FORGET Keats and his mellow fruitfulness, what autumn means round my part of York is the return of the students.

It is the same every year, so we are used to it. One day the area is as quiet as an inner-city suburb can expect to be - and the next the streets throng with students.

Once you've spotted the first student of autumn, and walked past the young man standing outside his lodgings saying to his new friends "welcome to my party palace", you know the noise will follow.

And so it does, the shouting and drunken singing, the bellowing and hollering, the hoarse-throated grunting - a chorus echoed one year by a neighbour leaning out of his window and suggesting that the students "shut the **** up".

This is not going to be an anti-student rant as such.

A few centuries ago, I used to be a student and next year my eldest son is going off to be one.

As a student I drank the most beer of my life, swilling from one day to the next. Guinness in the student bar, with (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay on the jukebox and earnest pseudo-intellectual conversations about James Joyce or TS Eliot forming on my callow, beer-wetted lips.

Such vaguely studious thoughts were always being deflected by hopeless romantic attachments, which in turn were drowned with another pint - so it went on.

Yes, I know what it's like to be a student, but we weren't that noisy - were we?

There is a point to this, aside from one middle-aged man's mithering about cacophonous youth (I think middle age has just about grabbed me by the ankles, however much I dodge and dive). This week the Evening Press is investigating the cost to society of binge drinking and it seems fair to suggest that students binge with the worst of them.

A report released on Tuesday by the Portman Group, a body funded by the drinks industry to promote "responsible drinking", found a third of young women say they have been assaulted while drunk.

Young men who drink to excess are more likely to be involved in fights, get arrested or be cautioned by the police. More than a third of young women say they have been injured or robbed after drinking too much. And the same proportion report having unplanned or unprotected sex after too much booze.

So the noise and disorder at the end of our street, and along other streets in towns and cities everywhere, is more than a nuisance - it is a danger too, with young women being at particular risk.

Alcohol is the nation's favourite distraction, a lovely way to unwind and a terrible way to get into trouble. It's all in the degree and some people - especially but not exclusively the young - drink far more than is good for themselves or others.

With more drink available, and more pubs and bars applying to stay open later, Britain's stupid relationship with alcohol looks set to get worse.

And the students are likely to get noisier and noisier as they head home after a long night in the bar.

It's hard to suggest an answer, except to say that sensible drinking is a pleasure that bothers no one - while idiot drinking is a quick route to personal harm and social nuisance.

Because this is my year of sleeping badly, it's not much fun to trick the brain into sleep only to be woken by riotous hollering from over-imbibed students returning to their party palaces. But it's worrying too, because some of those bloody nuisances could get themselves into trouble.

And what's the Government's answer to all this? Oh, open the pubs for longer.

Am I missing something here?

Updated: 11:20 Thursday, September 29, 2005