5.

The room assigned to me in my first year at Trinity, in the optimistically named Angel Court, was in a late-fifties concrete-and-brick annexe cunningly concealed behind Great Court. One minute you were standing in Cambridge’s most glorious quadrangle, with its cobblestones, chapel and fountain, the next you were slinking down an alleyway into the back end of a municipal centre with multiple fire doors and orange wood corridors.

My room – my suite – consisted of a sitting area with desk and pinboard, and a bedroom just large enough for a single bed and a basin, regularly used by visitors to pee into. From my window, if you clambered out onto the ledge, you could see Trinity Street and Heffers bookshop below, and a panorama of spires and rooftops.

It must be firmly stated that Cambridge was much easier to get into in the seventies than it is today. Trinity wasn’t yet accepting women, which doubled your chances by definition, nor did many students apply from Europe or Asia, other than the son of the Singaporean Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, whose room was further along my corridor. The Cambridge I found was still almost entirely a university of white, British men, mostly public and grammar school; such girls as there were, were cocooned in women-only colleges, and the gates of most colleges were locked at midnight (with a well-policed postern gate) and overnight visitors forbidden.

I made my five best friends at Cambridge in the first fortnight, and they remain friends to this day. Twice a year for thirty years we have held a reunion lunch in the same Chinese restaurant in London – the Jade Garden in Wardour Street – one of the dimmest dim sum joints in town. From time to time, someone suggests we really ought to raise our game and go somewhere nicer next time, but they are overruled: the Jade Garden it is. But I am getting ahead of myself by several decades.

On my first day at Cambridge I was walking past Magdalene College when an alarmingly tall man in a suit loomed above me. He was at least six feet seven, maybe taller, I couldn’t see that far up.

‘Are you Nick Coleridge?’ he languidly enquired. ‘I believe we may have friends in common.’

It never occurred to me he could be a student; I assumed he was a don, possibly Dadie Rylands or Maurice Bowra, or some distinguished aesthete from the Brideshead era.

‘Come and have tea in my rooms tomorrow at four thirty,’ he said. ‘The Porter’s Lodge will direct you.’

Nothing about the Hon James Stourton’sfn1 set of rooms indicated he wasn’t a well-established senior don; through a half-open door from his panelled sitting room, with its bay window overlooking a garden, I could see an equally large panelled bedroom, and a bathroom beyond. Furthermore, the rooms were hung with prints by John Piper and mezzotints of stately homes, and armorial shields, and bookcases filled with art books and first editions. On a sideboard stood decanters and ecclesiastical candlesticks. Every other Cambridge room I visited had Pink Floyd posters and Athena art posters Blu-tacked to the walls.

We talked at cross purposes, excessively polite and formal. Slowly, very slowly, it dawned on me, from certain remarks about gap years and working in Chinese casinos in Aberdeen, that James was actually a contemporary, who had only arrived at Cambridge two days earlier. I could not have been more surprised. Confusion sorted, he quickly became one of my closest friends. In the intervening years, he has looked exactly the same, while the rest of us have aged and overtaken him.

James’s cousin Edwardfn2 was on my staircase at Trinity – handsome, chunky, mature, already with a telegenic anchorman’s face. In the next room was Nick Allan,fn3 who I knew from school – punky, cooler than the rest of us, he ran a discotheque named Roxoff in the Chilterns. Along the passage was Peter Pleydell-Bouverie,fn4 a scruffy Harrovian with floppy fringe and infectious laugh. The sixth member of the future Jade Garden dim sum set was Kit Hunter Gordon,fn5 an enviably handsome artist who owned a lighthouse on a remote rock off the Scottish coast, to which potential girlfriends were lured with the promise of a nude portrait of themselves.

At the end of the third week, we held a joint pyjama party with sedative-strength White Lady cocktails in James’s senatorial set of rooms; at least 150 girls,fn6 largely gathered from sixth-form colleges and typing schools, were squeezed in, wearing pyjamas and nighties. It was a glorious bonding experience and rather set the tone thereafter.

If proof was needed of how old-fashioned and un-PC Cambridge was at the time, consider this strange episode. The Master of Trinity was Rab Butler – the Tory grandee who had so nearly become Prime Minister. His charming wife, Mollie, was a member of the Courtauld family, which explained why the Master’s Lodge was filled with museum-quality Impressionist paintings as well as Tudor portraits of past Masters.

