Students

I remember when I was a student. Everyone was cool. Thoughtful, intelligent, caring. Now I’m thirty suddenly I can guarantee every undergraduate you meet is a complete dick.

Have I heard of Portishead? Well, I was in my late teens when trip hop and the Bristol sound reached its zenith and I was lucky enough to hang around a club Geoff Barrow would DJ in, but you were — what? — five when Dummy came out, so why don’t you tell me all about it? Try and fit in the word ‘juxtaposition’ if you can. Even better, how about you put it on at 4am and I can listen to it through the floor?

Haircuts. Jesus. Every student you pass will without fail have the stupidest haircut you’ve seen since, I don’t know, forever. Why do you need to look like you’ve just survived a small improvised explosive device to the face? You’ve spent half your day crafting something so beautiful you’ll be embarrassed to even remember it six months from now.

And what’s with the gormless look? The facial expression that only flickers into something approaching interest when someone thrusts a camera in your face and uploads your latest look-down-then-up-and-pout Facebook profile photo.

Here’s a tip: people aren’t impressed when you buy your clothes from a charity shop. We give our clothes away once we realise someone from mid-80s communist Russia would be ashamed to be seen wearing it. But we can’t throw clothes away because we’d kill the planet or something, so we defy our guilt by offering it to the British Heart Foundation. So it’s laughable, not laudable, to see you walking down Byres Road attempting to fuse a Peruvian hat with my old, abandoned jumper.

Oh, one more thing: Californian mining communities started wearing jeans because they were hard-wearing. Buying them torn and ripped is nothing less than absurd, and spraying them onto those thighs that leave you teetering on the top edge of ‘overweight’ on the BMI scale means everyone walks past you desperately trying not to punch you in the face for ruining humanity for the rest of us.

Look, I know you invented satire and marijuana, and I know you’re going to change the world. I know because I did it all before you.

So stop being such dick about it.