Living at home is ruining my first year

For people who live close enough to the city, staying at home while going to uni is a cheap and convenient option. But one that is also really fucking inconvenient.

Travelling

Travelling from home will for most people involve Glasgow’s uniquely shit subway system.

After enduring a squashed and sweaty bus or train journey, arriving at the subway to be faced with  the horror of a “next arrival nine minutes” sign is guaranteed to make your bad morning a lot worse.

This is before the carriage stops for 20 minutes at a random station with no explanation, and all hope of making your class on time are well and truly fucked.

And despite the carriages seeming to be roughly the same age as your grandparents, the steep £3 return fare is now apparently justified by recent subway “modernisations”.

Wow

These consisted of putting a big glass box over St Enoch station to make it resemble a sci-fi greenhouse, and re-tiling the stations in three beautiful shades of grey. Totally worth the money.

Food

Staying at home not only involves forking out for overpriced transport, but also spending a fortune every day on food in return for little more than a shitey sandwich from the Fraser building that fills you up for all of four minutes.

Neither nutritious nor delicious

Alternatively, you could bring a packed lunch and either eat it on a bench looking like a bully victim, or whipping it out in the library and choking innocent students around you with the stench of your warm, soggy lunch.

Soggy

Free Time

For those living in flats or halls a gap in classes is a great opportunity to go home for a nap, but for those living at home discovering a three hour break in your timetable brings you out in shakes and cold sweats.

Fearful

Desperately trying to fill this gap, you text everyone you have ever met/known/bumped into at uni in the hope they are free to meet up, inevitably leading to buying even more overpriced food in the struggle to kill time.

Alternatively, you go to the library and repeatedly refresh facebook, twitter, buzzfeed and –hitting a heart-breaking rock bottom of boredom – even your uni emails.

Socialising

Without the sociability of living in halls, meeting people while living at home can be tricky in the first place. But even when you do make new friends, the inconveniences of staying at home come along to piss all over your fun.

A drink after class turning into a few more becomes not simply a casual event, but an annoying organisational headache.  Behaving like an uncool 14-year-old, you have to phone home to explain your plans, and then keep an eye on the clock throughout the night to make sure you don’t miss the last train/bus home. Hardcore.

In the meantime, everyone else gets steaming and stumbles home whenever they feel like it- while you stand frozen in the street for half an hour after the bus you were so careful to catch ends up being late.

No room at the inn

And after parties or nights out you have to behave like a homeless squatter trying to find a friend’s bed, couch or floor to sleep on- trying not to ruin their night and cockblock any potential romances.

But…

Going home to a warm house and a home-cooked meal is hugely enjoyable, especially when your friends in halls are living in sub-zero, impoverished conditions and regularly enjoying “nutritious” dinners of supernoodles and beans.