Uni days

I trust we've all read this?

Three years dossing at university? It's the only way to train for life

I never think back to uni and get misty eyed about the lectures I attended.

Alright, actually I do sometimes, especially these days 'cause back then having a row with some Toby or Clarissa in a seminar about politics and popular culture was considered the 'work' part of going to uni, as opposed to the 'work' part of life these days, which is a lot less interesting and takes up a much bigger part of your day.

I'll always remember having a mature student from Coventry in my politics classes. He was a big burly working class lad, probably about thirty, and the happiest bloke on campus, everyone used to know him because he was so chipper and an all-round lovely bloke. I got to a class five minutes early one day (that's not the interesting part...) and he was sat outside in the sun with his walkman on. He took it off and said "Hello mate - ain't this grand? I'm sat here listening to some world music on my walkman and waiting to go into a politics class I really enjoy when, like the rest of my family, I should be down the car plant working my nuts off for a pittance."

He properly loved it and would put the rest of us to shame in the way that we would show up the kids if we went back to uni now - after getting a sniff of the real world, and coming to realise that the subjects you're learning about are in fact interesting, you'd enjoy getting stuck into the books and doing a 'massive' sixteen hours a week work, which is what they recommended you do at my gaff - eight on lectures and seminars and eight personal study.

Sixteen hours a week! You'd happily let them cut an arm off for that kinda of schedule these days and yet at the time there was more chance of a nose-fulled threesome with Emma Noble and Kimberley Davies than there was of going to all your classes and then doing the same hours again down the library.