Cigarettes & Alcohol

What a day of work. With the sun out for a fairly record-breaking fourth day in a row, and lectures and seminars finishing for the term (and indeed, finishing forever for those undergrads in their final year), all of the students sensibly decided to go straight to the library and spend the afternoon preparing for their exams.

No, that's a slight fib.

I've sold more beer in the space of six hours today than in days, perhaps even weeks. The fields out by the residence blocks have been crammed with youthful revellers soaking up the sun, aided by food, fags and beer. Among them were the Monday Night Club, my favourite regulars, who were nice enough to invite me to join them after I finished work, an offer I happily accepted.

I think they were a little bit perplexed by me taking photographs of the detritus on the ground. It was difficult to explain to them that a scene like this sums up what it means to be their age, and that it's something worth documenting. In the same way that you can sometimes find it tricky to picture the face of someone you used to know unless you can also think of a context to place them in, these small facts of a spring afternoon - fag packets, beer bottles, a discarded biro - could end up being their last link to today in years to come, when all the other memories have blown away like a sandwich wrapper in the breeze.

I think they thought I was talking bollocks. It's possible that I was. Six hours of bedlam and a couple of pints of lager will do that to you.