"Every morning, I wake up and it's the same. I get up, and I buy the paper, and I circle them all, and I phone them - only to discover they've been taken by a bunch of fucking psychic house hunters!"

Ah, Spaced. It's a bit like the Bible really; constantly quotable to its devotees, a bit of a mystery to the uninitiated. But if there's one scene we should all recognise, it's the one four minutes into the first episode where Daisy breaks down in tears over the horrors of househunting.

I have a motley back catalogue of housemates; Ivy who moved out to the country and spent our water bill money on a horse, Helena who copied (and then stole) my clothes while calling me her sister, Dan who sulked in his room for a month before moving out to a completely fictional house in Highbury... I sure can pick 'em. So it was with trepidation that I began the hunt once more last week to find a place by September.

It started badly, as it always does on gumtree. I realised years ago that most advertisers are incapable of writing anything remotely meaningful about themselves ("I like cooking and music" - well what bloody kind?) but this was the first time I found adverts that didn't even include helpful details like room size and rent rates. It was also the first time I received messages from people wanting to live with me bereft of such basics. Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought that if you replied to someone's advert, you were meant to, y'know, tell them stuff. More stuff than, say, "I have a flat/apartment to share with you and I would be very happy to give you the details if you could reply back". How do these people conduct the rest of their lives, I wonder? How do they pay bills - write back and ask them to write to again instead of paying?

Then came the unhinged, "Hi Flatmate" emails, signed with "Your Flatmate" for good measure - though I suppose at least that person hadn't created an email address of both our names. Another man was apparently more in need of a psychic than a tenant, uncomfortable with actually asking me things he needed to know when he could say, "There are some questions that I need answers to, but didn't get in your email".

And then, because I'm female and thus obviously rentable by the hour, I got this message from an "easymoneyhunny" email address:

Hi, I know you are looking for a room but i thought you maybe interested in some cash in hand work,
it pays £80 an hour and its not for sex, it helps pay the rent, well thats what i use it for.

Lord knows what kind of "hand" work she meant that was "not for sex".

I could go on. Except now I've finally found somewhere I do want to live, with people I want to like with, I'm just breathing a huge sigh of relief that it's over... for another year, at least.