A tribe called quest: Uni days hark back to a time of plenty

Regardless of the Government's morbid fear of the impending day that an entire generation of spotty British teenagers question their all but automatic conscription into University (read: an ever-more-efficient production line of well-heeled, tax-paying, loan-swallowing, consumerist middle-class planners), those halcyon student days of calculated sloth and weak Carling remain a Holy Grail of sorts.

University is the closest thing to a reinscription of hunter-gatherer society we unappreciative grads will ever experience. The food/water/shelter sources are artificial, of course, but the social parameters - and their manifold benefits - are broadly the same. Rampant individualism aside, those horizontal days offered glimpses of a golden age.

Eating, sleeping and working together in close-knit community, maximum four hours per day dedicated to situational survival (attending minimum-quota lectures on corporate ethics/skewering venison), and almost limitless time for recreation and lovemaking - no wonder those years are traditionally referred to as 'the best years of your life.'

But isn't it also surprising, then, how readily we post-Uni masses trot out the 'lazy fucking students' line - in the same breath as giddily recalling such luxuriating freedom? Somehow we have unquestioningly internalised our own wage-slaving oppression - accepting that the communal heaven we acknowledge our University years to have been is now, "obviously", impossible.