The Seven Shit Flats You’ll Live in During Your Twenties

Being in your twenties is good, isn't it? It goes in three phases: a bubbling sense of I'm-destined-for-greatness euphoria and excitement for the years to come that quickly melts and folds to ugly first-job apathy; a bad breakup at 25 either makes you go full gear-and-beer off the rails or turns you into a yogic health goth who makes your own yoghurt; then you close in, accelerating towards the milestone of "30", knowing you haven't done enough to justify adulthood yet, knowing that you'll never truly live up to your potential. And then, just like that, your twenties are gone. And you're still in your overdraft.

And you'll live in seven shit flats while you do it. Sorry, but it's the rules. Just as Scrooge was visited by three ghosts, so you will be visited by seven hair-gelled property agents louchely twirling keys and asking you for £400 cash to do some simple photocopying. This is the second puberty we all unknowingly go through: switching from flat to flat, leaving behind a book here, a lamp there, a TV box yonder, a good pan that still lives four postcodes over with an ex: and then, lo, you are shaped and smoothed by them like a stone in a river. Here they all are. Figure out which one you're currently paying £200 too much a month for!

Leaving behind that year-long Red Bull-headache feeling of living in university halls, your first entry into the rental market would most likely have been your student house. First thing you notice: apparently not all properties these days come with double-glazing. Second thing you notice: the landlord is either on some I-don't-live-in-this-town-so-I-can't-fix-it missing person shit, or is some guy who lets himself in with a massive keyring and a rapt knock on the first of every month asking for the rent in cash.

Student flat living always goes one of two ways: if it's all-male you all end up spending 17 hours a day playing Pro Evo in silence while the one of you who is least psychologically capable of maintaining a weed habit develops a really big weed habit, and there is a single traffic cone always in one corner. If it's all-female, everything starts out with selfies and #BakingSundays and getting into each other's beds to watch Netflix, and inevitably descends into a screaming row and four months of silence over who used whose razor to do their legs with.

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It's Year Three and everything in the first house fell apart, so you and a couple of others from your course decided to find somewhere different, only you decided too late – you started all optimistic that you could steal in ahead of the second years and get that one good house right by the good pub and the bus to uni because you went looking nice and early, but now it's May and you're all looking at places two miles out because it's all you can find for £600 each – and, just like every student flat, it's just like a student flat: anodyne, beige-coloured carpets; heavy fire doors painted white in every possible corridor and transitional-area; garden where you all throw beer cans and which quickly transcends into a shitheap. You draw the short-straw and get the ground floor room with all the mould in it. So it is; so it always will be.

People keep talking to you about the "real world" now that you're no longer a student (and your tongue has bled from all the time you bit it and didn't try to explain that this concept was totally arbitrary), and that apparently means two things: you have to get a "real place to live" and you have to start tucking your shirt into your trousers, for some reason.

A brief interlude at your parents begins, though you'll need a job to stop the interlude becoming the main event of your life. At home, routine settles in: you're back to fighting with your parents, getting locked into who leaves the most missed calls for whom with your old school pals, and getting unnecessarily smashed on Mondays at Spoons simply because it's easier to pass the time on a hangover.

Anyway, it's been 14 months since you graduated now, and armed with the resolve that the post-university drop is well behind you, you go back out into the rental market to get yourself an actually decent living space in a big city – probably London, but Manchester can do it as well.

You quickly realise you can only afford somewhere quite small and shit in either Wood Green or New Cross, and you need quite a few bank transfers from people you love to get you over the 12-week in-total deposit, and also need your mum as a guarantor, and the estate agent was nasty to her when she signed and said that she had to guarantee the whole property and not just one person, and she got a bit flustered and signed, and you sort of gently coerced her into doing it – a bit, not a lot – but you didn't exactly stand up to the estate agent when he changed the contract to do this, and you tell her you're sure Tariq, Harry and Joe will be good for the money, and it'll never come to that anyway, you promise her; anyway, you're taking the little room on the smallest rent so you won't ask her for any more money favours, promise.

The shit flat turns out shitter than expected: outside shit pipes leak and water from the bath upstairs pulls off the living room wallpaper within two weeks. You ring the estate agent, who never answers his phone. You ring him again. A week goes by. You email and ring to see if he got the email. This is who you have become. You notice the estate agent seems to have two fundamentally divergent personalities: one is the calm demeanour of a methodical serial killer tabloids describe at his trial as being "charming", with all the bonhomie of a python weighing up which combo move to do on you; and the other is this flustered guy who pretends to be run off his arse for you, even though nothing has happened and you've been ringing and emailing all week and it's taken over your brain so all you can think about is him. You've even started giving him little pet names ("The Dickhead", "Lord Fuck") to take the edge off in your house WhatsApp group.

You also notice, but decide to worry about later, the fact that all you and your group chat mates ever talk about now is house stuff – there used to be banter in here, didn't there? There used to be memes. Now it's just photos of sinister-looking wall mould and 300-word rants about detritus in the sink.

