Andrews' Kitchen Nightmares

I happen to live in one of the nicest suburbs in London. It's a twenty-minute walk to Hampstead high street (picture on the left) and is surrounded by some of the nicest (or at least, expensive) housing on earth. For a start, Rachel Stevens used to live in a flat opposite my room and the conductor Adrian Boult used to live in the block of apartments situated around the corner. Just to throw around a few more names -- Sting, the ex-king (before he was deposed) of Greece and George Michael all live a couple of streets away. Yes, I'm living in university halls and yet I'm near the epicentre of celebdom.

And yet, the epicentre of the underworld (I'm picturing something out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at this moment) seems to reside in my campus's kitchen. It seems to be the university rule that the kitchen must be abused in some form or other.

At the halls that I stayed in Cardiff last year, there were enough disasters. Adam's grilled-to-flames pizza accompanied by U-boat shaped baking tray, the permanent marker scrawled all over the kitchen wall ('Wake me up at six in the morning') after a drunken spree and to top it all off my other friend's hunger for cheese on toast at three in the morning resulted in her grilling toast and throwing it at the floor as she was too drunk to contemplate where her mouth was located. Oh, and of course, who could forget the crowning glory, a large traffic cone.

Okay, I admit it -- the kitchen here in Hampstead isn't quite that bad (or as humorous). But it really does smell awful. It's like a smelly bog that must be avoided at all costs. I guess that's what happens when you share a kitchen with twenty-three other students. Imagine the smells of straight vodka, gone-off dairy products, more vodka, super noodles, more vodka, more gone-off dairy products, some eggs and some more vodka all mixed in together to make the worst stench on earth. Thankfully, I'm not as foul-mouthed (not at all, in fact) as temper-tantrum Gordon Ramsay -- but I daresay our kitchen really would be considered a kitchen nightmare. I could envisage him descending like a member of a SWAT team through our kitchen skylight and shotgunning us with expletives ...

On the other hand, not all the kitchens on site seem to have reached the depths of Dudin Brown. A friend's kithcen is too far in the other direction. It's ridiculously clean. So clean that there are sticky notes on each shelf of the fridge indicating which shelf belongs to a certain hall mate, letters explaining the shock at finding the kitchen sink full of plates one day and the appalling situation in which someone had borrowed a piece of cutlery and had left it in the sink. I decided to leave a little letter of my own on the fridge -- explaining that if anyone touches any of my property my (imaginary) polytheistic god will punish them with a lightning bolt. I think they had a kitchen meeting to resolve the dispute ...

Our kitchen has recently experienced several more setbacks. So much so that Emily has named our halls' poltergeist the "Dude in Brown". One of the electricity panels has malfunctioned, our microwave doesn't have its wattage on display (which has infuriated me many a time), three out of four ovens don't work and one of the kitchen sinks is unusable.

The kitchen has henceforth been renamed Room 101. Who needs O' Brien when we have the kitchen of the underworld?