New city? New life? Part 2

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Ah, the wonder of en-suite student halls is indeed a rare treat to be savoured during your first year at university - if you are lucky enough to secure a space in this royal standard of accommodation in the first place that is.

Come second year, the trials over toilet roll and countless other commodities will begin and they will probably never end.

Take for example my flatmate Fran. I’m quite certain she is one of the hairiest people I have ever met – I never really considered the pit falls this has when you happen to be sharing close bathing quarters with others. Every time I come to take a shower, her thick, dark hairs are clogged around the plughole so densely that I can’t even make out if the plug is actually there or not. I constantly walk around the flat in my flip-flops to avoid the carpet her moulting produces in every room and to make matters worse, I’m the only one who cleans it all up. Now, if I were her I would take every possible step to reduce the fall-out my unfortunate appearance may have upon my fellow house sharers, including buying cleaning products – it seems I’m the only one who knows why that aisle exists in the supermarket.

Then there’s John, who likes to consider himself more of a full-time raging Casanova than a university student. That’s right, he dedicates all his earthly hours to grooming himself and then positively forcing himself upon each and every girl he meets. Which yes, does result in rather a large amount of stray ‘friends’ emerging from his door in the morning but also a huge amount of unpleasant noise trickling down the corridor from his extremely thinly walled boudoir. Of course they all run a mile when they see the carpet of hairs in the bathroom, maybe that’s why Fran never clears them up, she’s probably as fed up of John as I am.

That’s the problem with all this house sharing malarkey. It seems like a great prospect at first, your very own place to call home. A living room, a sofa, all those treasured delights that the macabre, sobering state of halls could never provide. In reality though, it is all about polishing the skill of repressing your instinctual feelings in order to live in harmony with others. However, that can leave you with an unnatural and unhealthy desire to scream as loudly as is humanly possible for a prolonged period of time about once a week. But then again, I guess that’s what university is all about, developing those damn ‘transferable skills’ everyone always bangs on about. Shutting up about stray hairs, tolerating strangers, and forging your own way through the seemingly endless minefield of sharing private accommodation is just another of those to polish along with everything else.

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