I'm loving angels instead
Robbie Williams and the female flatshare
“Do you remember your Robbie Williams phase?” My housemate shouts up the stairs at me.
As if I would ever forget. I think of it fondly. In our last flat, I went through a period of listening to the same 4 songs on repeat every time I got in the shower, a personal greatest hits playlist. It was stunning.
Other notable memories of Robbie Williams worth mentioning include the episode in Tracy Beaker when Ben hit the decks and kicked off his set with Let Me Entertain You and also my mum telling me off for showing my brother the Rock DJ music video and making him cry. And that was just last week! I’m joking, it was of course when YouTube first came out and I’d have been about ten, my brother eight.
If you haven’t seen it, this is the video as described on Wiki: “after he finally gets [the female DJ’s] attention he proceeds with stripping off his skin, muscles and organs, until the only thing left of him are his bones, which is performed by special effects.” Wow, thank fuck they confirmed it was only special effects! Maybe my brother can finally get a decent night’s sleep.
What I liked most about “my Robbie Williams phase” was the fact someone was there to witness it. It’s kind of like that philosophy of the tree falling in the forest - if no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? If I lived alone no one would have been there to hear me listening to Robbie Williams in the shower it would never have resulted in being defined, rather distinctly, as “my Robbie Williams phase”. A couple of sidenotes before I continue. I do actually believe trees make a sound even if no one’s around. I’ve read The Hidden Life of Trees (you should too if you haven’t) and love the thought that other trees will be there listening. I will continue to put “my Robbie Williams phase” in inverted commas because it’s not something I particularly want to be referred to outside of this piece of writing. Moving swiftly on, listening to Robbie Williams made me grateful for my housemates and the wondrous concept of the female flatshare.
I read a Refinery 29 article by Meg Walters last summer about how Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love TV adaptation served as an ode to the female flatshare.
Meg reflects on how the female flatshare comes during a transitional time in a modern woman's life when she takes the leap away from childhood but hasn't quite landed on solid adult ground. It is a time of freedom, possibility, hope. It is what [one of the main characters] Maggie calls a “grubby, golden phase of life".
The article goes on to point out that once upon a time women went straight from their father's house to that of their husband. What a complete TRAVESTY. For women not to be given the choice or option of spending a short slice of their early lives living with other women is quite simply, devastating. To miss out on the opportunity of discovering who you are and crafting the person you want to become in the safety of home surrounded by other women I find so sad. Spaces where you’re prevented from falling into the rhythm of domestic gender roles. Someone has to bravely take the bins out after all. In the name of Feminism!
Communities of women living together later in life, usually after divorce or after becoming widowed have existed for a lot longer. Pretty much the equivalent of the countless stories in mythology where babies are abandoned on the top of mountains after someone’s decided they’re a burden and will bring no good to society. No one particularly cared enough to control whatever women got up to after their childbearing years rendered them redundant, so I don’t really take that one as a win.
Some of my best female friendships have been found, or existing ones strengthened, through sharing houses and making a home together. Cute. Through tears, tantrums and traumas. Dating dilemmas, dinner party disasters. Watching the entire Sex and The City box set with homemade cosmopolitan cocktails to match. I am so thankful for the most lovely, cosy, safe, silly, endearing, chaotic and real days of my life. They continue to shape core elements of my identity.
Here’s an image of Emma Stone as the protagonist Olive in Easy A singing to Natasha Beddingfield’s Pocketful of Sunshine. It’s a good visual for what I probably looked like (note, past tense) during “my Robbie Williams phase”.
