Your typical student kitchen

In my experience, house-hunting has always proved a rather stressful business. No matter how many times the university’s Accommodation Office announces that there is no shortage of student properties, no need to rush into anything, we are nevertheless consumed with a nagging suspicion that if we wait much longer, all the best places will be taken and we will be left with a hovel five miles away from university that hasn’t been renovated since they started building indoor bathrooms. And so we traipse from property to property, (invariably in the rain) in search of that perfect place which is both affordable and inhabitable.

Girls inevitably take a different approach to this than boys. While we search for a place with a ‘homely feel’ and argue over who is going to have the bedroom with the fireplace, boys’ most pressing concern is whether there is space to plug in their Wii. The use of a kitchen or bathroom is a secondary concern.

After viewing several places whose sanitation levels were dubious, to say the least, my would-be flat-mates and I finally found our perfect house. Maybe perfect is an exaggeration, but it did have large bedrooms, a decent kitchen and a square of concrete at the back that would be ideal for summer barbeques. After the horrors we had seen so far, we were more than satisfied. Cue a nail-biting dash to the landlady, in a slapstick style race against the other group looking around at the same time as us. We got there literally half a minute before them, and left feeling pretty smug at our good fortune.

However, the smugness has started to wear off somewhat since we have taken a second look around our new home. Several months have passed since we first signed the contract, and our tenancy has now begun. Seeing the place gutted of the last tenants’ belongings, it doesn’t look quite as good as we remembered. The musty smell of damp and disuse assails you the moment you step through the front door, so overpowering that I suspect it is a cunning ploy to distract us from the house’s many other defects. The furniture clearly has not been replaced since the fifties, and indeed most of it looks like it has been bought at car-boot sales and thrown haphazardly into our rooms, creating a vintage junk-shop effect. The armchairs in the lounge are, upon inspection, even worse than they appear, as you sink about six inches as soon as you sit on them, and the lurid purple bathroom suite which we previously told ourselves was ‘quirky’ is now simply vomit-inducing. An ominous damp stain is spreading across the wall, and the snail trails weaving across the carpets leaves me with a sneaky feeling that we are not the only inhabitants.

I know that landlords are often loath to do-up properties that they believe will be trashed by lazy students who happily pass a whole year without so much as washing up. And judging by the flats of some of my friends they have a point. Even getting through the front door can be a challenge, as the piles of empty beer bottles and discarded take-away cartons create an impressive indoor assault course. But this is not true of everyone. And in any case, landlords may complain about messy student tenants, but they are not so quick to complain about banking our extortionately inflated rent each month. So maybe trashing the place for a year is just fair pay-back?

Student houses are always slightly shitty. It is an unwritten rule of student life, right after living on Sainsbury’s Basics Vodka and pot noodles, and developing a Neighbours addiction. But that doesn’t mean that we are not allowed to complain about being charged a lot to live somewhere that any normal, non-student person wouldn’t even want anyway. We are not looking for pastel coloured walls and matching cushions and curtains. In fact, having curtains at all is a bonus. I’m just saying that living somewhere that’s been decorated this century would be nice.

Related posts:

1. Bog-roll in the student house
2. Rubber gloves anyone? Cleaning the student house
3. The horror of housing

A year in Paris has its ups and its downs

Ah Paris! The city that invented chic, the home of romance and glamour. I set off on my year abroad filled with excitement and apprehension in equal measure. I had been planning how to spend my year away from university for what felt like an eternity, but I soon realised that even the best-laid plans can turn to dust in the face of hard Parisian reality.

Having secured an internship with a top international recruitment agency, I must admit that I was feeling pretty smug, especially since I was lucky enough to be paid more than the usual rate of a third of the minimum wage. I arrived in Paris a week before I was due to begin work, in order to look for a flat. Surely it wouldn’t be too difficult to find somewhere?

It wasn’t quite the ‘Sex and the City’ cocktail-sipping, Jimmy Choo-wearing lifestyle I had fantasized about

I set about scouring the internet for flat-shares and trying to arrange apartment viewings in my less than perfect French. But despite all my best efforts, the weeks passed and I failed to find anything. It wasn’t for want of trying; I visited several apartments that I would happily have lived in, only to be told by the other tenants that they had already seen twenty or more prospective flatmates and were expecting more. My heart sank. Individual studios were no better.

