When I first moved in here I inherited a dead person. Well, maybe not a “person” as such. More like one eighth of a person. Of course I didn’t quite realize this at the time. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I “accidently” found my housemate – and when I did he kinda gave me the heebie-jeebies! There he was just quietly sitting in an open box up there in the attic when I wandered over and thought “Mmmm, what’s this?” before lifting him up and uttering “HOLY CRAP!”

You see this place was built around twenty years or so ago by a student doctor who took a year off from his studies to build it – and HELL it shows! He teamed up with his girlfriend and another friend (who just happened to be doing a course in architecture at the time) to knock together a cool little house on top of a secluded hill, next to a small pine plantation. In all fairness though I’d have to say that they all did a pretty good job of building the house even though they didn’t quite finish it in time.

The pine trees were originally planted by the guy’s father in the 1940′s or thereabouts and they were supposed to be eventually cut down and used as Christmas trees of all things! Only in the end the father decided he couldn’t be bothered cutting down and selling said trees and so they were left to grow very very tall and (unfortunately) very very thin. The end result being that if there’s anything stronger than a mild breeze around here we tend to get half a dozen of the buggers snapping and falling all over the place. Or at least they try to fall! Being so close together they just seem to lean over slightly and kiss the adjourning tree in most cases.

Now I’m guessing that after they’d built most of the house, Doctor Dugal and his girlfriend started moving in all of their stuff – including lots of medical books, some very dubious medical equipment (which I may write about at a later stage) and a human skull.

What makes the skull a little different from most skulls – as far as I’m aware – is that it has a flip top head. Yup, the top has been cut all around and then had a spring attached to it, making it act as a spring loaded lid to the rest of the skull. I don’t know if this is standard practice with medical skulls but there you have it.

Now I also have it on good authority that when a housewarming party was first thrown here Dugal filled the flip-top skull with cheesy snacks (Cheesels for Aussies but they’re similar to American Cheetos) and offered them around to party guests. Not exactly my cup of tea for one reason in particular…….This head was once……someone!

I can’t stop thinking about that even though I know that it’s no longer really someone……although it is…..It’s confusing!

I mean this was once part of a living breathing person? This ain’t no fake! I have no idea WHO they once were. I haven’t even got ANY idea of whether they were male or female? I don’t know what nationality they were, what they died of, what kind of person they were, what their dreams and aspirations may have been or anything at all really? I could probably hazard a guess though that they wouldn’t have liked ending up the way they did – stuck in a box in an attic in a house on top of a hill….but then I don’t really know?

Am I reading too much into this? Should I be THAT concerned by it? Does it really matter? Who knows?

All I know is that, for now, I’m sharing my house with part of another person and it kinda freaks me out a little….

At least I HOPE it’s just one other person?????

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 26th, 2005 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.