Will I ever get over University?

No, I am not suggesting that 3 years on, I have still not got over my hangover. Although, I am sure that I would have far less now if I had not undergone the perpetual alcoholism that is the typically British University experience.

When I left University, it felt like someone had died. I exaggerate not. Although my student library card had carried on it for three years the expiry date: 01/06/06, somehow, some part of my brain had failed to register that this experience would actually end.

I suppose it is all apart of being young: the total inability to believe that you will at some point not be young anymore. Just as most human beings find it impossible to truly believe that one day they will not be here anymore: I lacked a total inability to see past that cathartic hedonism that was Uni. Resulting in one year of pure grieving post graduation and two years of self-induced denial a.k.a behaving like a student and trying to ignore the fact that I need to start being a responsible adult. If you are now wondering if you to may suffer from this 'syndrome', symptoms include: utter inability to not go and blitz your credit card after just paying it off; tendencies to drink more than one should and finding yourself crawling up the stairs to your flat at 6pm on a Sunday night having not been to sleep since Friday night and wondering how you are going to make it into work on Monday morning.

I remember walking into my post University holiday job after returning from my graduation and someone asking me how it was. I could barely hold back the tears enough to say "good, thanks". I felt like a widow. What have I done to deserve this? How could this happen to me? And then of course, the utter inability to admit that it had happened at all. This was like your g.h.ds breaking, to then find out that the company has gone bust and that you will never own a pair again times 100.

For a year and a half after graduation, no one could play 'naive' by the Kooks without watching me burst into tears. And now, three years on I find that I have simply re-created the world that I lived in at University. I am still single. Most of my University friends have moved to London and at the weekends I engage in debauchery and do my best to forget that: actually, I'm a grown up now.

Maybe I have unfinished business? Maybe I have not completed what I set out to do when I entered University society? Either way, every time I look in the mirror I see the ghost of my university self dancing behind the 24 year old "responsible adult" that has to go to work. Next thing I know, its Friday and I'm ensconced in the dance floor of a warehouse party suckered onto the face of a 22 year old. I never thought I'd say it: but perhaps I now really am a member of The University of Life.