When I was 32, tired at last, for the moment anyway, of seizing the day, I stopped drinking and gave up smoking and enrolled for two A-levels in one year at the local technical college. My decision coincided with a state decision to expand the middle class and I was awarded a small government grant. I found I was ripe for study, passed both exams with good grades and applied to Hertford College, Oxford, to read English. The choice of college was specifically and perhaps idiotically based on a romantic obsession with Evelyn Waugh’s life and work. By a startling coincidence, I was interviewed in Waugh’s old ground-floor rooms next to the quad, and I noted that the window, if left open, was at exactly the right height for someone with ‘a kind of insane and endearing orderliness, in his extremity’ to lean in from outside and be sick into the room.

I was interviewed in a very relaxed and informal manner by two young female dons. They asked me if I’d read this author, and what did I think of that one. At that time I had read only 20th-century writers, and not even Dickens from the century before, and some of the names they came up with drew blanks from me. Very quickly I could see them masking their surprise at my ignorance by becoming increasingly matey and jovial. As an experienced publisher’s reader has only to read a paragraph, or even a sentence or two, to decide whether he should read on, so these kindly dons were able to see within the first minute and a half that I wasn’t up to the job. And they were kind enough, so that we could all get on with the rest of our lives, in my case with one fewer delusion, to break the news to me after about ten minutes. But before I went, would I like a quick look round, they said? A helpful, diffident undergraduate gave me a lightening tour of Paradise then bade me farewell at a gate in the wall.

What most impressed me was the Hertford Common Room floor, which was ankle-deep in discarded newspapers. Life at Oxford University was so rich, and lived so intensely, apparently, that students weren’t even expected to close and fold a newspaper after reading, but merely to let it slip from between their fingers. The sight of that floor littered with the pages of broadsheet newspapers was a kind of education in itself to me at that time.

I had also applied to the School of Oriental and African Studies in Bloomsbury, London, to read African Studies. I was invited for interview. My heart banging, I knocked lightly on the door of a Dr Jagger. He welcomed me in, invited me to take a pew, asked me what sort of journey I’d had, then he said, ‘I’m sure you are going to enjoy it here.’ And that was that: I was an undergraduate.

I lived in an all-male hall of residence and led an austere, monastic life that revolved around study. I was a total anorak. Our main study tool, we were advised, was the library, which is the national collection for Asia and Africa. I took the advice. Every evening I was chucked out of there at nine, when it closed, and I carried my books over to Birkbeck College library and worked there till it closed at ten. Often I was first through the door of the Soas library at nine the following morning.

University College London was 150 yards away. For pleasure, I went there every day and sneaked into the atmospheric old wood-panelled lecture theatres and sat in on the English literature lectures. I heard lectures on Willer Cather and George Gissing, writers I hadn’t heard of. I was such a regular attender, the other students and lecturers assumed I was fully enrolled on the course and I was invited to lecturer’s parties and to contribute to a new undergraduate literary magazine, for which I wrote a deadly serious piece about ferret-keeping.

But I loved Soas. Dr Jagger’s prediction proved correct: I did enjoy it there very much. Best of all, the Soas common room was as rubbish-strewn as the one at Hertford. And one could skin up a joint in there too, and nobody would bat an eyelid. Not that I, with my new austerity programme, ever did that of course.

These chill September mornings always bring to mind the excitement I felt at starting at Soas as a mature student more than 20 years ago. These shortening days and falling leaves never fail to make me think of that happy time, though with a strong touch of envy for all those who are packing their bags and preparing to go to university for the first time.