Natalie lived next door to me. She was years older - at least four. That was an unbridgeable gap in those days. She appeared experienced and sophisticated in a way that I wasn’t then and probably am not now. Also she was French; dark haired, beautiful, effortlessly sexy. I’d only gone to university and found Brigitte Bardot living in the next room!

And then, mid-term, she moved out. Our juvenile antics must have irked her. Oh - the bottomless pain of separation! The exquisite misery of emptiness! Surrounded by hundreds of eighteen year olds I was alone, so alone.

I played Hatful of Hollow endlessly. Morrissey incongruously spoke to me. ‘Please, please, please let me get what I want’ he sang through my cheap speakers. There was silence from the empty room next door.

East Slope, Sussex University, autumn term 1986.

I was driving my daughter around ‘my’ Brighton before one of the recent interminable lockdowns. We were stopping off and photographing all my previous addresses throughout Brighton and Hove. Some I stayed at for a matter of weeks, others for several years. Many looked decrepit, a handful were grand, very grand. I had situational memories of all of them. Job. Girlfriend. How cold they were (it was alway cold in Brighton flats).

On the way back to Burgess Hill we stopped off at Sussex University. I’d lived in three campus apartments over two years - East Slope, Kent House and Park Village. Let’s see if I could retrace once familiar steps and show my daughter, well what? Where Natalie left me bereft all those years ago? Mmm, maybe not. But to get a sense of where I lived certainly.

But like most universities since the 80’s, Sussex has got bigger - ‘welcoming’ more and more students in order to meet Tony Blair’s ridiculous 50% target. Add to this to the maniacal drive to recruit loads of fee paying foreign students and you have a university with near four times the number of ‘clients’ it had when I went there.*

So although we drove past many familiar buildings, there was a new feeling about the campus. It seemed very closed in whereas I remembered it as much more spacious when I was there. Tricks of time, perhaps. Sussex was a relatively small university in the 80’s and the student body was split fairly evenly between public school tossers and the brightest and best of the comprehensive system. 4500 students in all - one third living on campus. It felt like a village. A village out in the Downs, ten minutes train ride from Brighton. It sported Sussex red brick and the architect - Basil Spence - had designed the layout so that it nodded vaguely in the direction of a classical Roman forum. (I know this stuff because I used to do campus tours for prospective parents and students in my third year. £3 a pop, I remember.)

There were the bars of course. East Slope bar was notorious because of the cheap drinks, the scrum to get those cheap drinks and the sticky floor caused by said drinks being too difficult for students to navigate the plastic glass of Kronenberg from glass to mouth without spilling. (Pints were 60-70p). Park Village Bar merits a mention as it was the home of the Julie’s Jinx, a pint of every spirit behind the bar starting from a base of half a cider. These cocktails never lasted long in your stomach.

Sussex has changed since the 80’s. New high rise accommodation blocks bestride and dominate the northern end of campus. All those extra fee paying students have to live somewhere I suppose. Inside, these alien structures are probably very nice replete with all the mod cons our current flock of students demand. But the village feeling, the uniqueness of the first red brick university, has gone. And so has East Slope, so named because all the student accommodation was in single story flats rising gently up a hill. All gone. And yes, that campus flat where I met - and then mourned - the beautiful Natalie, now gone completely. A metaphor there, probably.

To be fair the remaining buildings from then to now, looked tired. Park Village specifically seemed on its last legs with rotting woodwork, overgrown green spaces, windswept rubbish piled up in corners. Not how I remembered it at all. But then what I truly remember is the spirit, the ephemeral feeling and not just the concrete. I remember the summer of ‘87, and every window being open and blasting out the newly released Joshua Tree. I remember late night parties and lying on the grass in the warm June air, talking bollocks about politics and music and gossiping over plastic glasses of cheap red wine. I remember reading Wuthering Heights for the first time out on the fields next to Park Village; fields now covered with blocks of flats and car parks.

It’s the people and the time; the young people interacting, doing stuff, each other, laughing and joking that defines a place, an era. I guess I always knew that.

So even before further buildings are torn down, as East Slope has been, the transient spirit my cohort possessed has gone. Each successive intake make their own memories, their own version of what a university community means. But that time is heartbreakingly brief and we’re left - if we ever venture to go back - with the mere bones slowly rotting away. The flesh has long gone. The spirit died the very moment we walked out that last day Summer Term ‘88. And maybe that’s as it should be. Life is ever onwards and never static.

And Natalie? Fuck knows. She shacked up with some professor, moved into a flat behind the station in Brighton and - for all I know - got married, had kids and never thinks about me. But if she does I hope she plays The Smiths occasionally and suffers a momentary flashback to her time at Sussex University as the unwitting star of a movie she’s never seen.

(I like live versions of songs. This solo version from Morrissey - years later, different lyrics - captures though the wistfulness of time passed. Hence me selecting it. You’re welcome.)

• Fifteen Minutes with You… From Reel Around The Fountain, The Smiths

• Foreign student income. Perhaps that why the British universities whined like bitches when the uneducated population voted for Brexit? Call me old fashioned (puts down pint) but shouldn’t the primary function of UK universities be to educate the children of this land first?