Good decisions made on bad hangovers

It was 11am last Saturday morning when myself and the Future Housemate viewed our fourth flat of the morning.

Whether it was our hangovers, the time of day, or both - the previous three places we'd seen were almost instantly discounted on the grounds of smell alone.

While the communal corridors and private spaces of the first two flats contained a pungent whiff of this morning's bacon and last night's dinner, the third hit us with a thick wall of cigarette smoke; a suffocating smell that permeated every inch of space and followed us out the door within minutes.

The fourth, we liked.

It was modern. It had good transport links nearby. It was over budget, but we wanted it anyway. I put down a deposit there and then.

With the first of my housing problems taken care of, there remained one more thing to sort out: myself.

When you're unhappy with a situation, you always have two options: you can either stay unhappy and complain to anyone who'll listen, or you can do something about it. Realising that I was fast falling into the former category, I chose to take action.

Firstly, I called up my friends and got drunk.

Then, the next morning, with another hangover dictating my actions, I started packing up my things at the old house, despite having another two weeks remaining on the rent. By the afternoon, the contents of my bedroom - the only space in the shared house that felt mine, really - were packed into plastic bags, boxes and rucksacks and ready to go home.

By the evening, I was sitting on a sofa in a warm, clean house with a large, grateful dog on my lap, in the company of my new 60 year old house mates - my parents.

And after a week of getting in from work to find dinner on the table, there remains only one problem left to face: the challenge of moving back out and cooking for myself again in six week's time.