Peppermint Heights

We do hear everything – when their phone rings, or yelling at their dog.

It’s kind of an adult-type flat, even though we’re all poor students. You come home and you say “yeah, I’m actually grown-up; I’m not a dodgy student anymore”. The wooden floors contribute to that; they’re the best part of the place.

It’s not a student area, either; we don’t have student neighbours. It would have been cute being close to town before the earthquake; walking home from the pub or the Court Theatre of whatever… now not so much. There are a lot of cracks in the place – nothing structural, apart from the “Death Chimney”. We think the bricks might have moved in it, and it goes all the way up through the house.

That distance from uni is good. It’s a really nice way to switch off from uni – if you’re living two minutes down the road it’s really full on, and you feel like you never leave. But we know a lot of people in scummy student flats as well, so we get enough of that in our lives.

It’s pretty good for entertaining, though we don’t entertain heaps. Once we tried to cook two roasts for eight or nine people. We didn’t realise the oven was broken, and the top element wasn’t going. We just had all this raw meat and raw chicken. It took, like, four hours in the oven, and it got to ten o’clock and we still hadn’t eaten, so we put the chicken in the microwave. It was so bad.

We don’t have massive flat parties or anything; it’s not really that kind of flat. It’s mostly more of a casual wine flat, watching movies. Although we’re all very social people and enjoy going out, we very much value our home space as a home space. On Snow Day we spent, like, twelve hours cooped up in the living room, because we didn’t want to go out and get cold and wet.

We didn’t build a snowman; all the snow around the house went untouched. Things got a bit cabin fever-y at the end of the night, but it was pretty sweet. We tried to do yoga, but the bitch on the horrible, horrible video turned out to be such a douche.