Around this time of year, a year or so ago, give or take three months or six, I was summoned back to my old school to address the Sixth Form on the subject of University admissions. What advice could I possibly have to applicants? What remarks could I make on Year 13, on A-Levels, on University Life? Was this another excuse to put on my gown during a vacation? So it’s peculiar, but never the less necessary, for me to return to the world of advice, and offer the most important piece of advice to Freshers that I would have been indebted to know two years ago.

That advice is quite simple. Forget lectures – the best part of Cambridge is dinner. Order your life to this end, and you may graduate with a 2:ii, but you’ll also graduate with memories, and tastes far outstripping any budget that 2:ii may gain you. You’ll soon wind up down and out, scrambling for any scraps of money you haven’t squandered. But you’ll look fabulous, and you certainly won’t be squandering that cash on any Jamshed Rosé.

Of course, at any decent dinner, you’ll want to grab some wine in advance. I have a few words on this. The premier venue for the wine trade in Cambridge – the Cambridge Wine Merchants. Last year, I fell deep into my overdraft. The wine is excellent, and you pay a fair price for excellent wine and a very good service. By all means, buy your wine here, if you’re sensible about it – but be prepared to pay. Otherwise, enjoy the fruits and delights of Mainsbury’s wine shelf, the long row in the deepest recesses of the shop – there are surprising delights to be found, particularly on the third shelf.

You have your wine, you have a stained suit several dinners past its best. You have a tie that you haven’t ironed since late September. Where can you find dinner?

there are about a thousand ways to 'do' Cambridge

It’s simple: societies. Each society will have its own annual dinner, and they are an affordable escape from college food. Call me biased, but the finest dinners are those of the Cambridge University Heraldic and Genealogical Society. You do need, however, to be able to put up with talks about heraldry and genealogy – the opposite of a problem for me, but perhaps not everyone’s main interest. But still – where else in Cambridge can you dine with an imperial highness? And, if it takes your fancy, the most storied dinners are for sports clubs – I’ve seen the aftermath of the Boat Club Dinner – but I really wouldn’t know.

If you can sing, your college choir will have you set. At Peterhouse, we dine three times a week for free – you will get to the point where you decline the free meal as you are simply bored of formals (writing this down I feel very, very stupid). But best of all, roughly once a term, you are guaranteed a free place at a college feast, where the joy and pageantry of a college dinner is combined with that rarest of things: good college food.

After the student urge toward drinking and feasting, you will feel the crushing echo of every tiny noise and piercing glare of morning after sunlight. Your options here are two, which you’d do well to combine, are simple: hangover cures, which a million other men will cover for me, and religion.

Little Saint Mary’s is perfect for me, with its incense, bells (“smells and bells”), processions, good music and good preaching, but in a city of churches you will find a home. Your college chapel will be very good, cannot afford to not be welcoming, and is designed to accommodate you as a student. And probably does Evensong, which is, as everyone will tell you, marvellous.

And before freshers enter the world, satisfactorily recovered from the night before, be careful. If you make a toasty – it is likely your college will provide toasty machines in your gyp – make the cleaning a thousand times easier by laying down greaseproof paper between the machine and the sandwich. Use butter or something similar to prevent it sticking. Oh, and don’t try and rig society elections.

But most importantly: there are about a thousand ways to “do” Cambridge. I can speak about maybe two or three of them. But whichever one takes your fancy, know that there will never again come a time in your life when every single opportunity you could want lies but five feet from your doorstep. Don’t let fear of missing out steer you down a path you don’t want, don’t spend your time worrying about this trend and that one. Find the path which really is there and waiting for you, and throw yourself into it as if you’ll never again have the freedom, the time and the opportunity – because you won’t. Cambridge will be right there for the taking for the next three years: enjoy it.