On arrival in Cambridge nobody here was cool. Whether you like to admit it or not, we were all the nerdy kids at school whose mothers ironed their underpants and who thought the Warehouse Project was Kevin McCloud’s latest Channel 4 endeavour. Yet, look around you. Fez is full on Thursday nights. People wear sheepskin and quirky hats and are smoking rollies outside the English faculty. And there are parties with themes that are just random collections of words. ‘Where did all these cool cats come from?’, I hear you cry. They’re not really edgy, they’re just pretending, and here’s how you can too:

First you’ve got to look the part. Not only does this alert all those around you to just how cool you are, dressing cool acts as a signal to the other cool kids so they know that they won’t look lame if they look up from the copy of Nietzsche they’re reading for pleasure to slightly nod in acknowledgement of your presence. There is no strict dress code, no real discernible rules at all really, other than wear something you can be sure that nobody else is. This can be achieved by trawling though charity shops, vintage fairs, tiny online fashion brands, or alternatively just by wearing something that’s really ugly. This last method is probably the most popular.

Being cool is about liking the right mixture of things that are so edgy nobody has ever heard of them and liking things that are actually quite shit. Your favourite track (nobody likes songs anymore, not cool) is by a producer who has only gigged in the UK once at this tiny bar in a part of East London that actual cockneys still inhabit, and you heard it the first time it was ever played outside of the studio while you were off your tits on a drug that’s a random collection of letters and numbers and feels like crack cocaine cut with calpol. But while you’re telling me this story your phone goes off, your ring tone is The Sugababes and it’s your aunt Carol calling to see if you caught the last episode of Last Tango in Halifax, and to offer you a ticket to see Michael Bublé  because she knows he’s your real favourite.

This last point may seem a little confusing, but bear with me. The key is to shroud everything you say or do in a sense of possible irony. Not actual irony, but possible irony. Actual irony isn't ironic enough. If people don’t know whether you’re not going to that festival that’s kind of like Burning Man but not shit and in Greenland, because actually you think it’s too mainstream and would rather go to the festival that’s like Outlook but more shit but on a beach in India, that’s cool. Or maybe you’re not going because you actually couldn’t possibly be away to miss entering your home grown marrows in the village fete. If they don’t know whether you’re doing or not doing whatever it is you are or you aren’t doing ironically or not ironically, then they can’t disagree so it must be right. So it must be cool. So you must be really fucking cool for doing or not doing whatever it is, ironically or not ironically.

Still confused? Good. That’s the point. In Cambridge nobody is cool. It’s all an elaborate act of duping the rest of us. The cool kids don’t get it, and neither do I, and I’m the coolest kid of all. Clearly.