Home Economics
Who doesn't remember this quality lesson, if you were lucky enough to have it imposed on you through your school life. The chocolate-covered pizzas, the cheese on toast. Effectively 30 kids ruining some ingredients.

One that I remember was pasta. Now that might sound a bit tame, even for home ec - chuck pasta in boiling water, leave for (a number of) minutes. But no. This was fresh pasta, so we were entrusted to make this with eggs an' stuff, get our 'dough' ready, and stick it through the press. Once we were done we could cut it into whatever we liked.

Once the lesson was over, everyone took their pasta back to the tutor room in their tupperware, where presumably the intention was to keep it until home time, then take it home and cook it!

Instead I left it in my desk. For over 6 months it sweated , it turned green, it went fuzzy, then went white. Then it went down the back of the year heads' radiator.
( Rookie You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel, Thu 1 Apr 2010, 11:58, 2 replies)

Your mum doesn't clean the house
Because she's too busy sucking me off.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Thu 1 Apr 2010, 10:57, 3 replies)

Not me, but
I live with in-laws in the former East Germany.

My Mother-in-law still has packets and ingredients in her kitchen cupboards from before the fall of the wall - i.e. more than 20 years old at least.

She also has, without fail, moths in her kitchen every summer due to the incredibly poor wallpapering job and the general level of filth in the house. The fridge is disgusting and the bathroom gets a special clean '4 times a year if it needs it or not'.

Can't wait to move out.

And then she moans at me for not dusting...
(chocmonster Failed to come up with a witty signature by, Thu 1 Apr 2010, 10:13, Reply)

How do you make a mess in an empty room?
I recently purchased a house and all I have been able to afford to put in is a bed. The kitchen has some things already in it my friend sold me a table for 10 quid and has let me borrow some chairs. But what can be called furniture amounts to a bed.

No sofa, No telly, No wardrobe(s)/hanging rail, No shelves. Just the bed and empty rooms.

So, how do you go about making a mess in an empty room?

What I do is I put all my clothes and shoes in a room plus Mr Freepens' clothes and shoes and then we have a sort out. And in too long at all you have the most incredible mess ever seen plus 2 people leaving the room and the door making a reassuring click.

Sometimes I like to 'mix it up a bit' with the addition of bin liners.

As long as the pens remain free house work need not be done.
(Free pens 100, 101, 102 is still counting on, Thu 1 Apr 2010, 9:57, Reply)

When I did a homecare job years ago
I saw some sights, but the worst were always the alcoholics.

They're not called 'pissheads' for nothing. Advanced alcoholism destroys bladder control, so that the drinker pisses everywhere.

Either they can't help it or they don't care - makes no difference, their home soon starts to stink, and they're the only one who can't smell it.

One elderly lady I had to visit had a younger alcoholic 'lodger' who filled her sheltered housing flat with the familiar ronk.

As their flat opened onto a shared corridor they weren't popular.

I soon sussed that other carers hadn't done much, so in the couple of hours I had there every week I set to and scrubbed the place out.

Over a couple of months I had pissy carpets and a mattress replaced, bleached the bathroom within an inch of its life and removed and washed every scrap of fabric in the place, watched by the drunk in the corner who occasionally grinned and raised a can of Super-T in greeting.

The smell receded noticeably and the couple's neighbours became friendlier towards them and each thanked me personally.

I eventually moved on to another job so no doubt it all went back to normal in a few weeks. Ah, well.
(Juan Quar is clinging to her front teeth on, Thu 1 Apr 2010, 9:22, Reply)

Wops! Beer! Palaces! Filth!
This has only just occured to me. I have been sitting here all week, gazing at the screen and wishing I had something witty to contribute.

I don't, but I do have a story outside the usual tales of student filth (most of us have been there, stealing crockery from Wetherspoons as an alternative to washing up, using clean boxers to dry plates as there are no teatowels, building a pyramid out of smelly beer cans and whatnot).

