Use of space

I found myself wondering the other night what architects from the past would think of our building uses these days. I live in a town full of big old late Victorian and Edwardian houses, too small for the aristocracy but still very large for the newly aspirant middle class. High ceilings, several floors, and a reasonable amount of outdoors space.

They would have been family homes, I think. Family in the pre-war sense; husband and wife, several children, spinster aunts, housemaids, governesses, whatever else was needed for a suitably genteel house. Most houses in that period would have kept servants – it was a very common thing to do, mostly because of the sheer amount of work involved in keeping such a big place running. Think Mary Poppins, if you will.

Nowadays very few of the houses are still run like that. A large chunk of them have been converted into nursing homes, charming buildings but a buggar to run on practical terms – staircases simply can't be widened all that much. Perhaps these are closest to the original purposes, although the staff come and go, rather than live in. People thrown together and living together in essentially the same household, while the staff snatch meals in basements with leftovers. (Yes, that last part really is personal experience.)

Some of the houses still have families in, of course. They don't have extended families – granny flats, and perhaps a cleaner and a gardener, but just one family. These days they're even more likely to just be an elderly couple rattling around together in a few rooms. Although I have nothing but sympathy for people who wish to stay in their own homes, I do sometimes think that the architect would bite through his drawing pencil when looking at this use of the space – empty, unused, and criminally helping to keep house prices inflated while young aspirant families shrink into smaller and smaller buildings.

What about where I live? The building I live in was (apparently) built in 1898, so still just about Victorian. What must have been astonishingly beautiful interiors have been ripped out and replaced by some quite shonky flats with thin walls and ceilings, and given the flat above us used to be a cannabis farm then probably quite severely changed. The buildings around us are all newer buildings – I suspect we live in the oldest on this side of the street. I think that maybe the architect would be unhappy as we live in our segregated areas, nodding on the stairways and only banding together to complain en masse about some difficult neighbours. (This may make us sound monstrous, but it wasn't your front door they were fighting with drug dealers in front of and on a few cases banging against it. Fading gentility, sometimes very faded, is the name of the game in this town.)

And yet, the other night, I wondered if maybe that was what he would have wanted. We're all very different people here, but we all constantly encroach on each other's spaces. There are at least three different nationalities represented in this buildings, with a wide variety of jobs, but we all walk up the same stairs and through our same front doors. I know the names of three of the four people living upstairs from the shouting – the fourth appears to be called 'Mummy' and very little else. We don't talk, and frankly I don't want to, but we all essentially share a house and we make it still work together.

So I wonder what the architects would make of the houses in this town today, and the way we use space as a community.

"Why don't you just move back in with your parents?"

The graduate/Young Adult With No Kids demographic is being somewhat ignored in the debates over housing benefit caps. To be honest, I don't really mind that, because although the point of this blog is my own demographic, I appreciate that as a healthy, young, childless individual I am fairly privileged in my set-up. It's okay guys, we're at the bottom of the priorities for this one. Carry on, we don't mind.

However, a phrase keeps popping up occasionally in these debates when we are mentioned, and I think it should be addressed. The phrase goes as following:

“Why don't you/they just move back in with your parents?”

Well now, there's a problematic phrase if ever I heard one. In some – nay, many – cases, Just Move Back In With Your Parents is indeed an option. Many people have wonderful relationships with their parents, and both parties are okay with the nest remaining unflown for a few years longer. The problem is that those people probably already have moved back in with their parents. Allow me to unpick exactly why it's impossible for some people to move back in with their parents:

1. The Autonomous Adult problem:

This one is from personal experience. I moved back in with my parents, and oh, it was not good. You lose all aspects of being an autonomous adult, and instead go back to the status of the late teens, where you don't get to make many decisions for yourself. It's empowering to buy your own food, decorate your own space, keep the hours you want. Losing that is hard. And given we're consistently being told that we have a problem with twenty-somethings growing up, we shouldn't be encouraging this.

2. Your parents are also Autonomous Adults:

Mum was really pleased when I moved back home after university. She was pleased for about a week. She was a lot more pleased when I moved back out, and is now pleading with me to try and persuade my younger sister to move out too. I am twenty-four years old, with reasonably young parents, and they have raised me very well. They're still wonderful people, and I like dropping by regularly. Christmas was fab. They're done with raising me now, though, and don't particularly want an aggravated mid-twenties adult moving in the hogging up the bathroom.

Also, from what I can tell, about twenty minutes after I loaded up the car with the last load of stuff to move out, my parents threw out all of the furniture from my old bedroom. Touché, Mum.

3. “Sorry, we sold the house.”

