Statutory warning: Guests – and this column – could gross you out and be injurious to your feelings. Last month, for the first (but perhaps not the last) time in my life, I used someone else’s used toothbrush. “Ugh!” I said to my wife, on suspecting the blue-and-green toothbrush I’d used wasn’t mine — it had been wet and recently used. “What’s a used toothbrush between family, or friends, or come to think of it, strangers?” my wife sniggered, stopping me from gagging.
This column has been witness to the comings and goings of more house guests than most people we know, but even so, last month was a record of sorts. They’d come in all forms and shapes, ages and gender, each with their own dietary requirements and health concerns. They kept special fasts (that required special catering), had sleeping requirements (hard mattress on the floor; or soft mattress on a hard bed); they talked all night, shopped through the day, left wet towels on unmade beds; they exchanged recipes, SMS jokes, hand lotions and shoes; at any given point, they were a crowd.
There came a time when the house had more people than I knew had signed up to sleep in, a few had names I never learned; they invited their friends, had air tickets changed so they could stay longer (but never shorter), wanted the car for pick-ups, drops and to go clubbing and the chauffeur to collect packages. They came to party; they woke when it was convenient (so we couldn’t get into the bedrooms they’d occupied, to get our own clothes, shoes — or, indeed, towels).
“I can’t find my towel,” I shouted to my wife through the bathroom door, shivering after a shower. “Pick one from the pile,” came her short reply. The only towels were all damp from recent use, which fact found little sympathy when I shared the information with my wife. So – oh dear! – a quick rub (and a pat down with a bottle of sanitiser), and who was to know any better?
It was downhill after that — recycled soaps, shared forks, community drinks; pillows got exchanged, guests (and hosts) slept wherever – and whenever – beds emptied, regardless of soiled sheets and used duvets. Having taken over the house, country cousins and aunts emerged to borrow clothes (and make-up), they wanted eye-drops, stomach medicines and hangover potions, creams and lotions, night clothes and nightclub clothes (both of which they’d forgotten to bring).
Mobile chargers got purloined, bedside reading was hijacked, laptops “borrowed”. We lent out clothes, shoulders and sympathy. Someone burnt the iron, another jammed the hairdryer, the freezer door was left open so the ice melted. Fans and air conditioners whirred night and day; the bathroom clogged (why would anyone shred and flush a blouse down the pot?); the milk boiled over (because the cook was having a tantrum), shampoo spilled into the basin, someone dropped a tray of eggs on the floor that the help refused to clean, citing an allergy to egg yolk.
The visitors were from small towns and large; from this country and not; those we knew, others we’d never met. We exchanged smelly hugs and buttery kisses, clammy handshakes and uneasy camaraderie; ate off each other’s plates, bore with fortitude the loss of drained scotch and bottles of perfume, condoned wine spills and consoled the loss of dignity in a melee in which used towels and toothbrushes were – alas! – grist to the mill.