When people say to me “Steve, what were your student days like?” I say “funny that, you’re the first person ever to ask me that ever, except in the context of a contrived pretext for a blog entry.”

My student days were a once in a lifetime chance to waste the unique opportunities you don’t realise you have until you’ve been graduated for a couple of years. They were also a time when, if I found a bike in a ditch, I could right then spend the next 72 hours straight restoring it to running condition. They were a time of making kung fu movies in the woods; of building remote controlled ducks and sinking them in Queens Dock liverpool; of building near-1:1 scale Minis out of snow; of forming a band, giving them two weeks to learn the songs, playing a live gig and breaking the band up again; of becoming the vocalist in another band purely on the strength of being a member of band society and hence meeting the guy who would later offer me a job (hi namke:-). They were a time of finding porn on Computer Services’ personal user filestore while searching for an image of the hot girl who used to come in the computer science labs to check her email, of learning to devilstick, unicycle, and ride an ultimate wheel, a time of fire juggling on campus without so much as public liability insurance or a fire blanket, and a time of bringing down the campus network servers with the network traffic from a multiplayer game someone on our year made, and of turning up hours late for a fancy dress party because my robot suit took so long to stand up in.

I’m not sure the alumni office had anything much to do with any of that.