Staying at Cambridge and becoming a fellow is an increasingly attractive prospect to me for two reasons. First, I am a huge fan of taxpayer-funded port. Secondly, I like the radical notion of being paid to do something that I’m really interested in. Without wishing to sound hopelessly earnest, in my English degree I write, think and talk about some of the most exquisite manifestations of human creativity, and I would rather like to devote my life to doing that.

In contrast, the common alternative – getting a ‘proper job’ – is more terrifying than the dream / nightmare I had the other night in which Dapper Laughs became Prime Minister. I’m thinking especially of management consultancy / financial PR / corporate law / insert the name of another excruciatingly tedious corporate job into which a depressing amount of Cambridge grads go and which make you think that – putting aside what happened with Marxism as actually practised à la Stalin, Mao, etc – Karl Marx was probably onto something.

50 years of chat along the lines of “the Dynamism Implementation Team must optimise synergies in the M & A process”. 50 years of those precious breaks from the daily grind around the water cooler – in which the really interesting, deeply characterful people who go into jobs like that supply you with more scintillating chat, like “the weather’s nice, isn’t it?” And then your reward for 50 years of that is a short period of golf and drooling called retirement. And then – death.

But what if you like the idea of staying at Cambridge forever but you’re not sure you want to commit?

My recommendation is pretending you’re a fellow at times, doing some method acting, putting yourself in their shoes (to digress slightly: is it just me, or is there something a bit disturbing about this cliché? Like, the idea of actually wearing the shoes that someone else’s feet have routinely been in is actually a bit disgusting?)

Admittedly, I’ve only played the role of the fellow once. Last term I was in the Corpus smoking area – as I am wont to be – and a fresher said, “are you a student here?” And God knows why, but I found myself adopting an even plummier register and saying “ah, no, no, no – I’m afraid my student days are long over. I’m a fellow.” At this point I extended my hand to “Cuthbert Warner, the Merton Sinclair Professor of Russian.” I’ve no idea why I said Russian as my subject. The fresher could easily have given my game away by asking me to say something in the language, to which I would have doubtless responded along the lines of “um...er ...Vladimir Putin.”

He did, however, raise some excellent points about how Russia is at once part of Europe and not part of Europe, and how this makes its nineteenth-century literature so interesting. I responded by weaving an intricate web of bullshit: “Oh, yes, yes, you are completely right. That is, indeed, the topic of my latest book – The Dostoevskyian Dialectic of the Teleological and Allegorical – that elucidates this issue.”

And therein you find the lesson of how to look and sound exactly like a fellow. Play to the posh stereotype, be very specific (and  utterly wanky) about your research, and – most importantly, the key to success in so many areas in life – be unfalteringly self-confident.