“Everything is laminated with the oily film of spillages.”

MY CAR is parked, hazards on, up on the kerb in Cork.

For the past 15 minutes, I’ve been emptying its contents onto the pavement outside my daughter’s first year in college student house. While she opens the front door, I grab a box of her belongings and look up.

The façade is denuded of the kind of decorative features that normally suggest ordinary human habitation; it’s unloved and dismal.

We close the front door behind us. Standing in the funereal gloom of a dark hallway, I blink. I follow my daughter into the gloom of another room, where boys lounge on degraded sofas. I perch on the arm of the sofa and look around the room; everything in it is laminated with the oily film of a million student spillages; a fag-ash-and-food glaze.

The grimy backdrop works as a foil for the boys, heightening them to a weird kind of sparkling, box-fresh cleanliness. They scramble up, turn off the screeching whine of Xbox racing car engines, say hi and offer to fetch boxes from the boot of my car.

My daughter wants to show me the kitchen. I balk like a horse spooked by a jump. We go upstairs and sit on her bed instead, where my spirits sink further anyway.

This bedroom signifies the dramatic and distinct divide between one phase of her life and the next. For some reason connected with this, I’d like it to be clean. I’d like to leave her in a room that doesn’t smell of something I’m loathe to put my finger on.

She couldn’t give a flying feck about the domestic ambience. I don’t suppose any of the eight housemates do. Life is not about that now; life is about unfettering themselves from former constraints — which have been placed on them by their parents up until this point — to do any of the following:

1. Pick things up.

2. Put things back.

3. Slice cheese instead of biting it and putting it straight back in the fridge.

4. Stop putting everything off ‘till after Come Dine With Me.

5. Put the tops of things back on properly.

6. Strike a healthy balance between moving limbs and sitting like an obelisk in front of a screen.

7. Plan an early night once in a blue moon.

8. Look after their livers.

9. Eat greens.

10. Wake up before lunchtime.

11. Stop deafening themselves with Muse/depressing themselves with Mick Flannery.

12. Stop leaving apple cores down the side of the sofas along with tissues and half a Nutella sandwich from earlier.

I return to my daughter’s house one week later at 2pm with the last of her belongings.

At first, from the hallway, it looks as if a wave of orange bedding has broken over the sitting room. Satsuma-coloured duvets spill from the sofas onto the floor and the kitchen seems to have acquired, unaccountably, a new focal point: an old mattress, which lies flat across the ancient lino, on the diagonal between the cooker and fridge. People walk over and around this mattress to heat their soup.

I’m offered tea by a boy who rises, stretching slowly like a bored cat, from one of the orange duvets. He’s been couch surfing here for a couple of days, he tells me, yawning. While I greet my daughter, somewhere in the field of my left peripheral vision, there’s a brisk manoeuvre; I’m pretty sure the boy is dropping his pants and putting on another pair. I realise I’ve interrupted his morning ablutions but he doesn’t seem to mind, not if I don’t.

My daughter settles down onto the satsuma duvet, while someone else asks the bored cat boy to put the kettle on. He stands on the mattress to do it.

I look about: the oily laminate of a million student spillages has been augmented by new ones, a confetti of fag butts, pizza boxes and beer-can-ring-pulls has settled over the rest of the room and the smell I’m loathe to put my finger on has ripened.

As I expected, one week on, all eight housemates have emancipated themselves from the tyranny of household chores and parental constraints: The fine tradition of student squalor lives on.