Here is the latest in our series of blogs by Glasgow students.

Edward Davies studies multimedia journalism at GCU. He loves comic books and always has an opinion on football related matters.

The life of a student is defined as the life of a party animal. You cannot utter the word student without people associating you with a pool of vomit in a nearby alleyway or assuming you spend every Monday night getting ‘mad wae it’. To some extent, that notion is true.

Arriving at university, first years will seek to use their new independent existence to go out on the town and show off their ability to get embarrassingly paralytic in front of a lot of similar characters. The moment they grab that first bottle of tropical vodka pop, they have achieved everything they want in life. We should be awarding them with a medal. Most likely they will be needing a bucket at the very least.

There seems to be an obsession for young teenagers with letting the world know they are able to consume alcohol. Is it the attention they crave? Or is it the mere adrenaline rush of being able to hand your ID to a bouncer without hearing the inevitable ‘not tonight, pal’?

Drinking and partying will always be part of a university student culture. Students will always spend their evenings dancing until 4am with their peers and trying to take home someone who probably lives just across the hall from them.

The bigger question for me is this: do we really need a drink in hand to enjoy ourselves nowadays? Can we not enjoy a night, an afternoon, an event, without a bottle of bubbly or a glass of the finest ale in the house?

Alcohol will always be overly glamourised. As soon as a party or seemingly uninteresting event offers ‘a free drink’, it automatically becomes more exciting. Because you need a plastic cup of cheap chardonnay to enjoy an afternoon of speeches? Pat yourself on the back. It seems that a lot of the simple pleasures in life - be it a birthday party, a football game or even a team meeting of some kind require alcohol to make it more enjoyable.

 

We all know the negative aspects of drinking, but the golden crown we give it when trying to get people out and about is wrong. Booze should never be a necessity.

You may ask that myself, as a student, must be enjoying a beverage or two throughout the week. This is true, I enjoy getting hammered just as much as the regular university attendee. That does not mean that the attention and allure which drink is currently across all aspects of society doesn’t greatly frustrate me.