VISITING MY sister in Edinburgh recently, and staying the night in her small spare room, I was looking out the window down onto the back green of the tenement, where a collection of traffic cones had been left on top of the bin shelter by students who live in a flat on the landing below.

Stealing traffic cones must be a strange by-product of a freedom the new student feels, because it's an epidemic in student halls.

It seems no student flat is complete without its own road sign or traffic cone. I'm not defending it; I think that it's maybe about the most useless thing a person could have in their house, and I was indeed ashamed when I awoke bleary-eyed one Sunday morning and waded through the rubbish in the hall of the student flat I lived in only to find a "Kilmarnock 7 miles" road sign leaning against the living room wall, left there by drunken flatmates.

I hated being a student. It was like school, only with more beer. First year student halls were a mild version of hell. There was a general stand-off concerning flat cleanliness. A couple of my flatmates were so transfixed and subverted by violent computer games that they drilled a hole between bedrooms so that they could connect computers and play each other all day and night, and not have to talk. (That was back in the days before wireless, when it required effort to get through walls.) We also had a flatmate who looked exactly like Bart Simpson, if Bart had had black hair, a scouse accent, and ate Fray Bentos pies every night.

It wasn't that people were unpleasant: everyone was nice enough in their own strange way. It's just never going to work, cramming lots of 18 and 19-year-olds who've just left school and never lived away from home, into five-person flats.

All that self discovery and growing up - it's like lots of tadpoles realising that they're supposed to be frogs except not knowing how to hop. And tadpoles with cans of beer and Bob Marley posters on the wall who think everything that they say is hilariously witty. I'm sure you know the type.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for higher education and learning, I just think that more often than not it's wasted on school leavers. It was on me and the people that I met, anyway.

I suppose my second year at university was a bit better. A group of friends and I rented an old townhouse and made creative use of it, practising and recording songs, much to the displeasure of the next door neighbour. Now that I am in danger of becoming the "next door neighbour", I'm a bit ashamed at the sleepless nights we caused the poor woman. I'm sorry Yvonne.

At least that was the only period of my life I'd spent like that. By year three I'd dropped out and was spending most of my time in a transit van and in various toilet rock clubs around Europe and the UK with the band. Which was considerably more hygienic and educational than being a student.

I think it was Werner Herzog, the brilliant auteur of German cinema, who, when asked by a budding film student for some career advice, told them to walk from London to Rome and film anything interesting that they saw along the way.

In retrospect, I think that was the kind of advice that I was hoping for when I enrolled. Not more exams, tests, and terrible nights in the student union.

Last month, out of the blue, through the letterbox came an enquiry from my former university asking me if I'd care to go back and complete the remaining two years of my course. I wasn't aware that you could take an 11-year sabbatical after dropping out. Maybe they need to boost the numbers.

Regardless, that letter is now stuck onto the front door of the fridge, held there by an owl magnet. And there it shall stay.

My one and only reminder of my life as a student.