Terms of Endearment

Another June thing.

It is the end of the academic year for the student population in the city.

To them it has probably felt like a very long period of their lives. The first year students began their journey just hours after the disclosure of their A Level results when, dependant upon their grades there will have been a clamour and a panic to reserve their accommodation for the forthcoming September or October start.

Most freshers are encouraged to take up rooms in  the official and managed Halls of Residence so as to find their feet in a strange city, make a few friends and at least get two sustaining meals a day.

Subsequent academic years are usually spent out in shared houses run by owner landlords and it is these, a good proportion of them that I get to see at this time of the year.

Contracts for letting are usually over 48 to 50 weeks of the year which gives only a very small window of opportunity for attending to redecoration, re-fitting, new carpets and the heavy industrialised process of removing blu-tac from wallpaper.

The main student streets, in June, are a hive of activity as white vans descend with contractors and cleaners vying for parking spaces with rubbish skips and forecourt frontages piled high with more than worse for wear furniture and furnishings.

It is also a good opportunity for the houses to be inspected and re-valued for the purposes of extracting any equity to go towards such refurbishments or to fund the acquisition of yet more housing stock.

In past years, and as a consequence of historically lower house price in the city than the national average it was common for wealthy or financially astute parents to buy a house to accompany their beloved sons and daughters for their 3 or 4 year secondment to the University.

In the period of the 1980's onwards there was a good prospect for capital growth over the short period of an academic course notwithstanding the generation of rents from fellow students and acquaintances who took up residence. A double whammy as it would be referred to with hindsight.

Indeed, an appreciation in values over a short term could set up the offspring nicely with any surplus available to go towards a deposit on a first proper residence in employment , finance that little run-around or a year off before having to get a job.

A combination of factors eventually put an end to this money spinning enterprise such as house prices in the city reaching parity with other regions, lack of liquidity amongst the Bank of Mum and Dad and an inability to really compete with the professional landlords in terms of standards, management and marketing.

A few parents were left, in effect, holding the baby, after their young adult children had graduated and gone. The houses in the best student areas rarely got to the open market but rather were traded between owners and landlords or their property managers like a life sized game of Monopoly.

The top ten owner landlords in the city now dictate the market. Rents are expressed as fully inclusive of internet, utilities and  the weekly service of a cleaner or concierge. Fitting out can rival the best budget hotels with flat screen TV's, leather settees and with rooms being en suite and comfortable, a far cry from my own experiences as a student in the early 1980's when, as a rule, first one up in the morning had responsibility for shuffling away the slug trails and emptying the mouse traps.

No wonder my generation of students got a reputation for being lazy. It was just down to being squeamish.

The current students have it quite a lot easier in their living environment but I would not repeat my time now given the uncertainties in the post graduate employment market and in the economies of the world as a whole.

Imagine if student houses were, freakishly the only surviving examples of 21st Century living after some cataclysmic event.

What would future generations make of them?

To start with there would be a general conception that the race of students were colour blind. This would be based on the all pervading use of magnolia and pastel shades for walls, ceilings and floor coverings.

Perhaps the population did not have any teeth or means of chewing based on the evidence that all sustenance was taken in liquid form with an alcoholic content. Excavations of poorly kept and overgrown gardens would reveal masses of brown coloured bottles, aluminium cans and small shot glasses.

It would appear that most tuition took place through a television screen or laptop with Playstation and Xbox being very popular and over subscribed providers of knowledge and life skills.

There would be little on which to base assumptions of on what the students were fed although it would appear to have been delivered in a large, square cardboard box on a daily basis and sponsored by the Italian nation.

Icons figured highly in popular student culture and each individual room of habitation would display one or more of the following images in glossy colour. Leafy vegetation and the flag of somewhere called Jamaica, a busty woman by the name of Kelly Brook, a hound lying on its back on a dog house looking upwards, various black men of gangster reputation and a reference to a place called Nirvana.

Many student residences were evidently being progressively improved and will have resembled a construction site given the abundance of Men at Work signs and hazard warning lights of a flashing variety.

Nocturnal activity was apparently the norm with curtains being infrequently drawn to let in microbe killing UV rays.

A principal trait of the student race was an eye for a bargain. A mantra passed down in colloquialisms was of "Buyonegetonefree" along with "Happy Hour" and common exclamations, thought to be close to ecstasy, of "Wowcher".

Enemies were abundant and the term "Bloody Students" is thought to be a reference to regular clashes with the indigenous population over noise, insensitive posh accents and strangely disappearing lap tops and bicycles from what were thought to be sound and secure stockades of academia.

As I trail around the hastily vacated and sorry looking shared houses I wonder whatever happened to their occupants on the long, hazardous and enlightening journey down south from whence they came.