Privilege

My university years, 2019-2022

All of man’s problems, wrote Pascal, stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone. How much of a problem, I would add, depends on where the room is. A Londoner with cabin fever can go to a museum; dine at a restaurant; stroll beside the Thames. And these are only the activities you might tell your colleagues or parents about. But there was a time when I did not live in London, and could rely no longer on its endless options for self-distraction.

I refer to the three years I spent at university. It is very difficult to write about Cambridge without sounding as if you are bragging about going to Cambridge. As will become clear, I write not to gloat, but to confess.

A gauche and nervous teenager, I infested the school library. I read about frenzied monks and lonely spies, Russian souls and American sleaze - anything which transported me. At home, I devoured the papers and periodicals, enchanted by their tales of a world rather more lurid, violent and interesting than the South London suburbs. Cambridge, with its giant libraries and wise professors, seemed like a paradise which could be reached through manic reading. And so I scorned parties, hid myself away and got an offer.

It started to go pear-shaped on the day I arrived. Bookish though I might be, I was also a Londoner. As I came down Trumpington Street, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s description of Cambridge as a “torpid, introverted village among dreary fens” seemed about right. My freshman “staircase” was a decaying Seventies house at the back end of the college grounds, where I was allotted a sloped attic room which I was too tall for and which had bloodstains on the floor. The plumbing barely worked, and some weeks later I found mushrooms growing in the hinge of the bathroom door. Being at that point a teenage boy, I was not greatly bothered by any of this. Besides, no one had ever said Cambridge was luxurious.

I finished unpacking and… realised I had nothing to do until the evening, when I was supposed to socialise with my new neighbours. Thus began my three-year search for ways to kill time. My first effort in this department was relatively sensible, compared to what came later. I went next door to the Fitzwilliam Museum, to look at an exhibition of Rembrandt nudes. A few days before arriving, I had volunteered to review this for the student paper. But I had not banked on getting round to it quite so soon.

I wheeled round the show, went back to my room, and started writing. I had just read Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, about a classics professor who gets over his wife dying from grief after he is cancelled by sleeping with a PTSD-ridden cleaner half his age named Faunia. It is a novel full of wisdom about how Bill Clinton should have handled Monica Lewinsky and why men pay prostitutes (not for sex, but to leave afterwards). I now think 18-year-old boys should be legally restricted from reading it. In my innocence and eagerness to learn, the novel had made quite the impression on me. I filed 600 words of sweaty, sub-Rothian copy about what it must have been like to be Rembrandt with all these nudes in your studio. It was eventually published in brutally (or mercifully) redacted form, and so began my disreputable and ill-considered career in journalism.

Evening descended, in the cheerless Cambridge way which would soon become familiar. I realised with dismay that it was time to socialise. Down the stairs I went, until I came to the room where we were meant to gather. We sat in a circle on the floor and drank.

I had got drunk perhaps a dozen times before going to university, in the quick, woozy and carefree way that you get drunk as a teen. I knew the ropes but not the depths, other than the time I tumbled down a Budapest bowling gutter in view of my history teacher. Already, I had sensed that there existed at the bottom of a pint glass the possibility of a different life - of freedom from shyness, from solitude and inhibition. And now I was an adult, and could drink as much as I liked whenever I liked! I drained my bottle, opened another and was soon talking like a normal person.

Within three or four days, I was observed strutting through the aftermath of our Matriculation Dinner with a lit candle protruding from my groin like a prop in a satyr play. I have no other memories of Freshers’ Week, which though unlikely to be a coincidence is probably fortunate. I experimented with white wine, red wine and port, and afterwards I experimented with spirits. I frequented student nightclubs and was blotto enough to enjoy them. When people said the most important things you learn at university are about yourself, I had not realised this was what they meant.

Term started, which had no discernible effect on my drinking schedule. The general ambience of the freshman cohort was a bright-eyed winsomeness ill-suited to the demonic energies I wished to cultivate. I asked the college chat if anyone wanted to watch the England vs Kosovo qualifier at the pub with me, and five or so boys turned up on my doorstep. We had virtually nothing in common at that point apart from our shared interest in degeneracy. Without further ado, we got down to the business of sin.

