bedrooms

I don’t remember much about my first bedroom. We had a small, terraced house on a very hilly street. Parking was a nightmare. My bed was a bunk bed without the bottom bunk, steel framed and sturdy. There was a big box of K’Nex and another plastic tub of rubber snakes. I really liked snakes, for some reason. I was going through my snake-phase. When we moved, I shared a room with my 2-year-old brother. I would lure him out of his cot and get him to follow me to landing. Then I would scurry downstairs and tell mum he’d broken out, and needed to be put to bed again. She would let out an exasperated sigh and head upstairs, and I would get five minutes in front of the TV with my Dad and my brothers while she tucked him in. Diabolical, I know.

I enjoyed sleeping in my mum’s bed. I would tiptoe to my parent’s room and whisper ‘please may I go in your bed?’ about once a week, happily tucking myself in between my increasingly frustrated parents. I always had an excuse, usually a bad dream, but really I just enjoyed being in the same bed as somebody else. This lasted until I was around eight years old, then it needed to stop.

I had a room of my own eventually, with all the hallmarks of a loud theatre kid’s quarters. Bright yellow walls with a small slatted bed that kept breaking. A built in bookshelf with a mountain of young adult fiction, from Skulduggery Pleasant to Alex Rider. A chest where I hid the numerous stuffed toys I was probably too old to play with, but couldn’t let go. A cross-stitch from my grandmother of some teddy bears waiting for a steam engine to arrive, on the central bear’s briefcase it reads: F J REVELL. The centrepiece- a poster from the musical Wicked, on which I’d plastered the tickets of every single musical I’d been to, from Les Mis at Queen’s Theatre to Hairspray at the Hewitt School. My room barely changed throughout my adolescence; I liked it the way it was, I wasn’t embarrassed by anything. As I began eating more, I would stash crisp packets and chocolate bars underneath my bed for a midnight snack. I became famous throughout the house as the gannet, the reason behind all the missing food. It was like this until I moved out in September 2017 and was forced to live alone for the first time.

I’m going to go ahead and skip Leazes. Nobody wants to hear about that place. I will say that the shelving unit directly above my bed meant sexual activity  was basically confined to a night of underwhelming missionary and nothing more, and the washbasin, after some time, became a more desirable place to urinate than our communal toilets. But it never felt like a bedroom. More like a strange, purgatorial cell. I missed my bright yellow walls so much that year.

My second-year bedroom was the smallest in the house, I think. There were three standard-issue, bulky pieces of pinewood furniture which the student residential company had provided us with: A large wardrobe with three sets of drawers, a metre long desk with a hole punched in for cables and chargers, and a slightly oversized bookshelf with five wobbly top shelves, and three shelves missing at the bottom (I used this space for shoes and blankets). The wardrobe was at the foot of the bed, meaning I needed to hunch forward and slam the drawers against the bed to get dressed in the morning. The desk was a sprawling mess of metro tickets, unanswered postcards and blobs of blu tack, with a dust-caked keyboard binding all my loose papers together. The bookcase was a leaning tower of unread literature, accompanied by a signed Wes Hoolahan headshot and a hole punch which I have never used, and never intended to use.

My bed was nestled alongside a radiator which was unadjustable and always slightly too hot, and a large window which overlooked a small courtyard. If I’d have made the effort, the courtyard could have been pretty: fairy lights, a barbeque grill, maybe some outdoor furniture or something. 

There’s no shortage of sunny motivational content on YouTube. A constant shared philosophy is that your room is a reflection of who you are. I spent a lot of time in that room lying on my stomach and binging self improvement videos with an arsenal of processed sugars and saturated fats on my mattress. I would eat, and while I would eat, I would take any semblance of positive change as gospel, idly swearing to myself that my room would become a headquarters of wholesomeness; polaroids on a corkboard, a vase of tasteful flowers, a jungle of well-nourished houseplants, fairy lights, more fairy lights, an endless network of fairy lights tangled into a blinking constellation of positivity, as if to say, look, I’m put-together! Look how together I’m put! I imagined myself welcoming guests into my humble abode, candles on the go, a turmeric-booster-tea in my hand as I took them on a tour of my happy little den. But it was a hopeless fantasy, because your room is a reflection of who you are.

After 30 minutes of monetised self improvement videos, I would shove wrappers under the bed, swat crumbs off the duvet, smoke a cigarette with my back to the window, and promise I’d go on a long, gruelling run later that evening. This was usually around 10:30pm. 

