I'm going to be renting a room in someone else's flat. At the moment, I'm renting a room in a shared house - there are four others here, it's a big house and only me and one other girl (who I don't get on with) actually do any cleaning so it tends to get steadily grubbier until I get fed up and give it my version of a proper clean (this occurs about once every couple of months, so you can see that I'm not a neat freak). Plus, the landlords are in Australia at the moment - they went for six months in January so naturally we've heard nothing from them since, until we emailed them to tell them about the letter we had from the bailiffs because they hadn't managed to set up a direct debit to pay the water bill. It will all be hilarious once I've actually moved out...

So, too many housemates I don't really like who never ever clean anything plus incompetent and long-distance landlords mean that I've decided to cut my losses and move on. From October 12th I will be living with one girl who is actually the owner of the flat and so has a vested financial interest in keeping it habitable. Fewer people to interact with = good, and she has a Bengal kitten which I will be able to play with but will not have to be responsible for! Instead of getting weird looks if I dare to mention science fiction, I will be able to borrow her sci-fi books and she's already invited me to join her book group (if one of my housemates weren't a journalist, I'd suspect the lot of them of being unable to read). Win-win.

the accommodation issue touches a nerve or two, could you tell?!