Our three-bedroom Wolverhampton council house was hardly Brideshead. Aside from not being built on the foundations of an ancestral home, it contained my seven brothers and sisters. So I began to develop a serious fetish for the Oxbridge stereotype.You know the sort - wealthy, highly educated, charismatic, pugnaciously intelligent. The kind of people who, à la Byron, might take a bear to university or roll a spliff using the family's collection of original Shakespeare folios. That's why I applied to Cambridge. It was precisely because I came from a poor household that I wanted to enter the ivory-towered world of the upper classes.

When I got an acceptance letter from Jesus College, Cambridge, to read philosophy, I put out frantic requests to relatives for all the things that I thought would be essential. Toasting forks - for gesticulatory purposes while holding forth about Nietzsche. Both black and white tie - plus back-ups in case I was to get “debagged” by some rival college's boat club. A pile of custom-printed calling cards with “James Moran, Esq” on them. I was ready for everything that the Cambridge of my dreams could throw at me.

On the first day of Michaelmas term, after a summer full of frantically reading Kant and learning how to pronounce “yeh” as “yar”, I arrived with trepidation. Well, actually, I arrived by making my mum park her Ford Escort around the corner and putting all my belongings into House of Fraser bags.

Things then became very confusing. I entered the bar that first night wearing a shirt, tie, tank-top and blazer, and loaded up with cigars and views on Jungian influences in Hermann Hesse's novels. My air of brooding but fiery eruditeness was ruined by the sight that greeted me.

Let me paint a picture. Someone had put that Babycakes track on the sound system. I gave a few people an avuncular “how d'you do?” - only to be greeted with “y'right?” Something weird was going on. Everyone was wearing jeans and trainers, and there wasn't a cricket jumper in sight. I asked for the wine list before realising that the prevailing mood was Foster's. Was I in the right place? The call went out that the first “bop”, or college-based party, was about to kick off. A-ha!

This was clearly just some sort of waiting area before they crack out the champagne pyramids. I filed in and was greeted by the sound of Girls Aloud. It's very hard to maintain a disposition that suggests you have at least seven interesting things to say about Dryden when you're dancing to “something kind of ohh/stepping on my tutu”. I looked around at my contemporaries - and they were loving it. I stood next to a classicist wearing sunglasses and punching the air as if this was the greatest party he'd ever been to. I saw two scientists high-fiving to the chorus of Fedde Le Grand's seminal dance track Put Your Hands Up For Detroit. Outside, among the smokers, someone asked me what I thought of Mahler. Yes! I began to expound my view that the first movement of the Fifth is not only the greatest piece of music ever made, but that it perfectly reveals the Schopenhauerian influence on the composer's life - when I realised that he had in fact asked me if I liked “cider”. I meekly muttered that it made me gaseous and left.

Over the next few weeks the Cambridge of my mind was gradually eroded. It was replaced by something much more complicated, and - I now admit - better. Many of the outward trappings of my fantasy Cambridge were there. Massive halls filled with begowned diners eating pheasant and saying Latin graces; beautiful quads; porters with bowler hats. They do exist. But the snobbish toffs who were supposed to hang around either intimidating me, or accepting me into their world after beating me about the buttocks with a paddle were nowhere to be found.

It was like Cambridge was a giant ornate house, with all the signs of wealth - but that had recently been abandoned by its wealthy occupants, and was now full of a whole generation for whom class was not an issue. If anything, I think there is a kind of downwards convergence - people of high social strata bent on proving that they're not some aloof intellectual square or pampered sissy.

It destroys my soul to say it, but those from a higher social strata now appear to have decided that Being Clever And Posh is “whack”, and that it's much better to pretend everyone comes from a council estate. As someone who comes from a council estate, I tried my best to scream “NO!”, and force them to see that drunkenly quoting Hamlet on a punt at two in the afternoon is part of the definition of “cool”, but they would not listen. Having arrived filled with fear that I might be excluded from Great Gatsby-style parties, I began to find that, if anything, I was the biggest snob around.

Towards the end of my first term, I reached a hysterical point where I still hadn't quite accepted that my Cambridge didn't exist. I began to behave in a way that, at the time, I considered to be an heroic attempt to single-handedly preserve the insular nature of an 800-year-old institution. However, with time's vantage point, I can see that I was just being a pillock. My attempts to bring to life my dream reached its apex, and death, when, at a lacklustre party filled with people talking about EastEnders, I accused everyone of “suppressing Dionysus” and fell backwards through a door that opened inwards. The next day I decided that perhaps the problem was me, not everyone else.

Recently, I returned to my sixth form to give a talk to aspiring A levellers about whether they should apply to Oxbridge. By far the biggest concern they had was that the institutions are snobbish, and will accept only pugnaciously intellectual people. I tried to assure them that if they got in they may well find themselves surrounded by people much more intelligent than them, but that they wouldn't know about it - because they would be singing Hakuna Matata, and wouldn't ever ask for their views on Degas. And that's a very good thing. I can see that now. Cambridge is an almost Utopian vision of how class doesn't matter when it comes to the pursuit of knowledge. But a little voice inside me can't help but ask - even after Jesus College parked up a truckload full of bursaries outside my house, and welcomed me with open arms, “isn't someone called Chet going to throw up through my window, debag me and call me an oik?”

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