Some of life’s most important lessons are not academic

How enterprising of Oxford University to instigate a buddy system for new students. Ostensibly it’s to make all the First Years welcome, but any fool knows it’s aimed at the “proles” who couldn’t tell a dreaming spire from a Tesco Extra.

It smacks rather of social engineering, but not in an entirely bad way. The possibilities of whom you might end up with are endless; Oxford’s alumni range from Aung San Suu Kyi to Hugh Grant, Rosamund Pike,

pictured, Albert Einstein, Baroness Thatcher and Ruby Wax. Unexpected matches made in heaven or the dinner party from hell, depending on your perspective. And crucially that’s what makes both university and the random allocation of a buddy so thrilling; the opportunity to gain a different perspective.

Imagine being paired with one of the 50 Nobel Laureates or 27

British prime ministers, Fiona

Bruce or Bill Clinton?

Then again, would you recognise inchoate greatness if you took tea with it on an afternoon

or glimpsed it poring over obscure periodicals in the library?

I’m not convinced most of us would. Back in my first year at Edinburgh I would have been horribly intimidated by a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or a David Hume although a Michael Mcintyre or a Miles Jupp would have cheered the long dark nights of the soul pulling an essay all-nighter.

That’s history now, of course, but it’s also an enduring truism that undergraduates spend the whole of Fresher’s Week desperately trying to win friends and then spend the next three years equally desperately trying to lose them.

I’d like to think I’d have recognised any buddy who was a keeper, with prospects of a dazzling career trajectory and an intellectual spark to match.

But to be honest, I suspect that Aung San Suu Kyi would have dumped me long before I managed to dump her; some of the most important lessons in life aren’t academic.