If you’re bored, having mauled off your nails and memorised your wallpaper, then you’re not alone. My brain’s natural autopilot descends into procrastination as follows; drawing palm leaves in black biro in the corner of my notepads, matching up my socks, educating my housemates on Princess Diana’s guilty pleasure of bread and butter pudding (stale Hovis and raisins just became a classy affair), reading through old journals cringing at the Jane Austen phase that resulted in emotions described using words like ‘felicity’ and, arranging the contents of my stuff draw into ninety-degree angles.

Previously, I spoke about freshers developing new coping mechanisms because of restricted access to pubs, clubs, friends, and family. In hindsight, I should have predicted what followed.

Whilst I’m picking the grub out of my fingernails for what feels like the hundredth time these teens, carotid arteries thick with home bargains vodka, have spent their evenings turning the accommodation residence into an insalubrious townie park. Strolling through the aftermath, I saw lacy black knickers kicked surreptitiously behind a bush because it’s not a park boozer unless someone’s had a fumble between the industrial bins. Cigarette butts discharged scattershot across the floor like the accompanying exchanges forgotten and blurred by warm beer. Grass skirting the designated smoking area turned brown and slushy, an ode to welly boots that should have spent the summer fashioning Glastonbury into a dirt-bath. Concluding the festivities an admirable attempt to throw a party in the block opposite, only going belly-up when raided (which had me imagining a police firearms unit busting down the door shouting “SIR, STEP AWAY FROM THE WKD!”).

The only positive outweighing the hours of robbed sleep listening to this carnage play out is that it’s managed to fill many a dinner time chat. Poring over the juicy details of who did what and when like a school-girl gossip is addictive. LIVING. FOR. THE. DRAMA.

However, because I’m a boring fart, I do have an adult observation I wish to impart. One, alcohol is a prosthetic for the melancholy mind and poor one at that. I used to be a big-time party girl skiing down the stairs of my four-storey house, taking drugs that transmogrified my friends into goblins and ending up paralytic in the back of an ambulance hair accessorised with brick-hard sick. From my window, I can watch all these young, elastic faced things as if I’ve put a VHS recording of my life at seventeen into a tape player and yes, it is fascinating but also sad. I used to be part of a large friendship group that without alcohol as a sticking glue, drifted apart. I was depressed and scared about my future and, flying headfirst into a vat of Captain Morgan’s felt easier than facing down my anxieties. Why else would freshers get so drunk if it wasn’t to speed up the bonding process without having to deal with awkward icky pauses?

Not only this, but it’s also made me realise how unoriginal drunk people are. It’s funny to think how rebellious I thought I was being when really, I was following in the footsteps of countless teens before me. Oh, and I certainly don’t miss the mornings waking up in a stranger’s bed, bank card gone, rooting around for pennies in my purse for the bus ride home. But hey – it’s the circle of life right Rafiki!

Learning how to knit in my mid-twenties makes me think I’m only a fig-biscuit away from a matching chintz sofa and dolly dress but does that mean what I’m doing is any less fun than these park town shenanigans?

I wonder when the febrile excitement of partying wears down what hobbies these kids will turn too. Sometimes I get FOMO but, for the most part, I’m content with my idiosyncrasies. Of course, I’m no longer searching for an identity and acceptance within my peer group. Alexa? Order me another set of black biros.