Upon leaving the safety of student halls and finally getting the opportunity to have your own place at university, one’s natural reaction is to fantasise wildly about an American Pie/Animal House über frat palace, bulging with beer kegs, booming with bass and overflowing with cascades of young ladies rushing in and out the door. Finally, you will be living the university life that those Hollywood studios sold you, just in grey ol’ blighty instead.
Determined to make these wet dreams a reality, many attempt to create the panacea of student dwellings, the perfect environment for pseudo-academic debauchery – the ultimate setup.
Obviously the first thing about creating the ultimate setup is choosing a location, it’s got to be in party central, somewhere that you will never be more than five metres away from an establishment selling vodka redbulls or cheesy chips. And for any naive fresher it has to be the hedonistic home of all things hectic, the student village – Fallowfield.
Objective number two is sorting out the basement. These dark, damp dungeons will seem like the perfect place to throw your scholary schnidigs, regardless of the strange stench that reminds you of the soggy, pale broccoli from your school lunches. You will measure up your fun bunker to fit in the Olympic sized lube wrestling pit that you are certain will draw in droves of toned bodied “fitties”. The basement is of course complete with a collection of instruments you have lying around for some jamming, because one day you’ll get round to starting that absolutely awesome band you decided you’d be in at university.
The final primary goal is to create an entertainment system fit for the gods themselves. Congregating the colossal collective collection of consoles that are shared between the housemates will no doubt end in a wall of blinding light and a mess of wires. It is pretty much a rule that you have to acquire the largest viewing screen possible, which normally results in some poor soul forking out for a projector that will require the entire living room to be in a persistent state of darkness only ever illuminated by brutal bouts of Mario Kart.
When you do finally try and throw that party it will be great, you and your mates will duct tape bottles of strongbow to your hands and get every one of your DJ pals to come round and play some really niche yet incredibly generic music. Then the next day, there will be a big session of “cotching”, eating dominoes and firing off blue shells. For a day you will feel like the legends that you see on the big screen, in your tiny, meaningless world things could not be cooler.
However, there are other non-party centric areas of your house that won’t seem like a big deal at the beginning: the kitchen will be just a utility for boiling noodles and microwaving pizzas, the garden will be a place to smoke on top of piles of variously sized rubble and the bathroom will be a small area to do business and then leave immediately so as to not inhale too much musty perfume.
Then when your bloodshot eyes are all partied out, you’ll notice that the shapes scuttling across the floor when you turn on the lights are actually disease ridden vermin, that the large mushroom in sitting in last nights pasta sauce is a three inch slug and that the party fortress is really just a large petri dish.
By your third year you will have forgotten those childish dreams of frat house antics, settling for a plain house in plain suburbia, maybe with a nice patch of grass and a well functioning oven. Accepting, as you sit eating a grapefruit and listening to a history of Latin music on BBC radio 4, that the ultimate setup is too wild and unstable to ever last and that you are quite happy being a boring bastard.
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