My missus is of Italian descent (in fact, one of her antecedents was the Finance Minister for the country some years ago, and the family is well known in certain regions). This meant that while they lived we wree able to go and visit her crumbly old Italian relatives. Most of them thought I was German owing to a certain beefiness, and my shaved head (I am balding, and have terrible hair). But, nevertheless, I enjoyed the trips.

We had a great time whenever we went and, as it was a small village, we were very much regarded as local celebrities (or novelties). We spent most of our time in local bars (both of them[!]), or visiting the aforementioned crumblies.

Most properties were in a slight state of decay, but one set of relatives, a great-aunt and her brother, lived in a colossal four level house and they were also privileged enough to have the only real garden in the village. The village is built on a mountainside so, of course, flat land is at a premium. The only parts of the property in use were the garden, which was terribly overgrown, and the lower two floors of the house. These were appallingly kept. The living room was a disgrace, the sleeping quarters scruffy, but the piece de resistance was the kitchen.

Southern Italy is very warm, but you could feel the damp as soon as you walked in. Plaster was feeling from the walls and ceilings, spiderwebs were so dense they looked as though they were supporting the building, and the furniture, whilst expensive and beautifully carved, was beginning (ha!) to rot.

The relatives were lovely people, and friendly, and wanted to break bread, or have a drink with us. My missus, gamely, had a carrot juice. My own feelings can be imagined, but I saw a Peroni Red in the fridge, or biohazard development zone, and thought I'd try it. What could be wrong with a sealed beer, after all. As I took it I declined a glass, intending to drink from the bottle, and noticed the design was slightly different to those I drank in the bars. I raised it to my lips and was surprised to find it tasted hugely strong, and a little flat. Belatedly, I looked at the sell by date, and nearly dropped the bottle. It was 8 years past it's use by date.

Interestingly, and surprisingly, they took us on a tour of the top floor one day. It was stunning. I found it hard to believe it was the same property. It was never used, and it was immaculate. The floor was marble; there were top of the range, vintage 60s tvs and ashtrays, small golden toys and a library dating back 400 years plus. It was incredible, and I daren't imagine the value.

Sadly, owing to the corruption of Italian solicitors, since the death of her grandfather and other crumblies the family estate (worth between three and six million Euros, depending on property values) is in doubt; there are all sorts of delays and loopholes. Bloody Italians and their ridiculous legal systems - Berlusconi and his corrupt authorities are ruining the country.

Mind you, it's not my inheritance, and, if I'm honest, going and seeing these mad Italians living in squalor whilst upstairs they had a virtual palace, and having little comfort or luxury while being hugely wealthy, was a marvellous experience.
( disasterprone "Pyjamas caused the Holocaust", Thu 1 Apr 2010, 7:10, 4 replies)

Log man
1983-84, Philbeach Gardens, South Kensington. Imperial didn't have many places in hall, so I thought I was very lucky, my final year, to land a place in a beautiful old Georgian house right across the road from college. And a single room (it was probably one of the servant's quarters, on the top floor.) Score!

There were maybe a dozen of us on that floor, almost all finalists, busting our humps on preparing for finals and/or final year projects. And one among us was log man.

Log man was like a ghost. Noone knew who he was, or which room was his. He'd make his presence known slyly, by leaving in the only top floor toilet bowel movements of such staggering dimensions that though they would occasionally soften up and be flushed away in the normal manner, a more efficient way of dealing with them would have been, I suggested once, a Kango to break them up and a block and tackle to lower them the 4 stories to ground level. Hard hats compulsory.

He did this every two weeks or so. The cleaners (Irish women all) were livid when they came upstairs to find one of log man's productions waiting for them. They seemed less concerned about the occasional pile of vomit where a bin had been missed, than log man's colon contents.

The cleaners were awesome, though. They kept the place in great shape, no matter how filthy and squalid some of the students lived. In good enough shape that, after finals, we staged the annual Garden Hall cocktail party, for which several bath tubs were removed from the hall to the back yard and used as containers in which cocktails were made. You haven't lived until you've scooped your glass into a bath full of Rusty Nail or Screwdriver. Many times. And then woken up face down on the sidewalk, with the Household Cavalry exercising their horses a scant few feet from the pneumatic drilling going on just behind your eyeballs.

