My best mate at school says that Gateshead was a good place to come from. She means that having grown up somewhere grim could produce the determination to find something better or at least different.

Better for me just meant a long way off - at least as far as London. I ended up in Colchester - where, due to the garrison, Geordie accents were fairly common. Colchester didn’t have much going for it, but it was seven hours from home.

University was certainly different. Though I would never have admitted it at the time, I was out of my depth socially. The place was full of middle class kids from minor private schools. I had never had much to do them away from that great leveller, the rugby pitch. We were from different worlds and had no idea about each other’s lives.

Most irritating were those who pretended to be poor as some kind of statement. In the worst cases this extended to not washing. I’m all for trying to understand where other people are coming from, but there are just no excuses for being filthy.

Still the working classes had the last laugh back then. Thanks to a full grant, a coal industry bursary and a couple of years profitable DJ work I was a well off student. Meanwhile the middle classes struggled as they waited in vain for their parental contributions. Poor little rich kids.

Despite all this, I loved Essex. Study was kind of optional. The point was to change the world - we were going to get our degrees anyway. So we got on in our various ways of bringing about the revolution - just as soon as the Union Bar closed. Really we should all have been thrown out and our places given to people who might have appreciated them more.

There were about 3,000 students then, more like a big school. Everybody knew everybody else and the Union Bar was big enough to accommodate everyone who wasn’t seriously boring.

Of course having arrived at Essex thinking I was left wing, I rapidly discovered that my Tribunite politics were wildly to the right in the barmy spectrum of student politics. I took it all far too seriously, but I did lighten up a bit by my third year. In the end I was enjoying it so much I had to stick around for another couple of years as a postgraduate.

Even then I found ways of mis-spending my time. I had got involved in Labour student politics and a group called Clause Four - mainly clever people with a smattering of charlatans. It was the place to be. Aside from a great deal of meaningful discussion and late night recreation, I met and worked with some interesting people some of whom ended up running the country. My then colleague and great mate John Boothman, an unfeasibly hairy man who is now a cheese of significance for the BBC in a foreign country called Scotland, had a series of bets on which of out contemporaries would become MPs first and which one’s might make high office. We were right about Jack McConnell and John Denham but were hopelessly wrong about many more.

One of these days John and I, at great risk to our livers, will get together, compare notes and settle accounts.