Robbie Dale sums up the season of farewells at the university.

SO that's it, time flies so fast when you're having fun doesn't it?

By the time you read this, university will have finished for another year, people will have moved on, and first years will be looking forward to acquiring the status of 'know-it-all'- at least with regards with how to walk into town and find a take-away at 1am - when they return next year.

Next up is an extended holiday, a chance to get away from York for a bit and build up your strength for another year in the front line.

While three months of relaxing, enjoying never-ending evenings out and waking up just in time to catch Neighbours may not seem like a departure from the normal schedule of term-time life, the summer holiday is the time in which students can return home in order to complete the metamorphosis necessary to move up the chronological ladder.

It's a time to reflect on the year gone by and work on an intricate study timetable for the year ahead. It's a time to earn some cash to get the accommodation office off your back for the time being and enable yourself to purchase shiny new electronic equipment, and it's time to escape from all the ducks.

This weekend, therefore, doesn't see many events with a student bent, so my advice is to get on the phone to your old friends from home and from school, identify that pub or night club haunt that saw you through your A-levels and escape the uni frame of mind in the most inebriated way possible.

Come Saturday morning there will be a trail of cars with duvets hard up against the back window streaming away from York.

It will see first years getting embarrassed as their dads keep shutting the car boot when they're trying to load things because their attention has been taken by a particularly short skirted history of art student.

There will be drawers full of socks forgotten, bikes left chained up because frankly they won't fit on the roof rack and a lot of goodbyes.

Updated: 08:41 Friday, June 25, 2004