Comments on: Living in Groups

By: Lionel

Lionel — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:45:14 +0000

I used to assume that restaurants were a relatively modern invention, till I heard that in Roman towns few flats had cooking facilities and that people went to takeaways for everyday meals. Not only would it be wasteful to have all those separate kitchens, but also dangerous in the days of fire-risky wooden houses.

In the 1950s the one family car took my father to work, so we relied on the bus but had weekly visits from a butcher, fishmonger, green grocer and hardware lorries, and our laundry was collected and delivered. The idea of having your own washing machine was sold as a 'convenience', though in practice running the machine, keeping the guarantee paperwork, buying soap powder and getting it maintained amounts to the burden of running a small home laundry business. So also the paperwork and maintenance of running a car amounts to running a small transport business. As for keeping a PC up-to-date...

So, in the name of convenience, most of us are now running masses of small home businesses on top of the work we need to do to earn a living.

By: Sasha

Sasha — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:03:00 +0000

The problem with living communally is someone always goes dangerously bonkers (generally an alpha male who didn't get something he thought himself entitled to) throws out the easily worried then chases the others with an axe and keeps the place for themselves!

Up till that point though, its great. Perhaps the arrangement would work if there were a good proportion of older people (I've only lived communally with student-aged people) on the grounds that dangerous loonies would have had ample opportunity by then to remove themselves from the gene pool, and the older generation have ways of dealing with little toe-rags plus years of practice

By: Improbulus

Improbulus — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:35:15 +0000

You really don't have room for lodgers, in that enormous place??

One of my former singing teachers upped & moved with her family to a community living project in Sussex, can't remember the name. I visited there - they jointly owned acres of lovely countryside, there were several families living there, with some communal areas. Fab environment for the kids to grow up in & learn to socialise etc.

By: David

David — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:33:42 +0000

Although we rarely actually cooked for each other, living in the same house as several other people was psychologically comforting for me. I really don't function well at all when living on my own; I've never officially done it, but in situations where all my housemates happen to be away for a few days, I've definitely started to slide into depression.

Yup, same here. It was one of the really surprising things I learned about myself whilst at College: that I'm simultaneously an introverted and a very social person.