Your love for winter comes crashing down when you become a second year

Winter was hands down my favourite season. I couldn’t get enough of the warm, snuggly, comfy lifestyle that the cold season brought with it, drinking hot chocolate by a working radiator with my cat on my lap and I’m A Celeb on the telly. My literal heaven. But now, that’s all gone to shit.

I’m in my second year and it’s bloody hard. There’s much more to stress about, and winter makes it all dramatically worse. Mid-term assessments have just finished, and the combination of stress over work and stress over bills is overwhelming. When is it acceptable to put my heating on? Are n-power actually cheap or were they just leading me on? How much does it actually cost me to put on the kettle? And dear God, why didn’t we just get a TV license.

Like everyone else, the house is always cold. A few clever individuals opted for an electric blanket, which seems like a dream until you realise you can never leave your bed. “Pfft, that’s not such a bad thing”, you cry, but think about how cold that toilet seat is going to feel. That lovely hot water bottle you’ve been using every night? Check your electricity bill at the end of the month and then get back to me. Being warm is a commodity and I’m sick and tired of it.

Alongside heating your body, you’ve got to heat your clothes, and leaving wet clothes on the radiators means that in two days, if you’re lucky, they’ll be dry. We invested in a ‘Dri Buddi’: a portable, indoor, electric clothes drier. It’s basically a giant pod that blows hot air inside it, lives under the stairs and costs 60 pissing pounds. The Dri Buddi however is not big enough to fit all of your clean clothes in, let alone everyone else’s. Tell you what it is perfect for though, hugging until you eventually de-thaw.

Thank you JML

Many of us second years walk to and from university. By the time the bus gets to your bus stop it’s already full, so you might as well try and shift some of the weight from first year. But in the winter this simple 20 minute walk is a hazardous journey. The amount of umbrellas that have broken and wet piles of leaves you have probably slipped on is ridiculous. It also means that by the time you’ve walked to uni you’re drenched with sweat due to having to go over-board on the layering up before leaving the house. And if it rains, you have to use an umbrella and pray it’s not so windy outside it will break, like my fence.

R.I.P

And the final burden winter brings: Christmas. Whilst I’m in no way a Grinch (I loved the John Lewis advert), it’s evident to see the downside of Christmas this year. Being a second year means that on top of rent, which is no where near as cheap as Park House, you’re dishing out for bills. I severely underestimated how much extra that would be a month, and I don’t have the spare funds for Christmas.

But there is a silver lining, which is the Christmas half term itself. Some of us have got four blissful weeks back at home thanks to horrendous timetabling, so we can soak up our family central heating and not have to worry about the potential mould growing on the ceiling. Not all hope’s been lost I suppose.