It’s finally time to admit self-catered is far better than catered

From the quality of people you meet in self-catered halls to the freedom high from surviving by yourself – it’s all just so much better. The catered and proud crowd have it all wrong.

If you are catered and have no communal area how are you meant to keep up to date with your flatmates sordid one-night-stands and their horrendously embarrassing public chunders? Where do you go when you are all hungover to eat chocolate and cry about your financial and love crises if you don’t have a communal kitchen?

Not that anyone in catered halls has a financial problem.

The variety of people you meet in self-catered halls is incredible. There are international students who will somehow always make the flat smell like exotic foreign food and the future Mary Berry’s who are forever baking wonderful smelling treats.

You’ll have the serial burners, the ones you somehow set off a fire alarm with beans on toast for the first semester but by the second semester have mastered pasta and sauce. Whoever you are, you fit into self-catered halls.

You soon realise who is an insane clean freak and which one of your flatmate believes that the washing-up does itself there is always one.

There is no better way of getting to know four or five random people than a communal living space, oh and passive-aggressive post it notes about the cleanliness. On a cleanliness note – in student kitchens there is no clean surface.

And who wouldn’t love to live in a filthy student kitchen? It is most definitely the grimmest place you will ever sit/cook/pre-drink, but as soon as you go home, there’s something you miss about its organized and filthy chaos.

Being self-catered gives you not only a filthy yet beautiful kitchen to share with your flatmates but also a pre-drinking space. Catered people pre-drink in their rooms – can you imagine those horrendous cramped conditions?

Another key aspect of the kitchen which makes it vital to every student’s life is that it allows a place to proudly hang the flats chunder chart and the flats pulling chart.

What if your short? The mirrors in catered halls are only for people 5″7 and above.

The type of people you get in self-catered halls are superior in many ways, for example we are capable of cooking our own food first of all, and most of the time with success.

We budget a weekly shop, we know how to use an oven and by the end of first year we have managed to survive, fending for ourselves without the reliability of catered food.

Freedom plays a big part in any students life, the whole point of University is freedom. So that’s why I can’t fathom why someone would want to be catered? Going from living with your parents to living in halls with set meal times and limited food options? No thank you.

In self-catered halls we have the freedom to do what we like. Cooking chicken dippers, pasta and beans at 4am? No problem, you’re self-catered, cook whatever, whenever.

How institutional and unhomely.

You never feel guilty if you skip a meal, whether it’s not being up in time for breakfast, or working so hard at the library you miss tea, the guilt for throwing money down the drain is there.

In self-catered there is no such thing as ‘up in time for breakfast’, in self-catered breakfast is arbitrary, if you wake up at 2pm and want coco pops of course you can have coco pops… this is self-catered.

See… all so happy and smiling because we chose self-catered.

Potatoes. According to reliable sources that’s all people in catered halls eat, potatoes on offer every day. Having food, having potatoes on a rota does not sound appealing to us normal people. I’m sure you catered folk are used to having rotated meals, I’m sure your butlers at home are very efficient.

But it’s a strong no from us, and the repetitiveness? Would kill us spontaneous, fun, exciting self-catered lot. Why someone would willingly subject themselves to potato torture, and pay more for it than self-catered where we can cook pasta, rice, noodles and potatoes, a smorgasbord of carbohydrate options are available to us.

This is no place for predrinks

mmmm lovely catered food.

Sorry you delusional catered folk, it’s not your fault, your stable hand probably told you that you were always right… but when it comes to the fight between self-catered and catered, self-catered wins.