Last night I braved the floods and drove north to Oxford, only to find myself effectively “flooded out.” The only two routes I knew into the city were closed due to the flooding, so I was left to navigate tiny one-way streets off the ring road in the hope of eventually finding familiar territory (or at least a few spires). My goal: to meet Morgan for an evening with MBA candidates at Oriel College.

Not my average night out. But an experience.

The Queen presided over the event, in full robed – if only canvas – magnificence. And there I sat, on a rickety wooden bench at an ancient wooden table, one of three long rows that stretched the length of the vaulted dining hall, surrounded by suited rich men eating a three-course meal by lantern-light. After the meal: the pub, where I stayed sober for the drive and watched the executives around me loosen up over pints of Guinness and a few unmentionable mixtures of liquor.

It was a surprisingly good evening, if a little surreal, and I didn’t get home until 2 a.m. The high point: exploring Tolkien’s dark gardens of Exeter College at nearly midnight, up worn steps and over dark-upon-dark shadows of flying buttresses and invisible cobblestones (in heels, might I add), and then the spires and domes and rotund stone Radcliffe Camera below us in dim lamp light under a star-strewn sky. Not even marred by the drunken students, trousers around ankles, peeing on the fences.

Six months ago, when I arrived in Birmingham, Alabama, for my internship interview, I could never have imagined the moment, six months later, when, after entering the empty Exeter College library and climbing a turret of spiral stone steps, I would be flipping the pages of an annal of history from 1776 with Morgan, searching for a mention of America’s independence, and laughing at the 18th century phrasing. The book was hidden behind others on the very top shelf, and Morgan had to dust it off as he stood on a stepladder amid leather-bound volumes and leather-clad bookshelves. The building had that musty smell that only an old library can have. The bells were ringing in the chapel, and Morgan said I looked at home among the books. We walked back to my car past scantily-clad girls waiting outside clubs. The wind was crisp and cold and smelled of night.

As I stood there in the most expensive skirt I own, with heels and hose and a coat that I’d only been able to afford because it was in the sales, the strangest thing of all to me was the realisation that I actually could fit in with this group of people: these lawyers and doctors and managers and financiers. That I was very easily able to hold a conversation, to be confident, to laugh and engage and give my opinion—or at least a part of it. That a high-powered lawyer would tell me all about his private plane and foreign timeshare and his wish for companionship. That, despite being nothing like most of these men, I was able to fit.

My Dad’s comment when I mentioned this: It helped that you’re a woman. This, of course, changed my perspective somewhat, especially after reanalysing the evening.

On the way home the roads were empty, and a shut-eyed moon was resting its gold head against strips of cloud. I took off my coat and hose and earrings and necklace, unclipped my hair, and turned up the volume.