Wash n’ glo
The Italian lodger who doesn’t quite fit in
Since the New Year, life has settled back into a rather dull old routine at Landlady Towers. My Italian lodger, who is here for another two months, I find deeply irritating. He has not done anything wrong at all, but in spite of the huge language barrier, I know that he’s not my kind of person. For a start, he perpetually wears dayglo sweaters over open-necked shirts giving him a distinct air of Wogan-meets-Tinky-Winky, which wouldn’t look out of place on Cbeebies. On a Monday morning, before he goes to English school, he piles these jumpers up on his bed with a note on top saying “clean all this please”. At least he says ‘please’. If I could be bothered, I would leave him a note in return saying something like: “actually, the verb English people normally use is ‘to wash’”, but I am too busy ‘cleaning’ said hairy horrors to worry about grammatical errors.
“There is an unspoken suspicion that, even if his English were perfect, he would be woundingly dull”
Then there’s the fact that he never seems to listen to music or read books and appears to regard our familial viewing of soap operas and reality TV with derision. However, on the rare occasions he’s left with the remote control and the living-room to himself, he immediately switches to previously unheard-of channels which seem to be devoted to obese men pulling milk-floats with their teeth. Hmmm, macho-man wearing dayglo – are you beginning to see where I’m coming from now?
He doesn’t seem to drink either. I’m absolutely fine if people choose not to drink, but he seems to indulge in ‘selective drinking’. That is, he only seems to drink (and fairly copiously at that) if someone else has provided the alcohol. When he first moved in, he quite happily quaffed almost an entire bottle of my Pouilly Fume, then pulled a face and insisted that French wine was far inferior to Italian. I invited him to one of my parties and told him that he should bring a bottle of wine and he arrived on the evening empty-handed.
Perhaps I am protesting too much, because in spite of the fact that my lodger’s never going to be my best friend, he is actually the perfect house guest. He doesn’t make any noise (beyond a little nasty snorting in the bathroom), is out of the house for the main part of the day, politely eats all the food I provide and has now stopped following me around as he did during his first weeks of residency. I think the main problem is that no one who lives in our house wants to talk to him, not because of the language barrier, but because there is an unspoken suspicion that, even if his English was perfect, he would be woundingly dull. Unfortunately for him, there are no other foreign students currently in residence at Landlady Towers.
What traditionally happens with the foreign students who stay here, is that they seem to all pal up on the first night over dinner and spend their entire visit virtually joined at the hip, speaking reprehensible English to each other, which handily masks the fact that they don’t actually have anything in common, bar their chosen accommodation. By the time they get to go home, it dawns on them that they have spent the past month not improving and possibly even damaging their poor English by hanging around with a total loser, and have therefore wasted their entire visit. Perhaps I should find another lodger with a penchant for Dayglo sweaters.