I rarely had visitors. It was probably for the best. My housemates kept themselves to themselves for the most part, which I’m really thankful for. I didn’t need an intervention, I thought. This is just being a student. This is just living independently. By the time I moved out, my ratty un-hoovered carpet was suffocated under a wasteland of unwashed clothes. The wardrobe doors had broken, creaking incessantly throughout the night. My mattress cover was a canvas of smudged cigarette ash and crisp grease.  The courtyard was full of weeds and smelled like bins.

I was extremely apprehensive about my transition to Manor House Road. These were some of my closest friends, but they hadn’t lived with me. I genuinely wondered whether I would repeat my old patterns and ignore them for 9 months, ensnared in another vegetated cycle of indifference. I knew this wouldn’t be the case as soon as I saw my room. Top floor, big bed, a skylight window, a wide, complimentary mirror, an obscenely long desk, and a wardrobe which stayed shut. I wanted to do so many things in this bedroom. I wanted to dance, I wanted to have sex, I wanted to lie down on my bed and knowingly smile at somebody while I listened to Radiohead through my fuzzy speakers.

I kept it clean. It wasn’t an obsessive thing, I loved cleaning my room. I loved organising my desk and lumping together my plastic bags. I loved the smell of clean laundry and scented candles. I even liked having the clotheshorse out, like some constant reminder of good health. On the walls I pinned up posters of my favourite bands, which I’d hungrily purchased from Ebay and Etsy. On the angular beam in the corner of the room I’d taped some letters and some lyrics and some (only vaguely stalker-ish) polaroids of Lana Del Rey that my mum had bought me for Christmas. I found a way to get my microphone working, and would use it to deliver ‘fake tours’ to people who would visit (our house was always full of guests) whether I knew them or not. I stuck a reminder to the ceiling for when I woke up. Initially it read ‘Be Good to Yourself’, then I changed it to ‘Be Kind to Yourself’, and then I removed it entirely. I didn’t need reminding anymore. I never brought junk food or takeaways into my bedroom and I always took my shoes off. I spent three hours rug shopping. I succumbed to the Pinterest clichés and hung bright blue Primark fairy lights from every angle. During parties I would invite people to my bedroom, yell at Alexa to play the sound of rain on a tin roof, and just have a chat. In my mind it was a hub for deep meaningful chats about existentialism and insecurity. But really, I think I just wanted to show it off. One of my proudest moments was when a friend came in for the first time and gasped: 

‘Your bedroom is exactly how I imagined it would look!’ 

It was the ultimate compliment- if my room was that wonderful, then so was I, and I didn’t even realise it. And of course, I adored my housemates. They always had time for me, each in their own unique way. I learned to love the smell of communal cooking and the sound of television from our living room; I thrived off companionship, I wanted to share my personal space with anybody who would oblige. I loved living on the top floor, climbing up three flights of stairs and smiling up at people after a long day of work, before collapsing on my obscenely comfortable bed. I developed a routine of waking up early, going for a morning run and lounging in the kitchen with a hot cup of tea. With seven of us under one roof, it usually wasn’t long until someone equally chirpy bursted through the kitchen door and told you all about their day. I liked hosting afters. A few months ago I cooked for five people after an uneventful night out, and we ate and smoked around my kitchen table at 3am. I’ve never felt such an immense pride in my living space, and people began to notice this. One of my best friends told me recently ‘I can tell you’re living happy now. Everything’s really coming together’.

Things changed a bit during second term. I was knocked down a bit and lost my focus. I couldn’t concentrate on myself as much, and my room was reflective of this. Oddly enough, it didn’t matter too much. Because at this point, our house was one big room in itself; a thriving little Jesmond community which kept me smiling despite the weather. One thing that held me back was how dangerously consuming my room was; when you’re in a comfortable place you never want to leave, especially if the outside world is losing its appeal. When coronavirus struck, I called my Dad and decided it was appropriate to leave. I was a little heartbroken to say goodbye to what I can comfortably say was the most important bedroom of my life. But it’s not goodbye. Some point soon, I’m determined to make a grand return.

My bedroom in Norwich is bare. It has that odd emptiness of a room which has been stripped of its essentials. I feel half-at-home here. I’m eating less, working harder, and spending long periods of time raking through old drawers for a delicious bite of nostalgia (100% worth it as I am now reunited with my Nintendo DS). I’m beginning to think those YouTubers were right, and maybe that’s why my room feels so plain. Because your room is a reflection of who you are, and I don’t really know who I am at the moment. 

It’s time for a reboot. 

I’m excited to self-decorate.