24 hours in the life of a student

The eight of them lived in a late Victorian semi-detached house at the top of Cotham Hill, its view of leafy Redland below a saving grace even at the dampest, dingiest, most rotten times. It had two kitchens, one on the first floor and one in a basement which opened out to a back garden where a jungle of plant life was generous accommodation for a work glove, a flask, a beach football, heap of rubble and later, when one housemate had decided against adding to an already overflowing kitchen bin, a bag of sprouting potatoes. The house’s character inspired such strong feeling that when they moved out one of them called it “a glorious heap of rubble”.

Months before that, on a memorable but not unusual November morning when they had been there for less than two months, the smell of old cigarette ash tugged at one housemate’s dreams and woke him. Battle images lingered in the young man’s mind, reminding him of his essay which was in for tomorrow: ‘“The crusades were a shameful episode in the history of the West, when hordes of fanatical Christians wrecked the Islamic world during the most brilliant period of its history.” Discuss.’ Looking at his watch, he counted 29 hours until deadline.

He leaped from his bed, found the source of the rancour, a coffee cup on the floor by the door, and disposed of its contents in a bin in the hall. By the time he returned the sheets had gone cold, but he got in anyway, bicycle-kicked, and waited for his alarm to ring, and when it did he trudged upstairs, hearing no sign of life, switching on the lights as he went, pissed, lifting the loo seat with as little of his thumb as possible and making sure not to touch the sticky pube-covered yellow spotted bowl, and showered (which woke him up), before returning, still with no sign of life, to the bedroom which was now warmed by the electric heater he had switched on.

Dressed, he took himself down to the basement kitchen to make breakfast. It was quiet. There were red uneven tiles (a bane on the rare occasion when someone attempted to mop); walls which were at that time bare but which would later boast a poster of Hunter S. Thompson on a motorcycle and a calendar from the Royal Bengal curry house in Northampton, complete with twelve images of twelve magisterial tigers; and a leg of Spanish jamón hanging in a plastic bag in front of the door. There was also an impressive collection of pots and pans on top of, next to, underneath, behind and inside the appliances and cupboards that one might expect to find in a kitchen, although a microwave would only come later. And there was washing up to be done.

He ate porridge cooked in water, thickened with a splash of milk. He drank tea, and as he sipped, his mind found the essay. Compelled, he rushed upstairs so that he could soon get to work, stomping his feet with no effort to avoid waking anyone, to complete the next task: toothbrushing, another exercise in precision, where the brush had to be extracted from its position on the windowsill without its bristles touching any of the dustiness around it.

Finally, he returned downstairs, carried the heater to the living room and sat down at the table he was using as a desk, checking his watch to see 28 hours until deadline. He switched on his speakers and turned the volume down. Elbow’s New York Morning quietly entered the room. Its guitar danced in the soft light that had begun to shine through the window from a gap between two houses on the other side of the street.