People are shocked when I say I hated uni but it’s a lonely place with all that pressure and little support

We are experiencing a mental health crisis in our universities. There have been 10 suspected suicides at Bristol University in the past two years, including three in the past month. A further two have taken place at the University of West of England, which is also in Bristol, and in 2016 there were five apparent suicides at York University in one year.

Why is this happening when your university days are so commonly thought of as the best time in your life? Personally, I’m not surprised. I found university to be one of the most difficult and most stressful periods of my life.

I read English at UCL and one September was deposited at a hall in King’s Cross with 500 other students on a campus of tens of thousands — none of whom I knew. I was immediately struck by the total lack of any pastoral care. I wasn’t aware of any support available from my halls of residence and was never made aware of any help from anywhere, despite a lot of students going off the rails — mainly assisted by heavy recreational drug use.

My tutors weren’t interested in undergraduates and only seemed excited by going on Newsnight or getting their articles published in the Guardian.

I only had a few hours of university lessons a week and had endless time on my hands. My life went from being regimented at school to being almost entirely without structure, and for the first time in my life I was lonely.

Outwardly, I was popular, in with the cool crowd, but there was something joyless about the highly pressured relentless socialising. Drugs were everywhere. Not just the illegal kind — a lot of people I knew were on anti-depressants. Many dropped out.

Financially we were all under a lot of pressure. I was lucky, my parents gave me £6,000 a year, but my room was £110 a week so I had £5 a week to spare. We all maxed out on loans and worried about money constantly. God only knows how the present cohort feel knowing each year of university they are racking up loans of £9,000 a year — and that’s just the fees.

Bristol University reportedly pledged last September to spend £1 million on “wellbeing advisers” and has committed to hiring full-time mental health advisers and managers. But one first-year student at Bristol I spoke to said nothing had changed. “There is nearly no support, and if you want it not only will you have to seek it out yourself but there are long waiting lists,” she said.

Now that universities are raking in the cash, is it too much to hope that they will address the fact that university is a time when students are vulnerable and need to know that help is there if they need it?

I got through it by getting a part-time job at the Guardian and meeting my husband but even now I’m always amazed at how everyone makes out university is the best time of your life. It always really throws people when I tell them I hated it — but I did.

My boy’s obsession with 4x4s will not do

My six-year-old has committed his first act of meaningful rebellion by telling me when he’s older that he is probably going to get a 4x4. This is a deliberate attempt to upset me — I hate 4x4s and the selfish status-obsessed people who drive them.

I am constantly edged off narrow roads by women with perfectly coiffed hair and furious expressions delivering kids to school in gas-guzzling tanks whose tyres would be better suited to the bombed-out streets of Aleppo than Acton. What I can’t understand is why anyone would want one in London — the last time I looked, there were no deserts or mountains or ice-covered peaks, and parking must be a nightmare.

Driving one is such an aggressive statement — it suggests “I don’t care about the environment, I don’t care that if I hit your child I will kill them – at least mine are safe! Look how much my car cost and how big it is.”

Childcrushers are so vulgar, so selfish, so crass, surely people driving them can sense how much they are disliked? Finding out that someone I like drives a 4x4 is like them telling me they holiday in Dubai or how much they love their au pair who does everything for them and all for £80 per week.

Am I the only person who feels this way? Please, let’s ban them.

*She shone in Stella McCartney at H&M’s wedding and wowed the crowds at the Met Gala in a Richard Quinn confection. If there’s a party, Amal Clooney — barrister, human rights activist and fashion icon married to George Clooney — will be head-to-toe in designer gear bathing in the paparazzi glare. And what of it?

Amal worked on the Enron case, advised Kofi Annan on Syria and represents Yazidi women in their legal battle against IS. The do-gooder fashion maven celeb arm candy combo makes me feel queasy — but is there a problem with being a celeb fashionista and a voice on global human rights?