And at the count of three I pull back the duvet

Of course, the one thing I keep forgetting about is the Grand Adventure.

Look at it this way; life is a path. Throughout your childhood, the path is small, and your parents help you walk it. At school, your teachers take over some of the shifts from your parents so they can go back to some semblance of normal life.

At university, you're expected to walk this path on your own for the first time. The path is wide, well-lit and well maintained, and there are lots of other people walking it at the same time as you - not necessarily with you, but there, nonetheless. At the start, the path seems easy to walk because, well, you don't know what you should be worrying about.

Over time, the path narrows, and the people with you start to drift away down their own tributaries, and the lights dim a little and everything gets that little bit more foreboding, piece by piece, until you reach the gate to The Real World(tm) and you're expected to push that gate open with some sort of misguided confidence that the world won't just slam it in your face, laughing.

Then, once you're out into the real world, there is no path except that which you make your own self, and if you don't have a map, well, good luck!

I love it here, but it isn't a grand adventure. It's a job, and one I'm lucky and glad to have, but a job nonetheless. I commute with all the other commuters, I put in eight to twelve hours a day (including, last week, a seventeen hour day, always fun), then I go home and do all the things a normal person would do. But it's not a grand adventure. Of course, I'm not sure my first time around on the university merry-go-round was a particularly grand adventure either, but...

... Yes, this is one of those things I struggle not to mention to The Young People Of Today. And it is a struggle, because while some of them are intelligent and well-to-do, some of them are so fucking dumb it makes me want to channel Spider Jerusalem and slap them over the head.

I know, I know, you're saying, they have to learn for themselves. And maybe they will. Maybe I'm sitting in a class of future directors, presidents and all round good guys who just need a little seasoning before the real world swallows them whole. And you're probably also saying why are you judging them? You're a workshy postgraduate who couldn't hack it in the real world!

And you're not wrong. I'm in no position to judge, whatsoever. But consider this; on an average week, I can note the following;

- Students using the films illegally downloaded from filesharing or torrenting sites as evidence of all sorts of things, from release date to quality, as if it's fact

- Lecturers mentioning the same thing at least once a week and, most recently, across lectures - i.e. the same material pops up in two completely separate lectures for no apparent reason

- Students actively arguing with lecturers in the middle of a lecture - not in an appropriate environment, i.e. a seminar, although god knows that happens too, but interrupting a lecture to make a point that, crucially, didn't need to be made

- Because of this, other students simply give up; the motivated ones leave halfway through a given lecture whilst the others barely turn up at all

- And at the end of the course, it's still likely they'll get a passing grade because of standardised testing, meaning both the argumentative and the lazy ones will pass into next year, no worries, mate.

I have a simple view. It runs thus: the world is what you make it, baby. So I go to the lectures that, thanks to burgeoning tuition fees (up approximately 250% in six years, thanks Labour!) cost between £15 and £20 an hour, even when they're interrupted or unattended. I use the library, even though my course isn't traditionally a reading one.

And I care. And this may be my downfall. Because apparently nobody - or at least, almost nobody - else seems to, anymore.

The end of the semester is four academic weeks away, then the students of today float away on the summer winds for the three and a half months that the university simply doesn't want to deal with them. I'll miss some of them.

Some of them, I really won't.