Hounslow and Love’s perfectly sound advice: First edition

When we advertised Sam Love and Tom Hounslow as our guest agony uncles, we had a lot of troubled souls get in touch. Thank you to everyone who wrote in, and we hope you find our attempts to solve your problems useful – although given the amount of Lambrini we’ve consumed so far, that seems unlikely.

“Dear Love and Hounslow,

“I’m eating too much takeaway. I think I’m addicted. What do I do?”

This question caused a bit of a dispute amongst us, so we’ve decided to answer separately, and you can judge for yourself whose advice is more helpful.

Hounslow: After a year of eating almost solely takeaway, I returned home to hear my own mother call me fat. Since that day I haven’t eaten solid food. Every meal is blended into a shake and I’ve never looked better. I’m deeply malnourished but nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Apart from juice. I fucking love juice.

Love: After a year of eating almost solely takeaway too, I returned home to find my mother still loved me, so I’ve just carried on. If I were to quit however, I already have my plan at the ready. Two words: crack cocaine. I’ve seen chubby cyclists, podgy runners, and even the occasional obese gym instructer. But I challenge you to find me one solitary fat crackhead. Plus, from what I’ve heard, it’s a hell of a lot better than juice.

“Dear Love and Hounslow,

“So during freshers I slept with this girl. Pretty standard. But now one of my block mates has started “seeing” her. He always tells me how much he likes her and is talking about become a proper couple. It’s always super-awkward when I see them together. Should I tell him that his soon-to-be-girlfriend is a conquest of mine or just let it happen?”

This is one of the classic fresher conundrums, the first week bang that comes back to bite you in the balls. Here is a step by step guide of how we would go about dealing with your issue. Step one: identify the biggest gossiper in your block. We all have one, that girl/guy upstairs who is genetically incapable of keeping even the mildest secret. Get talking to them, and tell them there’s something they should know… Step two: tell them another guy from your group, let’s call him Dave from downstairs, has slept with the girl in the question. I know what you’re thinking, this is an outright lie. This may be the case, but as we have discovered over our year and a half of university life, when it comes to romance, lying is literally fine. Step three: this is the easiest part. You wait till he finds out, if your gossip is as good as ours was, this shouldn’t take too long, and observe his reaction. If he’s perfectly calm about the whole thing, explain that Dave is innocent and it was in fact you porking his girlfriend in the first week. If he loses his mind and kicks the ever-loving shit out of Dave, just keep your mouth shut, and buy Dave an apology snakebite.

“Dear Love and Hounslow,

“I have a crush on one of the boys I live with. We’re really good friends but he’s a massive player. I’ve seen a lot of girls leave his room after our nights out at Welly. I also know he’s ‘not a relationship guy’. But I really, really like him. Where do I go from here?”

Being in love with your housemate is perhaps the most common issue facing 21^st century students, and we have the answer. Since you haven’t said otherwise, we’re assuming you haven’t slept with your conquest yet: if you want to tame this guy, that needs to change. Sleep with him at every conceivable opportunity. Do this for long enough, and even though there’s a chance this may not lead to him reciprocating your feelings, you’ll certainly be seeing less girls leaving his room on a Friday morning.

“Dear Love and Hounslow,

“I’m not enjoying my uni course. I’m a fresher and I hate it, I’m worried I’m going to regret my university experience because it’s too hard and stressful. Do you have any advice?”

This question was by far the easiest for us to answer, the reason being, we all hate our courses mate. Don’t get me wrong, many of us like the subjects we’re studying, or the people we’re doing them with. But if you were expecting to come to uni, and get a thrill out of your daily 9.15 – 6.15 lectures (PowerPoints), then you must have been following Love’s takeaway addiction advice (see above).

Secondly, when you talk about regretting your university experience, it gives us the impression you might not be aware of the institution you’re studying at. We’re at Hull, love your course, hate your course, it’s all irrelevant really. We’re all going to spend the rest of our lives wishing we’d worked a bit harder and got into Leeds. So in a way, it’s good you’re regretting your university experience now, you’re a couple years ahead of the rest of us.

“Dear Love and Hounslow,

“My blockmates are fucking awful people. I don’t get on with any of them. I just stay in my room and feel like I have no friends. They go out too much and are really loud. I feel like I’ve been banded with a load of people who I have nothing in common with. Shall I say something to them?”

Definitely not. Every block of first year halls has that one person no-one’s quite sure about. They never leave their room, and you’re not 100 per cent sure they actually exist, and aren’t just a hallucination caused by the excitement of Freshers’ Week, which was the last time you saw them. Last year, our mystery housemate just got completely ragged and kicked off at the entire block on our group chat. While it’s a first year memory I will treasure until the day I die, it just made everything more awkward than it already was. Our advice is simple: just be more fun. You only get to do your first year of uni once, so just go out with these cunts as much as you can, and before you know it, you’ll be a cunt too.

If you need advice from Love and Hounslow, or if the advice we just gave you wasn’t quite what you were looking for, please get in touch at [email protected] and your issues will be solved in next week’s article. Until then, keep it tight.