The Deeply Embarrassing Stuff People Do When They're Home Alone

It’s Friday night, the end of a long week of ridiculous bullshit at work and you’re on your way home to drink a bottle of cabernet sauvignon in bed when a message pops up on your housemate WhatsApp group. You open the chat, braced for another pass agg exchange about who used the last of the olive oil.

“Hey guys, just a reminder to water my plants pls! I’m in Amsterdam til Tuesday! Xoxo” says the secretly rich one. Nothing new there. But then another message pops up. “Soz mate I’m at home this weekend, will be back Sunday eve! :)” Ah, cool, just the two of you in this weekend. Maybe you can manage to squeeze in a quick bath without somebody complaining that you’ve used all the hot water. And then there it is. Your third housemate in the chat: “I’m at my cousin’s hen do lol. Won’t be back until Monday afternoon.” You’re home alone… for an entire weekend!

Is there any better news in the world? You can walk around naked and sing to yourself. You can have a therapy session with the cat. You can snoop around everyone’s rooms and invite that guy over for some heavy petting in the living room. You can leave the heating on for two days, ‘borrow’ the rich girl’s expensive shampoo and have 27 baths with the door open. The possibilities are endless!

People do weird shit when they're home alone. That's a fact. So in the name of inspiration for the next time you’re blessed with the gift of an empty house, we asked a few fellow victims of the housing crisis what they get up to on the rare occasion they’re home alone.

I love being naked when I’m at home because it just feels more relaxing, but I live with housemates so usually that’s confined to just my bedroom. Even then I’m always a little bit worried that somebody is going to burst through the door without knocking. When they’re both out I often just walk around in the buff, watch telly with my boobs out and stuff. It’s sad that I’ll probably never own my house and be able to do it full time. – Rachel

After I graduated from university I was living at home for a while and dating this girl that I knew from school. She was really into spontaneous sex so we would have sex around the house quite a bit when my parents and siblings were out. One time we were having sex on the living room sofa completely naked. I was sitting on the sofa and she was on top of me. I could hear this strange tapping noise, which I assumed one of us was making. Then all of a sudden I could feel this weird wet sensation on my balls. The girl spun round and screamed and that’s when I realised that the family dog had come up between my legs and was licking my balls.

She must have been sat there the entire time because the tapping noise was her tail wagging against the sofa. You’d think we might have been a bit more careful after that, but there was another time shortly after when my parents came home unexpectedly and nearly caught us doing it in the kitchen. – Ethan

All I do when I’m home alone is speak extra weirdly to my cat. I speak to him in this insane baby babble that I can’t do when my partner is home because it freaks him out, or pick him up and waltz around with him. And I sing to him quite a lot too, just like silly songs that I’ve made up most of the time. One of the most embarrassing things that has ever happened to me was this time when I thought I was home alone and was performing opera to the cat, but had forgotten that the landlord was sending a guy round to fix our shower. He’d let himself in and must have heard my entire Pavarotti impression. – Laura

I was in this weird war of attrition with my old housemate who was a total dick. They put a lock on the internet so that I couldn’t use it past a certain time. Whenever everyone was out, I’d creep into their room, unscrew the block thing and snip the wire so that I could use the internet when I wanted to. They just kept replacing it so it went on and on for months like this without either of us ever saying anything. Madness, really. – Luke

I sometimes pretend I have my own radio station when I’m home alone. I put on my playlists and talk between them, like “That was the melodic stylings of Moloko… they don’t make them like they used to. And now here’s Roisin Murphy back with ‘Narcissus’. It’s probably why I have over a hundred playlists, because I’m always wandering round the house saying shit like “Now it’s starting to feel like a Friday” and other random radio presenter cliches. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something wrong with me. – Lola

My uni flat was me and three other guys and we got into this ridiculous competition pranking each other. Whenever I was home alone I’d be setting up some prank on one of them, like switching their ketchup for chili sauce, putting Veet in their shaving cream or cutting butt holes out of their underwear. Real LadBible stuff. It got way too over the top, to the point where I was spending loads of money I didn’t have on buying prank materials and replacing stuff that got destroyed, and avoided leaving the house when anyone else was home.

The worst one was when I went away from the weekend and this one guy put fish paste down the back of my radiator. I spent hours trying to clean it but it still stunk out the entire house whenever we turned the heating on for the rest of the year. I put a lock on my bedroom door after that. Fortunately I live with girls now and it’s much less stressful. – Liam

My ex lived at home but his parents were away a lot and whenever we were spending the night in alone we would sleep in their bed instead of his. The sole reason was because his bed was a small double and the mattress was shit, whereas they had this beautiful king size one with a memory foam mattress. It was his idea and I felt a bit weird about it the first couple of nights, but we never had sex in there or anything, and we stopped doing it after they came home early one day and we nearly got caught. I could probably make a case for that being the beginning of the end for us really. It was a really comfy bed! – Jessica

My flat has really thin walls, you can practically hear people breathing in the room next door, so I’m usually too paranoid to watch porn with the sound on if anyone else is home but if I know I’m going to be home alone for a while and there’s no risk of anyone coming home any time soon I sometimes treat myself to a wank in the living room while watching porn on the big TV screen with the sound on. – Karl

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