Each year, Lord and Lady Butler gave three separate drinks parties to welcome ‘freshmen’ arriving at Trinity, on three consecutive evenings.

To the first party, they invited alumni from the top public schools, along with many of the Butlers’ own smart friends from Cambridgeshire to jolly things along. Champagne was served. To the second party, they invited second-division public school and top grammar school men. Dons and Fellows were invited. Red and white wine was served.

The third party was a beer and cider gathering for the remaining state sector, with junior tutors and research students.

It says a lot about us – and nothing good – that I don’t remember any of us finding anything odd in this arrangement. It was interpreted as ‘putting people at their ease’. Today, of course, Rab Butler would be pilloried by the Sunday Times and Daily Mail, and obliged to resign.

It is probably no coincidence that I have got a thousand words into this Cambridge chapter without once mentioning my academic course; I’m afraid it was only periodically I remembered I was there to study Theology. The Divinity schools – with their gaudy Tractarian architecture by Basil Champneys – were barely a stone’s throw from my window, but this did not make them any more alluring. Having fallen into the habit of skipping lectures, I soon stopped attending them altogether. The only other religiously minded student at Trinity was Justin Welby, an always-smiling, conspicuously spiritual figure, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who could sometimes be glimpsed crossing Great Court holding a coffee and walnut cake from Fitzbillies teashop, en route to a God Squad prayer meeting. How I passed my first-year exams (an essay about early Celtic Christianity on the island of Iona was part of it) I have no idea. But, by then, I had switched to History of Art, my Scripture days behind me.

Arriving at Cambridge, we almost at once began launching and editing student magazines. The main protagonists were the Jade Garden set, with guest appearances by Charles Moore, Wesley Kerr (a Jamaican friend of particular fascination, being every possible minority all at once: a gay, black, Roman Catholic, orphaned Wykehamist), Harry Eyres on wine, plus my old friend Craig Brown contributing (from Bristol) a twisted story about a peeping Tom father at a Hampshire party. Pandora Stevens and Alice Leatham wrote about fashion.

The funding for this magazine, named Rampage, which ran for several issues, came from two sources only: from Jocelyn Stevens, who took advertising for the Express Group, and from tandoori and balti restaurants in the town. Looking at these ancient issues now, I rate them 9 out of 10 for quality of contributors, 2 out of 10 for design. It is striking how words-first we were, and how little attention we paid to layout. The pages were created with scissors and Cow Gum on Edward Stourton’s floor, with bottles of wine tipping over onto finished artwork, all produced in a thick fug of cigarette smoke. These precarious paste-ups, full of in-jokes and borderline libels, were carried to a backstreet printer on the Trumpington Road, which turned them into pages. The issues sold like hot cakes, and we soon accumulated quite a large profit in our account.

Rampage was not the only show in town, and fierce rivalry simmered between competing magazines, like New York newspaper wars in the 1940s. We were not above pressurizing local newsagents, Mafia-style, to refuse to stock our rivals. Robert Harris,fn7 then a leading Fabian, ran Stop Press (the official student rag) and was a vicious opponent in those days, though later became a friend. Meanwhile, the intellectuals of Trinity – Oliver Letwin, Noel Malcolm,fn8 Charles Moore – published their own high-minded magazine, Definite Article, from G2 Great Court, of superior worth, but lower sales.

My Cambridge was half self-consciously cool, half defiantly traditional. Still in the thrall of David Bowie and glam rock, Nick Allan and I hennaed our hair bright orange, and my room was plastered with Ziggy Stardust and Roxy Music posters, and crayon pictures of sailors in the style of Jean Cocteau by Lindsay Kemp,fn9 Bowie’s mime tutor, with whom I took lessons at a church hall by Battersea Park. Pages from Vogue and Harper’s were pinned everywhere.

But I was also a member of the Pitt Club, with its neoclassical portico and enfilade of club rooms with leather sofas and armchairs, like a St James’s club. Its membership – men only – wore suits with ties or tweed jackets, and a pair of comically subservient staff, Dick and Mr Harborne, shuffled to and fro delivering Bloody Marys. Members ordered Veuve Clicquot at lunchtime, which was signed for by chit, and added to accounts that were only presented for payment after the end of the term. It was no surprise that the Pitt Club almost went bankrupt, saved only by being partially turned into a Pizza Express.

