You can always tell a person who went to a good second-rank university because within the first ten minutes of meeting you, they will say, “You can always tell a person who went to Oxford or Cambridge because they will tell you about it within the first ten minutes of meeting you.”

It’s funny, it’s only people who got their degree from universities at the top of the second division, the “A and 2 Bs” places that are second on everyone’s UCAS list and top of nobody’s, who do this.

Graduates of the truly crap institutions, who know perfectly well that they are thick, and that they are lucky to have gone to university at all, are not in the least bit bothered where anybody else went. And survivors of the cool campuses where the drugs are cheap and the girls are pretty and nobody knows where the library is, or even if there is one, don’t care either, because they had fun for three years and that’s what counts.

And people who didn’t go to university at all really, really couldn’t give a toss whether you went to Oxbridge or not. They’re too busy smuggling drugs through the prison laundry and watching their backs in the shower.

The only people who care about it are the ones who missed a grade by a whisper with a single daft mistake one May afternoon 23 years ago, and ended up at one of the rather-well-thought-of-actually overspill universities full of Oxbridge rejects.

And these are the fellows who make life terribly awkward for those of us who did, one way or another, slip into the top flight. Because we really didn’t do it to make you feel bad. We got in only because we’re a teeny, weeny bit smarter than you. It’s no big deal. And we really don’t want to rub it in. That’s why, when you pretend that you turned down an Oxbridge place, we nod and say “good call”, even though we both know you’re lying.

Obviously, you can tell from this that I went to Oxford (if I had gone to Cambridge then I would have a proper job). And I do not claim for a minute that it came down to anything but an accident of birth. I got in because my dad went there, because I went to public school, and because my IQ is through the frigging roof.

Microsoft Spellcheck, on the other hand, was at Cambridge. You can tell this not just because it went into computing, but because every time I try to write the name of this week’s restaurant it underlines it in red, and insists that I must mean “Magdalene”. At Cambridge, you see, they have a Magdalene College. At Oxford they have a Magdalen. Don’t know why. Couldn’t care less.

Except that the Cambridge/Spellcheck way is wrong, as witnessed by the church of St Mary Magdalen, Bermondsey, just across the way from Magdalen, and Magdalen Street, which connects the two.

Not that the head chef at Magdalen, James Faulks, is likely to care. He was at UCL (which, being part of London University, stands apart, aloof even, from the tawdry snobberies of the university class system). And he pronounces it, as they all do at the restaurant, Mag-dallen as opposed to “Maudlin”, which falls a little rough on the ears but is none of my business.

And you know what Mr Faulks studied at UCL? He studied genetics. And from there, obviously, he went to work for Heston Blumenthal. From the Fat Duck he moved to La Trompette, and then to the hallowed, the sainted Anchor & Hope in Waterloo.

An odd journey, that. The learning process would normally, you might think, take you the other way: from great gastropub to Michelin-starred French gaff to the King of the Wild Gastronomic Frontier. Yet in his journey towards heartiness, simplicity and warmth, Faulks has travelled in the direction that so many of us have. And Magdalen, which he has set up in partnership with his father, is more or less where we wanted to get to.

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