I can’t recall Cambridge clearly. After the unremitting boredom of exam term, the weeks which followed are bathed in a heightened reality. Those two weeks have put all three years into the shade. Those last two weeks are all I remember now. In my mind’s eye, the light still flickers behind the trees, and on the backs it is always sunny. Nothing else remains in the poetic memory and I don’t think that image will ever fade.

I’m now a postgraduate in a course whose name itself I hardly understand at King’s College London. I study a ‘Conflict, Security and Development’ masters. The cohort is very international. Everyone thinks of themselves as so ‘nice’, so ‘friendly’ and I just can’t stand it. I’ve even started being deliberately antagonistic in seminars just to try and create a sense of conflict. I find solace in an extreme opinion, the gasp of fright that follows and then the amazement at the self-righteous Cambridge graduate, a type so hackneyed but so persistent.

Many of my fellow postgrads had already met over Facebook, which I must say, threw me. One even expressed regrets that another postgrad had failed to get his visa on time. Where had they met, I thought? Were they old friends? Colleagues? In fact, they’d met on Facebook through a page for incoming freshers, added each other and exchanged messages. And, of course, alienation only breeds helplessness which must be expressed in anger. Old identity markers will soon cease to matter. Country, religion, family, class, all these things are redundant now. And maybe that’s a good thing. But what shall come instead? Will it be Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, or even Tinder? Will we become Facebookers, Twitterers? It’s a world I don’t want to know.

I sometimes use my Classics knowledge to give the impression that my mind is elsewhere, far away on higher things beyond the narrow and puny confines of ‘Conflict’, ‘Security’ and ‘Development’. I interject in seminars with half formed references to Virgil or Homer or some obscure poet I did an essay on in Week 2 of Lent Term in 2013. Everyone gazes at me as if I’m an old man with only half a brain. Often the chatter of the international students turns to the repulsiveness of British university culture. Everyone comments sincerely that they’ve never seen drinking on such a scale. And it falls to me as the sole product of our backward and moribund culture to defend my patch. My conversational tropes are reduced to the hollow narration of old times with mates that I once had.

One complication, however. To produce a sense of extreme detachment and irony, I both include and distance myself from Cambridge. I have to put in the odd comment about how I found it all really lame. That one time in Life when we got in the hot tub, yeah it was wicked! We have these things called formals and pennying as well but that was fun in 2012, not so much 2015. Swaps were fun at first but are actually really lame, and that wasn’t my thing in my final year because I was over that. These stories are greeted by shock or boredom, depending on how much I’ve exaggerated my exploits.

On the whole I’m glad that Cambridge is over. I’m glad I’m out of it. I’m glad I’m far away. And yet I can’t stop looking over my shoulder.