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Credit: Flickr//Curtis Gregory Perry |
I have always felt that the 'grass is always greener on the other side' expression rings true in most aspects of life. Having just moved into my first 'professional' let, I have found an area in which it does not. When it comes to moving from a student house to a proper grown-up house, I only realised when I made it over the bridge that the lawn I've been contentedly chewing on for the past three years was actually dry, shrivelled and covered in animal excrement.
Nevertheless, you don't need an immaculate lawn to throw a good garden party and the superiority of my new flat (it's massive and has a balcony) hasn't tarnished the fond memories I have of my final year house. Yes, it was damp. Yes, the furniture was sub-par. Yes, it had a shingly garden instead of a huge, spacious balcony. But there was fun to be had there, which is why I spent so much of my final year refusing to leave it.
Those who left university behind years ago and those who never went in the first place have a habit of describing student houses in a manner that I would generally reserve for the assessment of plague pits, demolition zones or Stevenage. Hyperbolic and hysterical as they may be, there is some truth to these descriptions. As well as their housemates, most students that I know have shared at least one house with some non-humans, including but not limited to: mice, rats, ants, slugs and various species of mould. In my first year halls of residence we also had a visiting squirrel, although this is unusual for flats that aren't on the fourth floor. Damp is par for the course, especially in Bristol where the houses are mostly Victorian and the natural meteorological state is reminiscent of a south-east Asian monsoon but colder and with less chance of spectacular lightning. And more fool any student who expects their furniture to be from anywhere more expensive than Wilko's.
Are students just careless, untidy and generally inclined towards living like they have little to no fear of dysentery? Of course not – or, at least, no more than any other demographic. From experience, your standard of hygiene and tolerance of mess don't change just because you suddenly have a regular salary and no essays to do. I still leave my shoes wherever I kicked them off when I entered the house, still leave the occasional plate next to the sink instead of washing it up immediately and still hoard mugs and glasses in my bedroom like they're a treasured collector's item. No, the difference is certainly not me. The difference is that the landlord of my current flat is aware that the state of his property has an effect on its value and that keeping it in a better condition than 'just about habitable' is in his interest as well as mine.
Student landlords share no such concern. As long as most of the building is still standing, they're fine and you're expected to be, too. When the damp in our final year house became so problematic that mould began to grow on some people's clothes, our landlords took no action whatsoever, despite damp posing a risk to the house as well as their tenants. They merely told us to turn up the heating, to which our response was that if we could afford to have the heating on full blast all day we could also afford to rent a better house – maybe a nice flat in Montpelier with a balcony. It's generally accepted among estate agents and landlords that students don't deserve nice houses because they will just throw up all over them, or throw huge parties where everyone within a five-mile radius is invited round to throw up all over them. Of course, if students had nice houses they might be more inclined to take good care of them, but life is far too short to explain the phrase 'self-fulfilling prophecy' to an estate agent.
My final year house had all the problems listed above and more so it may seem like a strange decision to spend most of my final year in it. There are three major reasons for this. One of them was that, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't particularly mind all the problems while I was actually living there. Obviously having the smell of damp assault your nasal passages every time you enter your home isn't ideal but it was an expected tribulation of Bristol, at least from what I could tell. You come to accept what you're given and that house had nothing to throw at me that my previous Bristol abodes hadn't already, some in greater quantities. It's easy to look back at the place as a shithole now I'm living in a nice, well-maintained flat (did I mention the balcony?) but at the time the house and I managed to coexist in our shared imperfection quite harmoniously.
The second factor was the lack of going out generally associated with being in your final year. This wasn't just because I'd decided that I was too old to pay to go somewhere I didn't like the music, limiting my choices to pubs or a £20 trip to Motion where the good DJs play. Final year is something of a mixed bag, especially when you've returned from a year of extended holiday masquerading as academic enrichment. Seeing old friends, making new ones and enjoying the Bristol nightlife after the frankly horrendous clubs of southern continental Europe were wonderful. Final exams, coursework and the prospect of job-hunting were not. Post-Christmas holidays the nights out start to die down and post-Easter they become non-existent. You might get a pub trip if you have a week-long gap between exams or someone you've been friends with for too long to bail on has a birthday but that's your lot for April and May. Even if you're lucky enough to have a light workload, your friends are probably too busy working to hang out with you. I stayed at home so much because that's what everyone was doing. Call me a slave to the masses if you like; it's a more appealing moniker than 'that girl who kept going to the pub on her own instead of revising and now she has a 3rd'.
The third – and best – reason for staying in a lot was my housemates, who were and continue to be wonderful. Living with people you get on well with can actually be detrimental to your broader social life because you can enjoy yourself without having to step out into the big, scary world of Outside. More frequently than any of us care to admit we ended up bailing on the pub and staying in with Cards Against Humanity and a bottle of half-price Sainsbury's Sauvignon. We weren't hermits, of course, but having some lovely people to share the living room with makes it that bit less tempting to leave it in the evenings. Especially when one of them sits in front of the damp patch so you can pretend it's not there.
So, in spite of the dampness, coldness and general scabbiness of the place, my fourth year house was actually where I ended up spending some of my most enjoyable evenings in the last twelve months. Now I've left and moved into a damp-free, slug-free house with a proper cooker and walls that aren't peeling, I can see the old place more for how it really was but I know I will always look back on it with a strange sort of affection. I think about it a lot when I'm relaxing on my new balcony. Did I mention that my new flat has a balcony?