PARDON the yawn but my sleep keeps being fractured.

It's that time of year. As the poet Keats almost wrote, autumn is a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and drunken students singing at two o'clock in the morning.

Mist we do get occasionally, although the mellow fruitfulness is a bit thin on the urban ground.

What we lack in fruity abundance we make up for in students carousing. Living close to York St John's College this becomes a seasonal hazard, with a cacophonous start to the year trailing off until Christmas. Summer brings its own hymns to the joys of being young, alive and very drunk at some ungodly hour.

I don't want to start moaning about inebriated students making a racket in the traditionally quiet hours, but what with car alarms breaking into song in the middle of the night, and their owners coming into the street and attempting to silence their alarms by shouting even louder, sleep has been a bit hard to come by.

I really don't want to complain about students because that is to turn into just the sort of grumpy old sod I knew for sure I would never become.

The trouble is, the journey from the headlong gallop of being a student to lying awake at night and listening to today's intake having rowdy fun is surprisingly short.

Travel 200 miles and some 27 years, a distance covered in a flash, and I would be out making a nuisance of myself, catching the Number 36 bus back from New Cross to Lewisham, in south east London, before tumbling out with fellow trainee inebriates and crashing into the Chinese take-away, which sold just the sort of curry you needed after five or six pints of Guinness.

All that beer, all those books, all those friends - most of them disappeared (and the dearest one gone for good). I loved being a student, so it saddens me to berate today's lot - but couldn't you pipe down a bit, it is two of the a.m. variety and some of us have to get up for work in the morning.

Dianne Willcocks, the principal of York St John College, wrote on this page recently about the a contribution student make to this city. She made many good points and I agreed with almost everything she said. But I couldn't help noticing elsewhere in the Press that Dianne lives at Rowntree Wharf.

Shout as loud as they wish, the students will never wake up their principal.

A while ago, the college, or perhaps its students' union, issued lollipops so that the students would have something to keep their mouths occupied late at night. Either that policy has now stopped or the present intake are very promising ventriloquists.

IMADE fun of Tony Blair's speech in which he said he did not have a reverse gear. Now it appears that Iain Duncan Smith, driver of the Tory minibus, only has a reverse.

The speech the self-professed Quiet Man made last week struck me as the tackiest and most desperate in memory.

As Mr Duncan Smith went ever backwards, crushing his battered transport against the brick wall of voter indifference, I wondered how long the poor chap could keep his hands on the wheel.

Then came the allegation that Mr Duncan Smith had illicitly employed his wife as his secretary. Looks like it won't be long before the mutinous, self-flagellating Tories rid themselves of another troublesome leader.

Updated: 10:29 Thursday, October 16, 2003