I'm in the back of my bedroom scraping

1. COOKING AND BAKING

Go to Lidl and buy eight chicken thighs. Don’t be scared or confused about buying eight chicken thighs, it is perfectly legal and no one will mind. They are there to be bought and I’m sure Lidl won’t miss them. Make sure to buy eight, because this is the perfect number to not fit in your tote bag, and you need to have some sort of meaty prop to hold above your head as you walk back home through freezing, sideways rain.

Transition effortlessly from your coat to your dressing gown and sit at the kitchen table. Gingerly open the packet of eight chicken thighs. Count them. Go on, count them again. Go on, count them a third time. Spoiler alert: every time you count them there will be eight. Take the first chicken thigh out of the packet and hold it in your left hand. Observe its pink squishiness. If you’re feeling curious as fuck, smell it. Gag.

Trim the eight chicken thighs and cut the offshoots into chunks of hugely varying size. Get chicken juice all over the table. Shriek like this: “AHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Errrr, cook a pie filling. Freestyle it, who gives a fuck! Spoon filling into tray. Cover with puff pastry, decorate as only you see fit, and place into oven. At this point, you may be feeling worried about how the pie will fare in its new, hot home. Try not to fret. The pie will be ok. It might even quite like it in there…

2. FILL OUT A COUNCIL TAX STUDENT EXEMPTION FORM

Fill out half of the form. You will then be confronted with a piece of information you do not have to hand (your student matriculation number). Leave the form. Remember it the next day. The tab will now be absolutely begging you to reload it. P-p-p-p-pwease w-w-w-w-weload m-me it will gurgle. Say something like, ugh, fine, and just fucking reload it. Lose all of your progress. Repeat this for eight or nine days. Realise after eight or nine days that it takes less than one second to look at your student matriculation number on your student self-service portal (yeah, you’ve got one of those).

Fill out half of the form. You will then be confronted with a piece of information you do not have to hand (the exact date your course started). Leave the form. Remember it the next day. The tab will now be absolutely begging you to reload it. P-p-p-p-pwease w-w-w-w-weload m-me it will gurgle. Say something like, ugh, fine, and just fucking reload it. Lose all of your progress. Repeat this for eight or nine days. Realise after eight or nine days that it takes less than one second to look at the exact date your course started on your student self-service portal (yeah, you’ve got one of those).

Repeat process until your laptop can’t take it anymore and crawls into a corner to die, like an old, sick cat.

3. BUY AN ORANGE FLAVOURED TWIRL FROM YOUR LOCAL TESCO

Wrestle with the embarrassment of having to go to the corner shop to buy an orange flavoured Twirl. Seriously consider going to the local corner shop to buy an orange flavoured Twirl but then paint an image in your mind of you, in your Birkenstocks and socks, in your sports beanie with bits of hair hanging limply from its sides, picking out an orange flavoured Twirl and laying it on the counter of the local corner shop. Realise that this is the most mortifying thing a human being could possibly do. Awww, is someone hungry? you imagine the man who works at the local corner store saying. Did someone fancy a Twirl? Horrendous. Shudder. Not just an ordinary Twirl, visualise him smirking, an orange Twirl! How exotic. Go on, enjoy it. See you next time for your weekly Wispa.

3a. INVENT NEW RITUAL LIKE “WEEKLY WISPA”

Walk ten minutes to Tesco. Select the shiniest orange flavoured Twirl from the confectionary aisle when no one is looking and hide it between a bag of lemons and some deodorant when you pay for it. Fuck it, pick up a Wispa for the road. Realise that buying deodorant is the second most mortifying thing a human being could possibly do, for reasons totally unknown and inexplicable to you. That is so mean of you to say that, your deodorant will hiss, and then it will do that thing where it sprays out a layer of white shit every time you use it, white shit that you have to sort of blow off your armpit, but that never works, does it, so what you actually end up doing is scraping the dross off onto the carpet with the back of your hand.

4. THEN SCRAPE YOUR CARPET

This cat-e-gor-i-cal-ly does not mean trim pubes. You want to leave these unscraped, flowing lush and free like a horse’s mane. You want to have so many pubes that they all start jostling for space and you have to intervene in their tiny fist fights, like some twisted referee. You want to be so fulsome of bush that you struggle to squeeze your front end into jeans in the morning.

4a. REASSURE PROSPECTIVE EMPLOYERS THAT THE BIT THEY’VE JUST READ IS A JOKE

Hey…hey! Hey you! That bit that you’ve just read is a joke! It’s just a nice, fun joke. I don’t usually like talking about my pubes on the internet, I think it’s really crass, but they were angry at me this morning about the space thing and I said I’d give them a shoutout. If you want me to shave for work, that’s fine. I shaved my armpits for my granny’s funeral so I totally get it.

I refer here, of course, to taking a carpet scraper, which you can buy off Amazon for two pounds, and crouching down on your hands and knees, ‘Peggy’ by Ceechynaa blasting into your left ear, and really getting down to business. You will be surprised at how much gunk is on the surface of your carpet, let me tell you that for fucking free. My flatmate said that the mass of hair, deodorant foam, bobby pins, loose tobacco, and dead skin seemed “almost alive.” My boyfriend said that I should “burn it.” I regret not keeping it as an extremely low-maintenance pet called Mabel 2.