Every time I idly pick one up I am away with the fairies, somersaulting my imagination forwards into the glossy pictures, dreaming glorious dreams of leisure and inspiration and the Platonic ideal of the Good Life - that chimera which always somehow eludes those of us with day jobs and dodgy guttering, lawns to cut, tax to pay and knees that twang when you stand up suddenly.

I don’t want to be here, I want to be there! I want to fill in the forms, I want to book early and often, I want to go to that Illyria, that Elysium, and be one of those laughing happy, fulfilled, shiny-haired people in the pictures. Why am I stuck here? It’s not fair! Why can’t I go?

Because they’re not holiday brochures. They’re university prospectuses which, year after year, as they are tossed around the house by child after child, grow lusher and more alluring. Ah, those leafy campuses, those mellow buildings, those ancient yet buzzing cities, those playing fields and parks, that cafe society so subtly hinted at in artfully-blurred pictures of young people swinging past cappuccino machines with shoulderloads of books. Ah, those neat simple little cells in hall, those uncommitted single beds, those clean walls awaiting one’s treasured posters of Zappa-on-the-bog and Che Guevara! And just look at those communal kitchenettes down the corridor, speaking of a blissful freedom from any sense of personal responsibility when the cooker fails!

And get a load of those libraries, whispering with promise, light filtering from high windows through the thinnest of dancing dust!

Those acres of shelving, those wide old yellow tables just at the perfect height for brooding over half-forgotten rarities you’d never find at Waterstones or the public library. Think of the opportunities for grand old library jokes, like the one I always retell about a haughtily aristocratic and beautiful friend who sat like a marble statue in the Bodleian some 30 years ago. When approached by the inevitable, heavy-breathing nerd holding her seat-number card in his hand and ingratiating himself with the query:

“Scuse me, are you using volume XVIII of the Journal of Oriental and African Studies?” She replied “No, actually, I’m on the Pill”. Fab, eh?

I can hardly bear to dwell on the actual courses. How rich they sound, how full, how divinely adventurous! How wonderful to be actually supposed to read Shelley for a whole week, or meander around in Paradise Lost for months on end, or indulge your fierce private obsession with Richard III and then find that the best of all his recent biographers is giving a lecture 200 yards down the road, and that you can go there free!

How fabulous to be led through new, loopy disciplines, to choose modules and embark on long self-opinionated dissertations in the happy certainty that one person at least will have to read them.

Above all, the university prospectuses seem to breathe a rich promise of time. When you are a student, unless you are the most hopeless and disorganised specimen, or so broke you have to do 30 hours a week in the Wimpy Bar, you have time at your feet.

Compared to the frenzied pace of A-levels, it presents a tranquil, swanlike progress. Almost every course, especially in arts subjects, offers time to explore at a pace dictated by the material, to take side alleys of reading and wondering, and then wander off and find kindred spirits with whom to drink cheap coffee and indulge in long meandering discussions with no conclusion.

For the first time since you were a carefree pre-schooler sitting under the kitchen table with wooden bricks and a purring cat, you can take education at a natural pace, going for depth rather than tipping hurdles and ticking boxes. It is also probably the last time you will get such creative leisure until you are retired, by which time your knees will have seized up and you will have other stuff on your mind like berating the prime minister, wondering what happened to proper tunes and snorting at your grandchildren’s fecklessness. No: despite the broken hearts and the poverty, nothing you will meet in life beats being 19-years-old and enrolled in a good university on a course that you love.

And I hope, of course, that it will happen to my children and all six of my nephews and nieces and every bright young creature that I know. And I rejoice in whatever proportion of my taxes helps it happen. But it doesn’t mean I can’t be jealous of the little swines. University, like youth, is wasted on the young.