1. Being ‘Independent’ means being skint.

It means walking around a supermarket thinking ‘fuck are tomatoes really that much? Day light robbery’. You don’t realize how much of a non existent dent your housekeeping makes into to monthly outgoings until you have to fend for yourself and start shopping on a budget.

2. You have to ‘work’ for your money.

This is a simple fact of life. If you hate your job, chances are its good money. If you love your job, chances are the money isn’t great. In the grown up world, there are very few people who wake up on a Monday who think ‘Yessssss, work’. If they do, you will find that they earn around £3 an hour or probably make jewellery or art out of seaweed.

3. ALL of your appliances will break at once.

Yep. When you live on your own, the washing machine will lock and start flooding at exactly the same time your fridge is fucked and the toaster sets on fire. Unless you have a bucket and a mangle and keep all your stuff in a cool box in the garden, you really need to have some savings.

NB: this is also the time your car will need a service/mot/new set of tyres.

4. You no longer look sane if you go to the park and go on the swings.

Not to mention you may get stuck. There are no instances to look sane in a park over the age of 12. I found this out the hard way after having passed out on a pirate ship slide at a party a few months ago.

5. You no longer get time to yourself.

None. Remember when you used to chill out and read a book, or cook, FOR FUN? Well, no more. When you come home from work there will be an endless list of tasks waiting for you, kids, pets, partner etc. By time you sit down of an evening it will be so late you will have missed all the soaps and all that will be on will be documentary’s about world war two and the shopping channel.

6. If you are a woman, and you don’t want to get married or have children, you will have to anyway to stop people asking if you are a lesbian.

There is obviously, no other reason for woman to be put on this earth than to bear child and make a man happy. So if this doesn’t appeal to you. you will have to do it any way to please other people. God forbid, you should actually be quite happy as you are an want a career. This is not allowed if you have a vagina. It’s banned.

7. Your GCSE results are barely worth the paper they are written on.

I have seen people successfully get jobs with ‘E’ and ‘F’ grades on their CV. What the secret is though, is that you DO need the knowledge you get from them. Although potential employers might not look, they are not going to employ someone illiterate who has to count things on their fingers. Its common sense.

8. You will fall in love with travelling.

Then you will realize at some point you have to grow up and get a proper job, and your dreams of seeing as many places you can will be in the waste paper bin with last weeks shopping list and Snickers wrappers. You will content yourself by going on holidays you can’t really afford and pick the smallest little complaints you can about them and write them in lengthy Tripadvisor reviews.

9. You will have to watch what you eat.

When you were 15, it was perfectly ok to have McDonalds breakfast and Greggs for lunch. In actual fact, you could pride yourself on the fact you can eat 7,000 calories a day and still look thin. Fast forward ten years and if you eat one Fruitella you put on a stone.

10. You will get 2 to 3 day hangovers.

Similarly, if you go out drinking, you will get 2 to 3 day hangovers and possibly still feel like death until Thursday. Gone are the days of being 18, going out clubbing on a Thursday night, rolling in at 5am, napping, getting up at 6am having a nice long bath and bouncing into the office like an incorrectly wired Furby. If you drink over the age of 22, you will spend the next day visiting your toilet for a very thorough look at the bowl, and you will still feel a bit ‘not right’ until the next weekend when you admit defeat and spend the weekend in a onesie not washing because you ‘went out last weekend’.