One place to start, we soon discovered, was the nightly Formal Hall in the college’s William Morris-decorated dining room, thought to be the oldest secular building in continuous use in Europe. Here, if you put on a shirt and a gown and paid £7.50, you could enjoy three candle-lit courses with whatever wine you paid corkage for - usually, in our case, a bottle of abject plonk per person. From there, you could repair to Britain’s largest Wetherspoons on the high street, which on Saturdays hosted a pervert-ridden and often violent club night called Dangerspoons. Another option was the college’s basement bar, where a few cheap fluorescent cocktails would set you up for the trek through the cold to Friday Cindies, our favoured hip-hop night, or the raucous bowling alley on the other side of the station. And from there…

The best part of any night out was the morning after, when we would somehow all get up at 10.30am to share recollections over college brunch. Most of my booze stories from university are too vile to publish in a reputable outlet, so it is just as well I have this website instead. At the tamer end was the time my friend peeled off from a night out to meet a weed dealer in a forest. Where this could have been I don’t know, as there are no wooded areas in or near Cambridge. We hadn’t heard from him by the time the club lights came on, and assumed matter-of-factly that something had happened in the forest. Just to check, we broke into his room - and there he was, floating to Pluto and back with a face like Snoop Dogg. “Go to bed, boys,” he managed to say at last.

Gradually, we learned each other’s back stories. Once, at a house party, one of my new friends had slathered pizza all over the walls and ceiling of the host’s front room. Another had been sent home from his school prom after trying to chat up his head of year. I knew I had found my people.

On and on it merrily went. Wallets were drained, hangovers were suffered, meals were skipped, keys and cards were lost. It beat sitting quietly in a room alone. The basic fact of student life at Cambridge was that there was almost nothing to do. And so, come nightfall, one may as well get plastered.

The daytime was a different matter. I recently met a chap I knew from a different college, and got down to reminiscing. I mentioned that I had loved my degree. “I’m not sure you ever realised you had a degree,” he said. It is true that I affected a beery disdain for highbrow matters. But, in the dank privacy of my room, I realised that actually doing my work was a good way to pass the time before the bar opened. Like a minor character in a Dostoevsky novel, my time was split between drinking too much and the feverish cultivation of bad ideas. Not that I had much work to do, compared to my scientist friends - perhaps two days’ reading and 2000 words of writing a week, culminating in the one-on-one supervision where it would all inevitably be torn to shreds. (Not a few of my History friends contrived to miss their deadline every week. I am not sure how they managed it.) There was at first a smattering of lectures, too, before like everyone I stopped going with the onset of strikes.

The quicker I breezed through work, the more free time I had left to fill. Rowing, which I still regard as a form of masochism, did not appeal to me. At the opposite extreme, neither did playing pool all day with the common-room stoner crowd. (Forests aside, my crowd was never particularly into all that. By contrast, the medical student with whom I shared the mushroom loo hotboxed his room so often that the college declared it unfit for human habitation after he moved out.) One could tell from a mile off that the Cambridge Union and associated political clubs were a snake-pit of creeps, bores and bullies - or, in the preferred phrasing, a training ground for future statesmen. And the good works of the college student council seemed to involve too much goodness and work.

I went along to the university Wine Society, held at a post-grad college, to see if that was my scene. The Côtes du Rhône on offer was highly agreeable, if a few multiples beyond my price point. But the actual socialising seemed to consist of prematurely old people gargling and spitting in a tent.

All options exhausted, I started to haunt the Fitzwilliam. The Renaissance galleries made me feel loutish and ignorant, like a Landsknecht sacking Rome. Why should all these Madonnas matter to a drunken rogue? The Dutch still-lifes didn’t do much for me, either. So I gravitated to the Impressionists room, well-stocked with works by Degas, Monet and Cézanne. I liked to think of them as angsty and angry and lonely, the sad boys of European art. This is not a bad way of thinking about Degas, about whose Fitzwilliam works David and Goliath and Au Café I wrote a heady, rapturous essay for the student paper. But it hardly fitted Cézanne’s apples or Monet’s icy skies. All they had to offer were brushstrokes and beauty.

