Today is a very special day: today my brand new flat got internet. Since I last wrote SYITC a lot has changed - I'm now in my twenties, I own my own flat and Kieran and I have started planning next summer's party in the USA. My teenage years were put to rest with a night out that I remember little of. Note to self - never go out the night before your birthday again! And my new flat, which I love. Je t'aime!
When I compare here to where I lived last year I can't believe I survived. No bugs spotted, everything's clean and my shower (which is like standing under a waterfall) never has a problem giving me hot water. There's still so much to do, and has been a lot to do - but so far I've painted the bathroom, my room, my spare room and the hall (which is a lovely sunlight yellow). And flatpack.....so much flatpack! By the time everything's finished I'll have enough allen keys to open up my own DIY shop.
Still to do: build the beds, build my chest of drawers, build a desk, wallpaper the living room, gloss the wood...easier typed than done.
It has been nice living in my own little world for a while after the stress of the last flat but David moves in on the 1st of September, and I'm getting quite excited about it. Glee nights, Lady G, going to Ikea even though we don't need to. And Kieran can come stay here whenever without it being awkward. Which is good, because it's going to be travel-plan HQ.
Once my kingsize bed has been screwed together I may never leave the flat again!

Ohh. Emm. Gee. I think I must have slept through this semester - nay, year! - because I was floating along and out of the blue my Creative Writing tutor, Rodge, said “well, next week is your last class”. What?! Are we not just getting started? I don’t know what scares me more, the fact that I’m now half-way through my degree or the fact that I can’t think off the top of my head of anything I’ve learned! I have two exams and even then looking at the timetable doesn’t make me feel like they’re actually going to happen. Just some classes that someone called Nadia has been to and knows enough to regurgitate the main points in two hours…
Then there’s summer. I’ll need to start looking for a new flat with my friend from school, David. Please, please, please no bed bugs this time! Rubbish accommodation need not apply! And there’s a week in the sun with my boyfriend - I plan to do nothing but brown pleasantly by the pool. And turning 20, which seems quite grown-up and important. Even though I had to drag myself away from buying flip flops and kaftans the other day I still can’t quite get my head around the fact that it’s not still Christmas. I’m losing track of time in my old age.
We were talking recently about how in the summer between school and Strathclyde my friend Kat and I did a two-month stint of work, out, work, out, work, out, work, collapse. Maybe it was the novelty of her being just over eighteen and me being just under (with a fake ID), or maybe we just had a lot of time and money to waste. Even in first year though, in the beautiful days of Garnett Hall, I remember all the random excitement and always being busy. Weekly 12-Hour, flat parties, ABC on a Thursday…ahh! Then this year, what have I actually done? Not been in classes that much (due to a lot of ‘self study’ course content), I could count in single figures the amount of times I’ve gone clubbing and I’ve not really done much of anything else.
This time round I did discover that going out for tea or lunch was sort-of better than going ‘out out’ because, apart from being far less expensive, when you see your friends you can actually hear what they’re saying. Also it’s ok to put your pyjamas on and have an early night, try some proper cooking and take your make-up off before you go to bed. I also really appreciated the good relationships that I had perhaps taken for granted before, especially my Mum and my boyfriend. Although living somewhere as 24/7 as Glasgow is amazing, the things that I enjoyed the most were things that I’d loved all along. I guess that’s what I’ve learned in my second year in the city. Not a bad lesson.

Have you ever heard of bed bugs? I hadn't either - except from way back in the day when Queen Victoria was still in charge and people were filthy...that was until we lived in THE FLAT. For those of you who didn't read the first installment of my column - since we moved into that attic of despair we've had nothing but problems: I discovered condom wrappers under my bed, the heating didn't work for 2 months and we found human faeces in our mop cupboard (although I think my exact, mature words were "ahhhhh! a jobbie!!!"). For those of you that did read that article yes, we still live in the flat with the condoms, cold and toilet-matter.

Still, all of that was almost bearable and we shuffled on like comrades in a battle of Somme proportions until the discovery that we were not alone. Bed bugs are really difficult to spot, mainly because they live in the dark and they're tiny for the first 6-8 weeks of their lives, so it wasn't until Susan emerged one morning from her room covered in lumps that we got suspicious. Either she'd brought someone home from the union the night before who was very hungry, or we had an infestation. Since then - despite stripping her room of all the furniature - the problem seems to have exploded. Since Christmas I've been going to bed head-to-toe in proper, outdoor clothes. Come get me now, you fiends!

Turns out they did and just went for the tiny patch of my face that I'd left uncovered for suffocation reasons. My actual face. So, I only had one bite in comparison to Susan (and Kerri by this point)'s skin rashing-up on a daily basis - but it doesn't make it any less disgusting. These little red brutes have been scuttling about in our walls, waiting to attack in the dead of night. For your own reference they're about 5mm long and the colour of blood. Blood that they just took from various parts of your sleeping body.

Last week 'the exterminator' (I didn't see him because I was at a lecture, but I have images of some sort of Arnold Swarchenegger kicking our front door down and filling the flat with dry-ice) came to rid us of our blood-sucking squatters. We left the flat for a few hours and when we came back there was a slight smell of baking-soda. I'm not really sure what went on but I'm absolutely terrified that I'll bump into the wall and hundreds of them will pour out like a scene from a parasite death-camp.