The Parisian studio is a law unto itself, inconceivable to those who have not experienced this phenomenon first hand. Generally, they are the size of a cardboard box, with a sofa bed, kitchen and shower all crammed into one room. And when I say kitchen, I mean a microwave if you’re lucky, and a little camping stove. I seriously contemplated renting one such delight, and paying 600 Euros per month for the privilege, and was only saved from this depressing fate when a friend of my parents offered me her own empty apartment for half the usual price. It was a lucky escape indeed from an existence that would undoubtedly have had me sprinting back to Britain within weeks.

And so I ended up living in the tenth arrondissement, half way between Gare de L’Est and La Fayette, and within easy walking distance of Montmartre. I could not have found a more perfect location if I had tried. I was (finally) living the dream. Ok, it wasn’t quite the ‘Sex and the City’ cocktail-sipping, Jimmy Choo-wearing lifestyle I had fantasized about, but hey – beggars (and poor students) can’t be choosers.

Life quickly settled into a less than glamorous pattern, involving a mad metro dash to work each morning, a day of mindless data inputting, followed by a mad metro dash home again. The nine-to-five ‘adult’ lifestyle was actually rather dull. I reminisced fondly of messy mid-week student nights out, and days when my lectures didn’t start until 2pm. Working in a foreign country was certainly an unforgettable experience, even if it wasn’t the laugh-a-minute existence I’d hoped for. I went through every emotion possible: excitement, frustration, disappointment, elation and loneliness. This was an aspect of the year abroad that I hadn’t really considered in the pre-departure meetings.

Determined to get the most out of my experience, I made a conscious effort to embrace all things français, watching French television, reading French newspapers and spending my days working with French people. But despite this, I remained in many ways resolutely British, and strangely drawn to all things home-like. A weekend in Paris was not complete without a trip or two to Starbucks (I know it’s expensive and I don’t care. I like it!) And my favourite night out with friends? Burger and chips, followed by a few drinks in our favourite Irish bar. Travelling is all about exploring new places, meeting new people and embracing a different way of life. But some things in life are just unbeatable, so why try?

Related posts:

1. Student Life in Liverpool
2. TYSKAB #2: your feet will disintegrate
3. Student life in London

However, turnout this year at the Union elections was reasonably good. There are probably many reasons for this – being bombarded with emails from the Union is one, and the complete overhaul of the sabbatical structure another. For the first time, students were able to vote on posts as bizarre and non-descript as ‘Vice-President: Welfare’ and ‘Vice-President: Community’.

The Presidency was won by the favourite, Owen Peachey, having spent a year as head of societies at the university. With a slogan as predictable as ‘Isn’t life Peachey’ and few if any policies, the man seems to have all the relevant mediocre character traits to make a Union President.

Elsewhere, James Ashton-Bell was elected as VP: Community.

Check the popped collar and smirk at the end – no wonder he was popular with the electorate. Just weeks earlier, Ashton-Bell came in for deserved criticism in the Epigram, the university newspaper, in his position as Chair of the AGM. Ashton-Bell repeatedly chose ‘unsuitable’ speakers to present the opposition to motions he wanted passed. Amongst the most ludicrous examples was his decision to choose well-known ‘character’ Aaron Hugh Ellis to speak on an ‘against’ platform, only for Ellis to promptly vote for the ‘pro’ platform. (Numerous students walked out in protest, and the end result was that the quorum was not reached and the whole day was rendered pointless.)

Ellis is most noted for his short-lived ‘Union Policy Forum’ pressure group, his ‘New Establishment’ newspaper which never saw the light of day, his insistence on challenging Epigram Comment writers to ‘public debates’ over issues he disagrees on, and finally, for claiming on his Facebook page that ‘every time I look into the mirror, I find it hard to believe I’m not Foreign Secretary’. The unfortunate consequence of Bristol students’ apathy is the fact that the likes of James Ashton-Bell and Aaron Hugh Ellis (three names are not yet mandatory for union ‘figures’, but I’m sure they’ll find some way to pass the motion) are able to form alliances and gain ‘power’ through 2% of the electorate voting for them.

Elsewhere, the election had everything you expect from a student election:

A slightly scary Canadian girl:

Two girls running for the LGBT position with a manifesto consisting solely of acronyms:

And a small Welsh boy who didn’t seem to have much of a clue what was going on:

There was also the usual high proportion of young Labour Party activists amongst those elected, all promising to ‘put pressure’ upon the people they aspire to be working for in a year.

The outcome? Little will change. No-one will use the union, the university will continue to delay plans to change the location of the union (first proposed in 1991) and basic services such as a bus to Stoke Bishop halls – two and a half miles from the uni – won’t be provided. What are we paying them for, again?

Related posts:

1. Politics, pirates and Papadofragakis, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love union elections