Christ, my liver could never stand being a student today.
(IHaveComeAmongThee__Twice Tissues on the left. Self-esteem on the right., Thu 1 Apr 2010, 4:44, 3 replies)

For sheer unpleasant grimy filth
My mother truly takes the biscuit. In fact, she not only takes the biscuit, but then leaves it half eaten on the side for 48 hours, before wrapping it in a piece of dogeared clingfilm and sticking it in the back of the fridge for 3 months or so. When you drag out the shrivelled, mouldy thing and play the ‘can we guess what the hell this is’ game, you’ll likely realise that they were the biscuits that went out of date, say, I don’t know…last year. She is, in the words of the excellent Bill Bailey, ‘a filth wizard’.

I shit you not. I wish I did shit you. The last time I was home (last month) I unearthed something in the breadbin that had a use-by of july 2009. I can only assume it was bread, but couldn’t really tell as it had liquefied. Mum denied all knowledge and refused to go near it, leaving me to deal with it. Which was fun, you know, despite my general distrust of mould due to a tendency to keel over in the presence of penicillin.

‘Come now,’ I can imagine you saying. ‘That could just be a one off. Don’t be so churlish!’. It’s not. It’s really not. It’s gotten so bad that I won’t eat anything that’s been in my parents fridge unless I’ve seen my mum buy it and open it. Every time I go home I have to empty out the fridge of various disgusting goop, mould and things so horrendously rancid even your average Labrador wouldn’t roll in it. she’s not senile or decrepit – she’s 50. and she’s been that way for as long as I can remember.

I lived in the same house from 10 months old to 16 years old. I only remember it being cleaned properly once, perhaps twice in all that time. My dad started to re-tile the downstairs bathroom in 1987. he still hadn’t finished in 2001, and it had never been cleaned in all that time. In fairness, it was rarely used due to his tendency to come in pissed out of his skull and take massive kamikaze style shits in there, leaving a malingering odour that not only made your eyes water and your stomach clench, but quite possibly melted your earwax too. When we moved out in 2001, I found a poo in there that clearly hadn’t been flushed for 3 or 4 months, and was attempting to climb out of the bowl and conquer the wild savannah of the bathtub…

Anyway, I digress. Our house was infested with mice. Fair enough, we did live next to a farm, but none of the other houses in our little block of 12 terraces had a problem. Just us – I wonder why. Mum was disgusting in the kitchen. Apart from the aforementioned fridge, she would also leave washing up to go mouldy, spill things and not mop them up, decant stuff in to jars for culinary experiments then leave them to go off – it was astonishingly gross. Of course, I grew up with it, so I didn’t really ‘see’ it, it’s only when we were clearing the house to move out that I got a sense of how bad it was. I mean, I was 10 years old before I discovered that we actually had lino in the kitchen. Most of it was just bare floorboards – the grime had long since etched through the lino – but I remember a genuine sense of wonderment as I prised a piece of green paisley pattern from the dirt, revealing a comparatively Caucasian piece of floorboard underneath.

It was truly so disgusting that I could well have been the worlds first levitating child – shoes weren’t allowed to be worn in the house (fuck knows why, it couldn’t have gotten anything any dirtier) so I would walk around on the outsides of my soles, trying to keep minimal contact between my feet and the floor.
I recall once, at the age of 12 with a cast on a broken leg having to crawl maybe 15 metres from the kitchen to the living room as I couldn’t carry a plate and hop. My knees were black from the shite on the carpet. I remember the ‘bin corner’ (handily situated next to the cooker, for all your hygiene needs!) which my mum would flick bin-bound remnants at willy nilly, leading to a lovely pebble-dashed effect on the wall behind and floor around. (never cleaned, naturally). I remember a layer of greasy fudge so thick on the cooker that it enveloped my curious 8 year old index finger to the second knuckle.