We're convinced that they've been there long before we have, although our landlord disagrees. Here's the worst bit: unless you take photos of everything and can prove it otherwise then legally it's your responsibility to pay for them to be gassed out of your flat. Renting somewhere is a LOT harder than we thought. And saying 'sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite' will never be the same again...

This month I’m hanging my head in shame. After writing ferociously in September about taking care of yourself on a night out I ended up in A&E after Octopussy. Ten days later my leg still hasn’t healed, although I maintain that even if I hadn’t had a bottle of wine before going out that I still could have ended up with a rainbow leg. Still, maybe best to put the high horse back in the stables for the time being.
Picture the scene: It’s just after midnight at the ABC. 5000 balloons are being released from above the strobe lights, some with prizes in them. Never one to miss an opportunity, I flop out of my ridiculous, ‘really just for show’ high heels (down to £15 from £80 in Office January sale, I’m not made of money) and into my Primark flats (point proven). ‘Aha!’, I thought, ‘How clever I am! I’ll now definitely be able to run around in the balloons and collect my winnings! Those foooooooools, fools I say!’ Fuelled with a lot of Dutch courage, as the hogmanay-esque countdown began I flailed wildly into the darkness. The balloons floated majestically downwards as Don’t Stop Believing blasted out – it was like an over-the-top prom-scene in a teen comedy.
One slip on something nasty and my leg was getting intimate with a metal crowd control barrier.
Usually when that happens you tend to not even feel it until the next day. Even at the time I was fighting back the tears. Being the trooper that I am, of course, I carried on through the night. When I woke up the next morning my immediate thought was that my leg had caught fire during my sleep. I rolled my pyjamas up slowly, like peering in a cupboard after watching a horror film, and revealed something on my shin that resembled a second knee. A second, black, swollen knee.
At Crosshouse Accident and Emergency I hobbled along to the triage nurse as my Mum sat shaking her head in the waiting room. Here’s a tip for you – anything you say in hospital that starts with ‘well, I was out last night...’ is going to be met with rolled eyes. I felt suitably embarrassed that I was one of those teenagers you see on Dispatches, wasting the time of the NHS. A diagnosis later (bruised shin bone with burst capillaries between it and the skin) and I stumbled off home to wallow with some painkillers. Maybe with Glee on a Monday, 90210 and Shameless on a Tuesday, Desperate Housewives on a Wednesday, How I Met Your Mother and Skins (my only television love-affair to rival my relationship with Sex and the City) on a Thursday it’s a good time to be putting my feet up...?

After six weeks at home - which was originally going to be three before the weather got crazy - Glasgow seems a mile off. It's so funny how quickly I can settle back into life at my mum's. My bedroom still messy, covered in clothes and photos from sixth year. The reclining sofas, the Sky TV, the always-full fridge....and I love, love, love the fact that my Mum’s there to pass comment on America’s Next Top Model – a commentary that I find I miss.

When I step out the house, though, everything else is like parts of someone else’s life. I drove past school (DURING THE SCHOOL HOLIDAYS!!) and I actually ducked behind the wheel in case my old headteacher saw me.  Why?! What could she do, give me an icy stare as I zoomed past at 30 miles an hour? (It’s fair to say that we burned our bridges, ironically with water bombs, on our last day of school – which was a perfectly reasonable response, I feel, to a year of suppressed creativity). My boyfriend’s little brother is in sixth year now and looking at photos of their – our – common room it’s not even the same place any more.

There’s always that dread as well of ‘the awkward reunion’. Everyone has the person or people that you were really good friends with at school, the ones that you put as your ‘other half’ on bebo and took photos on your phone of at lunch time. This sounds awful, but it’s never the ones that went to university, Strathclyde or not. They ended up going to college ‘to take time out’ which turned into two years or they got a full-time job and you haven’t really spoken since that time you had too much coursework to do or since they couldn’t come out cause they had work in the morning. You promised that things wouldn’t change but the truth is that no matter how far away from Strathclyde you come, it’s usually right in between you and the people you used to know.

So in Ayr there’s this club called Madisons, it’s usually a bit grab-a-granny but on a Wednesday night it’s amazing. Retro night consists of cheap drinks and chee-say tunes from the 80s and 90s. I  went with two of my friends from school – both of whom are at uni in Glasgow – and judging from the number of sweaty, pouting photos on my facebook I was a little worse for wear. Anyway, I was standing at the DJ booth waiting to request Vengaboys and singing along to B*witched when I clocked this girl from school. I never really liked this girl, only from the point of view that she could make anything, even our prom, seem like a funeral – though I wouldn’t have said I left school with a problem between us. Turns out she did. My initial reaction to her obviously bitching about me to her friend was ‘Well f you sweetheart!’ but then I thought why? I live in a city that never sleeps (unless it has a hangover), I get to learn about stuff I love every day and I’m never short of someone to go to the pub with. She still lives in the same place with the same, stale problems and I don’t think much else.

Six weeks was long enough to remind me why I moved away.