On my first visit to the Pitt, I was introduced to an older member, Nicholas Shakespeare,fn10 who was wearing a flamboyant silk cravat.

‘Nicholas Shakespeare meet Nicholas Coleridge,’ said a friend. ‘You should know each other, you have similar literary names.’

Shakespeare gave me a haughty appraisal. ‘I think we can all agree that Shakespeare was a rather greater talent than Coleridge.’

It was my Pitt Club friends from Magdalene who invited me to the annual ‘Wylie Practice’, a fixture which seemed to belong to an earlier age. An eighteenth-century Magdalene alumnus, Sir Joshua Wylie, had supposedly left, in his will, a great fortune in trust, the interest from which should be blown on an annual party in his memory. Twelve Magdalene ‘Trustees’ wore morning coats and circulated around a walled garden with jugs of lethal cocktails – 80 per cent vodka, 20 per cent grapefruit juice – challenging guests to ‘bumper’ pints in one. It was the shortest party ever. Within twenty minutes, most guests had passed out, comatose on the grass. It was a much-anticipated summer event.

My days followed a full-on itinerary of urgent time-wasting. Not one moment was left unoccupied. At 8 a.m., I would have breakfast in Hall, up with the lark; afterwards, I would have coffee in the rooms of a succession of friends, gossiping and planning articles; before lunch, I might stroll to WH Smith in the market square, to see if any new glossy magazines had been delivered; then lunch at the Pitt or a pub, perhaps at the Pickerel opposite Magdalene; then a nap, followed by a play rehearsal (I was in the Footlights with Nick Hytner,fn11 Griff Rhys Jones and Rory McGrath), pre-dinner drinks, dinner in Hall, a debate at the Union, some parties, bed.

Of course, there were variations. The Gardenia Greek restaurant in Rose Crescent was a favourite. Sometimes we drove out to Shelford and The Tickell Arms, to be berated by the cantankerous diva of a landlord: ‘Don’t play with the candles, girls, you’re not in your convents now,’ he would bellow across the bar.

Sometimes I would linger all afternoon in the room of Nick Allan, drinking wine and speculating about girls Nick thought he quite fancied, or we bunked off to the cinema to watch Saturday Night Fever. Edward Stourton insists we once drove to Little Gidding, near Huntingdon, and read aloud T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in the churchyard there. I suppose it is possible, though I don’t remember it. The pretentiousness of the idea lends credibility. I used to go to a lot of debates at the Union, especially when Edward became President, having inherited this lofty position from Andrew Mitchell, last seen as the Ashdown House Stamp Club Secretary.

History of Art – in my case, the history of 18th- and 19th-century neoclassical and Gothic architecture – consisted largely of sitting in the dark watching slide shows of English country houses. I was taught by two great figures: David Watkinfn12 – a legendary don from Peterhouse, distinguished, dainty, the authority on Sir John Soane and champion of the fightback against modernist architectural dogma – and Gavin Stamp,fn13 original model for the Young Fogey movement and a contributor to Harpers & Queen. On one occasion, I was travelling back to Cambridge by train and quietly copy-editing the proofs of a Gavin Stamp article for the magazine; further along the carriage, I spotted Gavin himself, correcting one of my essays. I kept my head down.

Although I did shamefully little work for either of these impressive scholars, I was certainly influenced by them, at least up to a point. One of Dr Watkin’s stranger initiatives was screening the film Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda movie showcasing the Nazi architecture of Albert Speer, which he admired. My essays were generally delivered late. I think I had a philosophical blind spot about researching and writing long unpaid essays to be read aloud to an audience of only one person – my supervisor – which was the Oxbridge system. I preferred to write paid articles to appear in Harpers, for an audience of 100,000.

Cambridge History of Architecture exams consisted in part of writing short essays about photographs of country houses and architectural details. You opened an envelope to find half a dozen black and white pictures, labelled A–F. If you were clever, you’d write: ‘Picture A is the side facade of Chipstead Hall, near Grantham, with portico by Robert Adam, wings by Samuel Pepys Cockerell and a later neo-Gothic oriel window by Norman Shaw …’ and so forth.

If you were less clever, you wrote: ‘This is a neoclassical house, er, inspired by the Parthenon in Athens …’

As our Finals exam envelopes were handed round, we took a quick shuffle, then turned to one of our friends and gave him a cheery thumbs-up. He looked blank and confused.

Afterwards, we said, ‘God, some people have all the luck.’