Back again, but with a sense of gratitude for the simple things. You gave up the shit flat – prompted by a lot of boyfriends and girlfriends moving in and taking about three months of bitching before begrudgingly deciding to chip in a bit of bills money in return for the now insane pressure on the only toilet/shower room in the whole house – and now you're home to mummy, home to lovely mummy. The whole vibe had changed there, anyway – you had all agreed this was at least going to be a party house to make up for the problems, but one of the newly moved-in boyfriends regularly puts you into apoplexy when he asks you to turn down your music at 10.30PM, and there's a screaming house row one night about the right way to do recycling, so you move out and someone's boyfriend takes your room as a study. You still haven't confided in anyone your anxieties about the outdoor shit pipe, but you figured they'll probably find out about it sooner or later. Also, even though you've left, you still have murderous fantasies about most of them in the house two or three times a week, for months after, and had to talk yourself very hard out of stuffing frozen prawns behind all the radiators and doing one final protest shit in the toilet cistern. This is growth, that you didn't do that. This is maturity.

Some pal needs you to house-sit his parents place in Queen's Park while they're in Cyprus for the summer – she has a real job already so can't do it herself – and after four months at your mum's house you are now transported to heaven: freedom, silence, full control over the Sky remote, a dog to look after. You love a good well-stocked fridge. And who knew Tesco Value emmenthal was that moreish? You start thinking about how you'd like a place like this one, one day. What you'd really love is to live in an actually nice flat. And have a good job, but also live in a nice flat. Alone. Like this. Like it was possible to imagine you could do, back in the old days. After six weeks you begrudgingly hand the keys back with an envelope posted through the front door, but that feeling of longing – that deep, fundamental urge to have a door and a ceiling and a house to yourself – only grows and spreads throughout the whole of your twenties, and must – you think, as you take a long journey time and an early start for a new job that pays almost living wage – must be what drives most of the other under-slept bastards you see on your commute to work.

… you say, with a steely glint in your eye. Only this time you mean it: you've read all those online articles and you've got a mate up there who says it's brilliant. You've got another pal who feels the same about London – "Shit city," he says, scrolling through Tinder with his phone screen set to a picture of his ex, "Shithole" – so you both decide to fuck it off and party it up north of the border. YOLO ISN'T OVER, LADS: 26 IS STILL YOUNG.

You get a flat off a direct landlord on Gumtree as soon as you arrive, somehow. You can't believe your luck: you don't have a job but he doesn't seem to mind. He has a lovely accent and looks like the type of guy you could really get on with. And plus it's… like… actually nice, here? The first place you've paid money to stay in and not utterly loathed. It's in West Side, which is the posh bit, and it's got an extra room so once you rent that out it'll be cheap af. He's even knocked £50 off because he thinks you and your pal are nice guys.

Turns out shit flats exist in Socialist Glasgow, too. Again the shower leaks into downstairs. Again your pal Dan's bedroom wall is way too soft for a structure that has pretensions to solidity. Again you learn that having no central heating is actually quite a big problem when September rolls around. It's at this point you realise that finding the previous tenants' burnt pizza crusts in the oven is the true tragedy of all shit flats everywhere.

You've been in this place three yea— God, has it really been three? At this point it's a Choose Your Own Ending. Either you accepted the Glasgow deal – colder, less social capital but massive rooms, more time to achieve your dreams and cheaper alcohol – or you decided that actually you liked all those conversations about the best bus to get from Elephant & Castle with that guy who has somehow ended up in the pub gang WhatsApp group. It made you feel safe. And so you get the van back down again.

This flat's not so bad: remember that shit one in Crofton Park? Remember Glasgow? Halcyon days, they seemed – you sort of wistfully remember the outdoor shit pipe, and your flat's incomparably nicer now. Well, the landlord's still a bastard (that's been a real theme; that never changed: even the friend's parents in Cyprus house, they – no lie – tried to charge you for house-sitting, and you only got out of it by not picking up your phone for a few weeks). Your landlord is still pretty absent but you earn money now and the estate agents now at least pretend to treat you as an equal. Even when they were back-combing your previous earnings, demanding a LinkedIn as well as two character-, two former employer-references and asking for a written assessment of career trajectory from your current boss, who did you a solid on that one and said you were a "go-getter kind of guy", they still said they'd only do flat inspections once a month, as it was procedure, which doesn't seem too bad. And they only said that one time about how you were breathing too much and causing all the condensation on the windows. Well, at least these days you don't have to vaguely trick your mum into covering for you.

The flat's in one of those new builds just by Lewisham station. It's good: you've got a balcony now, but you've never ever met your neighbours, not once in three years, not even when your alcoholic mate Anna came down from Sheffield and you played "Witness the Fitness" really loudly at 2AM in a desperate and, to your surprise, failed attempt for a bit of conversation round the place. You've got a partner now and they live with you, so considering where it is in Zone 2, it's pretty cheap, and you can put your all your books just there, and that cartoonist's impression of you two that you bought together on holiday goes over the comfy sofa. You can count yourself pretty lucky all in.

One thing you've learnt, though, you smile wryly – older and wiser and heading into your thirties, looking over the cranes and the concrete foundations of another new build tower block just next door – you never, ever, ever get your deposit back.