More common than you might think. One friend of mine went home for Christmas and discovered that the 'lovely new flat' her mum and partner had bought did indeed have enough bedrooms for her and her siblings. Sort of. She spent Christmas in a room that was so small her feet stuck out of the door, where she had to sleep on the floor, as there wasn't enough room for a bed. All of her stuff was in storage, too. When children move out, parents divorce, downsize, and generally don't necessarily purchase property in line with the wishes of the whole family.

4. There are no parents.

Without meaning to be too bleak, sometimes parents can die. This is hard, and horrible, and it means that when someone says 'Why not move back in your parents?' they are stabbing the knife back in a little more.

5. There never were any parents, or none that were useful.

Not all students come from nice middle-class homes. Although the rates of children moving from care and social housing to further education are shockingly low, they are still there. Sometimes university is the escape from a dysfunctional, awful household. Instead of celebrating these achievements, we just tell people to go straight back to where they belong.

6. Getting on your bike

On a more cheery note, or possibly more bleak, I'm unsure, where you can afford to live is not the same as where the jobs are. Hurrah, a graduate has managed to find work and not take money off the taxpayer! But boo, it's in London, so the graduate lives in a cardboard box and saves nothing for his or her future! But their parents live in Burnley! … and so on.

This is just scratching the surface, but please stop assuming that all graduates are middle-class homogeneous sorts with a wonderful family home waiting to invite them back.

Thinking space

Ever since I was about twelve, I've always wanted to live alone. I would decorate how I want, keep it exactly to my personal level of cleanliness – no higher, no lower – and watch exactly what I wanted to television. When I got a bit older I realised that living with one other person would be acceptable, mostly because having someone else to keep the bed warm at night is very nice indeed.

Mostly stuff doesn't work out like that. I lived with a small family of mother, father and younger sister until I went to university. I spent university in houseshares with a few people, some of whom I got on with, some of whom... not so much. Still, I assumed that when I left I would get to Live By Myself and that it would be Splendid. I actually did a summer of living by myself, when my housemates went on holiday/home, and I spent the summer drinking too much and heckling the TV. It was good times.

Unfortunately, the only job I could secure for myself after leaving university was a retail job in the city near my hometown; a transfer from my university job. So I moved back in with my parents. Bless them, they were over the moon. I drank a bottle of wine that night, stole a packet of my Mum's cigarettes when her and my Dad had gone to bed and sat in the garden, chain-smoking and crying about being a failure. (I am not a smoker; very occasionally, it seems like a sensible thing to do.) I then lived with my parents and sister for a year, falling into all of the same traps of being eighteen, before eventually moving back into a houseshare. The houseshare was significantly better than living with my parents, and the couple I lived with were fabulous humans, but still, it wasn't what I wanted.

Now I live with Mr Disorientated Graduate in a flat of our own and I'm moving towards actually having the place I want. These flats have paper thin walls, though, and I haven't had a full night's sleep for months as the baby in the flat downstairs is teething. Apparently the only noise that can penetrate my earplugs is the sound of a child crying in another property. BAD TIMES.

This is the economic truth of many a graduate, I think. Although we dream of the flat we'll own ourselves, and decorate, and live to our own rules, the sad truth is that we simply can't afford it. Although Mr DG and I are quietly determined to at least live somewhere with really good soundproofing next time, we're doing fairly well thus far for people our age. As that baby gives yet another wail downstairs, and another set of graduates prepare for their first Christmas as 'boomerang babies', the sad truth is that graduates are some of the lowest people on the rung of houses. The only option to squash together in family homes, in blocks of flats, in what will probably be increasingly rubbish housing.

This post is brought to you by a borderline hysterical lack of sleep. This may be a little obvious.

Lost generation

Nick Clegg: £1bn youth jobs fund to prevent lost generation

A generation lost in despair at youth unemployment soars

This new housing strategy won't save the 'lost generation'

I have heard more this month about being lost than I do from my SatNav. My whole generation, they would have you believe, is floundering about in the dark and nothing will save us from a life of bad privately rented houses, under-employment and a lack of moral fibre.

This is possibly true. I am, after all, a Disorientated Graduate. My very name indicates that I am, well, lost. I'm lost in a way that indicates I'm directionless through, rather than having been misplaced behind the sofa cushions of recession. The way I see it is that our generation is lost, some behind the sofa but mostly just lacking a clear direction.

It was easier in the past. A hundred years ago, the path would have been clear for me. If I was born into my class as a girl, I would have been expected to go into a local factory, or possibly service. After getting married, I would push out babies and raise them until I fell down through exhaustion or poor housing conditions.

