At university, I had this flatmate, a philosophy student, who found minor celebrity for his ability to strawpedo bottles of cheap wine. Strawpedo? Urbandictionary.com defines it as “the act of downing a bottle of drink through the use of a straw — often followed by physical convulsions and sickness”. And circa 2002, it seemed a fun way to break up the ennui of a Tuesday night in Birmingham.

It was, though, only an occasional novelty — which is how we should view the majority of undergraduate drinking habits. When Philip Laing, 19, a student at Sheffield Hallam University, went to court after relieving himself on a war memorial poppy wreath, he had been taking part in a bar crawl organised by Carnage UK. However, the kind of people who attend the night, which is the equivalent of a package holiday complete with itineraries and T-shirts, are not the the most hardened drinkers.

When I went on a Carnage crawl at university, most students approached it with the same awkward enthusiasm of a holidaying housewife being egged-on to dance with a Spanish waiter: a bit fun, a bit different and the sort of thing you can later laugh about with friends over coffee.

Growing up in Leeds, my friends and I viewed students and their heaving pubs with envy. Sneaking into ropey student nights and getting leathered on snakebite seemed the last word in anarchic, blackcurrant-stained fun. Now, the student hinterland of Headingley seems full of smart, wi-fi-enabled spots offering stone baked pizzas or extravagant hot chocolates. It looks quite nice, really, but if you want to see proper, committed, Olympic-standard drinking, book a flight to Kos. Follow Leeds United away. Go into town on payday, with those who actually have jobs, where no one is herded from bar to bar, and where the carnage is anything but contrived.

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