Over the next few weeks, thousands of first-year university students around the UK will be doing one or more of the following things: eating rank kebabs, having bad sex, binge drinking snakebites, waking up spooning empty takeaway boxes. Pre-drinks will be followed by pub crawls that wind up in the local Pryzm. And September will end in a localised plague of sorts – freshers’ flu – the inaugural lurgy of the British university, and the karmic punishment for sharing drinks and snogging your course mates.
That’s the idea, at least. But ambiguity surrounds whether that kind of freshers’ chaos is a thing of the past. Are we not living in the era of the so-called “puriteen”? And an entire generation of sober, prudish youngsters eager to turn their backs on the adolescent hedonism of their millennial and boomer forebears? Actually speak to young people today, though, and it turns out things are a bit more nuanced.
