For those who have now come out the other side, the first few years of living with people other than your parents are remembered not as seamless transitions into grown-up life, but as clunky (at best) attempts to emulate something distantly related to adulthood.
Those years were characterised by gross misinterpretations of what Mum used to make for dinner (pasta and gravy), barely any interior or environmental hygiene (not once replacing the hoover bag) and pushing our bodies to the limit with alcohol, drugs and sex.
This being 2017 in London with house prices at an all-time high, no doubt many of us are still living in said shared houses, but here's hoping – now that we're actual grown-ups – the worst of it is behind us. Now, at least, we have a recycling bin that's not a carrier bag.
Read on for the most horrifying stories about our first shared flats...
Lauren
"My first shared place was a big, horrible house I lived in for three years and I had 18 different housemates during that time. One summer, our hippie housemate rented out her bedroom without asking us to a middle-aged mum and her 12-year-old son from Germany, for 10 days. She went home to live at her parents' and pocketed the cash, while we had to spend 10 days with two very bemused tourists on holiday in our house. God knows what they thought they were getting, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't a house full of 21-year-olds with only one bathroom. The mum would very sweetly lay the kitchen table for them to have a nice breakfast in the mornings, while we walked through in towels, hungover, to use the loo.
"The same housemate also used to eat pasta with mayonnaise and raisins for dinner. And she hosted poetry salons in our kitchen – you'd come home on a Tuesday night to find scarves pinned up in all the doorways and a load of people having existential conversations through a thick haze of liquorice rizla smoke. She was also completely lovely – just mad."
Emily
"I lived with a guy who would only eat meals out of one particular pan. It was a standard silver metal source pan. He would cook in the pan, eat from the pan and wash up the pan. I'm pretty sure I saw him drinking tea out of the pan once. His reasoning was that, then, no-one could accuse him of not washing up his stuff. He was a good bloke to be fair. Not sure what happened to the pan."
Rose
"I grew up in London but moved to a shared halls on the other side of the city for uni. I luckily met one of my best friends there who I still live with."
Unluckily, at least half of the people in those halls were straight-up bizarre. Some were kooky, like the male student who got dressed up in full golf kit at lunch times and practiced his golf swing in the middle of the square next to our halls. Some were ill-advised, like the flat on the top floor who bought a suitcase full of mephedrone (before it became illegal) to sell at Glastonbury but ended up taking all of it and not bathing for a week."
"I was fairly lucky. I had one flatmate who was totally normal until she found out her cat at home in America had died, went into mourning and spent the rest of her year smoking stale fags and drinking Guinness in her room. Now, most of these stories are hilarious, but at the time living in such a mad house was somewhat nerve-wracking."
Natasha
"At art college my flatmate created a piece of work which consisted of five test tubes each with a different bodily fluid – collected from himself. Spit, urine, semen, tears. He was having trouble collecting the last one though: blood. The local surgery wouldn't draw blood for him to use in art. One evening another flatmate and I were eating dinner downstairs. Bodily fluid's girlfriend comes in looking pale asking, 'Does anyone have a plaster?' He had decided the only way he could complete his work was to cut himself, and he was bleeding everywhere."
"Same flat, same flatmate. For a week we were playing dumb pranks on each other. Hiding each other's food, cutlery, jumping out of cupboards, etc. One night I got drunk, drank a bottle of his red wine, replaced it with Ribena, and went out. He got very angry, and when I came home he had moved the fridge-freezer down the hallway blocking my other flatmate's room door. Every single chair in the flat was piled up in the hallway in front of my door. And he had taped mine and the other girls' underwear (which had been out drying) on the walls of the stairwell of the block, all three floors."
"After that, I lived in a four-bed flat. Myself and my best mate were there from day dot, but friends and strangers came and went in the other two rooms. For a while we had a German year abroad student living with us. She and her boyfriend had a very healthy and noisy sex life. One afternoon, my mate and I were in the kitchen, hiding out from what was clearly a good time in the other room. It goes quiet, German flatmate walks in wrapped in a towel, picks up the FAIRY LIQUID and heads back into her room, where their fun continues."
Rachel
"From the age of 22 to 24 I lived in a horrible flat in Bethnal Green. My boyfriend had been so grossed out by it that he said he was going to re-decorate my room, and started the project by ripping off most of my already damp wallpaper."
"He broke up with me the next day, and I was left with a ripped up room. I proceeded to go off the rails after the breakup, including many raucous house parties where my friends and I drew and wrote all over my walls with marker pen – things like lubetube.com and "SAZ IS DA BEST". Didn't want the deposit back anyway...."
Georgia
"We had a rescue cat called Jeremy who was at best hilarious and at worst a pervert. He used to spread his legs and lick himself when guests came over and would viciously scratch you at any given moment."
"One day my housemates and I were chatting in the kitchen when we heard Jez making a weird noise. We looked over and he was just in a sort of brace position, as if he was going to emit some kind of howl. It got progressively worse until his mum (the flatmate most responsible for him) picked him up around his waist, and ran towards the back door. Alas, she couldn't open it in time, and she let go of him. He flew through the air projectile vomiting, making the worst sound, which we swore sounded like 'MOM! MOOOOOM!'. He still lives with my flatmate now."
Sadhbh
"I lived in a house for three people, but with six people in it. We weren't very good at cleaning up and halfway through our first year we got these increasingly brave mice called Longtail and Tiny. There may have been more, but these audacious lil' fuckers got everywhere."
"My flatmate found little poos in his rice. I was once woken up by my girlfriend screaming because there was a mouse in her hair. It then died under our sink and we couldn't get the body out and the landlord wouldn't help so we had to sleep knowing we were sharing the house with a fermenting mouse corpse only slightly covered by the smell of coffee (which we'd read would cancel out the smell)."
"It was then we learned to properly clean the kitchen."
Cerys
"My first shared house had seven girls under one roof with not one valuable life skill to share between us."
"Our landlords' offices were covered in posters of scantily clad ladies from lads mags so, as six progressive feminists with a view to exploit men and their outdated gender views (or something) I think we got away with rather a lot when it came to throwing house parties, breaking things and generally being terrible human beings. Our male friends who lived in another of their properties weren't so lucky."
"Our luck ran out when it transpired that one of our merry gang of fools had 'forgotten' to pay her rent for the past few months which led to Landlord Number One pounding on our door whilst said flatmate cowered in her room, terrified. Finally we let him in, she responded by jumping out the first floor window in just the clothes on her back, running down the road in no shoes, blagging her way into the station and eventually on a train to Manchester where she stayed with her boyfriend for a few days until she was convinced to come back to face the music. Oh, we were in London by the way."
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