Though college life at Durham offers the never ending choice in ways to eat a potato, allows you the chance to bump into every fresher you are anxiously trying to avoid, and facilitates you being caught unaware by the cleaner in the early hours of the morning after the night before, nightmarish housemates can make you nostalgic for that time when life was so much simpler.

Yes, in theory, second year should be a blast: you no longer have the stress of making friends or have to navigate a new way of learning, nor are you duty bound in the library 24/7 in fear that your 9K a year will amount to no more than a few bruises from falling down the club stairs or a few extra pounds gained from late night takeaways. Yet sometimes your hellish housemates’ habits can prove to be just too horrendous to handle.

For starters, they may be quite used to washing their dishes a couple of times a week or only when there are no dishes left, so that the kitchen sink is buried under a mound of dirty plates so large, you could fit another housemate beneath it (and then have to pay less in bills, of course). Or they may be comfortable in using up 21 rolls of loo paper in less than 2 weeks, but not restocking, so you can merely hope there are kitchen towels or tissues available after a little shake and a shuffle downstairs. Or, they may be fine leaving used tampons in the bin, the blood still dripping from where it had been sitting… In short, they may find it perfectly acceptable living in squalor.

Source: Tash Mosheim

And when it comes to the temperature, you may find yourself defending your moral integrity and resilience, as one housemate questions why heating is even needed when it is only 5 degrees inside. That may be all well and good, but when you are wearing gloves, a dressing gown, your coat, and are in your bed with two blankets and at least three pairs of fluffy socks, you question how you can get any work done without your fingers falling off from numbness.

And to top it all off, if one of your housemates gets ill (a side effect of the house being Arctic temperatures!), then you will absolutely get ill too, for you’re all sharing hand towels, cutlery, and not to mention that one last scrap of loo paper.

How to survive? You could indubitably waste time in clearing up after them, or you could passive aggressively send them messages hoping they will fathom your rage and change their ways… Let’s just hope my housemates don’t see this one.