To be a pintman and a polemicist is natural enough, given the common liking for provocation and making a scene. To be a pintman and an aesthete is a taller order, one which surprised everyone who took me for a pisshead from top to tail. I had the makings of a double life. On Sunday nights, when my friends were too hungover or beleaguered with work to congregate, I would go to evensong in the college chapel. It offered me more solace than I could admit to bask in the woodwork and the gloom, the singing and the silence. And there was sherry afterwards.

Eventually, it was assumed that I had vague spiritual inclinations, and I was invited to become a chapel officer. I almost immediately disabused the college divines of their hopes for me by mixing up John 1 and 1 John, Trump-style, when I was on reading duty. But I kept it up, not least because it meant I could go to Formal Hall for free with the choir. And perhaps I do have spiritual inclinations, of a kind. It is just that they were crowded out by muddier urges. Among my other duties was topping people up at Dean’s Port, held in another William Morris room. I alerted my friends to this opportunity for corruption, and they came en masse. Port is quite the drink, it turned out. After falling out of an alcove in the small hours, one friend left the student common-room carpet looking like Franz Ferdinand’s tunic. The next morning, another texted asking if anyone had seen his tooth, which he had lost in collision with a bollard.

I rushed over ostensibly to help, but mainly to gawp and mock. As we mooched about for the tooth, we started crying with laughter. Never such innocence again. When one girl we knew saw his face, she started crying, and not with laughter. College soon got wind and my alcove friend had to take the rap. At its next meeting, the student council voted to introduce an Alcohol Awareness Workshop for all freshers. I scoffed, but a certain disquiet gnawed at me.

If you were wondering, we never found the tooth. Some weeks later, my friend’s filling was knocked out while we were dancing at Cindies. It glowed on the floor.

We had acquired a reputation. A group of third-year boys invited us to bring drinks to one of their rooms for a get-together. When we arrived they took the drinks, poured a little of each into a bowl and put the bottles away, never to be returned. They got us to play a game involving the bowl and the song “Roxanne”. This crew seemed to be more about masculinity than fun - one of them had a son, whom the others kept joking about - but we were in too deep. We headed to Cindies and they left us in the street while my friend had what certainly appeared to be a medical emergency.

In the morning I took the casualty to pick up a thank-you card for a girl who had shepherded us home. As we shuffled down the high street, with its Chinese shops and Greek tavernas, a man said: “Would you like to be photographed with the Barclays Premier League trophy?” A cliché of mawkish memoir writing is to look at old pictures and wish you had known how beautiful you were. In fact, I am not sure anyone has ever looked as bad in a photo as us hungover and traumatised with the Prem trophy. Who allowed me to get a buzzcut? And why am I dressed like James May?

I had burned out, hard. I began to stay up late, sleep badly and spend all morning in bed, which meant by the time I was upright and showered the canteen had stopped serving lunch. Not that I could afford it by that point in term, having lavishly subsidised Cambridge’s low-end nightlife economy. Instead, I mainly lived off Oreos, Sainsbury’s white-chocolate cookies, Creme Eggs, Shin Cup pot noodles and my neighbours’ fridge supplies. (Cambridge “kitchens” are little pantries with half-size fridges and hotplates which look like they once belonged to the Unabomber. They are not suitable for cooking like an adult.) Days passed by without human contact. A friend on my staircase - not one whose sandwiches I had nicked - actually knocked on my door and gave me some more Creme Eggs, as if I were in a safe-consumption facility for chocolate addicts. In case you were feeling down, she said.

It was almost a relief when, during the break between my second and third terms, the pandemic started and we were told not to come back. My life in the first lockdown was like The Salt Path, with the difference that it actually happened. I barely drank, ate three home meals a day and went on long walks around the hills and woodlands of south-east London. (No weed dealers here, somehow, although I did cross paths with Huw Edwards.) For the first and last time in my adult life, I attempted to develop muscles. More plausibly, I wrote a reflection on Auden’s “A Summer Night” as a poem for the moment - the last earnest-highbrow artsy piece I did at university, or indeed anytime since. And I worked hard for my Zoom supervisions on medieval Europe, dreaming in my sleep of Avignon and the Duomo.