‘Er, what do you mean?’

‘Picture D …’ (colossal pile in East Anglia).

He was none the wiser.

‘It’s your own house, isn’t it?’

His face fell. ‘Christ, that’s embarrassing. Oh bloody hell …’ Then he said, ‘Actually, I do see where it is now: round the side, down near the kitchens. And in my defence, I haven’t been down there for ages.’

During the holidays, I worked as an intern at Harpers & Queen, writing and sub-editing, enthralled by the inner workings of glossy magazines and the wider ecosystem of fashion, culture and society they showcased. My mentor at Harpers, to whom I owe so much, was the idiosyncratic Features Editor, Ann Barr – who had acquired my original unsolicited article, commissioned a dozen more and gave me work experience in the office.

I started dating a Harpers & Queen fashion editor, Sophie Hicks, who was wonderfully attractive in a gamine, boyish sort of way. She wore sailor suits and drove a Morris Traveller. She came to stay often at Cambridge, where she was strongly opposed to the custom of peeing in basins, and brought a dash of metrosexual glamour to the tweedy world which hung about the university.

Harpers & Queen was positioned in a particularly sweet spot at the time, in part because there was so little competition. Aside from Vogue, it had the upmarket all to itself. Tatler was moribund; Elle, InStyle, Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveller, GQ, Esquire, The World of Interiors, Wallpaper* … none yet existed. The consumer and fashion boom of the eighties, which was to usher in the thirty-year golden period for glossy magazines, was still in its infancy, but already the glossies were fattening up with advertising. Not yet hemmed in by rival niche titles, Harpers & Queen could be all things to all women – and men too, the men’s market not yet existing. Ann Barr gave me – the intern – a book of stories by Susan Sontag. Opening it at random, I found one which stated: ‘Look at all this stuff I’ve got in my head: rockets and Venetian churches, David Bowie and Diderot, nuoc mam and Big Macs, sunglasses and orgasms …’ It felt like a manifesto for Harpers & Queen itself – the intuitive, dysfunctional editorial alchemy which permitted political and sociological articles to exist alongside defiantly conventional ones, and treat them with equal value. Ann was only in her forties but to me she seemed ancient, with her dyed orange hair, deceptively dithery manner, Thea Porter jackets, velvet knickerbockers and concurrent admiration for intellectuals and Sloanes. She encouraged all types of disparate people to hang out in the office: drunks, punks, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley from Wham! You never knew who’d show up.

She was a brilliant line editor; handing in an article, I would hover beside her at her desk as she read it. Her busy pen struck out superfluous adjectives, while she muttered, ‘So much cleverness here. So clever, so clever. How do you even know all this?’ She had a theory that every ‘standfirst’ (magazine introduction to an article) must contain a new or arresting fact. To Ann, an example of a bad standfirst would be: ‘Best parties of 1978 – who came, who shone, who dazzled.’ She preferred: ‘Best parties of 1978 – the year charity ball inflation took tickets to £40 each for the first time.’ If she felt uncertain as to whether a particular idea was any good, she rang her sister, Deirdre, in Kent for a second opinion. ‘We’ll see what Mrs Average thinks.’ And then, ‘Mrs Average says yes.’

The Editor of Harpers & Queen was Willie Landels, Italian, sophisticated and effete, an art director by background. He not only edited the magazine but laid it out; disdaining paragraph indentations as ugly, every article was ‘ranged left’, which looked chic on the page but was harder to read. Ann hated it. ‘Willie isn’t a reader,’ she would fret. ‘He doesn’t even read the articles.’ While Ann busied herself commissioning zeitgeisty articles and essays about Sloane Rangers, Willie took care of the fashion, decoration and design sections.

‘Oh, my God,’ he would declare in his camp Italian accent, ‘I do dislike Ann’s Sloanes … too awful for words, those people.’

I was once with Sophie Hicks in Venice, heading from the Giudecca to the Zattere on a vaporetto, and we spotted Willie and his wife, Angela, strolling along. Willie was thirty paces ahead, draped in a pashmina, cooling himself with a Chinese fan. Angela trudged along behind, laden with six heavy bags of groceries. I had never seen Willie so carefree.

