try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms.

I spent the tail-end of the bank holiday weekend circling things in red pen and writing down masses of phone numbers and so on, keying myself up for all the ringing around I was going to do on Tuesday morning, in an attempt to sort out some goddamn private accommodation already, goddamn it. Luckily, I decided to check my emails on Tuesday morning before I launched, head-first, into the cut and thrust of the thing. This is what I found there:
"Dear [lozopus]

Re: Room Offer

We are pleased to offer you a room in University Halls of Residence at Liverpool.  For security reasons we are not able to give you details about the offer in this email. To view and respond to the offer please login to the University Student Portal..."

Oh dear, I thought, how terrifying. I'd already made up my mind to turn it down if it was another catered offer, not reapply through the university and utilise all the scouting around I'd done over the weekend. Luckily, I didn't have to bother - in just over two weeks I shall be moving into some self-catered, uni-owned halls which are, to boot, the ones I wanted all along; the ones that are close to campus and right in the heart of the city.

Frankly, I'm so excited now that it's unreal. In all my life, I've never lived in a city, only in (fairly horrible) towns - I know that seems a silly thing to matter to a person, but the thought of not having to get on a fucking train to see good comedy or music or theatre is just a little overwhelming. I'd been reluctant but resigned to spending my first year of city-life two miles out of the bustle, a bus ride away from everything, but now I am within actual walking distance of everything cool - within WALKING DISTANCE. Bearing in mind that I am willing to walk quite a long way for things and not, er, expecting it to be ten minutes across either way or something.

I saw a group of friends during the week who asked if the accommodation thing had sorted itself out; I replied in the affirmative and received a very lovely cheer in the middle of the street. What a good bunch. Then we went to the London Tombs and nearly had a coronary, which would have been a shame, after all that fuss.

On a semi-related note, my dad visited Liverpool this week - he had booked his train tickets back before we knew I'd missed my grades for my first choice uni, so it was just a coincidence really - and spent a happy day wandering about on his own, geeking out. My dad's a huge Beatles fan, and his obsession made a weekend in Liverpool one of the first holidays I ever had, certainly the first I can really remember, when I was eight or nine years old. The entire reason I chose to apply to Liverpool was that I'd fallen in love with the city during visits past, so him calling me up to go, "er, is it John Moores you're going to?" (no) had a pleasantly cyclical feel to it. He made me love the city, and now I am going to live there, and the fact his only child is going to live there has, I suppose, made him look at the place in a different way.

He found my future campus (verdict: "massive") and took a photo of the map they supplied, which he sent me in a text. A rather touching gesture, all told, particularly in light of the fact that I had been not a little concerned in the past about how he viewed my going away; he's made no secret of being happy that I didn't get into my first choice, though - further away geographically and with a year in a different country - so I suppose it's really all worked out for the best in that regard.

Oh, look at that. It just turned midnight. Exactly two weeks to go, now.

For all the time, all the years I've spent looking forward to this and preparing, it really has rather snuck up on me. But these things have a way of doing that, don't they?

it's just not cricket.

With each passing day, it looks less and less likely that I will receive another offer of accommodation from my university. This is understandable: I received one last week, very soon after our A-level results were released, and I turned it down. I do get the impression that this isn't really the done thing. University accommodation is a scramble at the best of times and I expect the fact that I'm going to my insurance choice, to compound matters, rather put me at the back of the queue; it really does seem a situation where you're expected to just lump it.

And ordinarily I would have done. Perhaps I should have done. I like to think I'm not an especially picky person - I just genuinely couldn't face spending a year in catered accommodation.

The accommodation at Liverpool University works thus: as far as I can puzzle out, there are about 1983 rooms in catered blocks and 1564 self-catered rooms. Speaking just in terms of probability, I was always going to get offered a catered room and I should have been prepared for this eventuality, which I wasn't, because I am a silly goose. Nonetheless, I refused an offer of a room in the abundantly leafy (and three-miles-from-campus) Salisbury Court, for the following reasons:

• I just DON'T want to live in catered accommodation. Partly because I'm a vegetarian and meat-free canteen food tends to be deeply unpleasant, partly because I enjoy cooking, partly because being able to budget and cook for yourself is an important skill to learn and partly because of the lack of freedom. Set meal times and the like really just don't appeal. When I have friends like E. and M. to stay, I want us to be able to have a cooking adventure together, as we would now - which we certainly couldn't do in the small and perfunctory kitchen they give you in catered. This all sounds prissy, but it's a massive point for me; I really enjoy food and cooking, and there's nothing when to stave off the occasional bouts of homesickness like being able to whip up a favourite stew or whatever.
  
• When I attended my subject open day back in December (I think?), the halls we were taken to see were these, or at least some part Carnatic Halls, a long-ish bus ride away from the university campus and catered. I went with a friend who was already in her first year at Leeds University and oh my god we absolutely hated them. HATED them. They were dark, oppressive, they felt like they were from the 1970s, they - it was just bleak, okay. I imagine that when you're actually in them, they're not so bad, and you all rub along together, and I've stayed in some deeply unpleasant Halls in the past without dying of typhoid, but still. On the day I visited this prospective home of mine, it really put me off.
• I'm not going to my first choice university. I've already said this, but it's worth saying again: having been rejected by those heartlessly picky south-western types whose name we shall not speak, in spite of having the same grades a friend got into Cambridge with (AAB), I was feeling pretty down in the mouth. At the time I got the offer, I just couldn't face a year studying at my second choice AND living in the horrible accommodation that had made me feel down in the mouth a half-year previously. Perhaps it was rash to reject the offer, but there we are. I was having a pretty wobbly day, all told.
• I didn't realise at the time, or had forgotten, how likely I would be to simply not receive another offer. I thought that rejecting one was a perfectly valid thing to do and something else would turn up. I may not have been entirely wrong in this, it remains to be seen, but what I can be certain of is that the longer I wait for something to "oh just sort of fall in my lap", the longer the better private sector options drift off into space.

Yes, so that's what I was advised by the very nice, very calm Uni accommodation lady, when I called their helpline some twenty-four hours later in a muddle. I was told to investigate living in the private sector. She gave me a telephone number and an email address for Liverpool Student Housing. I was dubious. When I phoned them up, another very nice and very calm lady gave me a website address for them.

I'd been terribly concerned about not being able to afford private sector living, but it seems to be - not hugely more expensive? About a tenner more, on average, which is enough that you'd notice it but not enough that it would ruin your life, as I'd been imagining. Moreover, my low household income means I should be getting some kind of wonderful bursary as part of Liverpool's intense bursaries/scholarship schemes, so hopefully it won't buckle me completely into the world of Not Being Able to Afford Food. I'd also been worried about having to go and live in a house with a bunch of people who already knew each other, rent the room of a drop-out in a flat full of strangers, I don't know, I'm not sure I really understood what the private sector entailed. But they own and run other sets of Halls, and Liverpool is a city rammed with students, and they are all, as the LSH lady promised me on the phone, much of a muchness.

I'd also been concerned about the social aspect of not living with other University of Liverpool students, but you know what? Not one of my good friends who's currently at uni socialises with or opted to live with the people they met in their Halls. Not one. Certainly not to my knowledge, anyway; all the ones I can think of met people on their course, through societies, through evenings out.

So - basically, this has been a very boring post, but I think it was a roundabout way of saying that I don't think the sky's going to come crashing down if I go through the private sector. I just have to be content with going about things a little differently to the norm, with a little more paperwork and confusion and suchlike. And that's okay.