After reading all day for work, I wound down by reading some more. I read almost everything ever written by the Marxist historian Perry Anderson. As a kind of foil, I read almost everything ever written by the lyrical-ironic memoir essayist Adam Gopnik, who led me to the novels, short stories and criticism of John Updike. I read Orwell’s essays. (I realise now that I didn’t read many - actually, any - women. It might have done me some good.) And I read the gonzo satirist PJ O’Rourke, who sent me insane. O’Rourke’s manic, diabolical pieces about drink-driving, Ecstasy, Ferraris and the Middle East made me laugh until I forgot that the country was under house arrest. They made everything I had written seem fussy, conceited and glum - untrue to the O’Rourkeish way I lived. And if ever a town’s pieties asked for satirical deflation, it was Cambridge in 2020. Yes, I thought, I will write like PJ O’Rourke.

This was a handy epiphany, since I needed some new ideas. Lockdown had put 60 miles between me and the Fitzwilliam, until then my main literary muse. But nor did it offer many opportunities for gonzo provocation. Sitting quietly in my room alone, I rustled up article after article. I wrote an investigative piece about dodgy dealings between Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope and the Chinese government. (I wish I had gone with the headline “Sweet and Sour Dork”.) I wrote long, sarcastic pieces about world politics - India, Burma, Brazil - in feeble imitation of Perry Anderson. And in my first go at the O’Rourke manner, I wrote a piece smirking at the Alcohol Awareness Workshop and college do-gooders more generally. Some people privately told me that it made them laugh. Others said publicly that it was offensive.

Sod them, I thought. I had taken a turn. There is a parallel, covid-free universe where I spent the whole of Cambridge pottering around the Fitzwilliam, before gliding into a career of respectable Fleet Street art writing in the tradition of Andrew Graham-Dixon or Alastair Sooke. If only. I had discovered within myself a strange appetite for fights. For growing inside me was something like disappointment. Even before lockdown, I had not expected Cambridge to be this much of a drag. My degree was great, but in my first year there was not enough of it. Day or night, sober or drunk, I spent my time waiting for something to come over the horizon - romance, perhaps, or even just happiness. Some spark that would light life up.

Absent any such ignition, the locked-down spring fizzled into the summer of Eat Out to Help Out, when I did my patriotic bit by drinking Stella cans in parks. I will observe only that free public toilets are hard to come by in London, while nettle patches are not. Perhaps it is not such a surprise that romance proved elusive.

One time I got together with a few Londoners from college. We picked up some bottles of Lambrini, with predictable consequences. The next morning my tooth friend and I were abruptly awoken in the same bed by his mum on the phone asking where on earth he had gone. Our host’s front room was in the worst state I have ever seen someone’s front room, including my stint as a crime reporter. As she walked me to the station for fresh air, she nearly fainted. I could physically feel the pickling of my brain and kidneys. Excellent, I thought. We are back in business.

Come October it was back to college, where my friends and I had arranged a boys’ house together - the six of us, a girl who perhaps wisely never left her room and a Lithuanian postgrad who had a cheese and tomato sandwich for every meal. Cambridge was even more of a zombie town than usual. Rather than petering out, the pandemic had come back with a vengeance. Pubs, clubs and the college bar were shut, as was the Fitzwilliam. The chapel wasn’t, given the Dawkins-baiting exemption for religious spaces, but socially-distanced, masked-up evensong hardly deserves the name. Belatedly, I accepted the end of my career in lay orders.

Formal Hall was also off. And so it required great ingenuity to avoid sitting quietly in a room alone. We bought a TV for 60 quid from a man on Parker’s Piece, no questions asked, which we used to stream pretty much every football game to be found on the internet. I commandeered a communal fridge and filled it exclusively with cans of Stella, which I bought in 18-packs at Sainsburys. It was not always easy to persuade the till staff that they counted as essential supplies meriting a trip outdoors, so I would sometimes get a pot noodle or cookies as well. We sat in each others’ rooms working through crates, loudly together. This could get repetitive in the absence of anything new to talk about or anywhere else to go. But since male conversations at that age tend to be about nothing rather than something, we got by.

