Nick Lezard is 48, enjoys a drink and keeps magazines in the bidet. Laurie Penny is 24, virtually teetotal and never empties the bin. Unlikely flatmates? You'd be surprised …

Laurie on Nick

When I told my friends that I was leaving inner-city proto-bohemia and moving in with a man I'd met at work who was old enough to have worn Joy Division T-shirts before they were retro, a few eyebrows were raised.

I needed a place in a hurry, and I fell in love with the house – a rickety flatshare in Marylebone with wonky wooden floors and review copies of every book published in Britain in the past four years stacked on every surface. The books thud through the front door at the rate of four or five a day. They prop up the furniture, they sometimes stand in for the furniture, and I pretend not to be impressed by how many of them have Nick's name on the cover. Nick refers to this place as "the Hovel", but it's a palace compared with some of the places I've lived, by virtue of having an intact ceiling and no one's drug-dealer boyfriend sleeping on the sofa.

I was happy to move in with another cantankerous, chain-smoking freelance writer. What I didn't realise was that living with Nick would give me such a profound insight into how grown-ups live. By grown-ups, I mean people who have been long-term partnered, had children and amassed a collection of scars and nice waistcoats.

Nick is divorced, and every other weekend his three children come to stay. While I try to stay quietly out of the way at such times, it's hard not to notice how tender he is with them – my parents separated when I was young, and I have some understanding of how hard it can be for dads to live apart from their kids. I've met few adolescent boys who actually seem to like their fathers as well as respecting them, but Nick's do, and it's not hard to see why.

Of course, they've not seen him standing in his pants and vest in the kitchen at four in the morning, eating a raw radish and an oyster at the same time and opining about the state of radical politics while some of us with deadlines are trying to get to the kettle. If living with Nick has taught me anything, it's that there's really no such thing as a grown-up, just people trying to muddle through their responsibilities as best they can while jamming in as much fun as possible.

If the amount of time Nick and I spend smoking rollies, complaining about our respective love lives and cackling at videos of cats doing amusing things on YouTube is anything to go by, being in one's early 20s can be a state of mind. If the time we spent drinking tea and arguing over the best Bob Dylan album is anything to go by, so is being in one's late 40s. Fundamentally, we're both writers, and we're both hopeless romantics, and that means we share a language.

Of course, Nick and I have our differences. He believes that tea should always be made in a pot; I believe that Green Day are a good band. He believes that the bins should be taken out more than once a week; I believe that a rotting hole with a broken sink, a bare broken lightbulb, a seatless lavatory and an ancient bidet stacked full of copies of the London Review of Books does not qualify as a "bathroom". The closest we've come to open warfare was a month ago, when a baby seagull got trapped on our patio. I named her Riot Gull and demanded that we keep her as a pet and train her to defecate on our enemies. Nick whinged about the admittedly epic quantities of guano, but I once caught him feeding her what I suspect was crab from the market. He can say what he likes, but he loved that bird.

Nick on Laurie

For two years I lived with one of my best friends, a man my age who drank as much as I did but never read books and was unafraid of making scandalously sexist remarks. So living with a borderline teetotal feminist intellectual half my age is a bit of a jump. However, I knew we'd get on. I'd been living with a girl even younger than Laurie for months and that had worked perfectly, plus I have three children with whom I get on splendidly, so the age gap is not a concern to me. Sometimes I wonder whether I should be living on my own, or with my own kind, but then I find myself rejuvenated by Laurie's enthusiasm and wit and I consider myself lucky to be living with her.

I love it that she's a first-rate writer and thinker. We are on the same side politically, although until she empties the bin she's banned from using the word "feminism" in my presence. It is a huge pleasure to be able to read something she's done and say "great piece, Laurie" without having to wear the mask. She raises my game.

The age gap is not ignorable all the time but when I do become conscious of it, it's not a bad thing. It is not quite like having suddenly acquired an extra daughter, although if I did have one her age I'd be immensely proud of her. I like her being around when my children are: it means they can't rule me out as a crazy old fart, and besides, watching Doctor Who with Laurie is one of the modern world's great entertainments (during one episode with those villains The Silents she nearly passed out in terror).

And we have a language in common, as she says: we are both incurable romantics with no wish to be cured; and she is, like me, a writer who has to zone out a lot of the time and so act in ways that normal people would consider anti-social. (She is also a good respecter of space.) Such friction as arises between us revolves around issues of tidiness and, much more mildly and increasingly infrequently, scoffing non-communal food ("Laurie, if you don't vividly remember buying it, don't eat it"), although some would say a household in which I am the tidiest is in big trouble. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the number of friends she has over, but then they are nice people and it isn't hard to see why they love her so much. She has a heart as big as her brain. I also admit it is fun to play the ancient, fading rouĂ© at them ("my dear boy, when I was your age I felt exactly the same way", etc).

If I may correct one or two small errors of fact or nuance. 1. I am right about the tea. I have read her Orwell on the subject and will continue to do so until she absorbs him. 2. Since that one underpant-related incident she describes, I have maintained a rigid trousers-on policy at all times. One does not want to scar a young person for life. And 3. I would no more have given Riot Gull crabmeat than one of my own limbs to nibble on. That bird came so close to being seagull fricassee she can consider herself lucky to be alive.

{loadposition user38} source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/sep/18/unlikely-flatmates-but-it-works

source: http://www.europerank.com/lifestyle/lifestyle/56667-the-odd-couple