It's 11am on a Saturday and we're having brunch. One might expect, or even perhaps hope, that conversation would orientate around what a wild Friday night we'd had, or our exciting plans for the weekend. But this is Cambridge, where weekends don't exist and brunch serves to plug the gap between work and, well, more work. Instead, conversation turns itself to all things mildly controversial (or not, as it might happen) and we find ourselves getting worked up about some abstract topic. Once, it was whether or not “flat” is a relative term. Today, it was the prevalence of televisions – and “screens” in general – in the lives of today's children. We talked about childhood, the importance of play and accused each other of habouring bourgeois idealism.

I love a good discussion, and these brunch-time debates are always interesting. But I can't help feeling that they are somewhat bizarre. It seems like intellectual foreplay for the procrastinating undergrad. We're letting out all those frustrated ideas that we just can't quite get into our essays, intellectually sparring with each other as a warm up for the day's work to come.

Someone told me before I came to Cambridge that I would learn more from the people around me than from my degree. I expected this, and I was excited for it. I just never expected it to come in the form of brunch.