One tactic was to put a horror film on and make anyone who flinched or screamed pay for it with their sobriety. I may as well have taken the pledge while watching The Conjuring. On the other hand, The Babadook got me so hammered that I took off-the-cuff inspiration from O’Rourke’s Ecstasy article and ordered Viagra online, to the tune of £50. (I was, believe it or not, the Sex and Relationships editor of one of the student papers. It seemed like the job O’Rourke would have gone for.) My order failed a medical check and was refunded, but I have never been one to let facts get in the way of good journalism. We ended up stumbling onto Coe Fen, where my friend - the alcove friend - fell into the River Cam. “I’m livid,” he said. “My clothes are wet.”

I write “off-the-cuff”, but there was a forced, jaded quality about our antics. It was hard to do anything that raucous under the circumstances, so we had to dig deep and egg ourselves on. Hence the Viagra, and, perhaps, the river. In truth, we had mostly - mostly - got the desire for all-male idiocy out of our systems. The beginnings of maturity had crept up on us. My articles that term were mostly conceits ripped from O’Rourke’s Republican Party Reptile, the gonzo foreign reporting of Holidays in Hell being harder to mimic. Britishly, they were more hungover than drunken - less about boisterous episodes in my life than the silences in between. It is hard to pretend you don’t know better when the evidence of your writing suggests you do.

I hate to be a dork, but the real, unforced joy of that time was my degree. John Updike once observed that this is the side of university no-one ever writes about, even though it is the reason you go. Boozing you can do anywhere. I had moved on to the history of political thought papers, which had always been the main attraction of Cambridge to me. This meant I had to read heaps of difficult stuff, quickly but cautiously - Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Luther. They are all still somewhere at the back of my head, frowning at what has become of me. I thought hard and wrote carefully, and it took up almost all of my time. I would begin my days by walking two miles through cow-trimmed fenland along the Cam to the village of Grantchester, where I would turn around and walk back. I must have looked listless, but I was drafting paragraphs in my head all the way.

Part of the reason I only wrote silly little riffs for the student papers was that I had nothing left in the tank to write anything smarter. And a theme of those riffs was the schizo switch-back between my daily studies and night-time revels. There is really nothing like reading Aquinas with a spirits hangover. I had found a certain balance and a certain fullness in my life - books and booze, in harmony. As Christmas neared, lockdown eased into the strangest and dumbest phase of the pandemic: when you could go out, but only if you ordered food. (Someone I know would order a portion of beans and use it as an ashtray.) We made a virtue of it and splashed our covid savings at the Ivy - a tellingly civilised way to see out the year, although we made up for it by getting tanked on M&S spiced brandy afterwards. It was perhaps the single most disgusting liquid I tried at university.

I felt like I had figured Cambridge out. But over the new year, covid came back strong and the country went into its third lockdown. For the second time, we were told not to come back to university. This time, I completely lost the plot. My days had roughly the same shape as in the first lockdown, with socially-distanced walks, solitary studies and the occasional round of Among Us with my once and future housemates. My Enlightenment and nineteenth-century paper offered a nice dose of escapism, which is not how people usually think about Immanuel Kant or The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. But it also reminded me of what I was missing out on, while still paying full price. My supervisor, one of Cambridge’s top intellectual historians, was known for doing supervisions in the form of walks along the Trinity Backs. Microsoft Teams did not really compare.

It was not all bad. My favourite memory from the third lockdown, and perhaps even from my life, was when Benteke scored a 95th minute winner against Brighton on my 20th birthday. Every Palace fan can remember where they were for that goal, if only because none of us were in front of it at Selhurst. I was at my kitchen table, which I punched hard with elation.

Other than that, the lockdown was a mess. The problem of sitting quietly in a room alone reared its head brutally. It is not difficult for me to see why many public figures and countless regular people went crazy during the pandemic, because I very nearly went there myself. Notes of bitterness and desolation crept into my writing. The last thing I needed, under the circumstances, was an internet connection. For some reason - too much free time; a roiling mood; a picture of myself as a contrarian - I went through a massive Hitchens phase: first the brilliant early stuff in the LRB, then the lit-crit in the Atlantic, then the pompous drink-soaked stuff, then the “Hitchslap” YouTube videos. (To my credit, this is the opposite direction of travel to most Hitchens readers, or viewers.) The swaggering pugnacity fitted my mood nicely. It certainly seemed a better way to write and live than impotent hand-wringing.

