Learning curve | The Guardian | guardian.co.uk

When the author of Big Snake - the story of his hunt for the world's longest python - left Oxford University he boasted two distinctions. One was the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry (previous winners included Oscar Wilde). And the other… "I was the only student in my entire year to get a pass degree."

No hard feelings. He's chuffed with it, actually. But he partly blames his dad. "He'd been to Oxford and I took his advice never to work after 1pm. The problem was I used to get up so late there was hardly any time for work."

Engineering, the subject he was admitted to read, proved far too much like hard work, so after six weeks he switched to politics, philosophy and economics. This could not be said to have engaged him either. "I went to one lecture, in the second year. I got a bit keener in the second year."

Wittgenstein did grab him. "The problem was that he wrote that if you understood him, that was the end of philosophy. I read that bit early on, unfortunately."

He was hardly idle with his time at Balliol College. He directed two films and staged a festival of new films by students. The posters for this showed topless women. "None of the films contained nudity and a lot of punters complained of being short-changed."

A very keen climber, he broke his back in a fall on Ben Nevis early in his second year. "This meant I spent a lot of tutorials lying flat on the floor, the sort of things tutors are supposed to do. I felt I'd got one up on them."

The pass degree has proved no burden since leaving in 1996. He says he's done only one white-collar job - a stint in a record-company publicity department.

He doesn't count three years' teaching English in Japan, from which he wrote his first book, the prize-winning Angry White Pyjamas, about a year spent on on a traditional martial arts course with the Tokyo riot police.

What did Oxford teach him?

"How to find information out, how to go into a library and come out with what you really want.

"And meeting extremely intelligent people at that age was very valuable."

• Big Snake, by Robert Twigger, Gollancz, £15.99