How to choose your housemates

As someone who didn’t really choose his housemates this year, I am in the perfect position to tell you how to do it.

I lust after a harmonious house, free from grated cheese scattered over work surfaces and passive aggressive messages left on the fridge. In this quest for amicable living, I have come up with a few formulas you can follow to create the perfect house.

Formula 1 (lol): Upon opening the door to number nine Richmond Terrace in October, I thought I would be living a sitcom-like existence. Late-nineties ‘Friends’ was the dream: we’d all get along really well and most of us would shag Jenifer Anniston. Of course this didn’t happen, but don’t let my pessimism get you down. Choose your favourite sitcom, New Girl and Fresh Meat are good examples, then pick the people you know who are most like the characters. This is a sure fire way to a happy and hilarious existence in your new accommodation. NB Don’t choose the programmes with kids in. That would be weird.

Gretchen, Ashley and TJ will inspire worried looks when your parents come to visit

Formula 2: If sitcoms aren’t your thing, you could always assemble an ambitious house. Turn a friendly association between fellow students into CV points collecting arch rivalry. To do this, only choose people who are in the JCR or whose ravenous society ladder climbing, makes you question how happy their childhood was. If you do this, you are guaranteed an internship with a large American bank and possibly an invitation to the Pitt Club. Your soul however, may not come out of it so well.

Pizza or Pitt? You decide

 Formula 3: If you are the edgy sort, you should use your basic sensory organs to choose fellow housemates. Start with your ears. Close your eyes and walk along the corridors in college.  Avoiding the various obstacles that may be scattered around, listen in for the type of electro trance music that you and only five other people in North of London have ever heard. Once located, knock on their door and engage in high class pretension. If your ears fail you, use your nose and try and sniff out your favourite class B drug lingering in a compadre’s bedsit. Knock. Ask for a spliff. And form a house. The combination of drug induced euphoria and discovering your new on-site dealer, make this a perfect transaction.

Formula 4: Finally if you are the mathmo sort, who would rather spend their time alone in their room with their gameboys and their table-top role play games’, then choose housemates who are tolerant. Find others who jump in the air and wet themselves when confronted with eye contact and engaging conversation. These guys are never going to steal your milk, or say your ritualised chanting at three in the morning is annoying. You can carry on with your sordid sadistic existence, without complaints from the neighbours that the severed head in the fridge is going off.

These ideas on how to choose your housemates are by no means exhaustive, but do try and be rational or copy what has gone before. Choosing them based in attractiveness and IQ score, or trying to emulate a mid eighties Thatcher government cabinet, the Fellowship of The Ring or the Famous Five are all other perfectly good ways.

Malibu Moment!!!

The hard part is to work out which one best suits you.