I remember going through the laundry basket/heap at the top of the stairs aged 14, and finding some of my baby clothes in the bottom of it. It honestly to god had not been emptied in all that time. I remember our yard filling up with sewage twice because my mum blocked the toilet with torn up sanitary towels, despite being told repeatedly that they needed to be put in the bin, not flushed. Then having to wait til payday to get it fixed, tiptoeing through the garden in wellies and hoping the smell didn’t cling to my school clothes. I remember parental bedclothes that weren’t changed despite period leakage or cumstains, or my fathers disgusting habit of wiping his fingers on the duvet cover when he’d finished cleaning his pipe. I think their record was 18 months of the same sheets, and they had faded so badly from all the sweat and disgustingness that they had to be thrown away. I remember a spare room that was knee deep in crap – I don’t even remember what crap now, boxes of stuff and dirty clothes most likely – that when I cleared out I found no fewer than 11 mummified mouse carcasses. I remember our dining table was one of those extendable ones, the extension only ever used on special occasions, such as one Christmas when the extra bits were pulled out and I spotted mouldy bits of food between the wood partitions from the last time it was used.

She’s not *quite* as bad now she’s remarried and lives in my stepdads place – although god knows she probably would be if he let her. My now stepdad was a friend of the family long before he and my mum got together, and I recall the house as it was before she moved in – a little shabby, Spartan even, but neat. Now it’s full of shit, 90% of it hers. (ans 75% of that is minging useless junk. Including the FUCKING FRIDGE. Can you tell it bothers me?)

Still though. By and large I’ve got a belting immune system from being exposed to essentially germ warefare for my entire childhood…
(berk, Thu 1 Apr 2010, 1:44, 4 replies)

Yes I was A Fucking Student
and when I lived in a shared basement in the west of Scotland the guys I lived with decided that plates, cups etc lived on the lounge floor when the food was gone. So did Pizza boxes, MaccyD bags, kebab wrappers... The place fucking stank and you couldn't move for the shit and plates in the lounge. To make sure I had something to eat from I kept my stuff locked in my cupboard, ate from it washed it and returned it.

One night after working as a bouncer at a local pub, I got back after a particularly shitty night (Smackhead in the toilets, had to use a chair to pin him to the wall once we'd got him out, until he calmed down a bit and stopped trying to stab us with the pen he'd found in his pocket...) I returned to find that the fuckheads had broken into my cupboard, eaten all of my munchies and left my plates on the floor covered in the remains of a particularly nasty chicken kebab. I told them to sort it out and they paid me zero attention. I shouted at them to sort it out and they paid no attention. So I explained that if nobody wanted the plates etc then I might as well start getting rid of them. So, I picked up a plate and threw it at the wall just above their heads as they sat on the sofa. They started to duck and cover so I just threw them lower - great game, I could've got a job as a Clay Pigeon launcher, Easy!

After about 15 or 20 plates they gave in, noisily, and started clearing the remains into some hastily gathered black bags, then they spent the next 2 hours, on a friday night/saturday morning, cleaning the lounge until you could not only see the floor, but walk anywhere you wanted without stepping in rotten half eaten fast food.

I moved out a week later and at the end of the year I heard the little cunts all lost their deposits.

I'm just sorry I wasted all those plates - didn't hit them directly once! (There was however, a lot of shrapnel :0)
(hengushrh is found at the Dole office every second thursday, Wed 31 Mar 2010, 23:39, 6 replies)

Our kitchen
...looks like this for a fair proportion of the time (student house, needless to say):

www.b3tards.com/u/9c12c49d7503cb734053/p1010561.jpg

Apparently there's a sink under there somewhere...
(Captain Backfire, Wed 31 Mar 2010, 22:09, 2 replies)

Dave went to college....
...and he was in residence for his first year. He went away for the weekend, and the guys on his floor thought it would be a laugh to pull up his carpet, put a kipper in the middle of the room and then replace the carpet and furniture. A few days after Dave returned, his room stank to high heaven, and his mates told him what they had done. Not being prone to housework, Dave said, "Ahhh, you get used to the smell", and he continued on living in the room. They hadn't bargained on the fact that Dave's family home permanently smelled of burnt mince and week-old mashed potatoes, courtesy of his mum's cooking. Once the kipper smell permeated the whole floor of the residence, and folk were gagging just walking down the corridor, the original pranksters broke into his room, removed the fish, and cleaned up.
(Lord Blumpy is mildly off-topic on, Wed 31 Mar 2010, 22:01, Reply)

Uni house whats more is there to say.
Last year I started uni and lived in halls, the halls themselves were in all honesty pretty epic more like a hotel than some of the scummy places my mates were in. Rooms huge, lovely shower to myself with hot water 24/7 perfect, well until everyone was there for a few weeks.

