My father and Evelyn Waugh had warned me against the dangers of making early friends, so I deliberately avoided contact with my fellow freshers in my first weeks, hoping to cultivate a vague air of mystery, which would bring me to the notice of the social elite. Fortune intervened to aid me in my plan, as my rooms on New Court were hidden away up a creaking flight of oaken stairs. Through the lead latticed windows I could observe the courtyard, a neat green oval of grass ringed with paving stones and a mantle of ochre gravel. Around the edges of the drive were parked the cars of various fellows, each one a mechanical version of their personalities. There was the ancient Daimler owned by the Chair of Theology, a man who had come to prominence through sheer familial endowment, the Porsche 911 of the young Computer Sciences supervisor who had made a fortune in the early nineties and wore only black, the muddy bulk of the Range Rover owned by a classicist doing her Ph.D, who was wire thin and always seemed to be engaging in some sport that necessitated tweed. From my vantage point I could see the young men and women, away from home for the first time, stumble home drunk late at night, and rise late in the morning. The medieval masonry had prevented the installation of heated plumbing in several of the staircases, and I would see them emerge at midday, crossing the cold stones barefoot in their dressing gowns to reach the shower block in the eastern corner. At the centre of the lawn stood a great beech tree, its arms sweeping in a magnanimous gesture of inclusion down to the edges of the grass. Its copper-coloured leaves were beginning to fall, and clog the drains that lined the gravel. It was early October at the end of an Indian summer, and it was still warm enough to have the windows open in the midday sunshine, but chilly in the evenings. Early in the morning the court was filled with the crunch of gravel and the brusque chat of sport, as rosy-cheeked girls set out for lacrosse practice on the Backs, their hair in ponytails. Their cries and the clatter of wood on wood floated back on the clear air, like the tumult of a distant battle.

It soon became apparent to me that my plan had some major flaws. Firstly, I was disgruntled to discover that, far from having to avoid the friendly advances of my fellow students like the whiskery kisses of a maiden aunt, I was completely ignored by all the other freshers. My plan to avoid making the wrong sort of friends worked too well, and I made none at all. Soon the artificial events set up by the college to encourage two hundred socially awkward teenagers to integrate had given way to an organic blossoming of social contact, and in the rooms around and below my own, bad guitar music, loud conversation and inexpert sex were all audible late into the night. Work too began in earnest and a stern supervisor, disapproving of undergraduate excess, set me two essays a week, so that I had to spend much of my time in the library. When I began to get friendly nods from the creatures, bespectacled and pallid, who spent more hours in the reference section than they did in the sunlight, I realized my plan to cultivate an aloof persona had gone disastrously awry, and I was in fact someone the socially incompetent workaholics recognized as one of their own. In the college cafeteria I sat alone, but I would try to place myself near to large groups, so that a casual observer would think me a part of them. I bought a second-hand TV and began to customize my routine to fit around soap operas.