The sense of being pulled out of the schedules pressed on me as I mooned around the empty bedrooms, looking at the old holiday snapshots lying in the debris. Wiping away the dust, I stared at these pictures of the girls cutting a swathe through the Greek and Spanish waiters, Henry arm-wrestling with a captain of pedalos and learning to water-ski. I missed our shared childhood that had once seemed to go on forever. When they came home on their brief visits—eerily like cast reunions—I knew that I was the last of us to grow up. They accepted adult life, while I was still thinking of our happy days watching the televised moon landings and Miss World contests, anachronisms that belonged to a vanished decade.

As I left London I ran deeper into the past than Sally’s commune near Norwich. I could have chosen a more easterly route, avoiding Cambridge altogether, which I had not visited for twenty years. But the old university town, where I had first met Miriam and Dick Sutherland, was worth a detour, if only to see if my mixed feelings towards the place had survived intact.

Fortunately, any uneasy memories were forgotten in the roar of heavy traffic that filled the approaches to the city. Cambridge had expanded into a complex of industrial and science parks, ringed by monotonous housing estates and shopping precincts. At its centre, like the casbah in Tangier, was the antique heart of the university, a stopover for well-disciplined parties of Japanese tourists stepping from their TV-equipped German buses. As an undergraduate I had prayed for a new Thomas Cromwell who would launch the dissolution of the universities, but mass tourism had accomplished this, overwhelming the older European universities as it would soon destroy Rome, Florence, and Venice.

I parked my car near the backs, crossed the Cam, and joined a column of Japanese as they wound through King’s. Undergraduates lolled in their punts like bored film extras hoping to catch a producer’s eye. Dons with their faux-eccentric manners posed outside the chapel with the self-consciousness of minor character actors, waiting as a Spanish TV crew set up its lights. The spirit of the Disney Corporation and the ethos of the theme park hovered over the gothic stone. Listening to a tour guide’s commentary, I waited to be told that the entire chapel was a fibreglass, tourist-resistant replica and that the original structure was now in the more enlightened care of the Ford Foundation in some warehouse on Long Beach.