By 11pm, the cobbled lanes down by the Tyne in Newcastle’s city centre are slick with rainwater, glowing yellow in the streetlights as a queue starts to form by Sea, a bog-standard nightclub with one distinction. Newcastle students flock here on Fridays. Judging by the state of the queue, they did well to flock anywhere. They are profoundly drunk, the girls swaying on their heels like buoys on a choppy sea, the boys jostling one another like adolescent walruses. This state of affairs might have something to do with the fact it’s chucking-out time at the triples bars, local establishments that engage in the daring practice of selling three treble shots of vodka for a fiver. But this isn’t another story of boozed-up Britain. Strain your ears over the whistle of the biting northeasterly wind, the distant thud of dance music and sirens, and you will hear a sound so distinct and unsettling it will transport you all the way from Geordie land to halfway down the King’s Road: braying.“Millie, call my mobey,” squeals a pretty girl with a large nose, rooting around in her Chloé handbag, while further down the queue a shaggy-haired boy falls over as his friends go, “Haw haw haw.” There is a steady witter of posh speak — “Is that a can of cake?” a boy asks his friend’s girlfriend. “No, vodka and cake, do you want some?” — and somewhere behind me a young lady shouts: “Edmund... Edmund... Edmund.” I turn aghast to my stepbrother Jack, 21, in his second year studying biochemistry. He’d told me the toff invasion of Newcastle University (and the toon) had reached critical mass. But seriously, is anyone here tonight not posh? “There’s some,” he says, with a twinkle, “but the rah-to-scum ratio is really good in here.”
Thinly concealed inverse snobbery or legitimate criticism of the 'rahs'? 
