MAN ABOUT TOWN: A night in the company of the city's brightest (From Oxford Mail)

MAN ABOUT TOWN: A night in the company of the city's brightest

10:00am Monday 30th January 2012 in Columns By Jeremy Smith

Damn, if only my gene pool had been different. Damn, if only the synapses in my brain fired off a little quicker.

And double-damn that I got hooked on movies at an early age instead of University Challenge.

Indeed, how different my life might have been had I just stopped trying to be cool (a feat that even today eludes me) and concentrated on my studies instead.

For the past 50 years I have had to make do with a so-so brain but a hugely impressive ability to always do and say the wrong thing, at the wrong time, to the wrong people, in the wrong place.

A gift maybe, but after dining out at Somerville college last week to celebrate Burns night, I can declare I’d trade in all of my more noble triumphs for just one crack at making it as an Oxford University graduate.

It was my first ever invite to a formal college dinner, and maybe I am a tad uncomplicated because to me it represented an event of almost night-before-Christmas significance.

No A-levels, no college, no Open University night schooling, yet here I was about to attend a dinner with the type of brains that normally go on to become captains of industry, prime ministers and heads of youth programming at Channel 4 and MTV.

Yes, it’s fair to say, my head was swimming. But do you know what? I wasn’t disappointed. Not a bit of it.

It was everything I had wistfully thought it would be – lots of formality, lots of tradition, a smattering of Latin, a lone bagpipe, and the kind of dinner guests who can be best summed up as young and fun.

There were trainee doctors, teachers, physicists, journalists and yes, it could have felt like heady company but it didn’t.

I’d feared there might be Hooray-Henrys, some La-dee-dahs, and a gaggle of ‘dahlings’ to out-manoeuvre round the condiments, but I was the bigoted one.

Margaret Thatcher may well have been a former alumna, but everyone I met seemed like a younger brother or sister to Professor Brian Cox – TV’s new pin-up boy for science.

I got drunk – okay, amusingly intoxicated – laughed almost non-stop and left three hours later feeling like if I achieved nothing else with my life, I could at least say I’d once dined, as a guest, at Oxford University.

And it is extraordinary, if you really think about it, that we live in a city populated by some of the biggest, brightest brains in the world.

Thankfully, it’s only when I’m shopping in Sainsbury’s or Tesco and I watch these brains attempting to prepare a meal for their house that I realise just how human and normal they are.

Like us in fact, just having eaten more fish...