While many spent the morning of C-Sunday dressed as pirates, drinking from funnels before undertaking the brave and noble mission of trying not to throw up in Mainsbury’s, I watched Bob Paris’ 1984 Mr Olympia bodybuilding posing routine, really questioning how this constituted journalistic research. I confess my usual perusal post-interview consists of googling synonyms for ‘really cool’, and yet my search history is now peppered with investigations into the Reichstag fire, thanks to Eve Connor. I am compelled at this juncture to inform you of the implicit artifice of the column. Eve’s room truly is, as the self-imposed title suggests, a ‘prop box’. The Lego flowers on her table are a temporary installation provided by a flatmate, and the many snippets adorning her walls are the product of a loyal friend and willing library printer, fearful of the looks she’d get from commemorating in print Eve’s abiding love of western movies. Eve’s room is a set, a curated eclectic perfection. I arranged to meet Eve in Week 0 – post-dissertation hand-in but pre-revision hibernation. With both of us simultaneously locked out of different parts of the accommodation, our meeting was off to a deliciously chaotic start.
Amazed by her convincing but fake plants, Eve assures me that Ikea truly is “the wonderful everyday”, with its immutable verdancy echoing the artifice I’ve warned you of. The room is punctuated by pictures and trinkets; a carved wooden cat “keeps an eye on me while I’m doing my work”, the observation necessary for focused studying lest she face stoic feline disapproval. A postcard of Van Gogh’s ‘The Bedroom’ is nestled in the recesses of shelves, memorialising the Birmingham stint of Van Gogh Live; created to radiate calm when people gazed at it, Eve finds a strange familiarity in the details of the inserted self-portraits and shades of mellow yellow. The sparseness of her shelving unit is one Eve revels in, with her flatmate’s mum once boasting “Eve brings so little, why do you pack so much?”. Since that day, Eve professes, “I bring less and less for the validation I receive”, a covert competition waged against her own collecting impulses.
“Eve’s room is a set, a curated eclectic perfection”
More than a silent competitor Eve is something of a linguist, displaying an Ursula le Guin novel for which she learnt the fictitious language, even attending a conference about the translation of the alien dialect ‘pravlish’. A lockdown project, or “literary mania” as she depicts it, saw Eve, despite speaking no Dutch, translate the diaries and travel writing of Marinus van der Lubbe, who — for anyone who missed out on taking GCSE History — is believed to have set the Reichstag alight, a figure with whom she jokes she’s formed a “sort of parasocial relationship”. There is something as infinitely compelling about her room as there is about Eve, so quietly brilliant, and yet to probe deeper reveals a saturation of interest and expertise, with a wondrously fantastical imagination.
Her desk boasts a Bauhaus infatuation inspired by a Berlin jaunt, attested to by its pastel print. Eve envisages a May Ball populated by the angularity of the infamous Bauhaus geometric costumes, absurd and abundant with infinite possibilities of indulgence in the fantastical. Although my suggestion of a small polythene tunnel (similar to those used in dog agility) to be used for sculptural elements was cruelly rejected for the sharp modernity of Bauhaus, keep your eyes peeled for mine and Eve’s Crufts-themed May Ball. Due to these eclectic interests, luxuriating in multiplicitous fascinations from bodybuilding to western movies, Eve was voted ‘would be worst man’ in sixth form. She was told “If you were a man, Eve, you would be unforgivable,” and I hesitate to disagree. I do confess that her love of bodybuilding is contagious; her appreciation of Bob Paris, an American bodybuilder and civil rights activist, whose movements are nothing short of balletic, has me perpetually returning to his poise and fluidity.
“She was told ‘if you were a man, Eve, you would be unforgivable,’ and I hesitate to disagree”
Her bedside table lays claim not merely to Bob Paris paraphernalia but an all too familiar sight, namely the Duchess of Malfi, as in exam term she tells me it’s “just me, John Webster, and John Ford”. Although Eve hasn’t quite graduated to curling up with Jacobean revenge tragedy, she revels in the idea that “after Shakespeare dies, they’re just looking for people and they’re like, we’ll do it! We’ll take it from here, William”. I survey her food store, not out of a burning desire to figure out her preferred bran-based cereal, but an intense intrigue at the photographed man pointing to a sign reading “Jesus Cares” above her collection of tinned fish. While there is no religious angle to the preserved poisson, with the image merely a still from a film, Eve jokingly explains “I got really into tinned fish for a while”, even following an Instagram where a woman tried international tinned fish, but Eve assures me “I’m not on that level, just Sainsbury’s”. The love, however, dissipated after a lacklustre anchovy encounter, after which she decided she needed to “take a break — it was diabolical and terrible, why do they have bristles, why do they fight back?”. Eve is now back on just neat fish going “straight down the gullet”, although she continues to worry about the aroma of her shared kitchen and her flatmates’ dwindling tolerance, fearing she may be the subject of a fishy CamFess.
Eve’s room may be a construction, as curated as Bauhaus costumes with the intentional familiarity of Van Gogh’s ‘The Bedroom’, all a ploy thrown together so I could not expose the minimalist reality she inhabits — but is her room any more artificial than my own? While Eve’s objectives in her staging may be more overt and hilarious than my own, it is all about — as my tripos supervisors continually remind me — affectation, eliciting a response. Eve may perhaps be this generation’s answer to William Gaunt, an actor best known for his role in the 60s detective fiction The Champions, whose photo perches above her wardrobe handles: a prop master, not hiding behind artifice, but a self-professed performance of the grandest kind. All of our rooms are prop boxes of one kind or another, holding the scenery of past iterations of ourselves, conveying to an audience the persona we wish to project — Eve is just bold enough to admit it.
