No, it's not a Stomach Haemorrhage, it's those Cherrybees You Drank at Lunchtime or Time Cannot Easily Wash Away What They Did to Me, Mother

If ever there was a fitting icon for the gloriously incontinent years of the seventies, a lowbrow house-on-the-hill where everything was tolerated except hard work, it was our own Bingley college sequestered above the town where Elvis would never die, the town whose only claim to importance was to be that it had created and fostered the Yorkshire Ripper and then closed ranks to defend him even when the truth came out.  But we never paid much attention to them , anyway. We had our own secret life in our little pond at the top of the hill.

The words  "College of Education" always seemed an uncomfortable, almost self-conscious afterthought on the part of the authorities.  Hell, we weren't there to actually learn anything!  Not for the first three years anyway. In September 1973 you could buy nine pints of beer and ten Sovereigns for a quid, and if you had the time you could literally drink yourself to death for less than three pounds. And there was always time for a drink at Bingley. That was the point. After all, this was the happy time, when sex and food didn't kill you, when excess was in, jobs and money were still everywhere and the government obligingly handed over huge grants to all of us, except for the dismal, means-tested few whose only mistake was to have been born to parents who were comfortably off.
Bingley was one large knowing wink, even the name Bingley dared you to take it seriously, and soon after arriving, students (sic) and lecturers  (sic-er) came to the unspoken accord  that we would demand nothing from them if they in turn would ask nothing of us.  Bingley students were the soul of sunny mediocrity, they  had to be, otherwise they'd have gone to a university or at least a Polytech like the rest who'd got A levels in something more than Woodwork and Home Ec.
There were half-hearted attempts by some to claim that their true vocation was teaching, but nobody took them very seriously. The drama lot, the dancers and a few superior, blow-dried P.E. students thought themselves a cut above the rest, but after a while they were indistinguishable from the rest of us, melted down to common ore with too much round the midriff and smelly trainers with no socks by end of second year.  People went to Bingley because they knew someone who'd been there and had a good time. It was as simple as that. Those who'd wanted to go somewhere else and ended up at Bingley soon changed or shipped out.
Of course, it hadn't always been a secret holiday camp. Sacrifices had been made during the late 60s so that we might enjoy the privileges we took so much for granted. Before the strikes and revolutions at the close of the previous decade, our beloved NeverNeverLand had been a bleak, forbidding place called  A Training College where the women's halls of residence signed men in and out by nightfall as though they were visiting a  prison. The policy was based on the amazing assumption that sexual intercourse was impossible to contemplate before, oh, at the very earliest,  9pm . 
During a particularly tense governing board meeting around that time, Miss (?), the Victorian dowager and senior college administrator, proposed a solution:  instead of the security guards scouring the halls banging on doors in search of alpha males who'd not yet signed out, a  loud bell should ring at the appointed hour advising the young men that it was time to finish their tea and refreshments, their amusing conversations and...depart. This alarm, explained Miss (?) with sudden inspiration, would be known as The Withdrawal Bell . 
Within a year of that seminal moment, everything had irrevocably changed. NeverNeverLand was no longer called A Training College and young men were permitted to stay in women's halls for as long as they wanted.  Whether the women wanted them to stay is not recorded for posterity.  Students, thanks to the spirit of the age, were not so much entrusted with the responsibilities of adult community life as simply left to their own carnal devices while the college authorities, having watched while the blue touch paper was lit, stood well back with their eyes closed and fingers in their ears. Which probably explains why we were able to get away with so much wonderfully reckless, irresponsible behaviour.
Things happened at Bingley that would be impossible now in the post-Thatcher age of pay-as-you-go.  During 1971/2 academic year,  Fray, a lad from London , lived in Priestley with Phil Simmons or Phil Hearne or maybe it was with the mysterious Gino.  At any rate Fray dined each day in the cafeteria and was like any other student at Bingley except for the fact that he wasn't  a student. He'd arrived jobless, homeless and penniless to spend the weekend with someone who was a student and had liked it so much he'd decided to stay for a year. What a great country! There are people today who still remember him but never knew he wasn't a student.  Still more were amazed to learn that they had actually been students and even more incredible, they would receive, at the close of three years , something called: A Certificate of Education !!!!  If it had been anything, they agreed, it had certainly been  An Education . No mistake about that. Amazingly, there was life after Bingley, despite Dave Holland's pessimism, and I can report that I've had more than a few near-Bingley experiences since. They almost always follow the same awesome patterns: a brilliant white light at the end of a long, dark tunnel; a spinning nausea, the sound of cascading water, beckoning white hands and muffled voices. And waking up next day in the pale dawn with a strange throbbing in the head and the feeling that something momentous has happened in the night, drawing close to the mirror you discover that one of your eyebrows has mysteriously vanished and there is eerie, indecipherable writing on your face as if by some cunning, alien hand...
It's a neat axiom that we must pay dearly for our Roman pleasures. More than a few of us have acquired a special affection for that extra drink, a custom acquired with a vengeance during life in NeverNeverLand.  But for what it's worth, we can console ourselves with the dubious knowledge that unique among those who have lived in this century, we 70s children had more fun than the generation that now succeeds us. Who could argue with that?
   Gavin Dunnet 73-77