I strayed around the Common Room until I found a hideous pot-plant which seemed to deserve my sherry. A moment later, we formed the usual sort of procession and shuffled off to Hall, High Table and dinner. High Table was much as it has always been, except for the cut of the dinner-jackets and the absurd youthfulness of the dons, but a glance over my shoulder into the bear-pit of Hall made me shudder. Two hundred shaggy Tom-a-Bedlams with their molls and doxies were scrambling and squabbling around a row of stainless-steel soup-kitchen counters, snapping and snarling like Welsh Nationalists in committee, or Italian press-photographers in pursuit of an adulterous Royal. Every few moments one of them would break out of the mêlée, guarding a plate heaped with nameless things and chips, which he would savage at the table, cursing and belching the while. The long oak tables bore none of the ancient silver of my youth – they have to keep it locked up nowadays – but there were long, proud lines of bottles of Daddie’s Favourite Sauce – and jolly nice it is too, I dare say. But I turned away with a shudder and dipped a reluctant spoon into the Mock Turtle before me. (You can tell how even the memory of it all upsets me if you note that I started the last sentence with a conjunction, a thing I never do.)

You must not think that I am carping when I say that dinner was five courses of poisonous ordure: I expected it and would have been disturbed if it had been good. High Table dinner in Oxford, as perhaps you know, is always in inverse ratio to the brains-content of the College which offers it. Scone is a very brainy College indeed. If you want a good tuck-in in Oxford you have to go to places like Pembroke, Trinity or St Edmund Hall, where they play rugger and hockey and things like that and, if you’re spotted reading a book, someone takes you aside and has a chat with you.

No, what really spoiled my evening was that Scone had gone in for the ultimate gimmick and acquired a she-don. She resembled nothing so much as a badly-tied bundle of old bits of string; her smile was the bitter, clenched rictus of a woman pretending to enjoy natural childbirth and we disliked each other on sight to our mutual satisfaction. She was not wearing a bust-bodice or ‘bra’, that was clear; her blouse was gallantly taking the strain at about the level of her navel.

I couldn’t say anything, could I – as a mere Old Member I was only a guest and she was listening intently – but I met the Warden’s eye and gave him a long, level look. He smiled sheepishly, a sort of qualified apology.

After dinner, in the Common Room, Dryden mischievously introduced us.

‘Gwladys,’ he said with relish. ‘Charlie Mortdecai has been dying to meet you.’