Mobile Phones - You see them everywhere...in shops and on street corners, in parks and in cars, in restaurants and on trains. And now university campuses are swarming with people with mobile phones.

I can understand executive-types having them - a briefcase in one hand, a plane ticket in another and a small phone protruding from under a chin as they close a multi-million pound deal in Milan. Anyone, in fact, who needs one for work, but a student? It's a juxtaposition, a contradiction in terms.

The mark of a student used to be ripped jeans, a CND badge and stooped shoulders as they worried about an immense overdraft. But not now. Instead of campaigning for human rights and getting drunk on out-of-date-cola, the students of today are getting yuppified.

Gone are the days when you used to see poor undergraduates rummaging for pennies to pay for a cold cuppa from the refectory, worrying about 5,000-word assignment deadlines and wondering if mushrooms growing on the bathroom floor, mice in the kitchen and no windows constituted poor housing and should the Environmental Health be called in and the building condemned - along with the landlord. Nowadays students are likely to be landlords themselves.

Upward mobility is a good thing, but being the nostalgic sort who wears rose-tinted contact lenses, I cannot but hark back to the good old days, the student poverty of yester-year. Ah, I remember with stomach-rumbling fondness the way we would eat slices of toast, and nothing but toast, for weeks on end and then, when on the brink of scurvy and several other unidentifiable illnesses, decide to have a treat and yep, put beans on top of them.

It was always so hard to phone home and convince your mother that you hadn't run off and joined the circus, that you were still alive: ("Are you sure?" Mum would ask).

Maybe that is the reason that so many students have mobile phones nowadays - parents are so concerned about their offspring getting lost, homesick, joining the circus, etc, that they supply them with these objects so that they can keep tabs on them?

Amazingly, even schoolkids have mobile phones now. You see young girls around college who could not possibly need a mobile phone yet they have them and proudly show off every time it rings in the middle of a lecture. It's a status symbol, along with a swanky car and designer labels.

And it's not just the young ones. An old family friend came to our house and after spending half an hour moaning about the youth of today and their obsession with materialism he was interrupted by the sound of ringing. His mobile phone had gone off. Unfortunately he didn't know how to answer the call, or turn it off and just ended up embarrassed. He explained that it was his son's and that he was looking after it. Although it does have some status, on the wrong sort of person a mobile phone also represents something shady. You get the feeling that the only kind of business going on is monkey business.

But students will continue to have them. Maybe it's because, according to reports in the paper, the use of mobiles increases the brain's reaction time, so the next time they are in the bar and someone asks them if they want a drink, they'll be able to answer faster than ever: "Yes!!!" You see, a mobile phone on campus does have its uses after all.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.