Students have a lot of bottle

Frankly, I don't think I've ever seen such scenes of complete and utter debauchery in all my life. Apart from having the misfortune to step in a pool of fresh vomit, I also had to dodge paralytic students rolling in the gutter and young revellers emptying their bladders in the doorways of shops in Milsom Street.

Sometimes it seems to me as if Bath is drowning in a sea of alcohol as we see herds of young people pouring bottles of designer beer down their necks and losing all sensibility by sinking shot after shot of vodka.

At the weekend our city is overrun by these drunken yobs and yobettes many of them students and the story is the same over much of the rest of the country.

Thankfully there is a glimmer of hope that the tide may at last be turning. After years of concern over excessive drinking by his students, the Dean of St John's College, Cambridge, has decided that enough is enough.

Following a particularly disgusting night of student depravity at the college, the Rev Dr Andrew Macintosh decided to dish out some fitting punishments to his sozzled students in an effort to lay down the bounds of decent human behaviour.

Dr Macintosh has taken tough action against three students from the all-female Sirens drinking club who were hosting a home drinking fixture against the Magdalene Wyverns. The women were so "hammered" that they vomited all over the college grounds and toilets.

They were ordered by the good reverend to clean out the lavatories to the satisfaction of college cleaners. Two other young women who were involved in a food fight at the college have been sentenced to clean tables and floors in the dining room, and a couple of young men who decided to use the college grounds as an al-fresco urinal now have the task of devomiting the toilets for a whole week.

Predictably, a students' representative has described the Dean's punishments as "draconian", but Dr Macintosh and his staff disagree. For some time the college cleaners have been growing increasingly frustrated by the arrogant and high-handed attitude of the drunken and foul-mouthed yobs whom they have to clean up after.

Students who have fouled toilets after heavy sessions of post-binge vomiting have shown very little remorse for their behaviour. Some of them, according to the cleaners, even think that it's funny for some poor "uneducated townie" to sluice away the contents of the students' stomachs from college toilets. Now the students are laughing on the other side of their faces.

These privileged young people who are being given a heavily subsidised education will probably one day be politicians, barristers and business leaders. But many of these academic elite seem to spend more time drinking than studying. Cambridge is awash with student drinking clubs some of them all-female societies with such dignified names as: The Slappers, The Minxes, The Slags, The Sids, The Pink Ladies and the Girton Gym Slips.

Initiation ceremonies at these bizarre sisterhoods involve such unsavoury acts as flour and egg fights or eating a Mars bar out of some man's underwear. One drinking club even inducts its new recruits by challenging them to drink 10 pints of lager. If they fail to be sick by the 10th, they are then forced to drink a pint of vomit... or urine.

All I can say is, thank goodness the university is finally making moves to drum some sense of decorum into its students.

It would be nice to see something similar here in Bath. Maybe we could get some of our weekend drunks to clean out the shop doorways that they use as lavatories. Perhaps we could even get them to dispose of some of the unmentionable items that end up being thrown into the basement courtyards of city centre properties.

I'm sure that's something that all of Bath could drink to.

And finally. .

APPARENTLY, a group of "independent experts" has given Bath the thumbs up for the cleanliness of its streets.

Well, I have to admit that the city centre is no longer knee-deep in rubbish and the streets are looking a bit cleaner. Mind you, that might have something to do with the fact that there's been a dramatic fall in the number of tourists visiting Bath since September 11.

But credit where credit is due things are beginning to look up. All we need to do now is to tackle the millions of blobs of discarded chewing gum on the pavements and we'll be looking more like Cheltenham.

I suppose that cynics amongst our readers will want to know who these "independent" experts" were who said Bath's streets were positively gleaming.

Well, they were a group of council officers from neighbouring local authorities. You see, it seems that council cleaning managers go around inspecting and marking each other's towns for cleanliness.

Now I'm sure everything in this case was all above board, but it does make you wonder whether such a cosy system might not be open to abuse.

"I'll say your town's clean... if you say mine's clean too."