Picture the scene - as the wind howls across the trackless east European forest a peasant family huddles fearfully round the fire, ears straining for the sound of footsteps or horses hooves above the noise of the storm.
The anxious mother looks fondly at her boy, so recently returned from university abroad. In his hollow eyes lurks an unspeakable terror. Suddenly the door of the hovel crashes open to reveal, silouetted against flashes of lightning, the figure they have been dreading.
Yes, it is the man from the Student Loans Company.........
Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, yesterday put students from the rest of the European Union on notice that, yes, they would be welcome to come and study in the UK and take out loans of £9,000 a head - but woe betide them if they didn't repay.
The SLC and its Glasgow-based enforcers would track them down, armed with EC regulation 44/2001 to get the money back. Few students know anything about EC regulation 44/2001 but it sounds nasty.
British higher education is popular and attracts about 17,000 successful applicants a year from the rest of the EU. In England EU students will be entitled to the same zero interest loans from the Treasury as home students (though not loans for maintenance).
But while getting back the money from UK residents via the tax system is pretty foolproof, there has been some anxiety over what to do about EU students.
Evidently civil servants have decided that grappling with the Italian tax system or the Latvian revenue is a non-starter.
More effective, they believe, will be to use the SLC which has experience of collecting the old mortgage-style loans from British students.
Mr Rammell's advisers have also tackled the problem of when to start repayments. In the UK graduates begin payments when their salaries reach £15,000. But a Lithuanian graduate might spend half a lifetime without reaching that level.
So the threshold has been adapted to the cost of living - payments in Lithuania, Poland and Slovakia will begin when graduates earn £6,000 and in Estonia, Hungary, Malta, Slovenia and Croatia it will be £9,000.
Meanwhile European students who go to universities in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland will have a completely different set of repayments to different bodies. We can only hope they are well briefed in the Baltic states.
Calling on the Student Loans Company does not avoid the tax systems of two dozen countries however. Repayments are based on 9% of income over the earnings threshold.
Boris Johnson, the Conservative higher education spokesman, is sceptical. "We have got the ludicrous spectacle of British agents stepping up dustry drives in Italy 25 years later to find people who have failed to pay back the loans the owe Her Majesty's government.
"Instead of producing this kind of nonsense [the government] should come clean and admit that in a great many cases we are going to be educating students from the European Union for free," he told the Financial Times.
But maybe that's not a bad investment?