We decide to carry out our own little experiment with milk. Turns out that after 5 months, a bottle of milk left behind the oven, turns a really awful colour and the smell is bad enough for kill a sunk. Well one night after a heavy night out, we bet this guy who ill call J £50 to down it. Now J will do anything you tell him to so he agreed and down the lot, not just a sip but half a pint of 5 month old putrid milk! This was hilarious, but what we didnt know was that after we all dispersed J throw up in the mop bucket and because the deal was he couldnt throw it up within an hour, he had the clever idea to hide the evidence in the cupboard next to the oven.

It took us almost a week before we discovered the rotten milk, beer and stomach juice mix. The kitchen smelt so bad that even the cleaners refused to enter, one sniff left you gagging, defiantly the worst smell i ever smelt.

P.s encase you wanted to know rotten milk, beer and stomach juice actually separates in the bucket.
(Warped, Wed 31 Mar 2010, 21:12, 1 reply)

The Palace
Below is an email I received from one of my student mates about the results of a night out with his housemate, S. They referred to their flat as the Palace, as it was such a shithole.

Be aware, it's written in Geordie.

so anywho S, we went out for a social which was canny good
ended up in digital, was very impressed. get back t' palace and were
drunk as fuck & canny hungry so i go to make us sumat ta eat.
look in th fridge and find eggs thinking it was a good time to teach
him how to tell the difference between a boiled egg and a raw one!

he sees the eggs turns at looks at the roof where the hole used to be
and says fucking shitting palace kitchen ceiling and starts hoying
raw eggs at the ceiling.

when half the eggs are gone (box of dozen) he turns and looks at the
washing machine (which is broken) and says your shit too, take that
you bastard and starts chucking spoons at it.
when there's no more spoons he picks up a jam jar and boosh.
big fuck off shattering noise but no broken glass, puzzled i look
down to the floor and cant see any glass cos he put the fuckin drum
window through.

i open the drum door and the lot just falls out on the flour.
this causes S to get even more pissed off and opens the back door
and starts yucking our special eggs (the use by date says '08 a.k.a.
palace bombs) over the back wall onto cretins windows ( the next door
neighbour) only the way the walls are situated the eggs could have
only come from the palace.

when they run out he stumbles back in and gets more jamjars, starts
pelting these fuckers into other peoples backyards drunk as fuck at
half 4 in the morning.
after we get in, we sit down and S mumbles something about
viewing people and then turns a shade of red that makes his hair look
white and then this S shaped blur flies through the palace to the
sound of wahhhhhh waaahhhhh blu bla fuckin blahhh.

i run into ( try to run) into the palace kitchen to see what's
happened and he's fuckin whitied every where. palace kitchen floor,
palace kitchen sink, down the back of the radiator & over the
washing machine. heres me thinking for fuck's sake.

he comes out the palace bathroom laughing his back off and says im
fuckin paggered am gannan to bed.

before i hit the hay i take a piss and there's puke over the
floor ,on the shower glass pain and in the bathroom sink. shaking ma
head i turn to the toilet to cyphon the python and to my suprise the
fucking toilet is sparkling. not a mark on it.

i get up at 2pm walk very ruffly into the palace kitchen, i
nearly chucked up at the smell, cause the heating was on, gathered
the strength to get a brew on the go and there's this knock at the
door.

i walk from the palace kitchen passed S's room to the front door
when S sticks his head out of his bedroom door and says "that will
be the people coming for viewing."
(Saltheart, Wed 31 Mar 2010, 19:59, Reply)