Even as an intern, I realized that one had to take sides: you were either a Willie person or an Ann person. Peter York, Andrew Barrow, Paul Levy and a host of random contributors were Ann people; the fashion and beauty departments plus Loyd Grossman were Willie people. With Sophie a Willie person and me an Ann person, I just about managed both sides at once. Ann would grizzle, ‘That Willie! He is so lazy, so lazy.’ He wasn’t, but she didn’t see it.

A fellow intern, destined to become a great friend, was Alistair Scott. He was the son of two doctors from Leeds, and we hit it off at once. He was a vehement foodie, already intensely greedy aged twenty, and we hung out in Soho brasseries gossiping about journalism, Peter York and Wilfred De’Ath. (Alistair was harsher on our colleagues than me, but we both relished the process.)

One evening, lingering late over drinks in the office, Alistair became hungry. Finding no snacks available, he hit on the idea of raiding The Good Housekeeping Institute on the floor below – he had heard they possessed industrial-sized fridges and kitchens filled with grub. During the day, one regularly spotted Good Housekeeping cooks bustling to and fro outside their test kitchens, large women in white aprons, bearing dishes of food.

Ten minutes later, Alistair returned looking shifty. He was carrying a two-tier cream and marzipan gateau covered with maraschino cherries and candied lemon peel. We polished it off in one sitting.

The next morning, an enormous fuss erupted. A security guard repeatedly broadcast a message to all staff over the intercom. ‘This is an important announcement … a fancy cake has disappeared from The Good Housekeeping Institute. It is required immediately for a photographic shoot. If anyone has any information regarding its whereabouts, please ring security.’

The foil cake base was still on our shared desk in plain sight, covered with crumbs. Panicking wildly, we wrapped it in newspaper and dumped it in a builder’s skip several Soho streets away.

As Cambridge wore on, we moved rooms. James Stourton found another magnificent set in Thompson’s Lane, which he painted Pompeiian red and commissioned a mural by Alan Powersfn14 of the sculpture gallery at Arundel Castle. It was officially unveiled at a launch party to which numerous ancient grandees were invited.

Kit Hunter Gordon had moved to a converted artist’s studio off the Huntingdon Road, to which all our loveliest contemporaries were drawn in succession like bees to honey. It was envy-making. I, meanwhile, had moved to digs in Portugal Street, to a terraced house run by a retired Trinity porter, Mr Dunn. I shared it with Harry Eyres, a wine connoisseur. However inconspicuously you tried to enter or leave the house, there was Mr Dunn at the foot of the stairs, keen for a chat.

‘Did I ever tell you,’ he would ask, daily, ‘about the time His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales came to take breakfast here in your very rooms?’

‘Actually you have told me that excellent story, Mr Dunn.’

‘Oh goodness me, what a day that was. Mrs Dunn prepared eggs, bacon, sausages, fried bread, mushrooms, a choice of tea or coffee, toast, marmalade … Normally, of course, Mrs Dunn doesn’t do breakfasts, but this was for The Prince of Wales, of course.’

‘How fantastic, Mr Dunn.’

‘Oh yes, he was the breakfast guest of Lord Alexander Russell, who used to occupy your rooms …

‘At the end of breakfast, The Prince of Wales turned to Mrs Dunn and said, “Thank you very much, Mrs Dunn, that was an excellent breakfast.”’

I must have heard that story thirty times, quite feasibly fifty. Later in life, I became friends with Alexander Russell.fn15 He wasn’t, as it turned out, a Lord at all, but he confirms the breakfast menu.

Sophie Hicks became a participant in a Harpers & Queen article named ‘Lifeswaps’. The idea was that ten people would trade their lives, jobs, homes, friends with somebody else for a month, and write about what it felt like being the other person. Sophie was to swap with Bob Colacello, the Editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine in New York, work with Andy at The Factory and inhabit his magnificent Manhattan apartment. Bob, in return, would get to live with Sophie’s parents in Kensington, sleep in her narrow childhood bed, and spend weekends with her current beau, i.e. me.

The Lifeswap experiment coincided with the Trinity May Ball to which I invited Bob as my partner. The dress code was white tie and tails, and he turned up looking as slick and oiled as a gigolo on a Hollywood red carpet.

Whether it was the sight of so many beautiful girls, or indeed beautiful boys in white tie, at the May Ball, or delayed jet lag, he hit the cocktails hard. Soon he was a liability. I realized I had to get Andy Warhol’s right-hand dude out of there fast.

