Claire Black: 'They were dives, each and every one, the settings for humiliation and bad behaviour'

Published on Saturday 28 November 2009 19:12

HOW often do you read something that you find so depressing it seems the world has finally lost it? I felt like that when I heard about those Yangtze River dolphins becoming extinct and when I discovered Beck is a Scientologist. It happened to me again the other day when I read that student union bars are under threat.

According to the National Union of Students, takings have gone down by 50 per cent in the past 10 years as "students are drinking less and being forced to work more". Honestly, is nothing sacred?

Don't get me wrong, I am not glamorising drinking either to excess or inappropriately (from what I remember this is largely the purpose for which I used student bars). I know Scotland staggers its way into the top ten of the highest alcohol consumption rates in the world (we're eighth) and that our drinking culture is nothing to be proud of. But I'm trying to make a point about education here. Ignore this issue and Scottish students will end up, like their counterparts at Anglia Ruskin University (don't ask me where it is, I have no idea) with their union bar replaced by a gym. Free weights will line the walls where the optics once were, yoga balls will roll where suspiciously sticky bar stools once stood. It's just wrong.

There were three main bars in which I spent my formative drinking years: the Lord Todd, the Barony and the Mandela Bar. They were dives, each and every one, witness to scenes of humiliation and bad behaviour. But they were the settings for several life lessons that have easily been more use to me than the time I spent learning about the structure of Scotland's local government.

After a brutal experience with a Bailey's cocktail I learned that copying what your friends drink and the pace at which they drink is a mug's game. I learned how to extricate myself from terminally dull conversations with engineers wearing bad rugby shirt and jean combos. And I learned that, if you drink a vodka and Irn-Bru before an 11am lecture on subsistence farming models, the warm glow of rebellion will soon be replaced by the wrath of a lecturer and the pity of friends as you wake up in a pool of your own saliva so big your lined A4 pad is now papier-mch.

You might choose to look at the predicted demise of the union bar positively, welcoming it as a sign that students have, at last, realised that there's more to university than trying to be cool, trying to get a date and trying to make it to the bathroom before puking. And I can see why, from an adult perspective, coloured with concern about global financial recession, funding layabout teenage children's education and how many units is in one of those lovely big wine glasses, that makes sense. But wait. Students are mired in debt from the moment they begin studying until years after they graduate. They are facing the fact that getting a job after their degree is going to be one seriously tough gig. Surely they need a drink?

And what will they spend their time doing instead? Making their CVs look better, or worse, drinking in bars with the rest of us? Having four jobs, the debt of a small country and now nowhere to buy a pint of snakebite is simply one cruelty too far.