What is it to be a first year? To be thrown head-first into the world of independence. To embrace the hedonic world and to be encouraged to do so. To awake in strange beds with exciting sexual partners and interesting venereal diseases, and then to feast on the Breakfast of Champions – the Super Noodles of Epicurus and the Carlsberg of sexual conquest. These experiences are not so much an entitlement, but more a prescribed rite of passage, even acknowledged by the relatively unrigorous curriculum of the first-year undergraduate.

A lecturer looks upon the hungover fresher with a mixture of approval and disapproval, as a father looks down at his miscreant son, “You’ve been in a fight! Disgraceful!……….. Did you win?” As Plato would have looked at a young Aristotle, the pity and envy with which the wise old sage watches the blunders of youth. Yet, to heed the words of the wise is to vaults youth’s folly, and what could be more unwise? Shouldn’t the scruffy, unwashed young thing that limps into the lecture theatre wearing yesterday’s clothes drenched in half a pint of scotch be greeted with a standing ovation? Shouldn’t the faculty award for attainment go to that student that has slept in the most wheelie bins? The industries of this nation are built upon such heroes, without them the sweet, sickly alcoholic drinks industry would dissaparate, our beloved Kebab industry would starve, and who, O who would buy all the Borat thongs? China, that’s who, and Iran.

So let’s not berate our first years, let’s celebrate them, embrace them, buy them a good square meal if they look a little peaky. They are after all, only slightly happier, less stressed versions of you.

Wez Milligan