@H3rm1one) for The Student
