How to decorate your student halls cell.

It has been almost four beautiful months since I moved into my pale green breezeblock palace, and I'm loving every minute of being encased in a ten by six cell. However, this is largely due to my interior design talent, something not many people are fortunate enough to possess, so I thought I'd share some tips to make Laurence Llawelyn-Bowen weep and your mother proud.

1. Gig tickets/ bits of card you should've left in your handbag, as proof of what an amazing crazy cool time you're having at "uuuuuni". The truth is you got so fucked that night you can't remember anything but clutching the interior walls of the club and have hung onto the meaningless bits of ticket in a desparate attempt to prompt further memories and justify the fact that you paid ten pounds for a sore head, and a piece of paper. Another good thing to stick on your walls is paraphernalia from eccentric women you meet on buses, and photos of loved ones in case you forget what they look like and it's mega awkward when you go back.

2. The highly embarrassing but essential Pretentious Book Collection. Note the astounding amount of literature on Communism,brought on by guilty sweats when you ended up doing an all nighter with SWP party members at a protest you arguably knew far too little about. You'll probably never read these, but as John Water's says "If you go to someone's house and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em." so best stock your shelves up as a precautionary measure.

3. Dead things. Nothing says "come back to my place" like a festering, species-ambiguous lump of the once living. This one's called Stout. Because he was once a stoat, and he's lanky...get it?

4. "Arty" soft porn poster. I once went to an ex-boyfriend's house whose entire bedroom wall was covered in badly blu-tacked, slightly askew pictures of naked women. He may have been fifteen at the time, but the truth is that if only he'd upgraded from Nutz to POP, the posters would've been totally acceptable. For getting away with indecent pictures of girls remember the simple formula: breasty="tarty", skinny="arty", even if the same amount of crotch is on show.

I also have an Ariel Pink poster so that I can drop in the fact that I met them once, leaving out the that I was too shy and uncool to propely talk to them and just watched in awe as my friend marched Ariel off to buy cigarettes and grilled him over the LA music press. Ariel's constant one liner reply brings me onto the next tip; "It's all smoke and mirrors maaan, it's all smoke and mirrors."

5. Charity shop finds. If you dish out a couple of quid like I did for these little beauties you can pretend that they came from the marble staircased, open air jacuzzi mansion you once inhabited before you had to downsize to live the student dream. Mirror, lampshade and plate all battle prizes from elbowing through grannies at St Oswalds.

6. Unmade bed/ dirty cups. If you really want to convince people that taxpayers should be paying for your education, then a hoard of moulding crockery is the way to do it. As for the bed, you can pass it off as decade-too-late BritArt installation. Take that Tracey Emin, I can do lazy too.