The problem with trying to write like Hitchens, though, is that you can end up writing like Rod Liddle. I found a lightning rod for my general dissatisfaction when a candidate for the student council presidency accused the college porters of “racial bias”. The porters, who run the physical plant of each college, are pretty much the only well-adjusted people you ever meet at Cambridge. I used to commiserate with my college’s head porter after Palace games. And so it seemed to me that, unless any evidence was produced, this was a cruel and cynical accusation which should be withdrawn - and that it was incumbent on me as a brown guy to say so in an article.

That was my “thinking”, at least. But, in my rage and isolation, I was hardly thinking at all. Had I asked the porters about it, they would have likely told me they could look after themselves. And even had I argued my case more tightly and calmly than I did, it would still have been social kamikaze. It is not like Hitchens regularly bumped into Henry Kissinger or Mother Teresa at the bar. My editor at the student paper made all these points, but I wasn’t listening and somehow persuaded her to publish. Perhaps kamikaze was what I was looking for.

After the piece went out, the student council produced a document showing that college had privately admitted unspecified charges of racial bias concerning the porters. Why they didn’t just show me this when I asked, I don’t know. It did seem to me, looking at the document, that the college had just thrown the porters under the bus to avoid a scrap with students. But the damage was done, and I had to retract and apologise. My Facebook account was swamped with fury from the student-council crowd and their allies, which is to say most of the college. Outside my immediate group of friends, I had made myself into a pariah.

I wish there were a droll and ironic way to write about the following days, but there isn’t, so I won’t. After regaining some stability, I spent the rest of the lockdown in a haze of anguish and disbelief. I eventually wrote another Cambridge-China piece to get a spring back in my step, successfully defending it against a Jesus College legal letter. But I was under no illusions about how badly I had screwed up or what it would be like when I got back to college. Other kinds of wishful thinking persisted. In a bid to escape going back to Cambridge, I applied to be a senior correspondent at the Economist - telling my mum that it hardly mattered that I would have to drop out, since I would have already got my dream job. I didn’t.

Instead, I had a cancer scare over the spring break. This was almost welcome as a way to change the subject inside my head. The biopsies were kind of interesting as an experience, and the lumps on my neck turned out to be toxoplasma. I wonder to this day how I came into contact with cat faeces, the usual cause.

Whatever else happened, Cambridge life never lost its slapstick side. On my first day back at college, I locked myself out of the house with no shoes, phone, wallet or covid mask. Since none of my friends were around to let me in and covid rules still applied, I went for a walk around the fen in my socks. I savoured Cambridge in high spring for the first time, and my God is it completely different from the cold, dark, dingy place I was used to. It seemed strange that I had ever resented it.

Life resumed. People in college generally avoided looking at me, let alone talking to me. I got into another futile journo-scrap, this time with the psychos and predators of the Cambridge Union. I don’t particularly regret it, but thanks to this, the cancer scare and a spot of post-pandemic romance, I bombed my second-year exams. I have never been one to do things by half. My director of studies said: “If you do this again in your finals, I will personally hang you.”

At the term’s end, we played pub golf and actual golf. The latter, at Cambridgeshire Lakes, was somehow the more undignified of the two. Over the summer, I wrote pieces about New Caledonia and Western Sahara, exotic and obscure places which had the specific interest of not being Cambridge. In September we went on a lads’ holiday to Spain, which featured missed flights, wing mirrors, minigolf, sardines, tinto de verano, ditches, road laws, Kanye’s last good album, repurposed Corona bottles, wolves, leg wounds, giant edible snails, the Merseyside rapper Aystar, monkeys, backpacks and £2 mojitos. It was our last big muck-around before third year, when we mostly just worked.