Even fifty years ago, I might have done the same thing if I failed my 11+. Chances are I would have done; both my parents did, after all. I may have survived a little longer, and at least I would have had contraception, but that would have been it. The path would still be reasonably clear.

If I passed my 11+, there were suddenly more paths. Hurrah! Not that many, mind you; teacher training college, perhaps, or nursing. Then it was, yet again, work until the babies.

Thirty years ago, maybe even twenty, it all starts getting a little muddy. I could have gone to university and I would have had a wide choice of jobs. Maybe I could marry, maybe I didn't have to any more; I didn't have to have children. My choices were my own but as long as I worked hard then I would be free to make whatever choice I liked, because the freedom was there.

This was the narrative my generation and I grew up with. Work hard and you too can enter any industry you want, buy a house, have it all. So we worked hard. All of us Disorientated Graduates, and the Disorientated College-Leavers, we worked to the best of our abilities, believing the narrative that all paths were open to us if we just tried. We picked our path, and by god we flew at it.

We're getting lost because the paths have been closed, or become too crowded, or filled with our predecessors. We need a new narrative, a new story to aspire too because the one we grew up with just isn't working any more. I'm not sure what that story should be, but I do know that just telling us that we're lost and building some cheap houses to try and fill the aspiration gap won't help. And going back to the models of fixed places in society is even worse.

I don't think that my future is lost behind the sofa cushions of recession. It's a big sofa, and someone has flytipped it in the way of my path of life (this is becoming a stretched metaphor) but I truly believe that my path is still there and that I am going to find it again once I work my way around the current difficulties. That's all.

The Disorientated Graduate's Guide To Winter

The nights are dark, the days are cold and the high street is pushing Christmas like it's going out of fashion. It is, of course, winter, and this presents a new layer of problems for graduates. I am now in my third winter since graduating and feel I can now guide the average graduate through the terrifying world that is the coldest season and the surprising bright sides it can bring. No, really.

The Heating

There are not many times in this blog I'm going to write this, but when it comes to the heating: REJOICE! FOR YOU ARE NOT A STUDENT ANY MORE!

Like so many students, I lived in a houseshare. As energy companies are bastards, we couldn't afford to have the heating on all day. I lived in Scotland. As such, days at home involved waking up and having a very hot shower. When you were out of the shower, you put on your underwear. Then – and this is a knack I am proud of – you put on the wooly tights, then the vest, then the t-shirt and the pajama bottoms. After this came the thin jumper and then over that a hoodie. Add another pair of socks to the equation, and some slippers. Make a hot drink, and then sit in front of the computer with a blanket over your knees. Add a hot water bottle when appropriate.

That, you see, is SURVIVAL. Heating takes away money you can spend on important things, like vodka and cheese, and my student priorities were very clear indeed.

Living with your parents as a graduate is often pants, but it does mean that the heating is on during winter. Remember going home during Christmas, and sweating as you sat in your t-shirt? Well, it's like that ALL WINTER ROUND.

Moved out with people with a job? Possibly not at parent standards of heat, but I am currently sat in a flat with the heating on and it is the most beautiful thing in the world. Sure, we can only afford a few hours a day, but as we work roughly equal hours it means we can time the heating around it.

… and if you are unemployed and can't afford to put the heating on? Well, see my tips as a student for keeping warm. Let me tell you, they're cast-iron.

Time Off

Summer holidays are no more. Spring break is not for you. British laws and customs, however, mean that Christmas represents more of a chance for a little time off. Within reason, of course; many graduates work in businesses that do not shut over Christmas, or only shut for a day.

TIP: Many people do not celebrate Christmas which is all good. However, if you celebrate Christmas find someone that objects to Christmas. Not the type that just 'don't like it' but people who really, really hate Christmas. Jehovah's Witnesses are particularly handy for this, and frankly it's revenge for all of those times you get woken up by missionaries.

Okay, it's not the big amount of time off you had as a student, but at least you don't have to revise for Christmas and/or write a dissertation. Christmas dissertations are rubbish, although asking a drunk father to edit it on Christmas Eve is quite good fun. I don't think he even knew who Charles II was.

… and work

Winter can bring new opportunities for work, through an increase in seasonal labour. Sometimes this can lead to new longer-term opportunities, although I will be the first to admit that being a Christmas retail temp can be soul-destroying.

The weather, however, presents new and exciting challenges. If you are travelling by anything other than a transporter, prepare to add more time on to your journeys. Travelling by train? Buggared. Travelling my car? Buggared. Travelling by foot? Buggared. You will need to get out of bed earlier without a doubt, which is frankly pants.

