Students Aren’t To Blame For Booze Shame

As modern day students we are constantly derided as ‘bingers’ by politicians and parents alike, but if our predecessors were put in our shoes they’d drink just as much booze.

The audacity of Cameron and his sidekick Clegg to criticise students’ ‘scandalous’ excessive drinking, while simultaneously overseeing the rise of tuitions fees to £9,000 a year; congratulations to them for their relative sobriety during the days of their free education at Oxbridge.

While they may suggest that random genetic mutations are responsible for our generation’s binge drinking, it seems more reasonable to suggest significant socio-economic factors are in fact more likely to be responsible.

Indeed, as if the looming debt we’re accumulating from tuition fees isn’t enough, we are also ever so generously supplied with a student loan, which hardly covers our rent.

For while we are at home during the summer months, desperately scavenging for a part-time job scrubbing dishes, we are also handing over a grand for an abandoned Shoebox-Upon-Tyne, which we are kindly allowed to rent for an entire year, rather than an academic year.

So what are we supposed to do? While the freely educated, yet seemingly forgetful, ponder whether to introduce a minimum price for alcohol, we are left unable to afford a TV licence, indeed central heating is a luxury we can scarcely afford. Thanks to the damned estate agents we can’t even spontaneously buy a St. Bernard to bring some life to the ‘home’.

Meanwhile, the bars, pubs and clubs look very cosy indeed; some of them even have fire on the patios (and all sorts of dogs tied up out the front). What is more, they can offer us nine shots of vodka for less than the price of a much-needed bath back at the flat.

Furthermore, these trebles also take our mind off the fact we’re going to have to achieve a 2.1 in order to have slightly less terrible job prospects, whereas filthy bath water simply serves as a depressing reminder, a metaphor if you will for graduate job prospects.

If anything, developing a pleasant alcohol dependency while we’re at University makes sense. We’ll look back on these times as ‘the good old days’ 10 years down the line when we’re injecting heroin into our eyelids on our parents’ sofa bed.