Our habits turned wholesome, diverse and faintly middle-aged. We went bowling lots. We played a bit of basketball, badly, for which I dressed in a cricket tank top. We rarely went clubbing, since the pandemic had done for Cindies and Dangerspoons. We patronised the Korean takeaway Kim’s - two bulgogi meats and rice for £8 - and had it with Coronas and limes in front of that night’s Champions League game. Through Muslim friends we discovered Lebanese joints and shisha bars near the mosque. Through a Chinese friend we discovered various places on the high street where you could order pig’s ears or pig’s intestines. (The former was alright, but the second tasted… like an intestine.) Cambridge was not such a backwater, after all. We made mulled wine at Christmas. After finals we played more golf and went to the Newmarket races. (Rip-off.) We went to Formal Hall lots but usually just played Mario Kart, Fifa or chess in the common room afterwards.

I won’t overstate the case. The biggest piss-up I can remember was St Patrick’s Day, when we experimented to find out the greatest number of Guinnesses a human being can physically consume. And there was the time when my alcove/river friend decided to down a latte and a double-strength Welsh cider in short succession, leading to a hasty evacuation from Wetherspoons. There was the time our Kazakh friend brought us horse and camel-milk liqueurs, and the time we were invited to join a girls’ night out and spent its duration competing to fit a record number of Spoons ice cubes in our mouths. We were still sinners at heart.

Funnily enough, I rarely went to the Fitzwilliam or the chapel. Other than anonymous jokes and riffs for the Porters’ Log, Cambridge’s version of Private Eye, I rarely wrote much journalism either. Instead, I infested the library, like the boy I had once been. I hid myself away, read manically and dreamed of paradises somewhere other than here. I wrote my dissertation on the seventeenth-century librarian, traveller, humorist and controversialist Gabriel Naudé, in whom - I now realise - I saw rather a lot of myself. My supervisor was one of the world’s leading intellectual historians, and a rare woman in a fuddy-duddy Cambridge School firmament dominated by poshboys and their idols. Having her kick my arse for a year was not comfortable, but it did me a world of good. Fragile male egos are not worth the trouble they take to maintain.

My love of history was as intense as ever, but a post-grad seminar on Hans Kelsen convinced me I was not cut out to be an academic. The romance seemed to get suffocated in the bureaucracy. O’Rourke had led me to Tom Wolfe, chronicler of berserk Americana. University shut you away, I decided; journalism showed you the world. And so one delusion was supplanted by another.

My life at Cambridge had become remarkably full, affection for the place as it was replacing my romantic ideal of it. And yet. At the end of the working day I would have an early dinner, by myself or with my friends. If it was the middle of the week, I would then go back to the quiet of my room. If Palace were playing, I would find a stream. (That was the year of the Vieira cup run, when I was at Wembley to watch us lose 2-0 to Chelsea.) If they weren’t, I would work a bit longer, read an old favourite or watch a film, often a Storyville documentary or something by Paolo Sorrentino. Other nights I would just pig out on the internet, watching Norm Macdonald clips or indescribably stupid YouTube Shorts. I acquired a knack for blocking out my head until it was time to turn out the lights.

I went out with a bang, though. This was partly down to good behaviour throughout the year drastically reducing my alcohol tolerance at the end of it. At the college May Ball I had so much shisha and so many cocktails - two in hand at any one time - that matters took their course and my friends eventually reported me missing. I was not to be found anywhere. My room’s windows were open, which made the authorities think I had fallen onto the fen and crawled somewhere. In fact, come the morning, after everyone else had gathered for a sunrise photo and searches had been launched, I came to in the postgraduate laundry room, my head nestled inside a tumble-dryer. “Boys,” I texted. “I think I messed up.”

At my graduation I had a hangover for the ages, which only faded when it began to literally rain on our parade. The ceremonies and lunches were all very lovely. Some days later, after my friend’s 21st in the countryside, I would wake up in an overflowing porta-loo. For now, though, we repaired to Wetherspoons, where I was induced to down a bottle of Sarson’s vinegar. I got talking to some people from college, who, it turned out, didn’t hate me. I told everyone I wasn’t going to cry. And then it was time to get the last train home to London, and Cambridge became my past.