I gingerly drove him back to London in my dented yellow Ford Fiesta. As the journey unfolded, he became sleepy, resting his head against my shoulder, then dozing with his face in my lap, so it became hard to change gear. Arriving outside Sophie’s house in Brunswick Gardens, I asked if he had his house key.

‘It’s in my trouser pocket … please help me find it.’

I fished away around his groin, and eventually retrieved it. Unlocking the door, I pushed him inside. As I pulled the door back shut, I heard Bob Colacello collapse onto the doormat, and the sound of violent retching.

My housemate, Harry Eyres,fn16 was an exceptional scholar with a serious disposition. It was perhaps no surprise, then, that he was approached one day by a particular don, and sounded out to become a spy in MI6. Trinity was a rich recruiting ground, and Harry had a first-class brain. Over drinks that night, he told me what had taken place and swore me to secrecy.

I respected the spirit of his confidence by telling only one other person, Edward Stourton, who was a model of discretion, telling only a couple more. We all loved the idea of Harry as James Bond, heavily disguised as a spice salesman in Istanbul keeping watch on the Soviet Embassy. Within a week, the news went viral, everyone knew. The recruiter don withdrew his job overture.

Several vacations I spent travelling in Eastern Turkey with John Scott; we did four long trips in all, hitch-hiking from Diyarbakir to Lake Van, Kars and Trabzon. Crossing the plain of Troy in a tinny white hire car, we were pursued for five miles by a giant, loping sheepdog, half wolf, half mastiff. It eventually bounded onto the bonnet of the car, snarling and frothing from its jaws, and cracked the windscreen with the iron spikes of its collar, before eventually limping off.

Other holidays, I went to Venice with Sophie, to stay with Rupert Forbes Adam in the burnt-out shell of the Palazzo Dario on the Grand Canal, where he lived with his girlfriend Anya Hillman, a reformed groupie for The Byrds. From the top floor, the palazzo had the finest view of the canal in the city, directly opposite the Gritti Palace hotel. We used to dance vigorously to a track called ‘Lucky Number’ by Lene Lovich, with the windows wide open and the volume turned up to maximum. (‘I’m having so much fun / My lucky number’s one / Ah! Oh! Ah! Oh!’) It must have been intensely annoying for the gondoliers down below, and the Gritti guests opposite, trying to sleep.

While in Paris, Rupert Forbes Adam took Craig Brown, John and me to lunch with Diana Mosley at the Temple de la Gloire. She was one of the Mitford girls and widow of Rupert’s grandfather, Sir Oswald Mosley, the brown-shirted leader of the British Union of Fascists. Within the curtilage of its walls, the Temple was the most beautiful place I had ever visited: a Palladian folly near Orsay, their exquisite place of exile. Diana Mosley could have been any charming aristocratic widow of a certain vintage. She questioned us sweetly about school and university, and spoke about her sisters Nancy, Debo and Unity growing up in Oxfordshire, and how she used to keep her own hand cream in the ladies’ powder room at Claridge’s. On a table in the blue-painted sitting room was a wedding photograph of the Mosleys’ wedding, held at the home of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler gracing the line-up. When we departed, she stood on the front steps to wave us off, flanked by a butler and a sinister manservant in beige linen jackets.

My back and slipped disc, damaged in Yazd, continued to give me pain, especially in cold weather, and I hobbled around Cambridge with a stick when the Siberian winds blew in. Sometimes it was fine for months, then the sciatic nerve became inflamed, and it was torture.

One such attack coincided with my Finals and I was rushed to the Edward VII hospital, injected with painkillers and put in traction. Unable to sit all my exams, there was some doubt over whether or not I would be awarded a degree. My college tutor rang the four dons who had taught me, to get their take on my likely grade, and it was unfortunate that two of them had never met me at all, since I’d skipped all their supervisions.

Fortunately, I had completed my dissertation, written in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, on the subject of the eighteenth-century Indian paintings of Thomas and William Daniell, and their influence upon Mughal-neoclassical architecture in England at Sezincote, Daylesford and the Brighton Pavilion.

After some anguished discussion, I was given an aegrotat degree (aegrotat being the smart word for ‘sick note’). To this day, I don’t actually know if I’m a BA or an MA.

My friends joked that the slipped disc was lucky timing, as a means of avoiding Finals. Fortunately, I had conclusive X-rays of my back as collateral. It was just as well.

But, by now, I was craving to get on with life as a journalist, and Cambridge and degrees already felt like stale news.