‘Yeah, see you later,’ Omar said. As he left he saw Karen from his staircase, who looked like she had been waiting for him to leave, nip out of her room and walk up to Jim’s door with a box of his favourite biscuits.

‘Hey, Jimmy,’ she said cheerfully, opening the door. ‘Knock, knock!’

‘Darling, how did you know I had the most hideous munchies!’ he heard Jim cry with delight. Omar shook his head ruefully. All the girls had a crush on Jim.

Back in the Radcliffe Camera, Omar decided not to bother to try and finish his essay on international politics. His head was too fuggled by the chocolate ale. He started on some reading for the following term for philosophy of mind, on self-deception. One of the books compared it to Orwellian doublespeak - the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind at the same time. He read about the divided self - one person with two parts, one of which must be necessarily lying to the other in order to deceive himself; whilst at the same time, the part that is deceived knows that he is being deceived, as he is the same self. The trouble with philosophy, Omar thought, was that he found himself thinking about what he was reading, rather than simply committing it to memory; it took up a lot more mental energy. He found the idea of self-deception hard to get his head round, as he was sure that it was practised so often as to lose all its cachet. ‘I didn’t drink very much just now,’ he thought to himself, testing the idea. He didn’t believe it. ‘My parents are happy,’ he tried, but again he didn’t believe it, he wasn’t even slightly deceived. ‘My brother loves me,’ he thought. Aah, that was interesting. He felt a conflict, a tug in his head; he wanted to believe it, but he didn’t quite; but he didn’t quite not believe it, either. ‘I’m still a virgin because I haven’t met the right girl yet and because I’m not a git like Sharif, who would take advantage of girls just because they’re willing.’ Well, that gave him a satisfying moral high ground. Did he really believe that was why he was a virgin? It was true that he hadn’t had much opportunity, but then he thought of the dark thoughts he had briefly entertained towards Cassie - a violent, cold-blooded itch that needed scratching. Perhaps he was no better than Sharif, just less honest.