Living alone

It’s been called “the biggest social change of the last 50 years that we’ve failed to name”, and we’ve hardly begun to plan for it.

By Hamish McKenzie In Current Affairs

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24th March, 2012

At the tender age of 31, Leigh Paterson has found herself living alone. A design lecturer, she has a two-bedroom apartment above a restaurant on Dunedin’s George St. A friend describes the apartment as a “costume cave” and Paterson concedes, with a self-knowing laugh, that she’s a bit of a “stuff monster”. She also admits she may not be easy to live with – “if I was living with me, I would probably hate me”. She decided to move into her own place three years ago after growing weary of passive-aggressive flatmates. At one point, her flatmates cut her off from the communal ...

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