One of Oxford’s unique selling points – I’m sure you’ve heard it all before – is “you’ll be taught by the people who write your textbooks”. But often that’s not a good thing.

The big-hitters often don’t care enough. Anyone who tutors you will be brilliant in their particular field; that much is a given here. Yet those who are so brilliant as to have earned fame from doing so often simply won’t have enough time or care for you.

They are busy, busy. You’ll find tutorials rearranged to fit in their academic conferences – a minor annoyance, perhaps, but somewhat disruptive to your plans when it starts happening every week. You’ll find essays either not marked from over a term ago, or marked but “mislaid” – it all amounts to the same thing. You’ll reach 6th week with your collections still unmarked. And your tutor will take a 10-minute break mid-tute to have an ‘important’ phone conversation. You wait, staring mindlessly at the array of edited volumed by the big dog himself that line the office bookcase.

It’s anything but ideal. Your essays will be the last of their priorities, even if they are the first of yours. Ultimately, through getting a high-flyer with ‘X-factor’ you might impress a few people, but will ultimately lose out. They will never get sacked, or even reprimanded, because they are big names that add to Oxford’s academic reputation.

When I heard I would be taught by a graduate student who looked about 23, I wasn’t best pleased. This was not what I pay my tuition fees for. But, contrary to my expectations, he’s been far more useful than the big names. Those who aren’t writing books have more time to worry about their students – which is ultimately what they’re paid to do. We shouldn’t tolerate lax teaching from tutors just because they are famous.

Every night in Oxford, just as on every night in every mindless clone town around the country, a bout of collective insanity is conducted by our otherwise rational fellow human beings. Briefly – oh, how mercifully briefly – the pillars of Western learning are reduced to mere urinals.

The ancient cobbled streets are filled with queuing hordes of gibbering, cackling imbeciles. These are the clubbers, intention: to club. They know they will not enjoy their evening, and their only consolation is that they will simultaneously stop anyone else from enjoying theirs. Clubbing has to go. It is the bane of my existence as much as it is, admit it, the bane of yours.

They don their finery. For the ‘lads’ (ugh) there are the ‘casual’ T-shirts (yours for £70). For their female counterparts, there are the far-less practical, and far-more expensive, high-heeled shoes. Off they go. A quick pre-lash first in the college bar, merrily ruining it for those of us who just want to drown our sorrows in peace.

Thus inebriated they sally forth into the wild unknowns of the High. There they will proceed to bankrupt themselves and their parents by spending lavishly on vile beer and cocktails, flail around a bit, take 15 million photographs, flail around a bit more, laugh hysterically, and finally, climatically, head for home, another small chunk of their souls lost forever.

Theoretically the purpose of clubbing is threefold. To socialise, to listen to music and to dance. Not one of these is something that people actually do. You can’t socialise in clubs: it’s too loud and everybody’s dancing, which renders talking to them impossible. As for the music, I need hardly remark how uniformly crap it is. Not bad, not mediocre, just crap. The worst songs are the ones about clubbing: look out for them and you’ll see what I mean. And the dancing… it not only destroys talent, it creates un-talent.

The great bassist John Paul Jones once got so annoyed with people dancing to his music, he wrote a song which people physically couldn’t dance to. That’s the spirit, I say. Dancing and music should be kept strictly separate. People would have a lot less fun, but it would lead to the end of clubs, which would be infinitely better in the long run.

This is irrelevant anyway, because it misses the point. We all go clubbing for three completely different reasons to the ones we theoretically go for. One is pure kudos; the others are to get drunk and, of course, to pull. Formerly the hot-blooded males of Oxford would look for bad, unsatisfying drunken sex in the numerous and excellent brothels which were scattered across the city. This is no longer necessary, because if they preen and prance enough they might just get off with that fat girl from Christ Church with the funny eye whom you wouldn’t even look at on a ‘bad’ night.

A more serious point, in my opinion, is about drunkenness. I confess I have actually enjoyed clubbing while drunk. I don’t think there is any other way to enjoy it, unless one counts drugs. But clubbing is bad for getting drunk as well, because everything is so expensive. People do not enjoy clubs, but they do enjoy alcohol. They enjoy alcohol almost as much as they enjoy social kudos. 

And that, my friends, brings us to the crux of the matter. The purpose of clubbing, as Orwell would say, is clubbing. It is an end in itself, designed to ensure that we are not seen as being out of the proverbial loop.

I beg of ye, Oxonians, to stop with the clubbing. I have never spoken to anyone who enjoys it, really. By all means get hopelessly pissed- that is enjoyable- but don’t go ruining it by a night on the town.

Go to a nice quiet pub. Sit. Calmly and serenely pickle what remains of your liver. Laugh a bit and roll around. I guarantee you’ll have the night of your life.

