'A place where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed'

Robert G. Ingersoll.

Today I went with three of my friends (my future housemates) to meet with our new landlord to a) look around our new home for the next academic year without all the junk in it from the previous tenents and b) find out exact dates for when we can move in/get keys and also if we needed our own kettle/toaster/iron etc.

It's my final year at university and it's also two of my future housemates' final year as well and it'll be one of my future housemates first year living away from home and the rest of us have lived in university owned accomodation and last year I lived in a 'luxury' student apartment owned by an agency. I met all three of my future housemates while living in university owned accomodation in my first year; I lived with one of them (we were the only English students out of the 7 students living in our house everyone else was German, French, Spanish or Chinese so we were a very multi-cultural household...which often led to conflicts over mis-communication as language was often a barrier, food was frequently an issue but above all there was one thing that caused the most arguments and that was the humble washing up bowl, seemingly only the English use such a contraption and everybody else had a bizare and random seehting hate for the poor green plastic bowl), another lived next door to us and the third was a friend of a friend who eventually became a friend. I don't want to jinx it but it looks like this year could be the best year accomodationwise. We all get on, no one has a stupidly small room (I slept in what can only be described as a cupboard in my first year) and the landlord seems nice and reliable.

I think university owned accomodation is probably the safest way to go in your first year since you probably don't know the area and there's always the union to complain to if something goes horribly wrong. However, because they have so many properties they are not always the most reliable and unless your problem is either lifethreatening or incredibly easy to solve it will probably go to the bottom of a very large pile of other problems. We had a lot of problems with ants in our kitchen which the uni were very reluctant to do anything about even though they were crawling all over the worktops and on the chairs in the living room. the cleaner also had a habit of stealing so someone had to watch her while she cleaned to make sure she wasn't helping herself to other people's stuff.

Last year in my agency rented accomodation we had no heating throughout November and no electricity in December.

So we're hoping for better things for next year.

I've managed to bag myself the biggest bedroom. It has two windows, some disasterously jazzy curtains (the decor in the house is a little...interesting), a wardrobe bigger than most shops, a shoe rack and the biggest bed I have ever seen. The landlords are a retired husband and wife team who own two student houses and treat each as if it were a child, the wife has been and bought us a brand new kettle, toaster, microwave, washer, tumble dryer, iron and ironing board even though we would happily have supplied most of those things ourselves and popped home or to the laundrette with our washing. They've also got us Sky and a massive TV to watch it on and are currently shopping around for a new sofa for us to sit on while watching our big TV. The wife has planted a pretty little garden and hopes we'll have BBQs out there while the husband has been re-plastering walls and drilling into us the importance of setting the burgalor alarm.