Everything you experience when you live in a room with a view…of HELL

We moved. Thank God, we MOVED.

Moving is presented as a bitter-sweet thing. Oh no, you’re leaving your lovely home and the lovely people you’ve shared it with. Oh no. But, I think, when you’re at uni, and the very walls of your ‘accommodation’ (I use that word loosely) are bitter – it’s definitely a sweet affair to move.

I couldn’t wait to get out of that house. Moving into a first-floor apartment meant just one thing for me – there will be no mice. Mice, I believe, are spiritual, grounded creatures and so don’t live in first-floor apartments. Having said that, I did find one on my upstairs bed once, and as if to say ‘come to bed honey’, he rolled on my pillows and washed his face. Nice. He did more than some guys I’ve known, but I digress.

The mouse trap on crack:

The best – worst – memory was using a printer box to corner the thing under one of my flatmate’s beds, knowing full well that it would just come back in. It did. Next best memory was when three of us cornered it under a different bed. Aha, we’d got it – it had no where to run. We lifted the bed up and it had fucking vanished.

We thought we’d had a collective hallucination. I checked to see if I’d had a nose bleed or my pupils had exploded and went to bed, unsure of reality.

Behind the fridge was magnificent…

'Too cold to come to lectures, sorry!'

Remember when we had that snow? Yeah. So do I. Our boiler packed in that very week. And uni house landlords move a little slower than the queue at the bars in freshers week. So it was a week of using the gas rings as heating (very dangerous, very necessary) and cold showers because the student-house-plumbing, so firmly fixed in the Victorian era, haven’t discovered the sodding electric shower.

Came outside to warm up.

However, being frozen out of going to lectures was a gift of an excuse I couldn’t have thought of myself, and I have thought of few!

Bus? I don't know her:

But it’s the area you pay for, isn’t it? The delicious closeness to town. Only a short bus journey. Well, it would be, if it ever turned up!

The 56 is a bit like Carrie’s common sense in Sex and the City – sometimes you think it’s going to appear, but it never does. The area – Hyde park – was interesting, too. The highest amount of burglaries of a student area in the UK, tied with an area in north London. Someone was always having a party, or blaring music even without a party (students are resourceful people), smoking weed, or, weirdly, setting off fireworks?

Lest we forget – the weed loyalty card.

Kill me, but please, please, don't take my TV:

Once, a scruffy looking man came to the door saying he was from the estate agency, doing an inspection. Me, being ridiculous and trusting (see: my failed relationships), let him in. As he went around the rooms making notes, I grew more and more nervous that I was wittingly letting some big lad case the joint. I croaked ‘I’m so sorry, but do you please think you could please leave, please?’ in what I now know was a ridiculously posh voice. He left without punching me, as I had imagined he would, and I rang the estate agents in tears, about to demand they send around a body guard for me and my TV.

Turns out it was genuine, they’d just ‘forgot to let you know’. Forgot.

Sorry, can I forget to pay my rent?

All the Mod-Cons: Shower, Fridge, Great Plagues, Eternal Damnation:

But not all student accommodation has plagues! Some have floods! As Matt Livingston regaled us all with in his article. I have yet to see blood coming out of the taps, but I have seen some atrocious things come out of the drains – mainly my facemasks though, I have to say.

I am therefore leaving immediately for Nepal, where I intend to live as a goat.

The proportions of student digs evils are nothing short of biblical – we were even persecuted, with eggs thrown at the window. That could have been my satanic tendencies, though.

Satan's Delight.

It had high rent and low moods. I remember one October evening when I was battling a break-up, I came home to a bin-liner full of my unwashed pots on my bed. Just lovely. Though I can’t blame that on the house itself – can I? Perhaps.