11am In university life, mornings are for study and afternoons are for games. Before you yawn, Cambridge University has eight snack-sized museums, which are all (with the exception of the justly famous Fitzwilliam Museum of art and antiquities) small, friendly, free and peculiar. (Peculiar opening hours, too: mostly weekday mornings. Check www.cam.ac.uk/collections for details.) If you’re organised, there’s no reason you can’t rattle through the best of them before lunch. Start at the Scott Polar Research Institute, dedicated to the cold ends of the earth and the crazies who thought it would be a great idea to go there. It has stuffed penguins, clothes from Antarctic expeditions, sledges, sun compasses and a thermometer that reads down to -40F.

11.30 The Museum of “Arch and Anth” (Lensfield Road) is hidden in suitably dusty academic style behind a discreet door in the corner of a quad. Here, British enthusiasm has bundled together collections of Japanese swords, Fijian whale-tooth necklaces, 40ft-tall totem poles and 4ft wooden shamanic effigies, all to inspire future Livingstones.

Noon Just across the road, the Museum of Zoology (New Museums Site, Downing Street) is easier to find: there’s a giant whale skeleton suspended above the door. Inside this modern space are more than 1m specimens of every familiar, ugly and obscure bird, fish, spider, skunk, rhino, Komodo dragon and thingy that ever swam, walked, wriggled or just thought about it. While I was there, one boy raced from cabinet to cabinet shouting, “Dad! What’s this?”

12.30pm The Whipple Museum of the History of Science (officially on Free School Lane, but can also be found in another corner of the New Museums Site) has three floors ram-jammed with George III’s scientific collection, Sir Isaac Newton’s prism, an 18th-century orrery describing the path of all six planets, cabinets of phrenology, and drawers of early surgical instruments and ancient 1970s calculators.

1pm Time to lunch like students do. The 17th-century Eagle pub on Bene’t Street is owned by Corpus Christi College. It’s said the idea for DNA’s double-helix structure occurred here, but that’s no great boast when you think of all the other great ideas lost to humanity as four centuries of geniuses reached for one pint too many.

2pm The other famous product of Cambridge University is spies. Take a £15 cab ride or a Citi bus No 5 to SpyMasters (Unit 7, Viking Way). This is an unassuming warehouse converted by a man who owns more “Best Dad in the World” mugs than the rest of us. After 10 years writing and organising spy missions for his sons to defend the world, Bond-style, against international baddies, Bob Richardson has made a business out of it. Children aged 8 and up (including this one, aged 44) overcome mental and physical challenges in a series of rooms within the “Russian embassy”: breaking codes, crawling through air ducts, opening safes, stepping under and over lasers in a smoke-filled corridor (haven’t you secretly ALWAYS wanted to do that?) and avoiding cameras and pressure pads until the final showdown and escape. (You need to book; prices from £14; www.spymasters.co.uk .)

4pm Back to town for tea. Fitzbillies (52 Trumpington Street) used to feed poor students with cheap “Chelsea pieces” — small shards of stickiness that had fallen from Chelsea buns. Wealthier students, or those with visiting parents, now dine on excellently simple English food (crown of pheasant on game chips with mash, for example; £18) at The Cambridge Chop House (1 King’s Parade; 01223 359506, www.cambscuisine.com ).

5.15pm Step round stoner students stuck in front of the new Corpus Christi clock (a 3ft metal grasshopper eating time) to end your evening with one of the best free treats in the country, at King’s College Chapel. Evensong (doors open 5.15pm, booking not usually necessary) is the last tick of the monastic clock that once governed all life in Cambridge. And as you sit, under candlelit, fan-vaulted ceilings, listening to the choir and the chapel’s three-second echo, you can wonder at what was, and what may yet be. Yes, I loved my time at Cambridge.

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