It’s funny how things come back around. We joined a book group here and the book for July is the playscript of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. We went to a barbecue the other week too and the film we sat down to watch when the mosquitoes got too persistent to stay outside was The History Boys. Now I’ve always found Bennett to be a little too tweedy and mumsy for my taste, evoking as he does a world of Thermos flasks, digestive biscuits and rides out on a Sunday, but reading the play again brought the whole experience of preparing for Oxbridge interview flooding back. When I was living back there last year I kept seeing my old (now very old) tutor pootling along on a black bicycle. And I still had that feeling that he would say ‘Ah, Stephen, how did you find the Gawain poet?’ and I would look down at my shoes and struggle to say something original.

And then that kind of anxiety dream gets all rolled up into being unprepared for exams. I’m half expecting to wake up with a shudder in the night thinking I’ve got Finals in the morning and can’t find my subfusc and my mortarboard. I wonder if they still have to wear all that and still go through the ritual of sporting a white, then pink, then red carnation buttonhole en route to the Exam Schools.

It’s more than twenty years since I went up for interview and I know, externally at least, little of Oxford life has changed. Worcester College still looks like Worcester and the chalk we scrawled in the stonework above one of the staircases is still there. I checked when I went to take a look back last September or so, having spent another year in Jericho.

He’s right about the idea of subjunctive history, as the trains rattle across the points and your journey goes in another direction. And the useless, incantatory words that stay with you years after you learned them. The woods are lovely, dark and deep… In the room the women come and go… Unreal city/Under the brown fog of a winter dawn…