Who's the Daddy: No winners in a house share

You wouldn’t keep chickens in the legendary hovel where me and my cronies dossed down in the early 90s.

For starters, her house has two more functioning bathrooms than our place ever had (it has two bathrooms).

It also has a kitchen which wouldn’t get shut down by the Food Standards Agency, a lounge that you’d actually want to spend more than five seconds in and is about as clean as these places can be.

But for the first time since she was seven and we broke the bank to convert our loft into a bedroom with a small en suite, daughter #1 will have to share a bathroom - oh the humanity.

The rules of the bathroom in a house share are pretty simple, in that there aren’t any. If you’re dumb enough to leave your la-di-da shampoo and body wash in the shower then it will be drained faster than a penultimate pint as the bell for last orders rings by people you think of as friends.

Same goes for treats in the fridge. Beer, cheese, that lasagne from your mum. There’s no winners in a house share, just survivors.

The old cliché that you don’t really know someone until you’ve lived with them is so painfully true it hurts.

The neatest, tidiest looking person I ever shared a house with while at my first newspaper regularly left the place in such a state that it looked like the police had carried out one of their dawn raids.

And a few years later I came home to the flat I rented full of thick black smoke because the dancer I shared with had tried to dry their costume in the microwave.

To this day I honestly don’t know how they didn’t burn the place to the ground. When I opened the door, birds fell out of the sky.

But daughter #1 cannot wait to get back to university. Me and the boss are the dullest people on earth compared to the cast of Love Island she will be battling with.

All wars are fought over resources and this one will be no different.