photo mine. it's truthful.
Moving into halls was far easier than I thought it would be. I was handed over a key, then handed over to somebody else, who walked me to my building and left me to begin the rest of my life. There were directions to the town and people in official hoodies waving signs and paperwork packs and about fifty billion emails, and even when my chair was broken and my internet didn't work, it all got resolved within a day.
A few months of living in halls, and I thought of myself as a Real Live Adult. I tidied my room without my mum forcing me to. I cooked meals for myself, and not all of them involved ketchup. (Although I did once, on a particularly grim day of essay-writing, perilously close to a deadline, buy just a packet of chicken dippers and a bottle of ketchup at Lidl. The cashier's response was 'we all have those days, don't we?'. I then proceeded to eat the entire packet. It was a low point.)
I was so very excited to get out of halls. The house I had paid a deposit for was a promised land, with a dishwasher and a double bed and peaceful nights, un-punctuated by the sound of the flat above singing Happy Birthday and banging on the floor for the fourth time this week. (How many birthdays can a flat of ten people have?!)
Unfortunately, I didn't quite take into consideration how much students are looked after by halls staff. I live with two other girls, and none of us are stupid, but when we got into the house and saw the fridge and freezer wide open, we naturally assumed that new houses just don't have electricity. We rooted about in the cupboard under the stairs and pressed a switch, and the house alarm went off. We pressed the switch again, panicking, and the fire alarm started bleeping ominously. We decided it needed batteries, and went about unpacking with the equivalent of Chinese water torture as a soundtrack.
Our landlord then arrived, and kindly told us that the electricity had already been on, and flicked the switch on the plug that was very obviously connected to the fridge. The beeping stopped. Peace was restored. We cleaned the house top to toe, hoovered the patchwork 70s carpets, and wiped the layer of stickiness off the kitchen counters. Thoroughly pleased with ourselves and feeling competent, we broke out the gin and tonics and settled down in front of 24 Hours in A&E (like the wild, crazy students we are).
Then the bloody slugs arrived. There were two big fat ones slithering across the freshly-cleaned kitchen floor, and a few more tiny ones wriggling across the Artex walls. For some reason, we had anticipated everything going wrong except this. We'd assumed that naturally, the wifi wouldn't work. We'd discounted the possibility of having hot water for at least a week, and that we'd be living in the lap of luxury if the heating worked just once over the course of the year. But nobody walks into their kitchen and expects their foot to meet something plump and slimy. We had had a few gin and tonics, and we were absolutely traumatized.
There it is: my experience as a student so far in a nutshell. Dodgy carpets, dodgy flats, dodgy food choices and dodgy TV. Oh, and alcohol, of course.