And yes, it's dark ALL OF THE TIME. Wake up? Dark. Get out of the office? Dark. I cope with this by way of eating more cake and taking more baths, two of the pleasures of winter as far as I'm concerned.

Now wrap up warm and attack the winter! Or hibernate gently. Either way.

IT'S NOT DEAD MONEY YOU FOOLS

If one more person tells me that renting a house is 'dead money' I swear, I will scream. In fact, I reached this point quite a while ago, but it seemed impolitic to start shrieking at the downstairs neighbour, particularly because I had just hit his car and we had arranged matters fairly convivially up until that point.

When you come out of university, you are almost certainly without money. You are without money in exactly the same way that someone who left school at eighteen is without money. To buy a property is inordinately expensive, tens of hundreds of thousands of pounds. As such, it's frankly bizarre to expect someone in their early twenties to afford a house.

And yet renting is considered by anyone about ten years older than you to be the worst decision you could possibly make. “It's dead money!” they will cry. “Save up for a deposit! Find the money! It will be your PENSION!”

So as I sit here paying my rent, I would like to take a moment to take you through why the above statements are a lie, difficult, impossible, and a downright evil lie, in that order.

1. 'Dead money' is a phrase I particularly loathe. It's that weird, Thatcherite fetishism of money, that money should in some way be doing something. The money IS doing something, and that something is putting a roof over my head. You tell me that's dead money and I'll invite you to sleep outside.

A lot of people choose to live with their parents in order to save up for a mortgage. That's fine. That's your funeral. I lived with my parents for a year, until my sister and I were having daily screaming arguments and I spiralled into what I now realise was the beginnings of a bad bout of... I don't know what, exactly, as I don't wish to be too dramatic, but I think I may have cracked if I'd stayed much longer. It was the point I realised I was crying into some toast on a daily basis that I knew something had to give. I houseshared for a time, and now I'm sharing with Mr DG. I couldn't afford to live by myself, and neither could the majority of people I know. I found the method that worked for me.

This method keeps me with a remarkable sense of self-worth and also means that I am now of much better terms with my family. My parents are even coming for tea tomorrow. That is a healthy parent-child relationship, aged 24. My mother still desperately trying to iron my shirts was really not that good.

2. That said, saving up for a deposit is a jolly good idea. I am all in favour of savings. I really, really am. Mr DG and I try to squirrel away what we can every month, admittedly currently towards The Great Social Event Of 2012 i.e. our wedding, but it means we know we can do it. We don't go out a great deal. We eat cheaply. Buying new clothes are a distant world. Savings are a priority, for us.

However. You need approximately 10-20% of the worth of a house to get a mortgage. An average house around here is £100,000 pounds. That's £10-20,000. My annual salary is somewhere between those two figures. So that's at least a year of saving, even if I somehow managed to spend £0 in that year. So, er, where is my deposit meant to have come from between then and now?

Before any smartarse points it out, I am aware that at the moment it tends to be cheaper in terms of monthly payments when you compare mortgage vs. rent. However, I refer you to the £20,000 deposit above.

3. 'Finding the money is entirely possible'. Unfortunately, none of my wealthy relatives have yet revealed themselves. Bastards. I have also failed to find an old map with an 'X' marked on a treasure island, win the lottery, or worked out a way to rob a bank that is morally correct and 100% likely not to get myself caught.

4. A pension?! MY PENSION?!! What? The money is LOCKED WITHIN THE HOUSE. Locked there UNTO FOREVER. That's like saying that my rather lovely pair of Converse (three years old this year!) is a pension plan. That's not how it works at all. I have bought the shoes, I own the shoes, I will not somehow miraculously get the money back from the shoes. It is money invested, yes. It is a sensible investment, as they go. However, your pension is your pension and your house is your house. Telling people their house was their pension is the reason why we are about to have a whacking great pensions crisis. (Guess what generation is paying for that one, too?)

In conclusion: your average graduate cannot and does not have a mortgage. Your average graduate spends the first few years of post-graduate life doing doggy paddle to keep above water. If you can afford, and want, an aspire to a house then please, go for it! If you can't, though, don't go insane trying to get one. Don't make yourself ill. Try not to encourage any more recessions in terms of becoming over-stretched in your borrowing. (Think of the next generation of graduates there, perhaps.) Try to remember that having a roof over your head is good and safe money, and that our communal fetishism over property-owning as a nation is just plain weird.

And don't ever, ever tell me again that renting is 'dead money' because so help me I will not be responsible for my actions.

There is a Graduate Myth post here, somewhere, but I felt a bit of rage was possibly the way forward.