Scone College, my alma mater, hadn’t changed a bit except that the outside was richly adorned with huge painted words such as ‘PEACE’, ‘SHIT’, ‘TROTSKY LIVES’ and similar sentiments. I thought it something of an improvement, for it took one’s eyes off the architecture. Fred was on duty in the Porter’s Lodge as he had been when I was there last: he remembered me well and said that I owed him half a sovereign in connection with some long-forgotten horserace. I wasn’t taken in, but I coughed up.

My rooms were ready for me and quite habitable, except that the undergraduate incumbent (this was in the vacation, you see) had pinned up a poster of a little fat black chap called Maharaj ji Guru in such a position that it smirked at the bed. I couldn’t move the chap’s poster, naturally, so I moved the bed. Bathed and changed, I still had half an hour to spend before I could report at the Senior Common Room where Dryden would, if recovered, meet me and take me to dinner at High Table, so I strolled over to the Buttery. On the lawn where, in the brave days, we used to play croquet, some forty tatterdemalions were squatting silently – a sorry sight. No doubt they were meditating or protesting; they certainly weren’t having any fun. As I strolled past them in my exceedingly beautiful dinner jacket I raised a hand in benediction.

‘Peace!’ I said.

‘Shit!’ said a spokesman.

‘Trotsky lives!’ I answered stoutly. You see, you can communicate with young people if you take the trouble to learn their lingo.

‘Hallo, Mr Mortdecai,’ said Henry, the buttery steward, ‘have you been away?’

‘No, no, no,’ I said, ‘I was here only seven years ago.’

‘So you were, sir. End of a Trinity term it was, I fancy, and you were rude to one of those Hungarian persons that are all over the place now – I can’t ever say their names, they always seem to come out rude-sounding when I try.’

‘I know just what you mean, Henry. And I’m dying of thirst.’

He really did remember me, for he reached down one of the battered pewter quarts from which we giants used to sup our ale in the olden days. I strolled outside with my tankard so that I could pour half its contents surreptitiously onto the lawn, for I am not the man I was.

‘I suppose you find that sort of thing a bit galling, don’t you, Henry?’ I said, waving my hand towards the solemn sit-in on the lawn.