I "went up" to Cambridge in September 1970, and whilst I can truly say I enjoyed my 3 years there, I now realise how much of my time I wasted. I undoubtedly put too many "eggs" in the academic "basket". Readers of C.S. Lewis' potted biography will know he got a "Triple First" at Oxford. I wanted - and ultimately achieved - the same distinction from Cambridge. I'm sure I worked much too hard and missed out on a lot of activities I would have enjoyed and benefited from.
Quite early on I was accosted and dragged into the Christian Union "CICCU" or the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union). This is (or was at the time) a very highly-organised group with representatives in every college and a central organisation. Bible studies and prayer meetings are arranged each week, and certainly in my day, there were "minders" to make sure you attended. Sometimes I got a bit rebellious and invented urgent things to do when the "minder" came round! However this all meant that I spent much of my time amongst those sort of people.
Much time and energy was spent debating the work of the Holy Spirit. The "Charismatic" movement was under way at that time, and much heat rather than light was generated amongst the various proponents of the different viewpoints. Some said "you get it all at conversion" others that "you get various experiences later". There was a ridiculous episode where two friends came to see me, the first gave me a book, the second came round, saw the first book, and gave me a book to counter that view, then the first one came round again and I quickly built up two piles of opposing books which I didn't want to read.
Warwick
After Cambridge, I spent 3 years at Warwick University, doing computer programming. I got to know a fair number of people there, both in the Christian Union at the University, and outside, in various churches I visited, but never felt at home.
I lived in Leamington Spa, and went to a church there, where I knew a group of half a dozen other people, who all suddenly ended up marrying each other, leaving me feeling a little isolated to say the least. The work at Warwick was more or less coming to an end, and I decided to throw my lot in with a computer company whose machines I had worked on, GEC Computers in Hertfordshire. So I ended up moving to Hertfordshire at the start of 1977.