Reading a subject simply meant reading books, and the books had to be the best. When I was a young student it was poetry all the way: especially T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell, not only because they made me feel important and clever, but also because poetry seemed more important than fiction. The languages were more intense, elusive and metaphorical. Poetry appeared closer to philosophy, to a real literature of ideas. I still think that poetry comes first.

I then went through a fanatical radical feminist separatist stage as a young woman where I read only women writers. I revered the Brontës, all three Brontës, because they wrote about adultery and violence against women with a radical candour that still takes my breath away. And I adored Virginia Woolf, because her writing swooped so close to poetry, and I fell for all the myths of Bloomsbury; all those middle class intellectuals discussing art in deckchairs and being openly queer. But I read anything that was written by a woman – a biologically female member of the species. Nothing else would do. We, the literary women of my generation, sometimes operated with a ruthless biological determinism, searching for difference, for confirmation that the genitals of genius governed the brain.

I still read writing by women that isn’t banal domestic fiction or romance, with a concentration and interest that few contemporary male writers can ever generate within me. Women who aren’t tools of the patriarchy are uncomfortable and difficult to read. They are not often published well. Now, however, I lay siege again to the Great Misogynist Tradition of the Fathers and claim it as my tradition too. I am especially fond of and attached to male writers who hated women with an engaged and committed desperation. At least they believed that we matter in the great scheme of things. Milton is one of these Great Fathers. The grandeur and fervour of his imagination still amazes me. Sometimes when I have been reading him I cannot imagine why I ever read anyone else.

But the woman to whom I say ‘Master!’ is George Eliot; I re-read one of her novels every year now. I love her vast intelligence, her eroticism, bitchiness and savagery. I am fascinated by the slipperiness of her narrative methods, the famous ‘we’ that includes and excludes whole communities of readers at will. Eliot was an arrogant and tendentious writer; she believed in the novel as an epic form.

I think that one part of growing up as a writer is that you lose interest in naïve first-person narratives. A first-person narrative will give you claustrophobic intensity, an unreliable first-person narrator is often suggestive and interesting, but it is hard to represent intelligence, good judgement, moral discrimination and a literary ethic of compassion. There is a danger with first person narrators – apart from Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby – that, if the writing is not careful and disciplined, the voice will seem selfish and long-winded, and the speaker’s concerns self-centred and trivial. I am perfectly aware that these judgements sound like moral judgements. But they are also about the effect of writing on the reader. I don’t like spending time with trivial, self-absorbed narrators. I have better books to read.

George Eliot’s narrators and storytellers have a generous sophistication that is subtle, principled, devious. It is a precious gift left to other, later writers. Henry James learned an enormous amount from her; he poached her themes and plots. He was just as clever as she was, but never so sexy.

Since my appearance in these pages, some people have been wondering why I am the way I am, so messed up, so ‘gonzo.’ ‘The rest of the Cherwell staff are so urbane, witty, suave and intelligent,’ they declare, ‘why do you always come across as the one cowering in the corner, dribbling and muttering to himself?’
Not initially having an answer to this question, I spent some time considering it, before, like a bolt, it hit me. Aged 13, I went to hospital.

Now, this wasn’t some cushy private hospital, This was an NHS hospital, state funded, with litter on every floor, lice in every bed and MRSA in every ward. Probably I’d fallen off a bike, and broken my leg. This necessitated an exciting ambulance ride, but once we got there things went rapidly downhill.
My bed was on a ward, with young children and Disney cartoons on the walls.

‘Don’t I get a room?’
‘No.’ ‘But what about the nine hours of undisturbed sleep that Mother told me I’d need, now rendered impossible by the screaming of innumerable children of considerabely younger age and courser manners?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Oh.’

Dinner arrived. I was looking forward to this. I liked almost all foods, from smoked salmon to ceasar salads. I could discuss the difference between Waitrose Organic houmous and the inferior M&S version, I could debone a freshly cooked whitebait, and I knew which knife and fork to use for every course in Michelin-starred restaurants.

They gave me chicken nuggets.

‘What are these suspicious-looking morsals of culinary delight?’ I enquired.
‘Chicken nuggets.’
‘Oh.’

After rejecting the chiken nuggets and wondering idly whether there was a Pret a Manger nearby, or at least somewhere that could do a decent prawn and avocado sandwich, I realised I needed the loo. This was potentially a problem, because my left leg was encased in four inches of plaster, and weighed more than my 13 year-old muscles could bear. I pressed the buzzer.
‘Could you possibly tell me where the loo is and how I get there?’ I asked the nurse, looking around for the en-suite.

‘Here, darling. she replied, producing what looked suspiciously like a milk carton with the top cut off. ‘Just pull your willy out and stick it in there,’ she instructed, with a smile on her face.
‘Oh.’

I left the hospital that evening. They said I wasn’t ready, but my parents judged that mental trauma I was suffering outweighed the risk of losing my leg. I’ve never been the same since.