Other people's living rooms

High in the list of unbritish things I do, there is the habit of peeping inside other people's houses. I have always loved to know were my friends lived, how they organize the things in their living rooms, all these things. And now I have a whole city of ground floor beautiful flats to analyse, by the price of getting a really upset look from an old lady in her couch, or disturbing a family dinner, from time to time.

By the way, among the general advantages of riding a double deck bus (the most important one being that there is no such thing anywhere else, as far as I know), there is the possibility of expanding you peeping universe to the first floor apartments! I admit, I do that. And it's fun.

Considering that I live in Kensington and I walk all the way from Imperial College to here, you can imagine the huge amount of fantastic houses I peep into every day. To me, all of them look like writer's houses, with lots of papers in a table, books scattered, and that kind of mess that gives you the idea that someone in creating something.

There is nothing more disgusting than that kind of decoration where the person hires an architect to create a bizarrely perfect scenario where no one could ever live. There are some houses in Brazil like this, and I'm sure it happens here sometimes. But these are not the rooms I look at.

Of course, some of them look like old badly decorated museums, with oil paintings hanging on the dark papered walls and dark wood heavy furniture all around. It feels claustrophobic just to look at them, and I imagine what kind of person could live there.

But back from the cool well decorated artistic houses. I know probably most of the owners of those houses are not artists. They probably have more boring jobs, but it doesn't matter. I can't help thinking if I will ever have such a nice house, or be a rich writer. I don't want to think about the odds right know, the only thing I know for sure is that if someday, for any reason, I get to be as rich as it takes to live in such a place, I will never see my room as a cool writer's place.

But maybe some curious and ill-mannered journalist, renting a tiny studio and living in a scholarship will walk down the street and be impressed by it. Too sad the journalist won't leave a note to let me know that I finally achieved it.