When the opportunity arose to write a column with a hedonistic slant I felt relief; I always knew that the wild and frivolous hours of my youth spent amassing and archiving Mexican postage stamps from the 1860s would provide useful material for something. Even as I write this I sprawl naked upon a divan, nude except for a shower of collectable tiddlywinks, while Michael, the Chief Executive of Stanley Gibbons, shyly feeds me grapes.

It is not only for this current depravity, however, that my staircase in Trinity is of historical interest with regard to Cambridge hedonism. In the 1930s Wittgenstein occupied the room across the hall from mine, and A. E. Housman the room below his. During an attack of diarrhoea Wittgenstein begged Housman, in a message sent via the bedder, for use of the poet’s loo, then the only one on the staircase. The reply came back negative. Wittgenstein was informed that Housman’s stance as a ‘philosophical hedonist’ meant that he preferred not to give permission, no doubt to the German’s great constipation.

Perhaps those were lighter, brighter days, when amusement could be gleaned from the smaller things – things as small, that is, as watching the man Bertrand Russell called “the most perfect example of genius” waddle across the court rather rapidly. And yet it is a slightly calculated, stuffy joke of Housman’s – not quite a conceit of Bacchanalian proportion, a hedonism more technical than wild. Housman’s starchy revelry set against my more lush interaction with Michael, who has just now begun to tease my nipple coyly with an antique duster, serves to illustrate one of the seeming contradictions of Cambridge life. On the one hand we inhabit a city devoted to our higher faculties, a cool world of textbooks and pendulums, whilst on the other the University’s ivory towers teem with students indulging their lower faculties – their equally pendulous proclivities.

Debauchery and an excess of rational thought make unhappy bedfellows, who clumsily head-butt each other just when things are beginning to heat up. One of maturity’s markers is foresight, and after dalliance with pleasures of the moment even the crudely philosophical must soon turn an eye towards future revelry – must recognise that the latter is often limited by overindulgence in the former. Lechery is all about balance. Or, as our Prime Minister wisely has it, too many tweets might make a twat. Maximal licentiousness, then, becomes subject to a temporal calculation. Byron put the problem expertly in 1819 when he wrote to his accountant: “you are right about income – I must have it all—how the devil do I know that I may live a year or a month? – I wish I knew that I might regulate my spending in more ways than one. – As it is one always thinks there is but a span.” When he wrote that he was 31 years old and right to imagine but a span for both his sexual and economic spending, or, for that matter, for spending of any other kind, because five years later he too would be spent– dead of a fever contracted in Messolonghi.

To weigh intensity of experience against longevity is an impossible guess, but one that we must perpetually make. T. S. Eliot’s words “But our beginnings never know our ends!” capture Byron’s problem concerning foresight and its limits, but pun to add a further complication. Not only is it impossible to know where our actions will end us in the future – one sense of ‘ends’– but our true motivations, our ‘ends’ in the sense of our purposes, desires, are not always apparent at the incipience of our doings, even to ourselves. No one can be certain of what they want, nor how to get it, nor how long they have in which to do so. And yet some spans are more definite than others. Three years at Cambridge is one of them.