So you’ve settled back into uni after a long summer and you’re living with your best friends (or the people you panic signed a house with in Freshers’ Week the year before). We know you’re feeling dread for what’s to come after hearing all the stories from third years, or you’re just blissful and naïve.
Either way, keep an eye out for these inevitable experiences coming your way.
Housemate group chat
This one is going to happen as soon as you move in, and it is pretty necessary. It starts out as just a friendly space to keep each other updated about the toilet paper situation, or the remaining lifespan of the dish soap. But just wait. This wholesome space won’t last forever. With the mounting stress of assignments and deadlines and that one housemate who still doesn’t know where the hoover is, the chat will be corrupted. By easter term, you’ll flinch at the buzz of your phone. You’ll look at the paragraph so big it doesn’t fit in the banner notification, and you’ll know to avoid all communal areas for the next 2-3 business days.
This is maybe exaggerated for dramatic effect, but the point still stands.
House messes
This goes hand in hand with the last point. Maybe you had a late-night snack, and you were too tired or intoxicated to wash it up. Maybe you had a messy pres and forgot to tidy after. But then you left it, and you left it, and then you left it a bit longer. Your housemates are asking each other who’s pot has been there all this time, and a witch hunt has begun (you should feel bad about this).
The other side of it is worse though. Walking into the kitchen everyday becomes a game of chicken – you hate the pot being there but it’s not your pot so you shouldn’t have to wash it. Everyone becomes a suspect. And you get gradually more irritated as each day passes with the pot unwashed.
This is the basis of 90 per cent of house dramas, by the way.
Getting locked out
We’ve all been there. There’re varying degrees of consequence to this one depending on the time of day this happens. Forgetting your key on your way to lectures, easy mistake and easily fixed. The real issue comes when it’s 3 am and you’ve lost your shoe and your phone and nobody is answering the doorbell. You’ve got yourself in this mess and the only solution is to either find a very nice “friend” to let you sleep over; or pull a mission impossible and break into your own house (the second option allows you to find flaws in your house security).
If you are that friend that wakes up their housemates at 3 am though, know they are not happy with you.
Thinking you have rats or ghosts
Durham is a quiet city. So when night comes and the city goes silent (save the Klute crowd going home around 2 am) you are left only with the sounds of your house. It’s highly likely you have neighbours a wall’s width away from you, some birds that frequent your roof shingles, maybe. But in the dead of night these sounds just sound creepy.
I can 60 per cent assure you that you don’t have ghosts or rats living in your house.
Getting as drunk as your fresher self when you said you’d be better
The transition from silly fresh to sensible second year is a stark one. You probably have a thousand embarrassing stories from when you were a first year that couldn’t handle their alcohol. It’s a messy year for everyone, so going into second year you’ve matured a bit and you’ve learned your lessons (or have you?). Now, you start pre’s bragging about how you’re so much better these days, no longer a liability. But then you end the night not having left pre’s because tuns out you actually haven’t learned your lesson.
Having one housemate you don’t like as much as you used to
It’s a sad truth that someone can be your best friend, but your worst housemate. Outside a living situation, you’d probably do anything for each other. But while living together you are not going to be the one to take the bins out again this week. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder and in some cases it’s true. Simply because when you live with someone, you don’t exactly hang out in the same way. No more cute brunch dates or long river walks, just hungover mornings in the kitchen.
The room size debate
This one probably started in first year when you signed for the house. But it wasn’t a reality then. Now, you’re sat in your cramped, shoe-box of a room and bankrupting yourself while your housemate with enough space to fit an Olympic-sized swimming pool is paying the same.
Getting to make fun of the fresh
After suffering a year of being at the bottom of the social pecking order, it’s finally your time. You are no longer a silly fresh, so now you get to make fun of the silly fresh. Some take it too far and become social secs and assert their power; others just quietly enjoy their comparative superiority – but everyone is happy to escape the silliness.
Everyone starts to get on execs
In first year, you signed up to fifty societies and attended one. A universal experience. Now, you have some uni experience under your belt (and you’ve realised you need to put some leadership skills on your LinkedIn profile) and you naturally are on the exec for something. If not, you at least have friends who are.
The extra honorary housemate (boyfriends and girlfriends)
You signed a house for four, maybe five people, but somehow now you have the bills and the mess of a house housing more than that. The significant other has moved into your house and they are now either: the pleasant extra housemate; or the reason you now can no longer have reliably undisturbed sleep. I’ll pray for you if you share a wall.
Being a bad chef
Gone are the days of catered college meals (a blessing if you aren’t a fan of hake). But now you actually have to cook. Some thrive in this scenario, others (like me) don’t. It’s now Saturday and the sixth day of the week where you’ve had pesto pasta for dinner.
First long-term relationship
As a silly fresh, you were too chaotic for a serious relationship. Now you’re sensible and, for some, this leads to more serious romantic relationships (or just a year of yearning). According to Durham statistics, you’re either going to get married after uni, or you’re going to have a disastrous breakup and bore your friends about it for a good few months.
Actually having to try for your degree
There are two types of freshers: those that take up seats in the Billy B during exam season and drive everyone else mad; and those that got through the year holding onto the fact that first year grades don’t count to your final mark. For the latter, second year has hit you hard. No more panic extensions and skipping 9 am seminars because you had to go to SNK. There are suddenly stakes and that’s scary.
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