We gave our flatmate an initiation into being 19

Initiations. An ordeal so horrifying, piss-up veterans are relieved they only have to do it once.

The shady world of “welcome drinks” are so extreme they can often be enough to put people off playing sport at uni altogether. So it was slightly bemusing when our housemate drunkenly told us she wished she was good at sport so she could have an initiation.

She probably regrets ever opening her mouth now.

For her 19th birthday, we decided she deserved a small taste of the bizarre rituals and humiliations that make up your standard initiation. The result was apparently “the toughest day of her life”.

The first she knew about it was a text listing our demands. Given a list of random items to bring with her, including a spatula and a hat, she was told to meet us in the kitchen at lunch.

One of her tormentors said: “She turned up in the kitchen begging for her hat not to be ruined, she was shitting it.”

Enough to make you shit yourself

After tying her wrists together with cling film, and using the hat as a blindfold, we paraded her down to the Triangle carrying one and a half bottles of water and a spatula for absolutely no reason.

By this point, the birthday girl/victim was deeply disturbed, a sensation heightened by the Homeland-esque torture techniques used by her housemates.

Looking back on the ordeal, the victim told us: “It sounded like they kept talking to other people on the phone, as if they were planning something big. It was really fucking scary.”

After walking her round Bristol in a form of bizarre public humiliation, the 19-year-old was released with orders to enter Waitrose and buy over £10 of fancy cheese. Upon completing this task, she was then to hide the cheese in her boyfriend’s room.

A housemate said: “The cheese she chose smelt like crusty ball sack, it was perfect”.

The victim’s identity has been protected to save their social life

Her innocent and blissfully unaware boyfriend didn’t discover the cheese for nearly a month, with the birthday girl forbidden from revealing her prank.

After going home for the weekend, he returned to a bedroom that smelled as bad as the Bunker toilets after sports night. That still wasn’t enough to clue him into the fact something was wrong though.

The birthday girl said: “He came back and said his room smelt like fox shit and got one of his mates in to inspect. The other boy said his room smelt the same so not to worry about it.”

So, was this small taste of the world of initiations worth it? We asked her what she’d made of the experience but all she had to say was simply: “I’m a changed woman”.